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A Conversation with JUNIOR BROWN, the Hendrix of Twang
[Fall 2001]
by David Ensminger
You wouldn't think a country guitar player would by any stretch of the imagination get compared to Jimi Hendrix
on a regular basis. But for Junior Brown, one of the most left-field traditionalists alive, that comparison crops up again and
again. With his trusty "guit-steel" in tow-a double-necked contraption that combines an electric guitar with a lap steel-the
uncannily talented guitarist melds country with surf music, rock, and rootsy Southern-flavored tunefulness. Brown's new
album, Mixed Bag, is due out this summer on Curb, an appropriate title given his unique and constant melding of different
musical styles. The cuts, most of which are originals, include some of his best ballads, a riverboat shuffle, an old New Orleans
jazz song replete with horns, and a blues number. Thirsty Ear recently caught up with Brown to talk about the state of
country music, life on the road, and staying sane in the music business.
Are you comfortable when people describe your guitar playing as "genius," that it even takes Hendrix a step forward?
[roars laughing] I don't think anyone could take Hendrix a step further.
Maybe backward a little, take him back to the '40s
[roars again]. But the compliment I will accept is originality. I take ideas other people have used and I present them in
hopefully a new, fresh way. As long as I'm doing that and people are noticing it, then it's a compliment and a deserved one.
All the other stuff is flowery and needs to be taken with a grain of salt. As long as you can stay original, and stay sincere,
that's all that counts.
But as Ernest Tubb said, you can be original and sincere, but you gotta bring it back to country.
Yeah, but I didn't take his advice, that's the irony of it. I tried to, I tried to.
But no one was interested in an old-sounding band. And I can understand why. I try and keep it country when it's called
for, but it doesn't mean that every lick I play is going to be a country lick.
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You are often able to connect to an audience that is prejudiced against country, but what makes them prejudiced to
begin with?
Because it's been worked to death. It's been used, parodied, and reduced to a
joke. It's too bad that it's that way, but that's what's happened. So there's really not much dignity, unless of course
you see an older country artist who's been doing it awhile and has stuck to his guns and is sincere and real. There ain't no
changing this guy, he's been around and good. And when you see him, he's going to cut through all those preconceived
notions you had about the corniness of country.
Ernest Tubb fought against watered-down country music. Is that the same fight you are fighting?
It's been going on for a long time. I just went beyond it, because I went
beyond country music. You see, I play Hawaiian, rock, blues, the surf stuff…I'm open to anything. I got a Dixieland
song on the new record. It's more about original music. I used to say original American music, but it even goes beyond
American music, because I like certain things from other countries. It's just music, and I think we're at a time now
when labels don't mean anything anymore. In the '70s, it meant something, because everyone was saying, Hey, where's our
country music going? It's been sold out.
Down here in Texas on KIKK, they changed formats. They play Dave Matthews along with country. And you happened to do
some shows with Dave Matthews this summer.
Yeah, anything goes. It's all just music now, and I think it's great. Yep, I'm
doing some stuff with Dave Matthews, several shows. I played with the String Cheese Incident the other night.
They're great; I had a great time with them.
People might wonder why you play with Matthews or the Stone Temple Pilots if you didn't think their music was exciting.
That's the whole idea. You take something that might not be exciting and
make it unpredictable, and therefore exciting. The whole idea of Junior Brown and the String Cheese Incident playing
together is exciting because it's different. I'm different, and they're different, so you put the two different things together,
and you have even more combinations. It's all about combinations-how you present something that is exciting. If you
want to get up there with your big belt buckle and tight pressed jeans, and you have five guys up there who look like they
pulled the same clothes out of the same drawer and they're all singing the same kind of song, they're all whining through
their noses and breaking their voice in the same spot, it's predictable, right? And you know, maybe some people find that
highly interesting, but I think that the consensus is, No, we want to see something more unpredictable and more creative.
And that's what I'm trying to do.
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But now there's a big underground of "alt-country" bands, or bands that are returning to stripped-down country,
including well-known artists like Whiskeytown and Son Volt. Is it an honest move or really just about people seeing an
opportunity and grabbing it?
Yeah, it's an opportunity, because I don't hear any country coming out of it.
What I'm hearing is like folk rock. What they're returning to is more acoustic-based stuff. That doesn't mean they're not
doing quality stuff, but I don't hear any country….
There's no going back to country. Those people aren't hillbillies, and they shouldn't pretend like they are. You got to
be real, you got to be who you are. If you're a college kid, you gotta say you're a college kid, 'cause you sure can't lie
about it. It doesn't work [laughs]. You can't hide. You gotta be what you are. And if you say you're country and you
ain't country, you're in trouble. That's how I look at it. Even hillbillies don't want to be called hillbillies. They want to
drive their pickup trucks and spit Beechnut and chew, but they don't want you calling them a hillbilly. They want to
feel that they are just as sophisticated as you are. So what do they do? They go out and listen to rock music, outdated
rock [laughs]. They don't want anything to do with country music, because it's been gone for so long. They don't want to
act like Grandpa Jones or…
Hee Haw.
