Chuck Ragan set the tone for our evening before even stepping on stage. We met in a dingy room in the bowels of Maverick’s nightclub where he offered me a Guinness and pulled up a tattered swivel chair for me, and a disintegrating leather couch for himself, using a rolled mattress for a footstool. Southern hospitality at its most punk.
Currently touring with his folk solo project, Ragan spent the better part of two decades on the road as the lead singer of punk legends Hot Water Music. The sound quality has changed — from thrashing punk riffs to country twang — but Ragan’s attitude isn’t any different.
“I feel like whatever energy you exude is what you get back,” said Ragan of his loyal following. “It’s exciting that I can go out and play a show and see just random people of all ages who have no idea who Hot Water Music is, what it was, what it sounds like, or anything. I never expected any of that. I was never shooting for any of that. I was just playing some songs.”
Ragan said he grew up in a Southern Baptist household, surrounded by gospel and country twang. He learned to play acoustic from a friend of his father’s, who taught him songs like “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay.” Then came the inevitable teenage rebellion, when he began picking out bar chords by the Misfits.
Both sides of Ragan’s identity show through his music, the whiskey-and-cigarette drawl is as punk as it is country. He also said the songwriting process is no different, whether you are writing a song for a moshpit or one that could feature a gospel choir.
“All the early Hot Water Music stuff was written on acoustic, sitting on porches, sitting around campfires playing folk songs and little ditties,” Ragan said.
In a band, there is always the balance among members, though. Writing songs all on his own means Ragan doesn’t have a filter or, as he said, “police.”
“There’s not a whole lot to hide behind,” Ragan said. “When you’re playing acoustic it’s just you and a box of wood and some strings and either you make it happen or you don’t. And to me it almost just pushes me harder than anything I’ve ever done.”
After almost 15 years on the road, Hot Water Music announced a hiatus, which most fans took as a break-up. Although Ragan said he didn’t intend for it to be that way, neither him nor his band members fought off the rumours. Still close friends, he said they were all ready for a change, musically.
Ragan and his wife started a record label around the same time he was signed to SideOneDummy Records to release his debut solo album, Feast or Famine. Together, they began hosting The Revival Tour, an open concept jam tour featuring fellow crossover folk musicians. This spring, the Ragans are taking the tour to Australia and hope to bring it to Canada in the fall.
“Even though it can be a great show some nights, the whole format of it is like sitting down and writing the same song over and over again,” Ragan said. “Basically we want to sever the lines and expectations of who should be an opener and who should be a headliner.”
Ragan said he can’t get the Revival Tour out of his system now. On his current tour with Tim Barry (Avail) and Cavaliers!, Ragan regularly shares the stage with the other musicians.
“I’ve always played music as an individual,” Ragan said. “To me, that I have friends I can share it with who think along the same lines that I do all over this world is a special thing.”