Last year, Jason Ringenberg received a call from his former manager, Jack Emerson. He asked Ringenberg if he wanted to dig through old boxes of Jason & the Scorchers memorabilia. Emerson was cleaning out his garage, preparing to move, so Ringenberg set up a time to visit.

The experience overflowed with memories for the two. Emerson had always been more than a business adviser. Not only was he once the band’s drummer; he was also the first person to understand—and to enthusiastically encourage—Ringenberg’s idea of merging the musical passion of punk rock with the lyrical passion of country music. “Me and Jack used to sit around talking about how we could make history,” Ringenberg says, laughing shyly. Emerson stepped aside to allow Perry Baggs to join the band, recognizing the need for a go-for-broke rock drummer. But he continued to work with the band, helping Ringenberg realize his artistic vision while doing the leg work to make the music heard. “I remember going through things and saying, ‘There are a lot of great memories in here, Jack,’ ” Ringenberg says.

Then Ringenberg opened a large box and gasped. What he found was more than memories. He discovered old tapes from a session at Sun Recording Service in Memphis; no one knew the tapes existed. Produced by Jim Dickinson, a legendary figure in Memphis music circles, the tapes were of sessions the Scorchers cut not long after the release of their first EP, Reckless Country Soul; they were the first songs the band recorded in a true recording studio.

Ringenberg contacted guitarist Warner Hodges. They set up a meeting in a studio to listen to the tapes. “None of it was labeled,” Hodges says, leaning on a rickety table in the upper room of Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge on a late afternoon as a singer moans Merle Haggard’s “Sing Me Back Home” downstairs. “Because no one had listened to it, we wondered what was there. We wondered if it was just junk.”

They started the tape and grew more excited with each song. “We had no idea we had done those songs,” Hodges exclaims. “We kept turning to each other and saying, ‘Man, we got that, too!’ It was really a special moment. It’s probably one of the funnest times Jason and I have ever had together.” Jason adds, “By the time it got through ‘Gone, Gone, Gone,’ we were rolling on the floor laughing, in tears. It was a religious experience. It was like looking at a video of your wedding.”

As best they can figure, engineer Richard Roseborough turned on the tape during warm-up sessions. What he caught included cover versions of “I’d Rather Die Young,” “Candy Kisses” and “Gone, Gone, Gone,” all early staples of live shows that had never been recorded. It also included a never-recorded original song, “If You’ve Got the Love (I’ve Got the Time)” and an unreleased arrangement of “Pray for Me Momma (I’m a Gypsy Now).”

The band had gone to Memphis to work with Dickinson in an arrangement set up by Emerson, who loved the producer’s work with Alex Chilton on his Like Flies on Sherbert album. What the band recorded, at least officially, were early versions of songs that ended up on Fervor. “We knew we were laying groundwork for a record, and we didn’t want to do a bunch of covers,” Hodges says. “We had to get sounds and levels right, and we didn’t want to wear out the spontaneity of the songs we were going to cut. So we were just doing other stuff we knew and did live. No one knew it was being recorded. It was like someone handing you back a chunk of your life that you didn’t even know existed.”

At first, nothing came of the Memphis recordings. Dickinson shopped them to major labels; so did Emerson. No one showed interest. “The only thing I remember about Jim was driving up to the studio, and he came out of the bushes with a brown bag. He was a little overweight and had a big old beard,” Ringenberg recalls, laughing. “He didn’t look like this big rock producer, you know. I don’t know what he did or didn’t do for us. Dickinson is a passive producer. What I do credit him for doing was he got me and Warner to work together better in the studio. He talked a lot about the Warner-Jason thing and how the energy was so important. We’d never been in the studio much, and he emphasized how we had to work off each other instead of against each other.”

Hodges remembers something else Dickinson said. “It didn’t make a lot of sense to me then, but it makes a whole bunch of sense now. He told me that the biggest thing about the Scorchers was that we played shuffles, and Perry played them all in 4/4 time. Over the course of 15 years, that has come to make a lot of sense, because we do that all the time. That was what made us different.” That was also the element Dickinson had problems with. “He just didn’t understand the punk rock side of the band,” Ringenberg says. “He had never had any experience with punk rock bands at the time. He’s done the Replacements and all these other bands since, but at the time he kept saying, ‘I just don’t get it. It sounds too fast to me.’ Which is weird, because the stuff on Fervor was the slowest stuff we did.”

A few months later, the band went into the Castle Recording Studio. They recorded a couple more original songs and refashioned a bit of what was done in Memphis. Fervor came out on Emerson’s Praxis Records. The New York Times, among other publications, published rave reviews. EMI Records signed the band, hired producer Terry Manning to recut vocals on a song, to remix others, and to add a new song, a blistering cover of Bob Dylan’s “Absolutely Sweet Marie.” The Scorchers were off, making history, or at least a bit of it. Eventually, Fervor became a record that changed the lives of some and became important to a cult of fans and many young musicians.

The lost tracks enabled the Scorchers to fill out the Reckless Country Soul tracks in a context that could be released as a complete CD. The original EP, plus a 1981 outtake of Hello Walls and the five songs from the Memphis session were released in March on a 10-song disk titled Reckless Country Soul. It includes the original cover art, several photos from the era and a fine essay detailing the early days of the band and the impact they had in Nashville and the Southeast.

Reckless Country Soul was cut to four tracks in an old Nashville flat, with the band set up in the living room and Ringenberg bouncing on the walls in a long, thin hallway. The four songs, recorded just as the Scorchers exploded on the Nashville nightclub scene, include a raging version of “Jimmie Rodgers’ Last Blue Yodel,” as well as a take on Hank Williams’ “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” which shifted from slow and traditional to full-speed, setting the mold for many country-punk bands. The album also included the Ringenberg’s original “Broken Whiskey Glass,” before the recitation was added for the Lost and Found album, as well as the only recorded version of the great “Shot Down Again,” which opened the album with Jason spouting the line, “Look out London, here come the Scorchers.”

The band pressed 2,000 copies of the 7-inch, vinyl EP. It received little attention outside of Middle Tennessee. “We gave away a thousand, and sold another thousand for $2 at shows,” Hodges says. “But the more time that passed, the more people talked about it. It became this mythical record no one had heard. I’ve been asked about it 9,000 times. I’m sure that’s true for everyone else in the band, too. The answer was always that there aren’t any, there’s no way to get any, I don’t even have one. So it’s cool that one’s out there. And I’m proud of how it was done. There was more money spent on the packaging than we spent recording the stuff.”