Blonde to Brunette

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     I think if you want a brown shade to stick on heavily bleached hair, you pretty much have to do some pre-pigmenting; otherwise, you'll get odd results from the get-go and/or it'll fade to awful shades.  

  You don't have to dye it red. Think of it this way: all you have to is add enough "contributing pigment" to support the brown you want.  For lighter browns, you can fill it to an orangey color and you should be good to go.

  Do you have a sally's near you?  When I went back to brown from Andy Warhol white, I filled with a mixture of dark golden blonde w/ strawberry blonde.  I mixed the full bottle of dark golden blonde w/ an equal amount of 10vol developer and then added in a good bit of strawberry blonde (w/o adding any extra developer).  I used a neutral protein filler on my hair before coloring and colored it until it was orangey/reddish in color.  Then I put a couple different browns over that (I used second nature for that part, too).  I topped it off with a color gloss. It actually looked good; the color gloss in particular helped camoflauge all the damage I'd done to my hair. 
 If a neutral protein filler alone isn't enough to get your hair ready for coloring, you might want to buy yourself a bottle of Clairol's Metalex. This is an old school product that's been around since the 60s or so; its oily, gooey, and smells bad, but it makes your hair stronger and healthier (temporarily) and gets it ready for chemical processing.  You can do a series of Metalex treatments until your hair is healthy enough to take color.  A bottle costs like $16 but should last for several treatments.