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A Blazing Grace: Alt.country Pioneer Jason Ringenberg by Bryan Miller www.carbondalerocks.com It's taken a quarter of a century, but country-rock pioneer Jason Ringenberg, the solo artist, children's entertainer, and frontman for the mostly retired and massively influential Jason and the Scorchers, has made the trip from a central Illinois farm to Carbondale, to Nashville, France, and finally back to the Carbondale area again. Jason with the Scorchers at an August 1998 show at the Copper Dragon."It was funny. I just did a mini-tour of France and was going to Paris. You would think that as I was flying over there, I'd be thinking about what I'm going to do in Paris and songs I'm going to play and where I'm going to go, but I was actually thinking about which songs I should play in Cobden," says Ringenberg of his upcoming show Friday, July 2 at the Yellow Moon Café . Ringenberg is still touring on the strength of his last solo album, All Over Creation, the follow-up to his first foray alone on stage, A Pocket Full of Soul. All Over Creation features Ringenberg singing with several notable guests, including longtime friends Steve Earle, Todd Snider, BR5-49, and others. All Over Creation is a powerhouse of a disc featuring the poignant ballad "Last Train to Memphis" and a stellar reimagining of the Earle/Ringenberg tune "Bible and a Gun." It features more of Ringenberg's slick songwriting on "James Dean's Car" (cowritten by Snider) with sharp lines like "She's right on track like James Dean's car/She won't be a falling star/She'd rather explode for all to see." This fall will also see the release of Ringenberg's fourth solo disc. "Things are definitely on an up-tip for me, and my career is blossoming on so many different levels it's hard to keep up with it all," he says. After attending Southern Illinois University at the tail end of the 1970s, Ringenberg joined forces with guitar powerhouse Warner Hodges to form Jason and the Scorchers. Ringenberg and his crew blurred the line between hillbilly music and rock 'n' roll, ultimately helping to create the alt.country genre that flourishes today in various permutations with bands like the Reverend Horton Heat, the Legendary Shack Shakers, and Wilco. "Being the first and one of the pioneers of any sort of musical trend will always make you more memorable," he says. "I'm quite proud to hear musicians point to me as one of the pioneers and one of their inspirations. That does sort of validate what I've done and makes me know that what I'm doing goes beyond myself. That's a good thing to go to bed thinking." Despite phenomenal critical acclaim and their heavy influence on scores of future acts, Jason and the Scorchers never reached A-list status in mainstream music. This is not particularly surprising given their lack of a clearly defined music style, although ironically they would ultimately help create a genre under which later bands like Uncle Tupelo would flourish. Not unlike Ringenberg's friend and colleague Steve Earle, Jason and the Scorchers were too country for the glut of pseudo-glam, make-up-clad 1980s hair metal, and too wild for a country music scene that was headed away from the outlaw sounds of Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings and toward Garth Brooks's faux-country pop pap. Which is not to say Jason and the Scorchers didn't have their share of fans. The band played countless shows and blazed trails across the country. Their first release, Fervor, was named EP of the year by the New York Times and the Village Voice, and it made its way onto Rolling Stone's guide to the one-hundred greatest rock 'n' roll records as well as the Country Music Association's one-hundred greatest-country records. The band parted ways briefly but reunited for three more albums and an appearance on Late Night with Conan O'Brien. Ringenberg is nothing but happy with his level of success, which is simultaneously impressive but underwhelming considering the band's talent and trail-blazing style. "I'm glad I didn't have smash success in the early or mid-eighties. I would prefer longevity, and the faster you go up the faster you come down, of course. I believe that the long-term approach is much better for me," Ringenberg says. "I believe that if [the Scorchers' second major-label album] Lost and Found had come out in 1994, it probably would have been a smash-hit record, but I can rest and sleep at night knowing that forty years from now people are going to remember who I am and probably will still be interested in what I'm doing-- if I'm still making good music, of course." Ringenberg says he's a big fan of the contemporary alt.country lineup, with some particular favorites familiar to Carbondale music fans. "I love the what the Legendary Shack