JASON

JASON One foot in the honky tonk 1992 Liberty records 320 kbps

The life of the party / One foot in the honky tonk / Try me / Letter of love / Already burned / Hardlucked boy / I washed my hands in muddy water / Feels so right / Wild about you / Devil's daughter .

Produced by J. Crutchfield

As leader of the combustible country punk band Jason & the Scorchers, Jason Ringenberg came on like a Southern preacher’s son acutely aware of the costs of sin, but living it up too hard in the here and now to turn back. And with the aid of flamethrower guitarist Warner Hodges, Mr. Ringenberg was responsible for some of the most ripping roots music of the past decade, starting with the brilliant 1983 EP “Fervor” and its lightning-fast follow-up, “Lost and Found.”With “One Foot in the Honky Tonk,” Mr. Ringenberg - now simply Jason - is following fashion and repositioning himself as a solo country artist, albeit one with blood racing through his veins a mite quicker than most. With the last Scorchers album, 1989’s “Thunder and Fire,” Mr. Ringenberg wisely began to share the songwriting load with co-writers; here he surprisingly contributes to only two of the 10 tunes.The bigger surprise, though, is that you would never know it. Mr. Ringenberg sings every one of these songs as if they were his own - the thorny predicaments of the title track and the bluesy “I Washed My Hands in Muddy Water” are particularly apt expressions of inner turmoil.And though the studio musicians backing him never fire it up like the Scorchers, the introduction of craft into the equation does Mr. Ringenberg’s always impassioned approach some good: The likes of the devotional “Letter of Love” and Buddy Holly-esque “Feels So Right” are liable to finally land him on the radio, with his soul intact.

Dan DeLuca- The Philadelphia Inquirer-June 27, 1992