Mavericks of Sound

by Ensminger, David

  I know Allen Ginsberg contacted the band in the early days. Is he perhaps a kind of model of how to marry sexuality, poetics, and politics, while living happy?

  Yeah, I only met him once. He wrote us a little letter and wanted us to do a song, something to do with Santa Claus. It was really silly, but we thought, we don’t know if we can do that, but it’s Allen Ginsberg! Yes, he was a great person and a role model for that. My political thing now is to try to do environmental stuff: oceans, wild horses, and wolves are my thing.

  You’ve said, “I believe in nature, but I don’t believe in God.” Is that a kind of transcendentalism akin to Henry David Thoreau?

  Sure, I believe there is a spirituality, more so now than I believed in the past. I can’t explain it. My intuition is better. I can sense things, and I can feel the spirit. I don’t know what it is. It may be the clearing away of some of the angry bullshit.

  Are you as satisfied writing a song today as you were in 1979?

  Much more satisfied because they are a little harder to come by, number one. And I don’t think in 1979 that I realized the value of them. On the other hand, I know when we first rehearsed “The World’s a Mess,” when we went through the song the second or third time, Exene and I looked at each other and said, “That’s a good song. That’s a keeper.” Nowadays, it is still a great thrill to play a song beginning to end and know in some ways that’s the best it’s going to be. And you are grateful for the way you can turn and twist things, and you can simplify, you can make yourself be simpler if you become too fancy; unless, that is, it comes out as a fancy song with an intricate story, plotline, and all that sort of stuff, then great. But if you have to beat it and hammer it and carve it . . . though sometimes you can whip it into shape.

  More like, “First thought, best thought”?

  Right. Letting it go, letting it come out. Listening to it and paying attention to it when it starts coming, like, “Don’t do something else. That feeling may go away.” As you get older, you become more thankful for what you can do. If you can get out of bed at ninety, you’re happy as hell, like “I’m alive.” Ask Ramblin’ Jack about that.

  Chapter 2

  Rockabilly and Honky-Tonker Renegades

  Sometimes construed as bastardized forms of rock ’n’ roll and hillbilly music, rockabilly and honky-tonk have thrived as global subcultures because purveyors like Junior Brown and Deke Dickerson retain a sense of unfeigned authenticity, adept musicality, and stylish thrills. In an era of hyper post-production values, such stripped-down “purist” music seems to transcend time and place, delivering uncompromising tunes that feel renegade, not merely retro.

  Junior Brown: Honky-Tonk Savior

  Originally published in Thirsty Ear in fall 2001.

  Junior Brown’s deep truck-driver baritone is the perfect antidote to all the fakeries of pop country. With guitar chops that rival those of rock ’n’ roll masters and a love of earthy, down-home, rust-bucket style, he meshes the worlds of Jimi Hendrix and Tennessee Ernie Ford in an easy-to-swallow Americana hybrid blend that doesn’t lose sight of underdogs and working people, the grain of American music, or the avid artistry of backyard mixed and matched songbooks.

  Can you tell us about Mixed Bag?

  It’ll come out in the middle of July on Curb. Well, the title is Mixed Bag and that’s exactly what it is. There are quite a few different kinds of music. I’ve written most of it. As I do with most of my albums, I write most of the songs. It’s very strong on the lyric end; there are some very good ballads on there, and then there are some sorta different things like a river boat shuffle, called “The River Boat Shuffle,” an old New Orleans jazz song. There are some horns. I went down to New Orleans to do it. So, there are a variety of things on it. There’s a blues song.

  Was the album itself recorded in many places or just that track?

  It was recorded in several different places because I’ve been working on it for two years. In some ways, some disparate sessions were reworked on it.

  Are there any surprises, like Mitch Mitchell from the Jimi Hendrix band on the last one?

  There are some good studio players; some of the greats are on there.

  You’re based out of Tulsa. For years, you were associated with Austin, so why the move to Tulsa?

  Well, it’s where family lives. I still have a place in Austin I go to when I’m writing things. You know, I lived in New Mexico for a long time, from 1965 till ’75.

  Was that in Cerrillos?

  Part of it, yeah, I had a place in Cerrillos.

  So what drew you out there?

  Cheap rent [laughs]. Back in the 1960s, Cerrillos was still pretty much a ghost town, and they called it a ghost town.

  It’s not much more now, minus a few tourists.

  Yeah, but they don’t call it that anymore. I used to stay at the Palace Hotel, and my first gig was at the Tiffany Saloon working in the melodrama with my dad. That was ’66, ’67.

  How did you get from Indiana to there?

  We lived in Indiana, but we lived in a lot of places. Indiana was the first place I remember hearing country music, having it soak in when I was young. My parents listened to classical, so I listened to that at an early age.

