By Jon Bream
Star Tribune
March 4, 1983

Michael Johnson set down his guitar against a stool. He had just finished singing "It's My Job" and "Bluer Than Blue." Now came the hard part...

He reached over to the stool for a handful of notes on crumpled paper and gazed at the teenagers seated on the basketball floor and bleachers in the gym at Benilde-St. Margaret's High School.

"It's easy to be impromptu when I'm hiding behind a guitar," he said haltingly. "I had to make some notes so l could get the rest of my act together. And it looks like a football play."

Johnson was nervous.

He started talking about the things he needs in life, his reasons for making music, his responsibilities and pressures, and images of rock and pop singers like himself.

"There are musicians who are famous alcoholics or druggies who get standing ovations for falling off the stool, " he said. "Not only is it cool to be involved with drugs and alcohol in the music business, it's absolutely tolerated and, in some cases, it's expected. I get points just for being straight in my business, which is kind of nice.

Of course, it wasn't always that way. And that's precisely why the nationally known singer from Minnetonka was at Benilde on a recent morning, why he has been to other area high schools and colleges, and why he will perform a benefit concert for the Catholic Youth Center Sunday in O'Shaughnessy Auditorium at the College of St. Catherine in St. Paul.

"My career didn't make me an alcoholic," he told the students, some of whom seemed to be listening intently, others daydreaming.

"I fell for my image. It was not the stress of having a hit record and being on TV and running around the country that made me chemically dependent. I just used it as permission to go ahead and get loaded."

He detailed his experiences with booze and drugs in a way the students could relate to.

"You may be wondering about why I'm doing this." he continued. "I found out, especially through Alcoholics Anonymous, to tell people about it. It's not for you, it's for me. The old axiom: In giving you shall receive."

There was an uncomfortable silence.

"Uh, I'll sing you a song... This song is called 'Love Will Get You Through Times with No Sex Better Than Sex Will Get You Through Times with No Love.'"

After the applause, Johnson opened the program to questions. There were none—"there never are after one of these" he would say later—and he received an enthusiastic ovation.

Then handfuls of students approached Johnson. They had personal questions about friends and family members who might have a chemical dependency problem, or they just wanted an autograph, or just to say, "thank you."

"One fear I have about this is the Jane Fonda, Dick Gregory kind of thing," Johnson, 38, said a few days later while chain-smoking over lunch. "I know Jane Fonda is a wonderful actress and I stopped going to her films, and I know Dick Gregory is a great comedian but I Just wrote him off because I didn't agree with someone using their career as a vehicle for a point of view or for another cause, for the nuclear thing for Fonda, and Gregory became serious about the black situation and others.

"I still don't know where I'm at with using my career as a vehicle for that. I am happier going to "detox' and talking to drunks as a drunk, not as Michael Johnson. The fact that I'm an entertainer kind of opens doors for some kids. So I use it."

At first, Jonson was hesitant to discuss the situation. AA, he said, is not interested in promotion or grabbing attention. But the affable blond with an easy sense of humor and comfortable sweat shirt-and-faded Jeans style was willing to talk about it in the context of his career.

Going public with his personal problems hasn't hurt his career. Johnson, who also functions as his own manager, sees no threat, nor does he worry much about It. In fact, he's been mentioning it at concerts since late 1981. And he says his career is going "pretty well."

Johnson's records haven't exactly been rocketing to the top of the charts since "Bluer Than Blue" introduced him to the masses in 1978. It climbed to the top of the easy-listening chart and reached No. 10 on the pop chart. His follow-ups, "Almost Like Being In Love" and "This Night Won't Last Forever," received widespread exposure but were hardly major hits-at least in the United States.

In Manila, by contrast, Johnson was the top artist of 1981-82. He's had enough hits in the capital of the Philippines that EMI Records put together a Michael Johnson greatest hits album to be marketed in just that area.

"EMI released 'I'll Always Love You' from my Dialogue album and I think (the people in Manila) discovered it on their own," Johnson said. "I got a gold record for 60,000 copies sold. Because Manila's Spanish, they are ballad-oriented and everybody sings in the streets; it's a very Latin-feeling country right in the middle of Asia.

"Manila is a strange place. The language and culture is half Spanish and half Chinese. The United States blanket-bombed the Philippines, and it's now post-World War II culture. The taxicabs are U.S. military vehicles. The country seems to take its values from American television. Lots of cars have Christmas lights on the inside all the time, and great big tape decks that they can barely see over to drive."

Johnson performed three concerts there last year, and he found the response "flattering and frightening.

"I didn't see any blonds over there so I really stood out," he said. "I felt like Bobby Rydell must have felt. It was like being a 60s phenomenon. People jumping up and down on street corners, and storming the TV stations in town, trying to get the number of my hotel room. It was scary. Most of them were teen-agers. I had no coping skills. I still don't. I had no idea what I was getting in for."

But he will know better when he returns there this June.

Johnson is a Colorado native who sang with the New Mitchell Trio and in a Chicago production of "Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris" before settling in the Twin Cities in 1971. He will begin work on his eighth album (his fifth for EMI) this year. And he is not looking to make a hit record.

"I wished it would have happened in reverse," he said, referring to striking with "Bluer Than Blue on his first EMI album and then having less and less commercial success. I did feel lot of pressure, and I don't now. I have a new frame of mind about it. It's really foolish to measure success by a hit record. Those would be horrible standards to live by. I just want to make records. If they sell enough to justify making another one, then I'll make another one.

"I can't be driven by having a bit. I think that being a father is more important to me than having a hit record. (His second son, Leo, was born In December.) Before, my motives for being a star were the alcohol, drugs and the party life that went with it all.

"My motives for making music now are music. I really like it. There's so much success at home I have everything I want. That includes singing and performing and being a father. If there's any pressure, it's just to maintain that.