Bass Player Magazine Interview

By Dan Forte

When you think of blues meccas—Chicago, San Francisco, New Orleans, Austin---Ann Arbor, Michigan, is not usually on the list. But in the late ‘60s and early ‘70’s, Sarah Brown stresses, “Ann Arbor was really happening. For blues, it was a really good place to be.” The main reason was the Ann Arbor Blues (later renamed Blues & Jazz) Festival, which began in 1969. “I went to those before I knew a whole lot about blues,” says Brown---but she learned fast. By 1972, she was onstage at the festival playing with the Boogie Brothers and being recorded for an anthology documenting the event.

These days, Brown makes Austin, Texas, home, and it might be easier to list blues luminaries she hasn’t played with---hasn’t played with yet, that is---than try to remember everyone she’s backed. The Boogie Brothers themselves produced one of the idiom’s top drummers, Fran Christina (now with the Fabulous Thunderbirds), as well as singer/guitarist Steve Nardella and multi-instrumentalist John Nicholas (best known for his work with Asleep at the Wheel). “I started learning blues from them” she recounts. “At that point, I couldn’t really tell the difference between, say, [harmonica players] Sonnby Boy Williamson and Junior Parker, whereas they knew their way around. Fran had already played with [guitarist] Duke Robillard in the early Roomful of Blues. That’s a real key to learning quickly: playing with people who are better than you are. We were the house band at the Blind Pig, a tiny club in Ann Arbor, and we backed lots of people: Lightnin’ Slim, Otis Rush, Roosevelt Sykes, Houston Stackhouse, Lazy Lester, Doctor Ross. It was a great band. Part of it was that we got to play with some great people, but---and I hope this doesn’t sound conceited---part of it was just that it happened to be a group of people who were really talented and had the taste to do it right.”

How did the daughter of a Russian literature professor at the University of Michigan become an outstanding blues bassist? It wasn’t easy. “I played cello in high school,” Brown explains, “and I was a fan of all sorts of weird music. I had an older sister with taste, and she had a single of ‘High-Heeled Sneakers’ by Tommy Tucker. I took it to a slumber party, and all my little girlfriends were lip-synching to Beatles tunes. I said, ‘Listen to this! You’re really gonna love it.’ I put on ‘High-Heeled Sneakers,’ and they said, ‘Oh, Johnny Rivers did this better’ I was so disappointed. I started feeling kind of like a freak. Then, when I was 13 or 14, I saw Buddy Guy. It was 1965, and he was in his prime. I remember he did ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ and ‘Everything’s Gonna Be All Right.’ I was floored. I didn’t know it was blues---I didn’t know what it was---but I knew it was really scary in a great way.”

Like her friends, Brown listened to the British Invasion bands, but she also felt a strong attraction for the soul music from Memphis and nearby Detroit. “For me, it was stone soul music: Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, Solomon Burke--- people like that,” she recalls. “I liked the Animals and the Stones, but I kept discovering that my favorite songs by those bands were covers of Little Richard or Chuck Berry. So I listened to those guys and found that my favorite songs of theirs were blues tunes. I did this backwards progression into the blues. There was something about the pithy, primal thing of 12-bar blues that attracted me. I wasn’t even playing bass then; I was just listening to records. Then I discovered I could hear bass---I was paying attention to it---whereas a lot of kids didn’t even know it was there.”

Brown soon took her discovery a step further, buying a Japanese bass in a pawnshop. In 1971, she enrolled at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. “Berklee’s reputation was hot at that time,” she says, “so I took the easy curriculum, which was so simple it was boring. I had a good private teacher, who started showing me more about theory, but I was a little too flaky. And any time I would bring up the idea of an R&B band with the other students, they’d just laugh.”

After a year, Brown returned to Ann Arbor, where she met the Boogie Brothers. “I had an understanding of the instrument’s function and a good-enough ear,” she says. “I didn’t study much. I didn’t sit down and copy bass lines from the records I was listening to. It just happened. The Boogie Brothers played with a nice ensemble sense, and it was fun to learn to play bass with Franny on drums, because he’s a real creative drummer. Hew got me into the spontaneity of it. Then I played with [singer/harmonica player] Big Walter Horton. That was a really important thing. Talk about spontaneous---you had to be ready for anything. The changes might come here, they might come there; this song could be one thing tonight, a totally different song the next night. It was imperative to be able to invent stuff every night.”

Sarah met the legendary harmonica wizard outside the Bling Pig the night of her first out-of-town gig with him. “We got in the car, drove to Boston, and played the gig,” She recalls. “After the gig, he spoke to me for the first time---he said, ‘You’re fired.’ I was totally crestfallen, until he told me it was a joke. He was like that: a real character---a peculiar, wonderful kind of guy.”

