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Jamison Brown
When first confronted with the problem
of how to play both the lead guitar and the steel guitar during his
live shows, Junior Brown came up with a unique solution: he fused the
two instruments, received a patent for the invention, and dubbed it a
guit-steel. He found a similar solution to the problem of how to
utilize all of the musical styles that had influenced him, which
include traditional country, rock and roll, surf, Hawaiian hula songs,
Western swing, blues, and more: he simply fused the styles into a
unique signature sound. "I've
done a lot of different things over the years," Brown told Lorraine
Ali for Gentlemen's Quarterly (March 1999), "everything from
playing Hawaiian luaus to performing with [ranchero accordion player]
Flaco Jiminez. I'm trying to be real and present music that's part of
me—and still have all this variety. It sounds like juggling, but
that's what I've become—an amalgam of all this stuff. Country is just
the center part of it. It's not the whole story." Brown sings in a
laid-back, drawling baritone, often employing humorous lyrics and
wordplay. His fiery guitar playing, influenced as much by the
blues/rock legend Jimi Hendrix as by country pickers such as Merle
Travis, is full of surprises. Reviewing Brown's performance at a New
York City club in 1994, Jon Pareles wrote for the New York Times
(January 29, 1994), "He
applies all the devices of country, blues and bluegrass guitarists:
speedy bluegrass picking, plainspoken melodies, chicken-squawk
repeated notes, melting steel-guitar chords, skidding fast runs and
the deep twang of a bottom string being retuned downward. As if Mr.
Brown could split his personality, the smooth tone of the steel guitar
contested the wiry attack of the six-string; he didn't run out of
ideas." With six full-length albums and countless performances to his
credit, Brown is a music veteran, but it has only been in the past few
years that he has attained significant commercial success. The outward
signs of that success are now abundant: he has been nominated for four
Grammy Awards, appeared or sung in advertisements for Gap clothing,
Lipton tea, and Lee jeans, and toured with such prominent non-country
acts as the Dave Matthews Band.
Jamison Brown was born in Cottonwood,
Arizona, in 1952 (some
sources say 1953). His father, Sam Brown, who was a musicologist and a
piano player, encouraged his son to play as well, but Junior disliked
the instrument. "He'd sit me down every day at the piano," Brown
recalled to Ali, "and say, ‘Why can't you do this?!' And I'd say,
‘Dad, it's just not fun. It don't swing."' Brown soon discovered a
predilection for a different instrument. "I found a guitar with just a
few strings on it in my grandparents' attic and I really took to it at
a very young age," he told Chris Heim for the Chicago Tribune
(January 14, 1994). "When I was about eight years old, I took lessons
from a college student and learned about four or five chords. Aside
from that, I learned it all
myself."
When Brown was young his family moved
around a great deal. After leaving Arizona, Brown lived in the
backwoods of Indiana—in a
town called Kirksville—and then in Annapolis, Maryland, from 1958 to
1965. In that year he and his family moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico,
where Brown attended Santa Fe Prep School before dropping out of Santa
Fe High School in his junior year. By that time he was already
interested in music above all else. At 13 he had formed his first
band, Harmonious Discord, which played mostly surf music. Next was
Humble Harvey, a psychedelic band. Brown left home at 16,
struggling to earn a living by performing at clubs around Santa Fe. He
began appearing with country and honky-tonk bands, playing guitar and
sometimes singing. (He did not write any of the music he performed
during that period.)
In
the 1970s Brown became serious about performing on the steel guitar,
which is normally held face-up on the lap and played with a slide to
produce smooth transitions between notes. He formed the Last Mile
Ramblers, which became a staple of the Santa Fe music scene and opened
for such acts as Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, and Dolly Parton when
they came through town. In the mid-1970s Brown moved to Colorado and
joined Dusty Drapes and the Dusters. He next became a member of the
Billy Spears Band, based in Lawrence, Kansas, then moved to Austin,
Texas, in 1979 to team up with Alvin Crow's Western swing band. Around
that time Brown also played briefly with Rank and File, Asleep at the
Wheel, and Gary P. Nunn. Brown, who was more interested in traditional
country music by the likes of Ernest Tubb than in country-pop music as
played by bands such as the Gatlin Brothers, found his tastes at odds
with those of the day. "People were in such a hurry to cover up that
[traditional] stuff because it represented bigotry and what it was
like to be a stupid hick," Brown told Joe Nick Patoski for Texas
Monthly (June 1996). "I was a pariah. People made fun of me. As
much money as I could've made doing Gatlin Brothers covers, I stuck
with Ernest Tubb covers, and I
was called all sorts of names."
