Jason And The Nashville Scorchers
Reckless Country Soul

It was the night between December 31, 1952, and January 1, 1953, when the Music stopped. It was cold that night; snow and blasts of icy wind. Hank Williams was supposed to play at the Charleston, West Virginia auditorium, but from Knoxville, there was no way he could make it on time with that awful weather. Oh well - they decided to reroute to Canton, Ohio: there, Charles, the student who acted as his driver, could drive him in his Cadillac, in time to light up dances and revelries on New Year's Day. But in Canton, that night, Hank would never arrive. The rhythm of that life was too fast for that twenty-nine-year-old heart. 

Or maybe, as I have always thought, too fast and vibrant, that crazy heart full of beer, songs, and rodeos, for the rhythm of life itself. Even faster than the Cadillac that was speeding through the Tennessee borders on that icy night, before stopping. And with the roar of that engine, the guitar also fell silent that night.

TWENTY-NINE years later - what are twenty-nine years after all...? too few for a lifetime, but an eternity for music... - four wild young men, dogs without leash or muzzle, enter the studio to record their debut EP, and among the grooves of that EP appears (certainly not by mere chance) "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry," the famous lament of old Hank. The miracle materializes at one minute and fifty into the song: the sweet sway of the ballad stops suddenly, a few moments pass, and everything happens - like a machine gun, Perry Baggs' deadly roll is the spark that ignites the blaze. From a sad honky-tonk melody explodes, and it sounds like a firecracker in the silence of the night, the PUNK. Wild fury. The piece is the same, but in an instant, it has transformed into a completely different creature. Imagine that the silence of those few seconds is, condensed, the same silence Hank left behind on that distant winter night. And imagine that in those same few seconds, a musical leap of nearly three decades took place. Country became young, alive (and above all...DANGEROUS) again; it's the vent of four kids from 1982 who go to the cemetery to revive sounds that seemed like dead bodies.

Those four were Jason and the Scorchers of Nashville. 

Jason Ringenberg, precisely: the classic example of the right man born in the wrong place (before taking the train, the one more congenial to him, to the South). What could he possibly have in common with the smokestacks of Illinois, someone who from a young age had worn out (and the term is not a metaphor) the records of King Hank, Jimmie Rodgers, and the Nashville of the golden years... but who had indeed learned the lessons of Chuck Berry and the Stones - because then... you don't reach the end of "Shot Down Again" that amidst that angry mixture of harmonica and r'n'r for cowboys you seem to hear it all: the "teenage" Stones, those for whom "You Can't Catch Me" & Co. was the daily bread, as well as the already "grown-up" ones of "Mother's Little Helper," who were already walking their own path without any inferiority complexes in front of the likes of B.B. King or Muddy Waters. The irreverence of youth...

"If the Ramones had grown up in Nashville instead of Queens, they would probably have sounded like Jason & The Scorchers" (without "Nashville," a toponym that would later disappear) - the phrase is historic, and whoever said it was spot on. "Broken Whiskey Glass" is another proof of what happens when punk and the roots of Southern cowboys (two equally explosive reagents) have the luck to meet. And in "Last Blue Yodel" (Jimmie Rodgers "revisited"...) the flame reaches its maximum height, that perfect brightness of pure rock'n'roll that Elvis - with very few others - kindled during his Sun period only to never find it again for an entire career. The flame (THAT flame) can be blinding, but often doesn't last more than a moment.

P.S. Listening to the extended version of the EP is highly recommended, with (among other things) a Carl Perkins doing the pogo ("Gone Gone Gone") but above all (and this allow the romantic writer here, who cares deeply about certain things) that heart-wrenching ballad "Pray For Me Momma," almost like a "Dead Flowers" under the effect of a sedative - "pray for me, momma, I'm a wanderer now..."