Junior Brown – Out of this world
Brown’s transition from sideman to triple-threat frontman — a singer and songwriter as distinctive as his instrumental mastery — proceeded from professional necessity. He saw that, no matter how good a player he was, the bars might never get any bigger, the money would never be any better, if he continued to spin his wheels through what one of his early (and best) anthems called “Too Many Nights In A Roadhouse”.
“I was just going nuts, wondering what I was going to do to make it in music, and I started seeing how these songwriters make a living,” he says. “They could sign a contract with a publishing company who would send them a check every month to keep them going. Not a huge check, but something to live on. And they had to come up with a certain amount of songs per year. I figured, well, if I stay up a few nights, maybe I can become a songwriter.
“So I started writing with the Last Mile Ramblers in New Mexico, had one on their album. ‘Too Many Nights In A Roadhouse’ dates from the mid-’70s, and that really spurred me on, people told me it sounded like a standard. I wrote ‘Gotta Get Up Every Morning’ around 1980 and when I recorded it, that was the turning point. They just started coming, though it was a lot of work. It wasn’t like I was taking dictation. They’d always put me in remedial reading classes when I was a kid, but somewhere along the line I guess I learned to write — poetry, you could call it — lyrics, how certain words work well together.”
Yet Brown might still be playing for sideman wages if it hadn’t been for his dreams. Literally. In the mid-’80s, after relocating to Texas and bouncing his talents between the likes of Asleep At The Wheel, Rank And File, and Alvin Crow’s Pleasant Valley Boys, he was drifting into a deep sleep one night when he heard a TV host announce, “Here’s Junior Brown, with his new song ‘My Baby Don’t Listen To Nothing But Ernest Tubb’.”
“I don’t know where that came from, but that’s where it started,” Junior told me when we first visited a decade or so at what was then his home outside Austin, back when he was playing mostly local gigs at bars such as Henry’s Bar & Grill and the Continental Club. “I get a lot of this stuff in my sleep….If you print this, people are going to think I’m totally nuts.”
They didn’t, and they shouldn’t. For this is the difference between the world of you and me and The Planet Of Junior Brown. When we have such dreams, we chalk it up to a bad burrito and get on with our lives. On The Planet Of Junior Brown, dreams are life-changing, destiny-altering visions.
He wrote the song he’d dreamt, not merely transcribing but changing it to “My Baby Don’t Dance To Nothing But Ernest Tubb”. It became the album-opening highlight of 12 Shades Of Brown, an independently released cassette that somehow fell into the hands of Nick Lowe while he was in Austin for a show with his buddies in the Fabulous Thunderbirds. Lowe flipped for it and took it to England’s Demon Records, who sent it back to the States as a cult import, which started Junior down the road that would lead to Grammy nominations, an appearance on “The X-Files”, and guest slots with the bands on “Late Night With David Letterman” and “Saturday Night Live”.
This Planet Of Junior Brown is a sphere that sprang full-blown from the imagination of its creator. Like all-American originals from Walt Whitman to Bob Dylan to Sun Ra, Brown is a master of self-invention, the artist as his most significant work of art, conjuring an entire context that surrounds and pervades the vision. Within that sphere, almost anything is possible, like playing with both Pig Robbins and the Stone Temple Pilots over the last year, feeling equally at home on stages with Ray Price and the Dave Matthews Band.
“The bridge between them is me,” explains Brown. “You hear my licks on a certain song and you say, ‘That sounds like Junior Brown.’ Then you hear ’em on something completely different, but it still sounds like Junior Brown.
“And, as Bob Dole would say, ‘That’s what Bob Dole would say,'” continues Brown with a laugh, a little chagrined as he realizes that he’s been referring to himself in the third person. Junior Brown (like Bob Dole) is a funny guy, both funny ha-ha and occasionally funny strange. He’s a humble, religious man with a perfectionist’s artistic ego. He’s a songwriter who injects plenty of humor into his material, yet inhabits an irony-free zone, with none of the retro “nudge nudge, wink wink” that informs lesser artists such as BR549.
“He takes his music very seriously, and that’s good,” says Buddy Harman, whose Hall of Fame drumming resume extends from the Everly Brothers and Roy Orbison through some 18,000 country recordings. “He’s just a different type talent.”
“I hate it when critics call me ‘quirky,’ because it makes me sound like a goofball or something,” Brown told me after his surrealistic videos began commanding attention well beyond Austin. “Rather than the outsider-fringe-cult-guy, I want to be the mainstream guy who has his own style. I don’t think of myself as old-fashioned, and I’m not trying to keep anything alive, either….To me, what I’m doing is pretty modern.”
It would be inaccurate to say that Brown lives in a world of his own, since he has shared it since the late ’80s with “the lovely Tanya Rae” — his former guitar student turned wife and bandmate. These days, The Planet Of Junior Brown is a big old bus, one where the kitchen in the middle of it finds her dicing vegetables to cook in a pot while he emerges from the sleeping quarters in the rear. Though they left Austin for Tanya’s native Tulsa almost five years ago, where they mainly live is on the bus, orbiting on a club circuit some 200 to 300 dates a year.
“We’ve been running up and down the road for eight years, since October ’93, so it’s just like old hat now,” says Tanya. “You get used to anything.”