Junior Brown's Dual Purpose

GROWING up in Annapolis, Guit-steel innovator and string virtuoso Junior Brown came of age in a region rife with trailblazing country and rock guitarists -- Roy Clark, Link Wray, Roy Buchanan, Danny Gatton.

Too bad he was too young to appreciate them.

"My dad was a teacher and he moved around quite a bit," Brown says from his current Oklahoma home. "We lived in Annapolis from '58 to '65, then we moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico."

By then, Brown had picked up his first guitar, at age 7. "I found one in my grandparents' attic, a real old guitar, didn't have all the strings," he recalls. "The first one I got was a Christmas present, a Sears Silvertone Acoustic."

Guitar was Junior Brown's second instrument. His father, Samuel Emmons Brown Jr., a musicologist and professor at St. John's College, steered Junior (then Jamieson) to piano at age 4, but Brown never took to that instrument, partly because he couldn't take it with him when he disappeared into his room for hours at a time. There, he explored folk, blues and early country recordings from the record collection of John Gottlieb, one of his father's students. Gottlieb, an inspired amateur, would be Junior Brown's first and only instructor -- an informal one, at that.

"There was a few of us young kids, and we'd wake him up after a long binge and he'd show us a few chords," Brown says fondly. "After that, I was self-taught."

As for the Capital region as a hotbed for guitar icons, Brown says he was "too young to see it as any kind of a scene. But every time someone had an electric guitar, it was a really big deal back then. You'd go over to someone's house to see their dad's electric guitar, or maybe their big brother might have one. It was a very special thing."

That Brown would become a very special player was not immediately evident. In Santa Fe, he put together his first band, Harmonious Discord, at age 13 and played the teen club circuit, following the mid-'60s shift from surf music to psychedelic rock in his next band, Humble Harvey. Dropping out of high school (in his junior year), Brown started playing honky-tonk in local (and later regional) bars, working as a sideman for numerous acts, occasionally singing, never writing.

Not surprisingly, Brown has conflicted memories of that era. On the one hand, he was in music. "It was the only thing I really enjoyed," he says. "I looked up to the guys who could make a living at it. You don't think about the life, you just do what you have to do for people. There never was any choice to it."

On the other hand, he was in music.

"I was very bitter for many years because I didn't do anything but play in club bands," Brown adds. "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.

"It was a very tough time. That's when I started supplementing my income by teaching a little bit. Thank God I was able to put a band together and get the original songs out there, which led to a record deal. I've been playing for first-rate audiences ever since then."

In the early '80s, Brown was building a reputation as a string whiz on both electric guitar and steel, "though I didn't get really serious about steel until 1972," he says. He landed a job at the Hank Thompson School of Country Music at Rogers State University in Calremore, Okla., where he worked with Leon McAuliffe, the great steel player with Bob Wills's Texas Playboys.

Better yet, he took on a guitar student who in 1988 became Mrs. Brown; Tanya Rae remains his rhythm guitarist, business manager and inspiration. "I never could get a group together until I met Tanya Rae and really got serious about it," Brown says.

By the late '80s, Brown, by then living in Austin, was also beginning to attract attention because of his Guit-steel, a unique and original hybrid of six-string electric and lap steel, whose double necks were fused into a single body. That mutant instrument first came to Brown in 1980 (appropriately, in a dream) and was finally built by Austin luthier Michael Stevens in 1985.

The inspiration, Brown says, was partly convenience: He was tired of having to choose between electric and steel, which necessitated a clumsy onstage shift between instruments, one that interrupted his momentum. The Guit-steel offered a practical solution, particularly after Brown added a stand to facilitate the shift from playing guitar vertically to playing lap slide horizontally -- and tilted it forward so the audience could catch the frenetic fretwork.

That first Guit-steel guitar, Old Yeller, now resides in the Country Music Hall of Fame, a fitting home for a radical reimagining of two instruments central to country music history. "I was going to make it work one way or another," Brown says, laughing, remembering the five-year odyssey from dream to reality. "The first night that I got it, I went to Nashville and did a show with it. I was just sure that it would work, and I was sure glad that it did."

These days, Brown plays Guit-steel No. 2, Big Red. "A third one is going to be made out of Bixby parts and is going to have beautiful golden-colored bird's-eye maple," Brown enthuses. "And I've got a pedal Guit-steel that's in the works, that's going to be really revolutionary."

Funny thing, though: Junior Brown started out as a fiery traditionalist, serving up hardcore country that no one seemed particularly interested in. It's still the basic foundation of Brown's sound, which he's dubbed "free-range country" and which embraces surf, blues, hillbilly jazz, Hawaiian, bluegrass, Texas swing, rockabilly, psychedelic rock and, on his new album, the aptly titled "Mixed Bag," Dixieland jazz and Russian strains.

"The honky-tonk country I played in the clubs when I dropped out of high school, that was what I knew best," Brown says. "But there was more that I wanted to know. For instance, Hawaiian steel guitar -- I loved that sound, so I went over to Hawaii and played over there. I followed the dream, but I was mainly trying to create my own sound. It's always been a hodgepodge of things with a unifying style, not just jumping around to any wind that comes along. I don't take it on unless I can make it a part of me."

Given his remarkable speed and dexterity, Brown manages to filter diverse influences through his own sensibility. He's an engaging encyclopedia of guitar styles, from early heroes like Luther Perkins, James Burton, Dick Dale and steel virtuosos Alvino Ray and Leon McAuliffe to later giants like Jimi Hendrix: A career highlight was playing "Stone Free" with Experience bassist Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell at the 1998 Bumbershoot Rock Festival in Seattle. Last month, Brown opened a dozen stadium concerts for the Dave Matthews Band, jamming on several of the dates, as he has done with the String Cheese Incident. Just as Brown is two lead guitar players rolled into one, he's a country traditionalist and maverick rolled into one.

On his albums, of which "Mixed Bag" is the sixth, Brown likes to showcase his singing and songwriting, as well as his guitar chops. He's got a resonant baritone reminiscent of early heroes Ernest Tubb, Dave Dudley and Ray Price, and a writing style that ranges from sentimental to (more often) wryly humorous. For instance, Brown's breakthrough hit was "My Wife Thinks You're Dead," which also won the Country Music Association video award in 1997, inspiring host Vince Gill to quip that Brown was "the only one really singing country music today. Now, if they'd just start playing his records on the radio."

Not long after, the sartorially resplendent Brown -- who always performs in sensible suits and ties under a white cowboy hat -- started showing up in ads for the Gap and Lipton Tea, even an "X-Files" episode. More recently, he appeared on "The "Chris Isaak Show" and is about to unveil new spots for Lee Jeans and Mountain Dew Code Red.

The previous ads helped spur catalogue sales, a bonus since Brown still seems to be a stranger to country radio, Gill not withstanding. As for his acting, "if it's something that sounds like fun, I'll give it a shot," Brown says. "I've gotten a lot of positive feedback on my acting, such as it is, which makes me want to do a little more, especially if we can promote my music while I'm doing it."

JUNIOR BROWN -- Appearing Wednesday at the Birchmere. • To hear a free Sound Bite from Junior Brown, call Post-Haste at 202/334-9000 and press 8124. (Prince William residents, call 690-4110.)