After the Boogie Brothers and a short-lived spin-off called the Vipers, Brown gigged around New England in various bands. Then she hooked up with the Rhythm Rockers, a Boston unit with John Nicholas and future Roomful of Blues guitarist Ronnie Earl, before stints with the Memphis Rockabilly Band, singer Geoff Muldaur, and her own band, the Hipshakes. In 1982, she toured Europe with slide deom J.B. Hutto, then moved to Austin to play with the LeRoi Brothers. “I hadn’t really played any hard-rockin’ rock & roll before,” she admits, “and I learned a lot about how much fun it was.”

Being a soul music fan and playing in a succession of blues bands shaped Brown’s playing style. “I think I have a melodic approach because I listened to a lot of soul, where the bass tends to fill more of a melodic function than in straight-ahead R&B,” she explains. “There was also a time when I listened almost exclusively to the string-bass players in the early-‘50s big bands of Gene Phillips, Buddy Johnson, and Roy Milton. The bass players were walking all over the place, hitting those long boong-boong-boongs. And I listened to walk the changes jazz players like Red Callender, Milt Hinton, and Slam Stewart. But every now and ten—I just realized this recently---while I’m walking the changes, Im also thinking about things I can do that tend to be more melodic, in the sense of what James Jamerson would do.

“I love to walk,” Sarah continues, “and I think that comes from the R&B/string-bass influence. And I love to hold notes and let them ring, which is the way Willie Dixon and Big Crawford played. That’s real important. I think people who have listened to string bass or played it---which I did for a few years---have a different approach. For instance, on a slow blues, a lot of electric players will use dotted eighth notes, but a string bassist will play dotted quarters. I love that. For a long time, I wasn’t even aware I was doing that, and I think it throws off some people.” Brown says several Chicago electric blues bassists also had an impact on her development. “I remember seeing Jack Myers, who was really great. Bobby Anderson was fantastic. I definitely want to mention Bob Strogher and Floyd Jones---and Mack Thompson with [singer/guitarist] Magic Sam.”

Brown adds: “The guy I’m nuts about right now is Buckwheat Zydeco’s bass player. Lee Allen Zeno. He’s got what I call that ‘red rubber ball’ sound---like a rubber ball bouncing. That really smooth, low bass bounce. I strive for that, but I don’t think I achieve it. Then there’s [ex-Thunderbird and Tail Gator] Keith Ferguson, for that big old booming ‘roar in the right key.’ Of the more famous people, I love the Meters’ George Porter and Rick Danko of the Band---I’m a big fan of that tuba sound.”

Sarah’s picking technique is straightforward---two fingers---although she muses, I’m starting to see the advantage of more technique. There are things I want to say now that require more chops to say them. A lot of people will learn a technique like slapping and popping without knowing what they’re going to say with it. But now I’m getting to the point where there might be some things I want to say with that, so I can incorporate it.” In 1985, Brown recorded a single, “Four Hours Sleep”/”Bad Boy’s Pride” [V-8 Records], which was named Best Single in the Austin Chronicle’s annual music poll. More recently, she sang and played on a “girl group” project for Antone’s Records that also features singers Lou Ann Barton, Marcia Ball, and Angela Strehli. And she’s had a chance to return to her first love, soul music. “I always want to be the bass player in a really tight soul act, but I just never had those gigs,”she says.

Sarah Brown’s Gear Sarah Brown’s main bass is a 1960 Fender Precision, she has been playing it since 1974, although she switched to a solid body, long-scale Silvertone for a couple of years. “I like the Silvertone---I still play it,” Sarah says, “but it doesn’t have much gain and it’s harder to get around on.” Although Brown’s instrument hasn’t changed recently, her way of holding it has. “After years of playing with the bass real low,” she explains, “the way all the roots players play, I discovered that when I shortened my strap, I got a lot more versatile, technically.” Over the years, Brown’s amps have included a Fender Bassman, an Acoustic, a Traynor, and an Ampeg SVT. Her current choice is an SWR SM-400. “I like it a lot,” she says. “It’s got a tube preamp that makes it really warm-sounding---and it’s so light! My speakers are two Dietz 15s in separate cabinets, for ease of moving.” In the studio, Sarah finds it helpful to use her amp. “The last time I recorded,” she explains, “I wanted to get that big, round, Leroy Hodges sound, so I used a cabinet. [Ed. Note: Hodges played on many hits by Memphis soul singer Al Green and others.] The way you sound affects your touch, so I brought in a 1x15 cabinet and sat on it. We didn’t mike it, but I could feel it and that worked pretty well.” Sarah’s current preference in strings is D’Addario Halfrounds, medium gauge. “I don’t know the numbers---I don’t care---but I like those strings. They’re a little more lively than flatwounds but not as blingy as roundwounds.”