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Carbondale Nightlife Jason Ringenberg: The concert also launches Ringenberg's new tour, which he says will carry him across the globe throughout the next eighteen months. He's travelling in support of his new double-disc release Best Tracks and Side Tracks, an incredible assembly of thirty songs that includes the most prominent tunes of his past as well as several rare and new recordings. Best Tracks and Side Tracks is a sprawling compilation that showcases Ringenberg's impressive ability to maintain a consistent voice while shifting between multiple genres. Tracks range from an early version of "Help! There's a Fire" recorded at SIU in the early 1980s by one of his first bands, Shakespeare's Riot, to a powerful duet with Steve Earle on "Bible and a Gun," which they cowrote. Also included on the career retrospective is a pair of Ringenberg's children's songs. (Ringenberg also performs as his alter-ego Farmer Jason, who sings cowpunk children's music about the bevy of critters and kooky goings-on at a fictionalized version of his Tennessee farm.) Ringenberg, one of the pioneers of alt-country, told Nightlife that compiling nearly thirty years of music onto a pair of discs was a big challenge-- and not always a pleasant experience. "There was a big sort of debate whether to do a really concise ten or twelve songs. But I just couldn't do that. I couldn't see limiting it that much, so we went ahead and filled up every minute we could on the CD," he said. "It was really difficult. I can't say I enjoyed the process. There were times I was like, 'Man, I'm not very good, I shouldn't be doing this!' I'm glad that process is finished." Ringenberg's versatility surely complicated the endeavor. Not only did he help create a genre (Rolling Stone once named his proto-alt-country EP with Jason and the Scorchers, Fervor, one of the one-hundred greatest rock albums of all time), but he's recorded everything from rock 'n' roll to folky solo tunes to music for the grammar-school set. His last solo album, Empire Builders, was almost entirely comprised of political songs. The end result is a twenty-song Best Tracks disc that veers from the boozy to the bucolic. The inherent pressure in releasing a best-of album, Ringenberg noted, is that "With a best-of record you're making a statement. You're making a statement that... you're a good enough artist to warrant this kind of treatment." Laughing, he added, "Whereas with a rarities CD, people have no expectations. This is stuff that never made the grade in the first place, so you have a more spontaneous, devil-may-care attitude about it. I think the outtakes and rarities surprised me in a big way... [because] there really wasn't anything to lose on the Sidetracks CD." One of the strongest tracks on either disc is a new version of the Ringenberg classic "Broken Whiskey Glass" recorded with- who else? - the Woodbox Gang. Ringenberg is more than a little enthused about the final result. "When you have the Woodbox Gang on your CD, it's going to sound good," he said. "They're one of the greatest new American rock 'n' roll bands in the world right now, and don't forget it. Those guys are really good, and I know they're out there fighting the good fight and the hard fight. I just can't say enough about that band. "We had a big time. They were total pros. And I will say that, for the record, I think that Alex [Kirt]'s guest vocal on ["Broken Whiskey Glass"] far surpasses my own vocals. He absolutely nailed it." It's the first time Ringenberg had officially worked with the Woodbox Gang, but the two have crossed paths before. Most recently both guest-starred on Stace England's exceptional concept/story album Greetings from Cairo. (Ringenberg's contribution to that disc, "Prosperity Train," is featured on Best Tracks.) It was England, the organizer of the Liberty Theater show, who not only introduced Ringenberg to the music of the Woodbox Gang but brought him back to Southern Illinois. "Southern Illinois before Stace England was a dusty piece of my memory," Ringenberg said. "Because my family's not there I didn't really come back after I left [upon graduation], except to play a few shows there over the years. And I have one or two friends there, Tom Miller from Shakespeare's Riot, but that's about it. Stace sort of got me back into it, into the culture of that strange place and the weird identity that Southern Illinois has." On his first trip back to Carbondale in several years, Ringenberg played a dynamite show at the Yellow Moon. The small venue was packed, with would be patrons standing outside the door and craning their necks in to hear the music. The fortunate few who were able to wedge themselves in got to see a hell of a performance, complete with a wild-eyed Ringenberg dancing his way down the bar and back. One fan who missed the show was the Woodbox Gang's Hugh DeNeal, who recalls, "I remember I was bummed because we were playing in Chicago that night and I really wanted to go to that show. Then we showed up at a party the next night in Carbondale and he played there." At that Fourth of July bash, Ringenberg played on a makeshift outdoor stage to a large, raucous crowd who danced from the first song to the last. Toward the end of his show Ringenberg mentioned that he'd recently been turned on to