Garbage Days Revisited #67: Jason & The Scorchers - "Still Standing" (1986)

 

"And though you are so far away, ten thousand miles of sorrow/This prison cannot, will not kill our blessed free tomorrow" - Jason & The Scorchers - Good Things Come To Those Who Wait

Like a lot of Britrockers my age, it's probably Ginger Wildheart's fault that I became a Jason & The Scorchers fan. They're a band who the G-man has never made any secret of his admiration for and the Wildhearts even covered the Scorchers classic White Lies as a B-side to Anthem many years ago. Most people who've heard them will happily tell you that the group's 1983 EP Fervor and their 1985 debut full length* Lost & Found are classics of the cowpunk genre, the perfect missing link between Johnny Cash and the Ramones and you can add me to that list as well. The follow-up, 1986's Still Standing though? Now that one seems to be a bit more divisive. And that's why it's the one we're covering here on Garbage Days Revisited...

(* - well, sort of, they put out a 1982 self-released effort Reckless Country Soul as Jason & The Nashville Scorchers which would contain a few of the tracks which would subsequently reappear on future releases) 

I was a bit surprised in reading an interview with Jason Ringenberg a couple of years back where he said he regards Still Standing as the group's weakest effort. Much as I love the guy, I have to respectfully disagree - to these ears, it's a more than worthy follow-up to Lost And Found. I think the issue comes from the fact that it had to follow up such a stormer of an album and was arguably always gonna fall slightly short. In a way, I'd call it the Scorchers' Goat's Head Soup, a good album that just happened to suffer a bit from where it was released in their back catalogue.

In a way, I can kind of see where the criticisms come from - the album is a lot more smoothly produced than its predecessor to give the band that big '80s rock sound (the guy behind the desk was sometime Motley Crue producer Tom Werman) and the choice of a cover of 19th Nervous Breakdown as the lead off single reeks of the band's label trying to get them to put something out with the aim of getting a radio hit that never really came but beneath that polished surface there are some great tunes on there from the frenetic Shotgun Blues and Take Me To Your Promised Land through the anthemic My Heart Still Stands With You to the album's high-point Good Things Come To Those Who Wait, a gentle ballad about a soldier imprisoned in either Japan or Vietnam wanting to be back home in Iowa with his sweetheart. It's the sort of song that could easily have been a total schmaltzfest in the wrong hands but with Jason and his band it's a genuinely affecting and heartfelt number which is pretty much the centre piece of the album.

I think the other reason the Scorchers may have less than fond memories of Still Standing is that despite them compromising their sound in the hope of a chart breakthrough, it still didn't shift the numbers that their label were expecting and saw them dropped by EMI after a four year stint there. They would move across to A&M for 1989's Thunder And Fire and unfortunately to these ears this is where the quality control really did start to drop off a bit - it's got a few decent moments in there like When The Angels Cry and the haunting Bible And A Gun (which Ringenberg would later re-record as a duet with Steve Earle) but there's also a fair few duds (Kingdom For A Car, for example, is probably one of the worst songs the band ever did). The group would lose their rhythm section, bassist Jeff Johnson and drummer Perry Baggs (RIP), in quick succession and would disband as the decade wound to a close.

Of course, this isn't the end of the Scorchers story by any means - the band would reunite in the mid-'90s with the original line-up and put out two solid albums in 1995's A Blazing Grace and 1996's Clear Impetuous Morning before disbanding again after Johnson's decision to retire from the music business (he'd been the guy behind the reunion at the beginning). Jason would concentrate on his solo music which is well worth an investigation especially 1992's One Foot In The Honky Tonk and 2004's Empire Builders. He also collaborated with Ginger and the Wildhearts for the excellent One Less Heartache single before reuniting with guitarist Warner Hodges (who's also got his own solo career on the side which is well worth investigating) for 2010's final Scorchers album to date Halcyon Times. With Ginger again on board helping with the songwriting, the result was arguably the group's best album after Lost And Found with the likes of Moonshine Kinda Guy, Beat On The Mountain, Fear Not Gear Rot and Mona Lee representing some of the band's best material in years. I saw them a couple of times during my London days and remember them playing an absolute stormer of a set at Highbury Garage with the group absolutely killing it right from the moment their breakneck cover of Lost Highway kicked things off to the last note of White Lies closing proceedings.

The Scorchers remain a going concern although there's been no new material since Halcyon Times with Jason and Warner both concentrating on their solo output (we reviewed Warner's recent best of in these 'ere webpages a month or two back if you missed it). Obviously if you've only just discovered them then I'd recommend Lost And Found, Fervor and Halcyon Times as the ideal place to start but give Still Standing a spin too if you get the chance. It may be a bit more polished than the standard Scorchers sound but the proof of any good album is in the tunes and on that front it more than holds its own in this writer's opinion.