Golden Ball and Chain

You are locked into The Zoo, where the deep cuts still bite and the album rock still has dirt under its fingernails. The needle drops on a song that should have been a national radio fight, not a cult souvenir. Golden Ball and Chain, the opener on Still Standing, the 1986 EMI America album from Jason & the Scorchers. Jason Ringenberg wrote it. Warner Hodges played it like he was trying to drag AC/DC through a Nashville honky-tonk. Perry Baggs hit the drums hard enough to leave a mark. Jeff Johnson held the low end. Tom Werman produced it, the same man who had already steered Cheap Trick, Mötley Crüe, and Ted Nugent through the board. Recorded at Cherokee in Hollywood and Scruggs Sound in Berry Hill, Tennessee. Issued as a single on EMI America with Greetings From Nashville on the flip. Mainstream rock radio pushed it to number 16. The album itself stalled at number 91 on the Billboard 200 in March 1987. That gap tells you the whole story of this band.

Golden Ball and Chain is not a party song dressed up in fringe. It is a warning with a backbeat. Ringenberg opens on a coughed hello and a wild haircut, then watches the subject realize the meal was only a taste. Los Angeles calls. London grooms the star. Somebody gets on the phone to find out who they are. Happiness is a dying trend. A train is coming around the bend, straining under the full weight of a name, and the name is carved into a golden ball and chain. The second half turns meaner. A drowning sailor in a jug of wine. First it was her, now it is you. No psychoanalyst is standing by with a map. Tears fall like grass in sand. They speak to no one. They give no command. Another line, another carved link. That image is the whole Scorchers argument in one phrase. Fame is not a prize. It is jewelry that does not come off.

The band had been playing the song live with different lyrics before it ever hit tape. Ginger Wildheart later noted that both Golden Ball and Chain and Crashin' Down had been road-tested that way. Ringenberg himself has been hard on the album. In a later reckoning he called Still Standing the polar opposite of Lost & Found, blamed the usual rock demons, and said the band lost focus. Critics at the time were split. AllMusic heard a polish job aimed at a wider audience. Musician magazine heard a sharpened attack. The Stones cover of 19th Nervous Breakdown was the first single pulled from the record, which tells you how the label was thinking. The band out-rocked the original without sanding off the twang. EMI also pressed a Still Standing promo shirt built around Golden Ball and Chain and sent it to radio stations. Years later Ringenberg dug one of those shirts out of the attic and put the design back in circulation. That is how close this cut came to being the one that broke them.

To understand why the song hits the way it does, you have to go back to a hog farm on the Illinois side of the Rock Island Line. Jason Ringenberg was born November 22, 1959, in Sheffield, Illinois. He passed through Southern Illinois University, fronted a short-lived outfit, then pointed a truck at Nashville on the Fourth of July, 1981, with a plan to kick American roots music into the modern age. Music Row was still living in the hangover of Urban Cowboy. The rock stations were full of Journey and Styx. Into that room walked a lanky farm kid in a faux-leopard cowboy hat and a shiny fringed shirt, the kind of getup that made him look like Porter Wagoner after a long argument with the Ramones. Praxis Records introduced him to the players who became the Scorchers. They started as Jason & the Nashville Scorchers. Guitarist Warner Hodges, born in Nashville in 1959, wanted the band to sound like AC/DC. Ringenberg wanted it to sound like country. Bassist Jeff Johnson and, once the lineup locked, drummer Perry Baggs made the argument physical. Jack Emerson drummed early, then stepped out to manage them. The word cowpunk had not stuck yet. The band invented the job description anyway.

The 1982 EP Reckless Country Soul got them noticed in the clubs. EMI signed them. The 1983 EP Fervor carried the fire-breathing cover of Bob Dylan's Absolutely Sweet Marie, the track that made rock critics sit up. Robert Christgau heard Gram Parsons's knowledge of sin crossed with Joe Ely's determination to get away with it. Lost & Found followed in 1985 and remains the record most people name first. Still Standing arrived the next year as the major-label swing. Nine songs on the original vinyl. Side one runs Golden Ball and Chain, Crashin' Down, Shotgun Blues, Good Things Come to Those Who Wait, and My Heart Still Stands With You. Side two opens with 19th Nervous Breakdown, then Ocean of Doubt, Ghost Town, and Take Me to Your Promised Land. A 2002 CD reissue added Greetings From Nashville, Route 66, and The Last Ride. Hammond B3 from Jai Winding. Extra voices in the back. The songs were mostly Ringenberg's alone. The sound was the argument between his pen and Hodges's amp.

They were too rock for country radio and too country for the rock stations that wanted their guitars clean. MTV gave Golden Ball and Chain some air. The Southeast treated them like a local weather system. Live, they were a different animal from the record. Ringenberg whipped the microphone cord and his own frame in the same motion. Hodges played like a man who had studied Angus Young and Hank Williams and refused to pick a side. Baggs kept it simple and savage until diabetes took him off the road in 1990. The band broke, reunited in 1993, cut A Blazing Grace and Clear Impetuous Morning, kept the fire through the 2000s, and released Halcyon Times in 2010. Perry Baggs died in 2012. The Americana Music Association handed the band a Lifetime Achievement Award for Performance in 2008. The Country Music Hall of Fame put up an exhibit. Mojo took to calling Ringenberg the Godfather of Americana. On his own he cut solo records, invented the children's character Farmer Jason, and won an Emmy for a PBS program. The Scorchers never became the household name the single almost bought them. They became the band later alt-country acts had to answer to.

That is the trick of Golden Ball and Chain. It sounds like a victory lap and reads like a diagnosis. The golden part is the contract, the video, the phone call from London. The chain is what happens when the wild reputation is the only thing left and even that stops getting said out loud. Ringenberg was already living inside the industry machine when he wrote it, close enough to see the train and smart enough to name the weight. Put it on loud. Let Hodges take the middle. Remember that a farm kid from Sheffield and a Nashville guitarist who wanted to be AC/DC walked into EMI America and left a song that still outruns the chart position stapled to it.

Jason & the Scorchers keep the legacy posted at jasonandthescorchers.com, with music up at their Bandcamp. Jason Ringenberg's own home base is jasonringenberg.com, and he is on Facebook and Instagram. The band page lives at Facebook as well. No active X account turned up that belongs to them, so that one stays off the list. For more of this kind of album-rock deep cut, freeform and commercial-free, stay with The Zoo.