the Woodbox Gang, then played a pair of DeNeal-penned songs, "Never Kissed a Girl" and the lyrically byzantine "Big Bang Yin Yang." (Ringenberg recounts, "I will say that anyone who can sing that [latter] song deserves a reward in Heaven. There's so many words to that song that I was thinking, 'Man, if I miss one word Woodbox guitarist Ratliff Dean Thiebaud took the stage, eventually leading an impromptu jam session with a rotating list of Carbondale music allstars. Later in the evening, Ringenberg and DeNeal had a tê te-à -tê te over beers and barbecue. "I remember him saying, 'I've got a few years on you guys,' and he did give us some helpful advice," DeNeal said. "It means a lot for a guy who's done that for twenty-five years on a large A lot has changed for the Woodbox Gang since first meeting Ringenberg in 2004. In fact, a lot seems to change for them almost on a monthly basis as the career milestones come faster and faster. In 2007 the Gang signed a deal with Alternative Tentacles to release their back catalogue. (Alternative Tentacles is the label owned and operated by former Dead Kennedys frontman and political activist Jello Biafra.) The day after the Liberty Theater show the band will head west on another leg of their neverending tour, stopping along the way to play a show with Split Lip Rayfield at the Fox Theater in Boulder, Colorado. DeNeal said that the band is scheduled to have a meeting with Biafra while out west to discuss future partnerships, perhaps even Alternative Tentacles releasing their new, in-the-works album. "He wants to have a sit-down meeting with us," DeNeal said. "There's definitely talk about doing some more stuff [with Alternative Tentacles] because so far it's been quite a success. They sold out of everything we sent them within a short time." In addition to signing with their first national label, in November 2007 the band played their swankiest venue yet-- none other than the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. (It was a big year, apparently, for the Woodbox Gang and all things Kennedy.) The Kennedy Center performance was also broadcast live on the internet. "That [show] was amazing," DeNeal says. "That's a very different show than we're used to playing-- that goes without saying. It was this massive, incredible place.... We knew it was going to be broadcast over the internet and we knew that a lot of people back home and elsewhere were going to be watching it. But we weren't sure what the actual crowd in the place was going to be. We thought there might be a couple dozen people sitting there. But there were hundreds and With bigger and better shows under their belt, plus label interest and a new CD in the works, the future looks to be wide open for the Woodbox Gang. What seems to be something of a meteoric rise, however, has come only after a lot of hard work and an intense touring schedule that keeps the band packed into a van and driving coast to coast. "It's not so much the talent but the stubborn perseverance that leads to success," DeNeal says. "You kind of just take every new development as a positive thing. Even looking back seven years ago and getting to play in a new, better venue or some festival or getting booked in a big city, you stay positive and focused. You can look back and see where you've been and how far you've come, but you don't really think of it as happening so slow... because all the way there's good development that keeps you pumped up and keeps morale up. "That doesn't mean you always get the bills paid," he laughs. "And eventually it'd be nice not to have to worry about that. But... bands are supposed to fail. Everything is against you. But we've beaten the odds so far, and I do kind of feel like we're about to get over the hump, though. On our compound bow, we're about to get past the wheel." DeNeal pauses for a moment, then chuckles and adds, "That's kind of a redneck analogy." Ringenberg also says he expects bigger things to come from the Woodbox Gang. Though they capture the unique vibe of Southern Illinois, he says, their appeal stretches far beyond the area. "At first I was thinking, 'Okay, I'm a fan because they're from my area and we have the same home and roots,'" Ringenberg explained. "But the more I listened to them the more I thought, 'No, I would like this band if they were from Auckland, New Zealand.' They're world-class." Southern Illinois, Ringenberg adds, "has some of the finest musicians in the world, and no one knows it. It's a great secret. The quote I heard two or three years ago about Carbondale is probably the best, which is, 'Nowhere else in the world are there better musicians with less expectations.'" And the region, he says, continues to influence him as well. "That's one of the reasons why I'm starting the whole tour in Carbondale/Murphysboro. Without that area, I don't think the Best Tracks CD would be nearly as good and I don't think I would be nearly the artist that I am. I don't think I would have made the statements that I made in the music world, because I think I learned so much from Carbondale-- not only in the past, but even now. There's a lot of my songs that come from Carbondale. "Truly, as a word-traveled artist, the more I spin around the world, the more I appreciate Southern Illinois for its charm and its funky, unpredictable backwoods character." |