Jason And The Scorchers: Wildfires + Misfires

Between its 1983 EP Fervor and its 1995 comeback A Blazing Grace, the seminal cowpunk quartet Jason And The Scorchers reserved its finest moments for the stage. The band didn't totally hang back in the studio, but its first splash came in the '80s, when even hard-edged rock groups with heavy country influences were expected to apply a certain amount of hairspray sheen and arena-ready, nuance-swallowing echo to their records. When it was trying to make it big, Nashville's finest rock act kept some of its essential personality in reserve, so Jason And The Scorchers only really captured its electrifying potential on tape before (and after) anyone but the diehards cared. The majority of Wildfires + Misfires—a Scorchers anthology identified on the CD cover as "two decades of outtakes and rarities"—comes from the band's contradictory period, when it tore up the college circuit, then returned home to stuff its rave-ups back in airtight plastic containers. Which means that in spite of smoldering live versions of Hank Williams' "Lost Highway," Tony Joe White's "Polk Salad Annie," and Johnny Burnette's "Tear It Up" (recorded in Germany with Link Wray, who duels with Scorchers guitarist Warner Hodges for more than six minutes), much of the collection is dedicated to songs that weren't good enough to make it onto albums that were themselves relatively weak. Still, there's some pleasurable kink to Wildfires + Misfires. A low-fidelity rendition of the traditional folk ballad "Long Black Veil" has a spooky sparseness, while the speed-freak Scorchers original "If Money Talks" reappears as a straight-up country demo, as sweet and corny as a Frosted Flake. Predictably, the disc's best tracks come from the leading and trailing edges of the group's career. Early demos of "Shop It Around" and the touchstone Bob Dylan cover "Absolutely Sweet Marie" are impressively charged-up, while the stormy Blazing outtake "Buried Me Like A Bone" obliterates the likable but damnably slight demos that make up the middle of the disc. Wildfires + Misfires is no substitute for Reckless Country Soul, a 1996 re-release that collected early live tracks and studio recordings, or for the mammoth 1998 double live CD Midnight Roads & Stages Seen. But as a shadow history of one of America's great might've-been bands, it's both entertaining and instructive.