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Phew - what a "Scorcher"! We meet the man who was alt.country before the term was even invented. Sue Keogh - July 2002 BBC Radio 2 The leader of roots-rock trailblazers Jason And The Scorchers took time out from his recent UK tour to tell us about recording his new solo album All Over Creation, how he re-wrote Steve Earle's song without upsetting him and the time he shared barbecue with Bob Dylan... Back in 1981, while New York was still reeling from the explosion of punk, and country music was dominated by the smoothly produced sounds of George Jones, an Illinois hog farmer's son moved to Nashville and formed what was to be the pioneering band of alternative country. The music Jason And The Scorchers played was based on the varied musical influences of the band's principal songwriter, Jason Ringenberg - from Hank Williams and Merle Haggard to The Ramones, David Bowie and Bob Dylan - and what came out was an electrifying fusion of country, punk and rock. Their high-energy performances attracted the rock fans, the quotient of Hank Williams songs in their repertoire kept the country audience happy and their look - Western wear blended with rock star shades, dyed hair and eyeliner - convinced people that they really were something new. It was a real alternative to the country mainstream, the forerunner to what we now call alt.country and the whole roots-rock movement. But not everyone was happy. Jason told me that in the early days their music got a pretty hostile reception amongst the Nashville establishment. "We had immediate impact with people; they really either loved us or hated us..." he recalls. "To play the way we did and look the way we did and the sort of energy that we hit roots music with, aside from the Cramps and a few others there wasn't really anyone else doing this. It was really radical, especially in the South. There were fist fights and violent reactions to the band. It was really wild." Many people found it hard to come to terms with what this boy from the sticks was doing to their sacred country music. "We were playing Hank Sr. songs and our guitar player had a shaved head with his hair in his face, and the drummer would have cigarette burns on his arms and stuff - it was just a wild band, it was a punk rock band, you know, I was this crazy kid from Illinois, this little kid with a cowboy hat up there." Meeting him in the flesh in a nice hotel overlooking Hyde Park, he's such an eloquent and gently mannered man that I almost find it hard to believe that top Nashville music critic Robert K. Oermann once said of his maniacal stage performance, "Jason acted like a guy who had been attacked with a cattle prod". Apart from anything else he looks too damn healthy to be an old punk rocker. But then he never got sucked into the life of rock and roll excess enjoyed by the rest of the band, which was to lead to their break up at the end of the 1980s. Now touring as a solo artist I wondered how it felt to be on stage without the band behind him. "I can't possibly really compete with the energy level and the intense "legendary" vibe of Jason And The Scorchers. The band's a damn legend, you can't compete with that." He finds performing solo particularly hard because, "A) it's so new to me and b) you have to concentrate every second, every tiny minute…everyone's looking at you all the time! You've got to keep their interest and that's hard to do." But he admitted how much he enjoys the freedom of being able to walk on stage without a set list and play whatever he and the audience want to hear. Off stage he's enjoying more freedom too, having set up his own record label, Courageous Chicken Records. "So I'm an industry mogul now!" laughs Jason. "The first act I'm going to drop is Jason Ringenberg. Drop that loser!" The new album, All Over Creation, is a collection of duets with artists including Steve Earle, BR549, Paul Burch, The Wildhearts and Lambchop and is a diverse mix of classic country, Britpop, honky tonk and Civil War ballad. Apart from the odd track recorded in London or New York most of it was done in producer George Bradfute's house in Nashville (incidentally the former home of Jim Reeves). Singer Kristi Rose and her multi-instrumentalist husband Fats Kaplin are present throughout the album. Their relationship goes back a long way; in return for the great job Fats did on fiddle and steel on Jason's 2000 solo album Pocketful Of Soul Jason built him a fence. My absolute favourite on the new album is the duet between Jason and Kristi, their take on the old George Jones and Melba Montgomery song I Dreamed My Baby Came Home. It is such a merry little song, sung with such immediacy that it just grabbed me by the throat the first time I heard it. I wasn't surprised to learn that it was one of those one-take numbers, sung facing each other round one microphone as singers used to do. It sounds like they really captured a special moment. "Man, there was energy in that room…we were just right there, hitting those notes. I think we practised it once and just rolled the tape and did it and bam! It was there." The other track I listened to on repeat when I first got hold of the album was Bible And A Gun. Co-written with Steve Earle, the original version appeared on The Scorchers' Thunder And Fire album back in 1989. Originally simply about a fugitive Jason thought it would be an interesting idea to shift the emphasis sightly and place it in the context of the American Civil War. "I decided to write about a man who had lost his wife in the war - a lot of women were just shot on the spot, their children and animals just driven off. The men would come home from doing the same thing to somebody else and find their wife dead. So I set it in that sort of tone, and the guy has an absolute belief in his cause, which is vengeance for the pro-slavery forces killing his wife and at the end of the song the sort of moral of the story is - and this is basic good old fashioned Christianity - vengeance leads to nothing. It doesn't satisfy a person." Steve and Jason had become friends when Steve's career was first starting out, and Jason recalls how they would have long conversations on the phone about the future of music at 2 o'clock in the morning. But as Steve became more famous and got involved in drugs they lost touch, and so when Jason chose to rewrite their song he did it without asking Steve first. A brave decision? " I was terrified at first because Steve has a reputation of course, and he's earned a reputation for being very difficult. He's not the kind of guy that takes to his music being "screwed" with. And here I was having rewritten his song without asking him! I hadn't even had the basic decency to ask the guy about it!" But thankfully Earle was gracious about the situation, being more concerned about tricky elements of pronunciation then his precious work being re-written. See above right to hear the full story of their meeting. Another song which was already celebrated before Ringenberg got his hands on it is the Loretta Lynn classic Don't Come Home A Drinkin'. When first released back in 1966 it was a bold feminist statement that clashed with the still very conservative climate in Nashville. But haven't things changed when you consider that it's perfectly natural (and very funny) for barroom boys BR549 to turn the song on its head and sing it from a man's perspective. "It's the perfect comic relief on the record", smiles Jason. "The thing from top to bottom is humour: you can't take it seriously. It's BR549 - they've spent their whole lives in bars drinking while their women were at home waiting for them!" A family man himself I wondered how Jason has managed to juggle his family responsiblities with life on the road. "Well the older I get the easier it gets because I've discovered all the tricks for touring. In terms of the harsh reality of the life of Jason Ringenberg, because I don't have these massive smash hits or have ever written smash hits for other people, economics is a real consideration in how I live my life. So when I'm not playing I do carpentry and construction work and things like that, really hard work." The new album includes a song written for one of his daughters, Camille, written as much out of love for her as an attempt to prevent any future sibling rivalry. "In the last record I wrote a song to Addie Rose," he explained, "so I was thinking the whole time when I was getting ready to do the next record, OK, what's going to happen when Camille is sixteen and Addie will be going, "Daddy wrote me a song - and he never wrote you a song!" Sue Keogh - July 2002