Exactly. So you're trying to bring back something that is like 1950s rock,
but you really can't bring it back. It will always be a parody of something that is gone.
You've said the thing is to listen to a Louis Armstrong record in a new way.
Well, you don't listen to it in a new way. I was talking about playing it in a
new way. It was about interpreting it. If you are going to play an old song, for instance, you add your own thing to it, and
your own thing should define you. And what should define you should not be an imitation of the past. For instance, I did
this Dixieland jazz thing with horns on the new record. [SONG TITLE TK] I didn't call up a trombone player, I sat and I learned
the trombone part on the steel, which is a different idea. It's original. I'm doing a traditional song in a traditional way, but
I've taken a new idea and put my Junior Brown thing on it. If I was to hire a trombone player and say, Okay, play exactly
what's on this record, and tell the other players to play exactly what's on the record…
It's copycat.
Yes, it's copycat. Anybody can do that. That's why I'm saying you can
use the old ideas, but add something new to them to make it fresh.
For years, you were associated with Austin, so why the move to Tulsa?
Well, it's where family lives. I still have a place in Austin I go to when I'm
writing things. You know, I lived in New Mexico for a long time, from 1965 till '75.
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Was that in Cerrillos?
Part of it, yeah, I had a place in Cerrillos.
So what drew you out there?
Cheap rent [laughs]. Back in the '60s, Cerrillos was still pretty much a ghost town.
It's not much more now, minus a few tourists.
Yeah, but they don't call it that anymore. I used to stay at the Palace Hotel,
and my first gig was at the Tiffany Saloon working in the melodrama with my dad. That was '66, '67.
How did you get from Indiana to there?
We lived in Indiana, but we lived in a lot of places. Indiana was the first
place I remember hearing country music, having it soak in when I was young. My parents listened to classical, so I listened
to that at an early age.
Your dad also listened to big band 78s?
He had some of those too.
And he played piano?
Yeah. He was a musicologist. He knew a lot about music.
Are there any early experiences with music that have stayed with you, like hearing your father play piano?
The things that turned me on the most were hearing electric guitar players.
When I first heard an electric guitar, that
just changed everything. It had a magical sound to it because of the loudness and that cutting tone. The memories I
have of being really excited by music is hearing a live band…one of them was downtown Annapolis in the early '60s.
They had a March Of Dimes parade and there was a live band in it. It just changed my life. I was never the same after that.
You found a broken-down two-string acoustic guitar in the attic.
That's going back to when I was real young. That was my idea of guitar.
I didn't really hear records because I was too young, but I heard the radio. But then you really see a guy playing an
electric guitar and he's plugged in; it was a big, life-changing thing. A similar event to that was a neighborhood having a
party across the woods from us. I had been put to bed, but listening out the window I could hear an electric guitar band
playing, and I just thought I was at the party. I was visualizing everything. I was there, but I wasn't there.
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As you got older, college kids turned you on to country, folk, and blues?
That's because my father taught at a liberal arts college, and the college
campuses are where all that folk revival was going on in the '60s. There I got to hear all the blues players, people
that were associated with all that. The kids my age were listening to the Beach Boys and the Beatles. They weren't
digging any deeper than that, because they didn't have the records. The college kids had the records.
Did you already know you were a guitar player or did you fiddle around with different instruments?
My dad wanted me to be a piano player. I had played piano, improvising
very well, when I was a kid, but I never enjoyed it as much as guitar.... I took a few lessons, learned a few chords, but I
was self-taught after that.
You started working the club scene as early as the '60s?
Yeah, I started working in the Santa Fe and Albuquerque bars in the late '60s.
At that time, I was playing with country groups. It was all covers.
Was there a work ethic, sensibility, or set of values that was instilled in you back in Indiana that stayed with you?
No, because it was all rebellion. I mean, I didn't get along with my parents. I
wish I had. I had a miserable childhood. It wasn't anybody's fault necessarily. It's just the way it was. I spent a lot of time in
my room with the music, and the work ethic came from the desire just to be good at something, a passion for that
particular thing. I really didn't have a choice, you know. I didn't sit around and practice all day because I liked to work. I
sat around because that was all I could do. I wasn't really practicing, I was playing, but it amounted to the same thing,
because I was working things out. I did it for fun, and I did it because it was therapy, and eventually I did it for money.
When I dropped out of high school, what was I going to do? I immediately just started playing with the older guys in the
clubs. Got a fake ID. That was my work ethic: survival. It just continued on from there.
You once said that music was a stabilizer.
I think it kept me from getting into trouble. It was something to focus on. I
had a goal. It was a tough time. The '60s were tough on a lot of people. And the '70s too. A lot of people didn't make it.
They went down some bad roads. I managed to stay out of trouble. I stayed off the booze. You know, playing all the bars
with the free booze, I watched a lot of guys turn into drunks. I avoided that and just concentrated on the music. The
music had helped me as a child…. I always had the music to pull me through. It was one thing I could do well, because I
didn't do a lot of things well.