In
1984 Brown was approached by a local Austin bass player, Speedy
Sparks, who was starting his own record label and wanted Brown to
record a single. Brown obliged with "Too Many Nights in the Roadhouse"
and, on the record's B side, "Gotta Get Up Every Morning (Just to Say
Goodnight to You)." Five hundred copies of the record were pressed.
The following year Brown's vision for his hybrid guit-steel was
finally realized, thanks to the work of the luthier Michael Stevens.
For years Brown had been forced to switch back and forth between the
lead guitar and pedal steel guitar, which interrupted the flow of his
music, and in about 1980 a simple solution had come to him in a dream.
"In this dream [the lead guitar and pedal steel guitar] just melted
together and I was playing this double-necked instrument that was
both," he recalled to Heim. "I woke up and arranged the two
instruments on the bed and arranged the covers around them to form the
shape of this thing and I thought it just might work." In the
mid-1980s Brown moved from Austin to Oklahoma, where he was invited by
Leon McAuliffe, a former pedal steel player for Bob Wills's Texas
Playboys, to teach guitar at the Hank Thompson School of Country Music
at Rogers State University, in Claremore. One of Brown's students
there was Tanya Rae, whom he married in 1988.
The 1980s had been lean years for Brown. "I
was very bitter for many years because I didn't do anything but play
in club bands," Brown told Richard Harrington for the Washington
Post (August 10, 2001). "I thought, ‘I'm going to spend the rest
of my life doing this in bars, playing for people who don't appreciate
the music, learning songs that I don't particularly like.' It was
dismal in the early '80s: Clubs started drying up and people got their
entertainment elsewhere and a million bands showed up to undercut you.
It didn't matter how good you were, they just treated you like a
jukebox." Tanya Rae helped Brown to think in an organized way about
his career. "I never could get a group together until I
met Tanya Rae and really got serious about it," he told Harrington.
Brown began to branch out from country, incorporating his disparate
influences—including surf, blues, Hawaiian, psychedelic rock, Texas
swing, jazz, rockabilly, and bluegrass—into his music. He even made an
extended trip to Hawaii, where steel guitar is prevalent in much of
the music.
In
1990 (other sources say 1989 or 1991), Brown self-released a 12-song
cassette called 12 Shades of Brown.
It featured a tune that alluded to his Hawaiian experience, "Hillbilly
Hula Gal," and the crowd favorite "My Baby Don't Dance to Nothing But
Ernest Tubb." In 1992 Curb Records, based in Nashville, Tennessee,
took an interest in Brown after a talent agent named Bobby Cudd
discovered the musician playing at the Continental Club in Austin.
Brown's music "was so good, so profound, it was hard for me to
believe," Cudd told Peter Cronin for Billboard (March 26,
1994). "His instrument is unique, his songwriting is unique, and his
presentation is marvelous. Singing these songs with a twinkle in his
eye and a snarl on his lip—you could tell it was real." In 1993 Curb
Records reissued 12 Shades of Brown along with a new
album, Guit with It.
On "Guit-Steel Blues" from that album, Brown demonstrated his prowess
on his instrument with an extended jam that featured several riffs
inspired by Jimi Hendrix. Brown's dry sense of humor is evident on
several songs, including "My Wife Thinks You're Dead," on which he
croons, as quoted by Ali, "Please go find another ex-sweetheart to
hang around instead, cause you're wanted by the poe-lice, and my wife
thinks you're dead." Brown, commenting on his penchant for humor, told
Chris Heim, "There's a style of lighthearted, wise-guy country music
that went out of style. People just didn't want to laugh at
themselves. I think they were scared to be corny or whatever. But I
don't care. I enjoy it." Reviewing Guit with It for People
(October 25, 1993),
Tony Scherman wrote, "Finally—a new country artist who doesn't sound
like the result of market research! . . . His humor may be too bent
and his sound insufficiently pasteurized for him to fit inside
commercial country's confines, but Junior Brown will delight any true
country-music fan."
