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The Daily Inter Lake

Music man juggles multiple gigs

Original Mission Mountain Wood Band member keeps his hand in music

Christian Johnson of Kalispell might not be matching the 300 dates a year he played in the 1970s as a member of the Mission Mountain Wood Band, but he still is one of the most prolific musicians around.

Johnson, 58, plays guitar, fiddle and mandolin as part of five mostly rock and bluegrass-style bands, teaches three days a week, backs up novice musicians during an open-microphone night at Red's Wines & Blues once a week, and this summer is part of a Mission Mountain Wood Band Hi-Line reunion tour, which features a concert at Majestic Valley Arena in Kalispell on July 11.

"I'm busier now than I've ever been," he said. "I choose to play five or six nights a week and teach three days a week. I can't get enough of it. I don't know how much longer I can do it, and I don't want to miss a minute of it."

Johnson's various bands, which are grouped under the Loose Productions umbrella, are booked eight months out. He's busy almost every night of the week - for example, he played 20 dates in June at sites throughout the valley.

Billy Christian is the name of a duo with Johnson and Billy Powell of Libby - "the best acoustic player I've ever run across," Johnson said.

For the Good Wood Trio, Powell and Johnson add someone else to the lineup - a banjo player, or before he moved to Chicago, flute player Trusten Williamson. Sometimes Steve Riddle joins on bass, creating a foursome dubbed Good Wood.

The Christian Johnson Project is an all-out club dance band; Out of the Bluegrass features members of the Mission Mountain Wood band playing acoustic bluegrass; and Loose Caboose is a well-known Flathead Valley party band, which now mostly plays gigs such as corporate events and weddings.

Johnson pulled together Loose Caboose as the house band for the Bierstube on Big Mountain in 1992.

"I've had about every good player in the valley in that band at one time or another," Johnson said, saying he recently counted 21 different musicians who have been part of the Loose Caboose family.

Drawing people into his musical universe always has been a passion for Johnson.

"I love playing with young people," he said. "It rejuvenates my interest in music any time I get on stage with young people.

"I get to share my knowledge and experience, and I get to learn stuff from them and feel that energy. I've come to love that energy."

Teaching in his home studio is a recent addition to his life. He's been giving private lessons to students, who range from age 6 to 60, for three years.

He loves the teaching, but admits "I'm a sucker for performance. I hope to continue that forever."

It would be a difficult thing to walk away from performing after being part of a live phenomenon such as the Mission Mountain Wood Band.

The group spent the years 1971-78 on a custom-made Greyhound cruiser, criss-crossing the United States playing one college, one club, one fair date after another. They lived on the road, literally doing nothing but performing in front of enthusiastic audiences - which Johnson guesses averaged 3,000 - then packing up and moving on to the next show.

Johnson's journey to becoming lead guitarist, fiddler and mandolin player with the band (as well as bus mechanic) started when he hitchhiked to Billings a few days after he graduated from high school in Carson City, Nev. A friend had invited him to join a band there. It took three days to make the trip.

"I had long hair - it was difficult getting rides in those days," Johnson said.

He played with a group called Pretty Face in Billings and later hooked up with a Missoula-area band Sperry Grade, named for a stagecoach stop between Missoula and Helena.

With Sperry Grade, Johnson was living a commune life, and once was even arrested "for putting up a peace sign on the highway and for disturbing cows."

In 1971, Greg Reichenberg and Johnson were spotted by the other three members of the Mission Mountain Wood Band - who had started out as a University of Montana-based three-piece acoustic group - during a Missoula show.

Once the final lineup was formed, the Mission Mountain Wood Band toured regionally for a year. They the band auditioned for entertainment management companies in New York City, and from there were booked into first the college circuit and later the fair and casino circuits.

They developed an almost Grateful Dead-like following, playing for hundreds of thousands of people, buoyed not by an output of Top 40 hits but by the energetic party atmosphere of their live shows.

The five original members of the group - Johnson, Rob Quist, Riddle, Reichenberg and Terry Robinson - created their sound by taking acoustic folk, adding elements of country and rock, and ending up with an electric style of bluegrass with plugged-in banjo and mandolin.