  Your dad also listened to big band 78s?

  He had some of those too.

  And he played piano?

  Yeah. He was a musicologist. He knew a lot about music.

  Are there any early experiences with music that have stayed with you, like hearing your father play piano?

  The things that turned me on the most were hearing electric guitar players. When I first heard an electric guitar, that just changed everything because it was loud. I guess it just had a magical sound to it because of the loudness and that cutting tone. It didn’t sound like an acoustic guitar. I guess you call it a twang sound, the reverb and all that. The memories I have of being really excited by music is hearing a live band. There were a couple of instances, one of them was downtown Annapolis in the early sixties, they had a March of Dimes parade and there was a live band in it. It just changed my life. I was never the same after that.

  You found a broken-down two-string acoustic guitar in the attic.

  That’s going back to when I was real young. That was my idea of guitar, so you can see this kid’s idea of guitar, then he hears some records, but not that many, some radio. I didn’t really hear records because I was too young, but I heard the radio. But then you really see a guy playing an electric guitar and he’s plugged in, it was a big, life-changing thing. A similar event to that was a neighborhood having a party nearby across the woods from us. I had been put to bed, but listening out the window I could hear an electric guitar band playing, and I just thought I was at the party, I was visualizing everything. I was there, but I wasn’t there.

  As you got a bit older, college kids turned you on to country, folk, and blues?

  That’s because my father was a college professor. He taught at a liberal arts college, and the college campuses were where all that folk revival was going on in the sixties. There I got to hear all the blues players, people that were associated with all that. The kids my age were listening to the Beach Boys and the Beatles. They weren’t digging any deeper than that because they didn’t have the records. The college kids had the records. I hung around there because my dad worked there.

  Did you already know you were a guitar player, or did you fiddle around with different instruments?

  My dad wanted me to be a piano player. I had played piano, improvising very well, when I was a kid, but I never enjoyed it as much as guitar.

  So the guitar just fit you, no two ways about it?

  I mean I took a few lessons, learned a few chords, but I was self-taught after that.

  You started working the club scene as early as the sixties?

  Yeah, I started working in the Santa Fe and Albuquerque bars in the late sixties.

  Doing covers, or working on some original material?

 
At that time, I was playing with country groups. It was all covers.

  Was there a work ethic, sensibility, or set of values that was instilled in you way back in Indiana that stayed with you?

  No, because it was all rebellion. I mean I didn’t get along with my parents. I wish I had. I had a miserable childhood. It wasn’t anybody’s fault necessarily; it’s just the way it was. I spent a lot of time in my room with the music, and the work ethic came from the desire just to be good at something, a passion for that particular thing. I really didn’t have a choice, you know. I didn’t sit around and practice all day because I liked to work. I sat around because that was all I could do.

  I wasn’t really practicing, I was playing, but it amounted to the same thing, because I was working things out. And I did it for fun, and I did it because it was therapy, and eventually I did it for money. When I dropped out of high school, I mean, what was I going to do? So, I immediately just started playing with the older guys in the clubs, got a fake ID. That was my work ethic, survival. It just continued on from there.

  You once said that music was a stabilizer.

  I don’t know what context I was talking about.

  I think in terms of how much music meant to you.

  I think it kept me from getting into trouble. It was something to focus on. I had a goal. It was a tough time. The sixties were tough on a lot of people. And the seventies too; a lot of people didn’t make it. They went down some bad roads. I managed to stay out of trouble. I stayed off the booze. You know, playing all the bars with the free booze, I watched a lot of guys turn into drunks. I avoided that and just concentrated on the music. The music had helped me as a child. I didn’t get along with my parents very well and spent a lot of time in my room. I always had the music to pull me through. It was one thing I could do well because I didn’t do a lot of things well.

  Around 1980 you had a vision of the guit-steel, the combination of the steel guitar and guitar. Was it really a spontaneous dream, or something you had envisioned in the seventies as you honed your music?

  The idea had come to me of putting . . . well, Stella, who I was staying with in Hawaii, had this old zither that he had turned into a lap steel guitar. He had cut off part of the zither and made this small lap steel guitar out of it. It really didn’t work very well. It was small enough to where I thought I could glue this to my guitar. So I had been thinking about the idea of that. For some reason, it didn’t come to me until I had this dream that it was a double-necked instrument. I hadn’t thought of it as a double neck, I had thought of it as guitar with something stuck onto it, and my whole idea changed when I started thinking, hey, double-necked steel guitars. They make double-necked regular guitars, with a twelve-string and six-string. I said, this will be something like that, one of each. Interestingly, I hadn’t thought of that until the dream. That’s when I looked down and saw myself playing this thing.

  Why did it take five years until Michael Stevens helped you make it?

