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Biography
- Born February,
1971 in Spartanburg, SC
- First sexual encounter
was at 18, with a Waffle House waitress in an actual double-wide
trailer. I believe this alone lays to rest any debate as to my
white trash bona fides.
- First paying gig
was as a solo act at the legendary Taco Mac in Emory Village,
Atlanta GA. Every Wednesday, all my friends would come down and
drink ‘till they passed out, and I would sing them cover
songs. Some of these songs were not very good, but my following
was faithful. I assumed that since I could pack ‘em in there,
I could do it anywhere, so after graduation I moved to New Orleans.
They call it the Big Easy, right? I figured I’d be playing
the Jazz Fest in no time. However, it was then that my real education
began. It took me ten years to get that spot at Jazz Fest. But
during that time, I learned how to write good songs, manage and
front a money-making traveling band, and actually play my guitar.
- My first band was called Sweet
Pea’s Revenge. I formed it in February 1997,
and we played our first show at Monaco Bob’s Touchdown Lounge,
scenically located under the Claiborne overpass in New Orleans.
All I remember about that show was the vicious fight that broke
out during the first set, and the hundreds of giant cockroaches
that crawled out of the walls when we started playing. I think
some of them actually started the fight.
- But things slowly got better,
and by the time we played Jazz Fest 2004, we were doing 100+ shows
a year all over the Southeast at big venues like House of Blues
and Tipitina’s, and working on our fourth CD.
We even got to open for Government Mule, Delbert McClinton, and
some other people I thought were really cool. We also started
selling our CDs on Amazon.com, and got some great fan letters
from people all over the world. We’re huge in the Slavic
countries.
- But SPR was a collective effort,
and we were trying too hard to be an “all things to all
people” sort of jam band. I began to be
uncomfortable with the material, and sometimes I felt like a stranger
in my own band.
- It wasn’t until our 4th
CD, “Side Road to Paradise,” that I found myself the
only songwriter in the band. Guys had fallen away
for different reasons: one wanted to do more jazz, one was tired
of the road, one just stopped getting out of bed. Anyway, it was
totally up to me how the songs on Side Road would sound. I was
listening to a lot of Robert Earl Keen and James McMurtry, and
I knew that was the type of music I wanted to make. I wrote songs
that told a story—funny songs about the music business,
dark sagas about doomed honky tonk heroes, and cautionary tales
of moonshiners who switched from White Lightning to crystal meth
because the money was better. Only some of these were true stories
about friends of mine.
- While working on this CD—in
fact, just after it was printed and delivered, to our drummer’s
shed in New Orleans—Hurricane Katrina struck. I had moved
out of New Orleans and over to Florida, enjoying my own personal
destruction during Hurricane Ivan the previous year, and I realized
the Gulf Coast was not where I wanted to be any more. So I moved
up to Athens, GA. I figured I could always play the old Taco Mac
in Atlanta if things went badly. (Didn’t know at the time
that it had been torn down shortly after I left. No, they didn’t
put up a shrine to me on the spot.)
- Then “Side Road”
was so successful, and people loved it so much, that I realized
I wanted to put my own name on the band. The whole
time we were known as Sweet Pea’s Revenge, I was never crazy
about the name. In fact, I grew to hate it. So it was with enormous
relief that I decided to kill it and officially start working
as Big Jim Brown. It has truly been a long strange trip, and I
can hardly wait to see what the next 10 years bring. Hopefully
no more cockroaches.
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