This isn’t the life Tanya was anticipating when she enrolled for a guitar class at Oklahoma’s Hank Thompson School of Country Music, part of Rogers State College, a program under the direction of legendary Texas Playboys steel guitarist Leon McAuliffe. Though Tanya was hoping to improve her technique so she could play in church, Brown saw potential in this pupil in more ways than one.
“I kept her after class, extracurricular activities,” he once told me with a shy smile.
While the Browns remain one of my favorite couples in all of professional music — mainly because they seem so much more like a working marriage than a professional partnership (and never forget to give their best to my wife, Maria) — I once ran afoul of them by suggesting there were occasionally some onstage tensions between the perfectionist teacher and his appealing pupil.
While showbiz hadn’t been her dream, the regulars at Henry’s Bar & Grill sometimes called for more of a spotlight turn by “t.l.T.R.” than the song or two that the star of the show was willing to cede her. And she made no secret of her disdain for certain songs of Junior’s that lacked Christian charity, like “Venom Wearin’ Denim”. The glares they sometimes exchanged made them seem all the more human, offering proof that, even among the born-again, life on the bandstand isn’t always heaven on earth.
These days, Tanya is not only a recording artist in her own right (she recently released a five-song EP, Meet The Mrs.), but also a partner in the Thompson-Brown management company that handles their business affairs. As they’ve progressed from the Austin honky-tonks to stadium shows this summer, opening for the Dave Matthews Band on the hottest tour this side of ‘N Sync, the Browns have smoothed away most of the rough edges, while intensifying the supercharged serendipity of Junior’s music. You never know which corner his playing will careen around next. At the start of most of those Matthews shows, he may be all but anonymous to that the stadium crowd, but the ear-popping, jaw-dropping force of his improvisations typically wins thousands of converts.
“It helps that Dave comes out and introduces me, which is always a shocker,” says Junior, who made the Matthews connection when the two appeared on “Saturday Night Live”. “I was sitting in with the program’s band, playing into the commercials and out of the commercials, that sort of thing, and they were the featured musical guest. We got to talking, and they invited me on tour.
“A lot of their crowd doesn’t know who I am, so I try to cut up with them a little bit, loosen ’em up, anything I can do to get their attention. If these kids haven’t been told something is cool, they won’t commit to it. Until somebody says, ‘This is really good,’ and then they’ll go, ‘Yeah, this is really good.’ So you have your work cut out for you, but the guitar playing usually gets their attention, and then they’ll start listening to the singing and songwriting.”
Fellow musicians have long been Brown’s biggest fans, from Nick Lowe’s chance discovery of 12 Shades Of Brown to resident gigs that had artists from Travis Tritt and Marty Stuart to Neil Young seeking out Junior when they passed through Austin. More recently, he found himself collaborating with members of Stone Temple Pilots after the band asked him to appear with them on the Letterman show.
“And I don’t think they’re from Temple, Texas, either,” says Brown with a laugh. “They’re good songwriters and good players. I wouldn’t go out there if it was gonna be mindless headbanging. They’re legit. If I tried to sound like a Stone Temple Pilot, it’s not going to work, but I can give what I have to offer to them, and hopefully they’ll offer what they have to me, and something good will grow out of it.”
Mixed Bag, Brown’s first release in some three years, was delayed from its originally planned fall 2000 release when some prospective sessions with the Pilots failed to materialize. Such a collaboration might have lured a few more rock fans into the fold, while making the album even more of a mixed bag. Instead, he may try to turn his next album into one of those guest-artist affairs, featuring various bands and friends on the sort of project that too often works better for marketing than musical purposes.
To these ears, less is more where such prospects are concerned, as they seem as likely to distract from his distinctive songcraft, though I’d never suggest he put the reins to his unbridled creativity (not that he’d be likely to heed such suggestions anyway). No other artist signed to a Nashville major label enjoys anywhere near the creative freedom that Curb allows Junior — who produces, writes, and selects the musicians and the material — though the flip side of the bargain seems to be that he operates in a promotional vacuum. For better and worse, the label that knows how to package and push the likes of Tim McGraw leaves Brown pretty much to his own devices.
“When they came down and saw me in my natural habitat at the Continental Club, they said, ‘Let’s capture that, bag it, take it back to our zoo,'” explains Brown. “‘Well, what are we going to feed it?’ You’re gonna have to feed it what it eats, and what it eats is its own creativity. Free-range: I’m a free-range chicken, and I gotta go where I gotta go. So I signed the contract under those conditions. You can’t make a Junior Brown into something he isn’t….There I go sounding like Bob Dole again.”
In the interval between albums, Brown found time to exchange his guit-steel for a canvas and paintbrush, extending his artistry even further. These days, the bus occasionally doubles as an artist’s studio, bringing yet another dimension to The Planet Of Junior Brown.
“I’ve become a part-time artist, putting the canvas on Tanya’s makeup table,” says Brown, pointing toward the rear of the bus. “My grandfather was an artist and my dad dabbled in it; I come from a family that has always been into both music and art. I’ve always loved it, painting Southwestern art, and never had the chance, and now that I’m getting old I’m going to do it. It’s like anything else, you’ve got to observe and practice, keep observing and keep practicing. With the whole painting thing, I’m looking at everything a different way, trees and things, light and dark. It’s just another way of getting that creative energy out.”
Ernest Tubb, Dave Matthews, Jimi Hendrix…and Georgia O’Keeffe. Is this the future of country music?
“To me, that ’70s sound that I started with is pretty much what I still do,” says Junior. “I’ve gotten used to the fact that country radio doesn’t play country music, and I’m not locked into that Nashville thing. I guess what I do is just American music.”
When Junior Brown was playing nothing but country music in the early 1970s, ND contributing editor Don McLeese was listening to Roxy Music, Mott the Hoople and the Stooges.