Shakers are doing right now, the Wild Hearts from England, I'm a big fan of those guys. And I love the Woodbox Gang from Carbondale, actually. I don't know if they know anything about me, but they certainly have something to do with what we started years ago, and I'm a big fan of those guys and I love what they're doing." Ringenberg's last two solo albums and his shift toward a more folk-influenced singer-songwriter style came about as a natural progression, because, he says, in the late 1990s the Scorchers reached their apex. "I felt a little bit stale going onstage [with the Scorchers] and doing that because we'd done it so long so well that we could just throw it on auto-pilot and things would be okay," he says. "Now as a solo artist I have to really be on it, I have to be sharp, and I've got to be very focused. I learn every night doing it and it's a real challenge to go onstage and turn on a crowd with just you and an acoustic guitar." As if Ringenberg weren't busy enough, he's now two entirely different singers. Ringenberg's latest project is a major shift away from playing rowdy bars and honkytonks. Now a father with three young daughters, he is embarking on a second career as a children's entertainer as his alter ego Farmer Jason. It's a shift the Jason Ringenberg of fifteen or twenty years ago, smack in the middle of his Scorchers period, would never have imagined. "That wasn't even a thought," he laughs. "I thought Barney was the antichrist." The seeds for Farmer Jason were sewn when Ringenberg had to hit the road and leave his children behind for long stretches of time. What has become an increasingly successful side project arose from a much more intimate and personal endeavor. "I have three little daughters and two of them are really young, so I was around [children's] music a lot," Ringenberg explains. " All Over Creation was such a successful record in terms of getting me out on the road that I was touring so much in 2002 and 2003, so I thought it'd be neat to have a record for the kids to listen to, you know, of their daddy. That was the impetus to do it, but it's since grown much deeper and broader than that. It's grown into a sort of alternative career for me." Ringenberg says the challenges of playing for children are considerable, and indeed his younger audiences can be tougher and more demanding than the rowdiest bar crowd. "For the first time I have to use lyric sheets," he says. "You have to concentrate so much with these kids, you can't let your guard down for even a second or they'll just wander off. You have to be very focused and concentrate. I find myself concentrating so much with what's going on in the room, trying to keep the kids' attention, that I forget the words. "You can't go back and get a drink of water and tune your guitar for a few minutes like you can in a regular show. You have to keep the interest level up at every minute." As curious as it may seem, though, Ringenberg says the switch between his usual act and the Farmer Jason character isn't so different after all. "It's not as strange as you would think. There is one thing in common, which is that even though Farmer Jason is a children's thing, I approach it with a certain energy. I'm not out to placate and pacify the children, I'm out to sort of turn them onto good music and show them what a concert experience can be like. There are real solid parallels between the two." [Ringenberg will return to Carbondale Saturday, August 14 at 1 p.m. at Longbranch for a Farmer Jason show. See Nightlife for future details and possible schedule amendments.] Hardly content to rest on his laurels, Ringenberg is making yet another shift in his career. His forthcoming record, Empire Builders, is another first for him, an album with a heavier dose of social commentary. "Political is not a word that normally would describe me, especially not in the capital-P sense," he notes. "There's quite a bit on the record about foreign policy and the perception of Americans around the world. I was profoundly changed by the events in the past two years with the war in Iraq and the time I spent overseas." "I was overseas seven times in the last year and a half," he continues. "I went to Europe, Australia, Canada, all over. I saw how other people look at us, and Americans have a sort of World War II mentality in that we think we're the saviors of the world's freedom-- which we really were in World War II, along with the Russians and the British. We're still kind of holding onto that idea, but rest assured that the rest of the world doesn't see it that way at all. In fact, the rest of the world sees us as rather dangerous and rather violent, very imperialistic. That's just a fundamental truth. Even if you disagree with that idea and disagree with the people who think that, the fact of the