At The Rolling Stones’ first Milwaukee concert, in 1964, a young black Milwaukee keyboard player called Junior Brantley was tapped to open the show. His band, Junior and The Classics, was essentially a Top-40 cover act with R&B flair. “Yes, we did meet,” Brantley says, recalling his encounter with The Stones backstage at the old Milwaukee Auditorium. “The thing I remember most was smelling marijuana for the first time. I didn’t know what it was! Nine months later I smelled it a second time and then I knew!”
Brantley has enjoyed a long career of steady musical work since that night. He has often been a sideman, but for more than a decade he co-led, with Jim Liban, Milwaukee’s most popular blues band, Short Stuff. Brantley has lived in Las Vegas since 1994, where he continues to work as an entertainer. Most summers in recent years, he returns home to play shows with Milwaukee blues band Leroy Airmaster. This summer, Leroy Airmaster’s vocalist-harmonica player, Steve Cohen, has arranged a mini tour.
“We’d go to hear Short Stuff when we were in high school,” Cohen says of his long relationship with Brantley. “After they broke up in the mid-’80s, we invited Junior to jam with us. After awhile, he just kind of joined the group.”
Invitations have often come Brantley’s way. His first paying job in the early ’60s, with Sonny Boy Williamson, came because the bluesman’s organist didn’t show up. When Brantley, who owned one of Milwaukee’s first Wurlitzer organs, delivered the instrument to the gig Williamson asked him to fill in. Years later, he was living above a bar where Short Stuff played on weeknights. “They sounded like Sonny Boy Williamson,” Brantley recalls. “I went down, checked them out and asked if I could sit in. Pretty soon, their manager asked me to join.”
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After Short Stuff and Leroy Airmaster, Brantley went on the road with Jimmy Vaughan, The Fabulous Thunderbirds and Roomful of Blues. “I went all around the world a lot of times,” he says. “Oh, I loved it!” He gave up the road to raise his son in Las Vegas after Cohen, working there in the early ’90s in a Blues Brothers tribute show, arranged for Brantley to audition as a Little Richard imitator.
For their Milwaukee shows, Brantley will front Leroy Airmaster, performing most of the vocals as well as the keyboards. The sets will include songs Brantley performed through much of his career, including numbers by Little Richard, Johnnie Taylor, Wilson Pickett, Jerry Lee Lewis and The Staple Singers, as well as at least one Brantley original, “Funky Woman.”
Junior Brantley and Leroy Airmaster perform at 8 p.m., May 24 and 25 at the Potawatomi Sidebar; 6:30 p.m., May 26 at The Italian Community Center; 6:30 p.m., May 27 at Morton’s Wisconsininn in Cedarburg; and 5 p.m., July 5 at Summerfest’s Johnson Controls Stage.