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Around 1980 you had a vision of the "guit-steel," the combination of the steel guitar and guitar. Was it really a spontaneous dream or something you had envisioned in the '70s as you honed your music?
Well, Stella, [LAST NAME TK], who I was staying with in Hawaii, had this old zither that he had turned into a lap steel guitar. It really didn't work very well. It was small enough to where I thought I could glue this to my guitar. So I had been thinking about the idea of that. For some reason, it didn't come to me until I had this dream that it was a double-necked instrument. That's when I looked down and saw myself playing this thing. I went around talking to everybody [about it], and they just looked at me like I was half-crazy.
It took five years for Michael Stevens to build you one?
Yeah. I went into his shop, and there was all these double-neck things…then these other instruments that weren't double-necks but had the same beautiful craftsmanship. You never saw anything he made that didn't look exactly like something Gibson or Fender would have made at their factory. He was good at imitating the integrity of an instrument and making it look like it had been made by a company instead of just somebody in his garage. I said, This is probably the guy who could make the guit-steel. We took the guitar, then we took a lap steel, then some big, huge rubber bands, and we stuck them together. I strapped it on and we found balance points, where to set the steel in relation to the guitar and all that. Then we drew up some blueprints, but he had a lot of projects going at the time. But by 1985 I had the thing.
How long did it take you to get accustomed to using it?
I was playing it the next night. I played the Station Inn [IN NASHVILLE?] with Mark O'Connor, Vince Gill, and Jerry Douglas. The night after it was made I just jumped on the stage and started using it.
You'd already been working on your songwriting, because your first solo record happened not too long after the development of the guit-steel.
I was a frustrated guy because I knew I had something to offer, but I hadn't written any songs and I was just good as a player. Well, what do you do as a player? You play for other people. I saw all these guys that I knew get publishing deals. They could write a certain amount of songs and get a paycheck every month. They didn't necessarily have to be good songs, they just had to turn out a certain amount of them. I thought that it would be a great thing to try. And I also knew that if I wanted to do anything as a solo artist, it would be good if I wrote my own material. With those two reasons, I just got into the songwriting really heavy. In the early '80s, I started concentrating on it.
Was it hard for you to find an audience?
When you play with other people, they usually forget you the same night, even if you're good. Because what they've gone to see is the star, and you're not the star, so they forgot all about you. I had a little bit of a following because I put my own band together, and in 1983 I recorded a single down in Austin, a 45 record that was amazingly well received. It sort of got a little buzz going. I don't want to say cult, because I hate that word, but it kinda had an underground following. By the time I put my band together and started working in Austin with Tonya [Brown's wife, SP?], a lot of the musicians knew who I was, so they'd come out and see me. Then gradually it caught on to the other people.
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You played the Smithsonian Institution Guitar Seminar [WHERE AND WHEN?]. Did you ever imagine that a kid from Kirksville [INDIANA?] with a busted two-string guitar would end up there?
I appreciate the accolades. They aren't what you live for, but when you get them, they're nice, you know. I like to be appreciated, because it shows that people are listening.
That a lot of different people are listening.
Yeah. It's important, because you have to try and reach all the people. I always had the dream. I always wanted to be a famous musician, and I always wanted to be good. So it helped. I hope I'm good [laughs]. If they don't think I'm good, I'll still believe in myself, but it's nice when we agree.
As you head towards 50, are there things you want for your music other than a bigger audience?
Oh, I think just a bigger audience and hope that it's always increasing. I haven't had a record out in two years, and my audience has diminished a bit. I'm still packing them in, so as long as they like the music, and I come up with fresh ideas and keep the music going, that's enough. It will be interesting to see where music goes these next few years.... I hope to have longevity like B.B. King, Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby, and a lot of the greats who worked until late in their years and came up with fresh ways to reinvent themselves.
Bruce Springsteen once told a reporter that he didn't work in a factory, he couldn't work on cars, but he could write a song. That's who he was, but once in awhile he had to take a step back, because if he lost the ability to do that, then there might be trouble. He couldn't take such a thing for granted.
That's very good. See, most musicians don't think that way. They just say, Oh, wow, here's the party and it's never going to end. If you go into a hotel and say, We're musicians, what rooms are they going to give you? They are going to give you the same ones they give to construction workers because they think you are trouble. Why do they think you're trouble? Because musicians have brought the name of being a professional musician down. And that's too bad. As far as what we do, we've got our system, and it works for us. We just try to do the best we can.
I've seen a lot of guys come and go, and figured out a lot about how that works before I became successful. So by the time I did, I didn't squander anything and was very careful about how I handled it. Because I know it's something you work on, and once you get it, it can be fleeting, so you try and milk it for all it's worth and try to respect it.... Tonya [SP?] and I started this thing from nothing; we were living in a tent for awhile. We built it up, and we cared for it. We don't take it for granted at all.
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