matter is, a vast majority of the rest of the world thinks that, and that's a very dangerous and unfortunate thing." "I'm not like Billy Bragg or something," he's quick to add. "I don't anticipate changing the world or even changing politics much. I definitely felt it was necessary to speak out a little bit as to how I feel about some things." The record features several nakedly political tracks. The best of the bunch is the album's closer, the satirical "New Fashioned Imperialist," which skewers the stereotypical middle-Americans Toby Keith-era pop country is so eager to placate. Other tracks-- most notably a roaring tribute to Link Wray - feature classic Scorchers-like guitar riffs. Despite a handful of less-topical songs, the album is pervasively political. He attributes this shift toward further-reaching and more long-term thinking not just to his overseas experiences, but to the change in attitude that comes from being a father. Having kids, he says, greatly altered his perspective, "especially in terms of having $400-million deficits that our children have to pay for. I definitely have concerns about things like that." The album would never have come from Jason and the Scorchers, he says, joking that "Warner Hodges would never have gone along with some of the stuff I wrote on this record, ever, in a million years-- which I respect; that's fine. I know a lot of my fans aren't going to think the same way I do, and I'm not preaching at anyone. I'm just saying what I feel and what I saw out there. "It's not all anti-American politics," he continues. "There's also some very positive portraits of other Americans who I admire very much, Americans who I think are people to be proud of. There's a song to Link Wray on there, the legendary guitar player. There's a song about Chief Joseph, there's a song about my dad. These are songs about Americans who I truly admire and who I think we should maybe pay more attention to." Ringenberg says he doesn't identify himself as a Republican or a Democrat, a conservative or a liberal, but he does seem to have a bit of ire stored up toward the White House's current occupant. "I'm not sure that our current government would be considered conservative," he says. "How can you have a $400-billion deficit if you're conservative-- or go to a war that makes the country less secure, not more secure? I don't have any problems with some conservative ideas, but I think we have, in the last fifty or sixty years, ridden the World War II ideology way too much and way too long, and we took way too much license in our foreign policy because of that, and it's caused us a lot of problems and caused us to make a lot of mistakes. There have to be some changes." Ringenberg, for a man of such shifting musical styles and career paths, is mostly zen when it comes to the idea of dealing with change and mapping out the future of his work. Twenty-five years and fourteen albums into his musical career, Ringenberg says he's content to stick with his instincts and not worry too much about what changes may come. "I absolutely take it as it comes and trust my instincts and it hasn't failed me too much," he says. "I do tend to follow my gut and it usually leads me in the right directions, although sometimes it doesn't seem so at the time. But in retrospect, I see things work out the way they should have. Looking back over my career, I don't know if I'd make too many changes if I could." He adds that listening to the contemporary alt.country scene keeps him fresh, perhaps even forcing him to. "I hear now what Gillian Welsh is doing or the Shack Shakers or the Woodbox Gang and think, my god, these people are really pushing the envelope and on the edge and doing wonderful, exciting stuff. I need to stay up there with them if I can, as much as I can. You can't just rest on your own laurels." In the meantime, Ringenberg says he's looking forward to returning to Southern Illinois. "I so look forward to doing this," he says. "We played Carbondale in the past before, three or four times since I left there in eighty-one, but I've never looked forward to it as much as this one. I think it's going to be a real magic night. It's my first solo performance in Carbondale, ever. Even when I was in college and playing the bars, I don't think I ever did a solo show. This is my first solo show in Carbondale in thirty years of playing music." Carbondale stands in his mind as the place where he found "my first real girlfriends and my first real bands, my first experiences playing music for people. Those are the formative years. I have thousands of memories of those times, and most of them are good. Except for those morning classes. "I learned a lot of things in Carbondale, that's for sure," he concludes. "It was a very good place to be a musician and obviously still is."