  I went around talking to everybody, and they just looked at me like I was half-crazy.

  Stevens made a six- and twelve-string guitar for Christopher Cross.

  Yeah, I went into his shop, and there were all these double-necked things, a six and twelve, then a bass and a six, and things like that. Then these other instruments that weren’t double necks but had the same beautiful craftsmanship. There was a consistency; you never saw anything he made that didn’t look exactly like something Gibson or Fender would have made at their factory. He was good at imitating the integrity of an instrument and making it look like it had been made by a company instead of just somebody in his garage. His finishes were second to none.

  He had these sunburst finishes. He had one he had made for Christopher Cross, and I said, this is probably the guy who could make the guit-steel that I want to make. We took the guitar, then we took a lap steel, then some big huge rubber bands, and we stuck them together. I strapped it on and we found balance points, where to set the steel in relation to the guitar and all that. Then we drew up some blueprints, but he had a lot of projects going at the time, but by 1985 I had the thing.

  How long did it take you to get accustomed to using it?

  I was playing it the next night. I played the Station Inn with Mark O’Connor, Vince Gill, and Jerry Douglas. The night after it was made I just jumped on the stage and started using it.

  In Austin?

  No, I was in Nashville.

  You’d already been working on your songwriting because your first solo record happened not too long after the development of the guit-steel.

  I was a frustrated guy because I knew I had something to offer, but I hadn’t written any songs and I was just good as a player. Well, what do you do as a player? You play for other people. I saw all these guys that I knew get publishing deals. They could write a certain amount of songs and they could get a paycheck every month. They didn’t necessarily have to be good songs, they just had to turn out a certain amount of them. And if they didn’t turn out a certain amount, then they dropped them. But for that year, or six months, or whatever it was, you got a paycheck, and I thought that it would be a great thing to try. And I also knew that if I wanted to do anything as a solo artist, it would be good if I wrote my own material. With those two reasons, I just got into the songwriting really heavy. In the early eighties, I started concentrating on it.

  As you developed your songwriting and put together a band, was it hard for you to find an audience, or was it built-in because people knew you from the other bands you played in?

  When you play with other people, they usually forget you the same night. Even if you’re good, because what they’ve gone to see is the star, and you’re not the star, so they forget all about you. I knew a lot of musicians, but I didn’t really have . . . well, I had a little bit of a following because I put my own band together and in 1983 I recorded a single down there in Austin, a 45 record that was amazingly well-received. It sort of got a little buzz going. I don’t want to say cult, because I hate that word, but it kinda had an underground following. By the time I put my band together and started working in Austin with Tanya, a lot of the musicians knew who I was so they’d come out and see me, then gradually it caught on to the other people.

  How did you get the gig teaching over at the Hank Thompson School of Country Music in Oklahoma? Who brought you out there?

  That was Leon McAuliffe, the steel guitar player from Bob Wills Texas Playboys.

  He came out to a couple of your shows?

  No, no, I found him. Someone took me up there and introduced me to him and he offered me a job that way. We played together, and he said you oughta teach up here. The gigs were really thinning out, I was getting into my songwriting really heavy, and I needed a job, so I started teaching. That’s when I met my wife Tanya Rae. She was one of my students.

  You kept her after class, you’ve said.

  Right, right. It all worked out to where I was supposed to be there for that reason.

  It’s not Nashville or Austin, so did being there give you a different sense of what you wanted from your music?

  It gave me time to sit back and take things in and get out of the bars for a while. I missed it, I missed playing. I didn’t like teaching. I did it strictly for survival. Tanya and I immediately started playing together, because we liked music, and she picked up that style of guitar that I had already developed in my music that I knew that I needed, which is a very strong rhythmic style. She learned that and we started building the band around that.

  Are you comfortable when people describe your guitar playing as genius, that it improves upon things, or even takes Hendrix a step forward?

  [Roars laughing.] I don’t think anyone could take Hendrix a step further. Maybe backward a little, take him back to the forties [roars again]. Those are nice compliments, but the thing, or the compliment that I will accept, is originality, because I’m original. I take ideas other people have used, and I present them in an original way and hope
fully in a new, fresh way. As long as I’m doing that and people are noticing it, then it’s a compliment and a deserved one. All the other stuff is flowery and needs to be taken with a grain of salt. As long as you can stay original, and stay sincere, that’s all that counts.

  But as Ernest Tubbs said, you can be original and sincere, but you gotta bring it back to country.

  Yeah, but see I didn’t take his advice; that’s the irony of it. I tried to, I tried to. But no one was interested in an old-sounding band. And I can understand why. I try to keep it country when it’s called for, but it doesn’t mean that every lick I play is going to be a country lick. Of course, he told me that in the 1970s, so we’re talking about a little bit of a different time and context there [laughs].