September 2008
Interview by Jeremy Searle

Still Scorchin' after all these years
One of his stage suits hangs in the Country Music Hall Of Fame. He founded and led one of the most incendiary bands of any music genre anytime anywhere. He has an alter ego who sings wickedly funny animal songs to children of all ages. He's recently celebrated thirty years in the music business with a career-spanning compilation album. He is Jason Ringenberg of Jason and the Scorchers fame, also increasingly familiar as Farmer Jason, currently in the UK to promote said album.

'I still feel excited' he says. 'I'm looking forward to tonight's show, which will be his fifth in two days (Ringenberg does Farmer Jason shows in the afternoons and solo sets in the evenings) and I'm looking forward to it as much now as any show I did when I was 18. Writing a good song still excites me but what keeps me in the business is the absolute addiction to live performance. I'm addicted to it, there's no question about it. It's a level of excitement, wanting to get on that stage. I can't imagine a better high in the world really. At the end of it you've definitely done a tour (laughs). But actually I love every minute of it, I wouldn't trade it for the world.'

The big news for Ringenberg lately has been the reuniting of the Scorchers for the first time in well over a decade. With a solid solo career and Farmer Jason really taking off this initially looked like something of a backward step and Ringenberg is characteristically honest about it. 'I did that tour because they threw a lot of money at us' he owns, 'but when we got into it I found myself enjoying it more than any tour I've done in a long long time. I really got into the new rhythm section (currently the Scorchers feature Fenner Castner on drums and Kenny Ames on bass), the way Warner (Hodges, the Scorchers flamboyant and flamboyantly talented lead guitarist) was playing, the spark was there more than it'd been in a long long time.' So will there be more from the Scorchers?

'Absolutely yeah, I'm sure there will now. I went into this tour saying it was the last one, I told Warner that was it, we need to pretty much call this quits, at least go into an extended, indefinite hiatus but, you know, if the cards fall right we might do some more work, though the reality is having to write songs that were as good as 'Broken Whisky Glass' and 'Victory Road' and 'Still Tied' and 'Pray for Me Mama (I'm a Gypsy Now)', to write songs that stand up to those, that's gotta be done first (laughs) because if we're going to make it real we have to make a new record otherwise we become our own tribute act. That said, Farmer Jason has been the main focus of my career over the last couple of years and will be for quite some time I think. It's really a fun, cool world to live in.'

Although initially Ringenberg built Farmer Jason on his Scorcher fan base bringing their children ('in a lot of cases grandchildren' he notes wryly) he's moved on to a much bigger audience now and that can sometimes cause him problems, particularly after his strongly political last album Empire Builders was released.

'I have to be really careful trying to entering the bigger world that I'm entering with Farmer Jason' he says. 'It can get you into trouble, especially in America. I did take some heat too from the American Scorchers fans when I put out Empire Builders. A lot of those guys, especially the forty-something guys who saw us in college in Auburn or Atlanta, the South, they were pretty conservative guys and they've grown up to be Republicans and conservative folk and they sort of saw us as their band and when I came out with that record they gave me the benefit of the doubt, but there was some doubt and there were some...discussions about it.'

'But I had the attitude and still do that I don't have anything against those kinds of folks or think they're wrong or anything. Once we could talk about stuff they found I respected where they were coming from and things worked out ok. But having said that 'Rebel Flag In Germany' got played on XM Satellite Radio, the big national radio station, and it just enlisted a storm of bad reaction and some of them were old Scorchers fans saying 'I like Jason & The Scorchers but I hate 'em now' and they were getting all these emails and they ended up pulling the song.'

The parallels with Steve Earle and 'John Walker's Blues' are clear and it still seems strange how people can be fanatical about a performer, follow them for twenty years, have all their albums, have seen them many times and then after one song say 'I hate everything about them.' Fortunately Ringenberg doesn't see it as a major problem. 'I think it's a pretty rare thing' he says 'I think most people eventually will come back. And anyway, if you are a conservative Republican then well, you know, most artists are liberal so eventually you've got to kinda get over that or you won't be able to listen to anything!'

Ringenberg's new album, which covers his whole career from the days of his first band Shakespeare's Riot through to the latest Farmer Jason album, was really difficult to pick tracks for, he says. 'At first I tried doing it myself and it drove me crazy' he recalls. 'I don't like listening to my stuff anyway but I began doing it myself and got really bogged down and I started really questioning whether I even had the validity to do a project like this, whether I even had strong enough material, so I just turned it over to some friends of mine, Arty Hill, Bruce Hilton and Stace England. Those are guys that know my stuff well and they're all stars in their own right.'

Ringenberg is keen to stress that the absence of original Scorchers material on the album (all the Scorchers tracks included are re-recordings with a variety of bands including The WildHearts and The Woodbox Gang) was an artistic decision rather than because of any commercial issues. 'If we're going to do a Best Of record and include the Scorchers it needs to be a Jason & The Scorchers record. That's a record that needs to be made but I don't have the power to do that at the moment' he says. 'This compilation felt like it was closing off a stage in my life, a full stop on a point in my career and I don't think there will be another solo record for a while. I'm concentrating heavily on the Farmer Jason side and I'm doing a lot of work with that the rest of this year. In terms of another recording I would probably do a Scorchers record at this point I think and I just don't feel driven to do a solo record at the moment. In the future I may again but it won't be for a long time.'

Ringenberg still has unfulfilled ambitions though, even after thirty years. 'I'd like to have some commercial success at some point' he laughs, 'just to know how it would feel! It's not that I have to have it because I make a living so I'm happy about that but just to have that sort of thing happen in some sort of way would be interesting. How it could happen I don't know but it would be fun.' More importantly he doesn't see any end in sight to his music making. 'There's a lot more cool stuff to be made and I think I'm just beginning with Farmer Jason' he says, 'and I really believe that I'll be doing this when I'm seventy years old. That's just a wide open world, it is a whole world, it's an imaginary world I'm creating as we speak. Not only that but I do believe that, of our generation, Jason & The Scorchers have the sort of ability to do what Jerry Lee Lewis did and what the Rolling Stones did with their generation. I think you'll see us and go 'wow, those guys are sixty years old and rocking like crazy'. The important thing though is to have new material, a really valid new album to tour, and if we have that, well me and Warner are still in great health and still love playing and we can always get these young rhythm sections! We still have the enthusiasm so why not?'