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On Mixed Bag, Junior Brown continues his
style-blending ways, mixing Country and Rock & Roll
with everything from Swing to Dixieland.
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These days, Junior Brown is one of the coolest artists on the Country scene -- at least to people whose tastes lean away from the Pop-inflected Country that populates mainstream Country radio and toward the twangier traditional sounds of years gone by.
With his guit-steel guitar, Brown's one-of-a-kind double-neck instrument that combines both a traditional electric guitar and a steel guitar, his snazzy suit and cowboy attire and a wry, yet folksy sense of humor, Brown has been one of the most unique -- and acclaimed -- artists to arrive on the national scene over the past decade.
But Brown remembers a time when he was anything but hip -- namely in the late 1980s when he first put together a band and began playing on the usually progressive-thinking Austin, Texas, music scene.
"When I started my own band it was frustrating because they (audiences) would yell for Rock & Roll and I just kind of played traditional Country," Brown, 49, recalls. "They would laugh at me. 'Hey, play us some Rock & Roll, will you?' (I'd answer) 'Well, why don't you go watch MTV? This is a Country band.'
"Then they'd make fun of me singing an Ernest Tubb song or something," the affable singer-guitarist says. "They'd be making their little chicken moves out there, like they were really hip and I was real square. So that made me angry, and I would reach down and turn that amp all the way up and just blast them. 'You want some Rock & Roll, here it is.' And in doing that, I actually stumbled on a style.
"What I do today is a combination of a lot of things. The traditional Country didn't work. I still do a lot of that sound, but I augment it with the wild guitar playing that I hadn't done previously. So it was out of a sort of an anger and a desperation that I started, but it actually turned around to my advantage. So it's kind of interesting how that all came about."
The wild playing is one of the things that makes Brown different from any other Country-oriented artist of today, and perhaps of any era. Sure, artists like Brooks & Dunn and Travis Tritt have been known to blaze away, but their music has a strong dose of Rock & Roll, which naturally lends itself to a style of playing that delivers a noticeable level of voltage.
Brown's music is much more rooted in the classic sounds of Ernest Tubb or Hank Williams Sr. and, while he has his tunes with frisky tempos, just as often Brown's songs have a laconic quality. But when he solos, either on electric or on steel, his fleet-fingered playing puts a jolt into a style that has typically been buttoned-up and reserved.
Add to that Brown's willingness to venture beyond his Country foundation to touch on styles as divergent as Blues, Jazz, Surf Rock and even Dixieland, and you have an artist who has developed a singular identity.
The latest example of Brown's artistry is the appropriately titled CD, Mixed Bag, which finds him once again venturing out into a host of styles. His cover of Jerry Reed's "Guitar Man" subtracts a bit of Reed's swampy style in favor of a burst of Rock, as Brown unleashes some of the CD's hottest soloing. "Catfish and Collard Greens" gives him a chance to put some hyper-speed licks into a song that mixes Blues and Bluegrass, while a cover of Ernest Tubb's "Kansas City Blues" features a bit of jazzy Swing. Still, the biggest departure is a cover of Hoagy Carmichael's "Riverboat Shuffle," which introduces a bit of Dixieland into Brown's stylistic arsenal.
"That was a song that my dad had bought a 78 of," Brown says, "and my dad and I both shared a love for that song, that particular performance of it. So I always thought 'How can I fit into a Dixieland band? What can I do in a Dixieland band?' I thought I could play a trombone part because a steel guitar can sort of mimic a trombone with the sliding and that sort of thing. So I learned the trombone part, and sure enough, it worked."
Then there are several straight-ahead Country tunes, such as "Our First Bluebonnet Spring" and "Runnin' with the Wind," that serve as something of a grounding point for Mixed Bag. On such songs, Brown dispenses with the stylistic experiments and plays it straight.
"The key to it is not ruining a song," Brown says of his approach to purely traditional Country material. "If you do a Country song, play it Country. And then you can throw in if you want to do your Surf medley or your little Jimi Hendrix tribute or whatever -- find the right places to do that, that's the key. Not taking a beautiful song like 'Waltz Across Texas' and throwing Jimi Hendrix licks into it. If you meld these styles together it has to be done in a very sensitive way. That was the key to making it work."
As with Brown's six previous CDs, Mixed Bag also features its share of his witty lyrical style that has surfaced on such well-known earlier tunes as "My Wife Thinks You're Dead" (about the untimely return of an old flame), "Highway Patrol" and "Joe the Singing Janitor." This time, there's "Cagey Bea," a sly tale of a beautiful Russian agent, and "Ain't Gonna Work Today," a song devoted to the joys of leisure time.
Despite such tunes, some critics have called Mixed Bag Brown's most serious album. He surmises the main reason for this response is the presence of the pointedly topical song "Grow Up America."
"I just think there are too many people who are raising kids, and they act like kids themselves," Brown says, describing the song's message. "They haven't grown up, and they don't take responsibility and put the kids first. So the kids get the short end of the stick. I mean, you see it everywhere from child abuse and neglect to just things like the way people -- so-called grownups -- conduct themselves at their kids' sports events. They act more childish than the children. So I think it's a real problem, and it's something that bothers me quite a bit."
Such a song, Brown notes, isn't unprecedented for him. "I had a couple of songs like that on my first album, one of them called 'Don't Sell the Farm' and the other one was called 'They Don't Choose To Live That Way,' " Brown says. "But then I kind of shied away from serious issues after that, I mean really serious sort of social issues. Then here six albums later I've gotten a little serious again.
"I just didn't have anything I wanted to say." Brown says, explaining the absence of issue-oriented songs on most of his albums. "I like to shy away from causes because I don't like to push causes. I'm not a Folk singer or anything like that. I don't sing protest songs. But when I feel, really, really strongly about something that I feel needs to be said, then I do it."
JUNIOR BROWN performs on Friday at the Southgate House with special guest William Lee Ellis.
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