By 1996 Brown was beginning to get a taste of
the success he had long sought. He was selected by Country Music
Television (CMT) as one of its rising stars for 1996, played with the
house band on the television show Saturday Night Live,
performed on the Grand Ole Opry, and appeared on Late Night with
Conan O'Brien and the Late Show with David Letterman. The
video for "My Wife Thinks You're Dead" won the video-of-the-year award
at the 1996 Country Music Association (CMA) Awards ceremony and was
nominated for best video by the Academy of Country Music. Brown also
released Semi Crazy in 1996; on the title track he intoned,
"Til I'm pushing up daisies, I'll be semi-crazy. " The album contained
Brown's usual mix of traditional country, rock and roll, and deadpan
humor. It also featured a seven-minute medley of surf songs, which had
become favorites in Brown's live shows. Guitar Player magazine
chose Semi Crazy as its best country album of 1997;
Brown also won that publication's vote for best pedal/lap steel
guitarist and tied with Vince Gill for the best country guitarist
award. A reviewer for the CMJ New Musical Report, as quoted on
CDNow.com, wrote of Brown and Semi Crazy, "There's a certain
artistry at work with this journeyman musician that's missing from so
much of today's musical landscape. . . . We're lucky enough to have a
few living legends in American music—James Burton, Willie Nelson,
Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, and such, and Junior Brown is quite simply
another one in the making."
In
1997 Brown was nominated for Grammy Awards for best country song and
best male vocal performance for "My Wife Thinks You're Dead." He also
appeared on the television shows Prime Time Country and CBS
Sunday Morning and was recruited for a Gap clothing-advertisement
campaign. In 1998 he released his fourth major album, Long Walk
Back, on which he had the chance to explore his Jimi Hendrix
influence with "Stupid Blues," a nine-minute cut that also featured
the work of Mitch Mitchell, Hendrix's former drummer. Brown also
teamed up with Mitchell—and Noel Redding, the third member of the
former Jimi Hendrix Experience—at the 1998 Bumbershoot Rock Festival,
in Seattle, Washington, where the trio performed a rendition of
Hendrix's "Stone Free." Brown expanded his media exposure further in
1998 by becoming a spokesman for Lipton tea (he is an avid tea
drinker), appearing again on David Letterman's program, and making a
guest appearance on The X-files on November 15, 1998.
Brown's eclecticism had always appealed
to listeners who were not otherwise fans of country music, and as his
popularity increased he was embraced by some high-profile bands
decidedly outside the country-music scene. On the Late Show
with David Letterman in
2000, he jammed with the alternative rock band Stone Temple Pilots,
who had asked Brown to perform with them, and in 2001 he opened 12
concerts for the Dave Matthews Band and joined them on stage on
several occasions. Also in 2001 Brown released Mixed Bag,
which lived up to its title with songs ranging from the searing
"Guitar Man" to the old-fashioned dixie swing of "Riverboat Shuffle"
(on which Brown imitates a trombone with his guit-steel) to the
off-beat "Cagey Bea," about a fantastical tryst with a seductive
Soviet KGB spy. A reviewer for Billboard (August 11, 2001)
called Mixed Bag "perhaps [Brown's] best ever, deftly melding
jaw-dropping ‘guit-steel' solos with authentic, Texas-style country."
Reviewing Down Home Chrome, Brown's 2004 album, which includes
the songs "Where Has All the Money Gone?," "Jimmy Jones," and "Two
Rons Don't Make It Right," a
critic for allmusic.com wrote, "Honky tonk, rockabilly, and the rich
sound of Bakersfield country are leavened with a healthy sense of
humor."
Junior Brown and his wife live in
Oklahoma.
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