Country music’s most left-field hat act, Texan Junior Brown, is the toast of “Late Night With Conan O’Brien” and “Saturday Night Live,” but he confesses he wasn’t always cool.
The eccentric instrumentalist, who plays a weird guit-steel (his marriage of the electric guitar and the steel guitar) and writes and sings such off-the-wall ballads as “My Wife Thinks You’re Dead,” discloses he used to be laughed at by the same youngish, rock-crazy crowds who now love him.
“That’s what started me playing all this wild guitar stuff,” explains Brown (scheduled to headline at FitzGerald’s in Berwyn Saturday after working with Travis Tritt on Friday at Star Plaza in Merrillville, Ind.). “I wasn’t doing very much of that, and I could see people out there kind of making fun of me, treating me like I was some dumb old hillbilly. It made me mad, and I said, `OK, I’ll turn that amp up and blow their eardrums.’
“Because I can play that rock stuff if I want to, and I found I could use it in places where it wouldn’t really ruin the music. It would just maybe add a little excitement to it. And that’s when they quit making fun of me and started telling me how great I was. All I was doing was making a bunch of racket.
“What they think is really good guitar playing is really the easiest to play. And what they think is easy to play is really the hardest–which is the country stuff with the feel, the Ernest Tubb kind of stuff and the Ray Price shuffle-type things. All that is much more difficult to play, but they don’t realize it. They think, `Oh, country’s easy.’ They still don’t understand: It is art.”
Because of his eclectic appeal, Brown has performed on the same stages with such varied acts as Merle Haggard, Morphine, Widespread Panic and Chris Isaak.
Brown isn’t your average product of today’s Nashville mainstream. He isn’t even in that mainstream. His idols are not country’s present horde of sometimes interchangeable neo-traditionalists but, rather, their spiritual fathers and grandfathers, understated men who stood onstage in big white hats and played their working-class music without apology, take it or leave it.
As a boy, Jamieson (Junior) Brown, Arizona-born son of an itinerant music teacher, admired deep-voiced Grand Ole Opry pioneer Ernest Tubb.
“I think it was his personality and the way he could put that feeling into a song,” Brown now says at 43, his deep voice reminiscent of the late Tubb’s own. “It just did something to me. . . . Really, the first time I had ever seen a steel guitar was on his show. I didn’t even know what a steel guitar was ’til I started watching that show.”
The stereotypical country steel guitar is a table-like instrument with strings across its top and legs underneath, at which musicians tend to sit and labor with the air of accountants on Tax Day. It was this instrument that Brown combined with a regular guitar to invent his guit-steel. He did so, he says, because he had found it “awkward” switching back and forth between the two onstage.
Brown took his two-headed mechanical monstrosity–which he holds like a regular guitar–and combined it with Tubb-like vocal resonance and some retro tongue-in-cheek honkytonk songs he had written, then topped the package off with a rakishly-positioned white hat more like a farmer’s headgear than Nashville’s current designer cowboy chapeaux. As Brown himself notes, his hat is the more traditional, sidebrims-up style still worn by some bluegrass performers and such Grand Ole Opry stars as Little Jimmy Dickens.
“I wear that hat to make me look a little taller,” Brown confides. “I’m just a little, short, balding fellow, and it gives me some character, I guess, in what I look like. I’ve had some pictures taken when I was playing without the hat, and it just didn’t look right.”
With it, he is striking. Joining him on stage is his wife, Tanya Rae, whom he met in the mid-’80s when he was teaching guitar lessons at Rogers State College in Oklahoma and she was his student. She now plays rhythm guitar and sings backup vocals in his band.
At present he is trying to parlay his image and left-of-center popularity into mainstream country airplay. Not long ago he entered a Nashville studio to record two new songs and redo three of his best-known ones.
The recording project began as an effort to make “Highway Patrol,” as he puts it, “a little more radio playable.”
“We went and did it in Nashville and got a little bit better sound on it, spent a little more money,” he says with a laugh. “Then we went ahead and redid `My Wife Thinks You’re Dead’ and `Sugarfoot Rag,’ too. We played ’em a little bit better, because we play a little better now.”
The improvement is attributable to the fact that Brown and his aggregation have been touring virtually non-stop for the last couple of years.
A veteran musician who dryly says he was surprised not to have become a big star at age 21 (“I just thought somebody’d come along and discover me, and they never did”), he worked in bands from the ’60s on, but never got anywhere. He says his primary musical vision was always his own kind of country, but he also worked in “rock ‘n’ roll dance bands and, like, the surf stuff, the Beach Boys, that kind of thing” and later “some of the blues stuff.”
One of the hallmarks of his playing today is that his melodies are spiced with fleeting bits from his work in those other genres, but for a long time he just hung on, seemingly going nowhere.
Circa 1987-88, he spent a year in Nashville. He characterizes it as “a real hard time” in a town that then boasted few serious performance venues.
“I didn’t have a tape to shop around, so I really had no business being there,” he says. “I was desperate for work and I remember I called every agent in the phone book, and that just wasn’t the way to do it. I had to find another way to get started.”
Like Willie Nelson and a number of other incipient stars before him, he left Nashville for Texas. In the profusion of nightclubs in Austin, he knew he could at least work. It turned out to be there, during the annual South By Southwest conference in 1992, that he played a showcase at Austin’s little Continental Club and blew the mind of booking agent Bobby Cudd, of the Nashville office of Monterey Artists.
“I heard about him, so I went to the Continental Club to see him,” Cudd remembers. “It was packed, and I squirmed my way up to about six people deep. He had a snarl on his lip and a twinkle in his eye, and I asked myself, `Is this guy messin’ with me?’ I was really awed. The guy was sincere and had attitude.
“I went out and found a second-hand copy of his homemade tape, `12 Shades of Brown,’ and listened to it in my car for about a month.”
Cudd then told executive Dick Whitehouse of Curb Records, and suddenly Brown was where he thought he’d be at 21. Now he says he’s on the road more than he’s home, working on another record and writing more songs.
Asked to explain his popularity with rock-loving audiences, he cooperatively tries.
“I surprise ’em, I guess,” he says. “I think they look at me before I start playing or something and think I’m an old honkytonk singer, but then I throw in some rock ideas and other things.
“But it’s still honkytonk, and I think people kind of like that rootsy thing. I think the rock ‘n’ roll crowd has always gone for that. That’s why all this big rockabilly craze: because they’re looking for the roots of things.”
