Junior Brown

It came to him in a dream. Junior Brown, a prodigious master of both the electric guitar and the pedal steel, dreamt one night of a hideous mutant monster guitar with one body and two heads – one electric, one slide steel. The following morning, he woke from this frightful vision, arranged the pillows on his bed to see if it would work, and then commissioned the building of the world’s first – and only – Guit-Steel. And then spent years learning how to tame this unholy beast.

Some musicians have so much fun onstage and lead such enviable (from the outside) lives that it makes you want to run home and form your own rock band. I can do that! And some musicians are so wise and engaging and proficient with their instrument that the inspiration they generate is enough to carry you through months and even years of hard, lonely work, “wood shedding” and honing your skills, building up your chops. I will do that! And very occasionally, a musician comes along that is so good, so far beyond any previously conceived notion of what it’s like to play an instrument that you know there’s no hope of you ever being able to reach that level, or even any neighboring plateau. Oh, fuck it!

Junior Brown is one of those musicians that make you want to fuck it.

I think it was Chet Atkins, no slouch himself when it comes to the guitar, who was so shocked by the experience of seeing Jimi Hendrix play that he couldn’t pick up his own axe for six months after that. And, in an odd way, nobody reminds me more of Jimi Hendrix than Junior Brown, a short, gravelly-voiced, old-school country boy from Ohio. It’s his natural facility with the guitar, the ease with which he can coax any possible sound out of his instrument, the eloquence of his musical vocabulary that brings the comparison to mind. Jimi’s a lot flashier, and his pyrotechnics are more evident on his recordings, but I will stand by my assessment that Junior Brown has every bit the chops that Jimi did. He even slyly quotes Hendrix at the end of his eleven-minute freeform blues jam, Sugarfoot Rag.

One of the reasons Junior probably doesn’t get his props is that you really have to see him play to understand how extraordinary his guitar technique is. His recordings, while superlative, really don’t show it in the same way. We’re all too used to hearing bands with two or three guitarists swapping leads, so when an electric solo ends and a slide solo begins, we just take that as part of the long established tradition of call and response soloing that’s been going on since the early days of jazz. It’s hard to really comprehend that, with the exception of the acoustic strumming backgrounds, all of the guitar parts are being played by the same person. In real time. With no overdubs. It isn’t until you see Junior Brown finish some virtuoso electric lead full of whammy bar gymnastics, carefully controlled feedback, and hammered harmonics, and then see him switch necks, pick up a slide, and start playing a frighteningly good slide solo in the space of one beat of music that you really understand the depth of his technique. And he does this all while he’s singing clever lyrical puns in his rich, deep baritone. It’s a truly exhilarating and frightening experience.

I also like that he mines the rich vein of old-school country music for his material – he sounds more like a throwback to the fifties than the current crop of shiny, lifeless country music stars. To me, one of the most appealing features of country music is that it is simple, plain, stark emotion, sung and played without pretense or academic technique. Too much current country music is too polished for my tastes – too sophisticated. This is another reason Junior probably doesn’t get his props in the country world – his songs are anachronistic in this day and age, relying as the do on outdated themes, structures, and idioms. Too country for rock, too rocking for country, too old for new school, too hip for old school, Junior falls tragically between the cracks.

One of the things I particularly like about this song, which I didn’t realize until I saw him play it live, is that the middle solo is played entirely by detuning the open string he’s plucking.

Like I say, seeing him live is the way to go – you can’t really appreciate his technique unless you see him actually doing it. He’s got a band – a stand-up bass player, a drummer, and his wife Tanya dressed like a flight attendant and strumming acoustic guitar while offering the occassional harmony (that’s her trading lines with Junior on So Close Yet So Far Away) – but the show is all Junior, his monster Guit-Steel and his twin Fender amps. He doesn’t leap about the stage, smashing amps and crowd surfing. He doesn’t breathe fire or lie on the ground or eat broken glass. He stands still, a solid fireplug with a cowboy hat, and lets his fingers do the talking, occasionally turning around to glare at one of his musicians. The audience eats him up, nodding heads agreeably to his wry honky-tonk tunes, and the musicians who have come to see him stare slack-jawed or cower in fear.

I’ve seen him a few times, taken to shows by old college mates Matt and Sage (although we were all in the same class in college, I didn’t become friends with them until we had all graduated), who did more to open my ears to country music than anybody else. They taught me the obvious but easily forgotten lesson that all music deserves a chance to be heard and judged on its own merits. They both have extensive and eclectic music collections and are just as likely to be caught listening to AC/DC as they are to Leon Redbone. Like me, they favor the edges of popular culture, largely leaving the center to the public at large, who is more than welcome to the Brittanys and the Limp Bisquiks and the Pariah Scarys. Matt and Sage were in a locally famous (on the Hampshire campus, anyway) and hysterically funny punk/pop band called Beatrice (which later changed to Beatrice UTB, although what UTB stands for is a closely guarded secret only shared with a few inner associates and no I won’t tell you what it is) that produced such unknown classics as Marcia Brady, Prophylactic, and Harder Faster.

Matt and Sage were briefly in a country band in LA called the Toughskins before Sage broke it up and formed the painfully accurate Western Swing combo The Lucky Stars and Matt went on to form the legendary Lonesome Pie, featuring yours truly on bass. But that, as they say, is another story.