Given its hybrid qualities, the Mission Mountain Wood Band's music lacked commercial radio appeal, but the energy and precision instrumental work was perfect for live performance. Music lovers flocked to colleges and clubs all over the country to experience the band's no-holds-barred stage show.

Meanwhile, the band itself was just having fun. The traveling bus had cargo space for all their equipment plus five bedrooms and a home theater system - it was a self-contained life. Johnson said he and his wife, Catherine, didn't even have a permanent address most of those years with the band.

Catherine met Johnson during a weekend with a friend in Lake Tahoe. She and a friend had gone to a Sammy Davis Jr. show and stopped off to play craps.

"There was this uproar in the cabaret, and we went in and the maitre'd seated us next to the stage," she said.

They stayed for three of the Mission Mountain Wood Band's sets, and afterward, Catherine handed Christian a note, saying she wanted to meet him. They went out to a night club, and a few days later she quit her job as a legal secretary and followed him on the road. They've been married for 32 years.

Catherine Johnson was as much a part of the endless road trips as the rest of the band. She had great enthusiasm for the lifestyle and still is her husband's biggest fan.

"Live, they were and still are one of the greatest experiences in music you will ever know," she said. "This band would walk on stage and no matter where we were, the crowd would start dancing. I saw governors of states on top of tables, dancing."

Johnson left the band in 1978. Besides being burned-out from life on the road, he was interested in progressing in the studio recording industry, and felt the band was not taking steps toward that goal.

"I felt we weren't doing the right things to get a record deal," Johnson said. "We made the mistake of telling management we would go anywhere and do anything. We weren't learning how to record, or learning anything on the business side."

The Mission Mountain Wood Band did produce one record - 1976's "In Without Knocking" - but it was an independent release, which sold about 50,000 copies not long after it was released, and Johnson estimates it has sold about 200,000 copies altogether.

After he left the band, the Johnsons went to California and then Reno, Nev., where Christian Johnson was working the cabaret circuit, playing in shows six nights a week.

The Mission Mountain Wood Band continued to tour, but changed as members dropped out, eventually becoming the Montana Band, with lead singer Robinson the only remaining original musician.

In 1987, Robinson and the rest of

the Montana Band died in a July 4 plane crash off of the west shore of Flathead Lake.

"That was kind of what got us back to Montana," Johnson said.

After he and Catherine traveled back for the funeral, they were reminded that they had a wealth of friendships in the state, and in 1992, moved to Kalispell, bringing two portable engraving businesses to malls in Kalispell and Whitefish, with Johnson still performing as much as possible.

But with a daughter, Gina, headed to study dance at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles in 1999, Johnson needed a steady income that would help pay for college, so he went to work for Semitool for seven years.

After being at the tail end of Semitool layoffs in 2003, Johnson qualified for education assistance. He attended the Musicians Institute of Technology in Hollywood, where in his 50s, he was decidedly the oldest student there.

He became a certified audio engineer, and the studies also helped him with his music teaching. He also developed a new skill as a luthier, building electric guitars.

Johnson has developed a business model for staying productive in the local music scene, creating smaller groups for the local clubs that can't afford to hire a five-piece band, and always treating local club owners with respect. Despite his immense talent, Johnson never has adopted a prima donna attitude.

"He is the most reliable, consistent, honest, hard-working gentlemanly, kind man you'd ever want to know," Catherine Johnson said. "He never misses a date, he is always early, and he makes sure the band plays to his standards."

And he continues to improve his artistry as a musician.

"I play better now," he said, referring to his days with the Mission Mountain Wood Band. "I work at it harder, I push myself and I focus on it more."

Since most of the band members still are working musicians, even if not full time, Johnson said the band members are just as or more skilled - and maybe a little more focused on the music - when they take the stage these days.

"It never was really about musicianship," Johnson said of the band's heyday. "It was about the party."

Reporter Heidi Gaiser may be reached at 758-4431 or by e-mail at hgaiser@dailyinterlake.com