By Thomas Goldsmith
The Tennessean
July 11, 1985

Michael Johnson makes no claim of being a country boy, but he's glad to be in Nashville all the same.

Pop fans will remember Johnson as the singer of Bluer Than Blue, I Know This Night Won't Last Forever, and other Nashville-recorded pop hits in 1978 and 1979. In a Music City filling up with ex-rockers professing their country roots, Johnson says he's back in town to make country records simply because he likes the songs and the sound here.

"I can't say that I'm a second son of country music or that I'm a student of Lefty Frizzell," Johnson said. "I couldn't pull it off."

The fair-haired songster, whose negotiations for an RCA record deal are in the final stages, brings his one-man, acoustic show to the Bluebird Cafe tonight. A native of Colora-do, Johnson's musical roots are in classical music, jazz, pop and folk music, especially the latter.

"Coming out of folk music, my love has always been of songs," Johnson said of Nashville's attraction for him "People in L.A. write records, people in Nashville write songs."

Now a resident of Minnesota, the songer-songwriter has been spending about half his time in Nashville, working with producer Brent Maher and swapping songs with some of Music Row's best songwriters.

"Im co-writing with Kent Robbins, hopefully with Mike Reid," Johnson said. "I've also been working some with Harlan Howard."

Plans call for Johnson to start work on his first RCA recordings in September, with a single intended for fall release and an album after the first of the year. A duet with country star Sylvia, I Love You By Heart, has already been released.

Johnson is excited about his collaboration with Maher, who came up with the unique sounding records that propelled the Judds to country stardom in a startlingly brief period.

Another part of the production team will be songwriter-guitarist Don Potter, whose slide guitar figure on the Judd's Why Not Me? was the most memorable instrumental hook on a country record in some time.

"That's the game plan, that Don Potter and I will be the sound," Johnson said. "That sound will be that from which all the rest of it springs."

Although an accomplished player, Johnson in recent years left most of the guitar work on his albums to studio musicians.

"I have usually not played since Bluer Than Blue, but I had three albums before that that were almost all voice and guitar," he said.

Johnson once spent a hectic year as a member of the the Chad Mitchell Trio along with another young folk singer named known as John Denver and later went out on his own as a sing-er. It was a song from one of Johnson's several melodic, jazz-folk LPs recorded in the early 70s that brought him to Nashville.

"There was a song called Lucky Stars that Gene Cotten heard and wanted to record," he said. "He found me and brought me to Nashville to play on the record, and that's when I met Brent and everybody I worked with later on."

Johnson's friendship with Nashville folk-pop songster Cotten, Maher and other Music City record people led the singer to borrow $18,000 to pay for master recordings here of Bluer Than Blue and two other songs. The gamble paid off when Johnson landed an EMI/America record deal and Bluer Than Blue climbed up high into the pop charts

When the pop hits started coming in Johnson's life became the proverbial succession of concert halls, hotels and airplanes, he said.

"I would see the reaction of my neighbors when limousines started pulling up to the same old apartment," he said. "I remember agreeing to things that I wasn't equipped to do yet, like daytime TV talk shows.

"I'm a lot more equipped now to be myself, which is all they're going to get. It's all that's required"

In his performance tonight at the Bluebird, Johnson will stick to the classical guitar that has been his mainstay since even before he traveled to Barcelona, Spain, to study classical guitar for a year at the age of 21.

In an unusual setup for classical guitar, Johnson uses steel instead of nylon strings on his hand-made instrument's two highest-pitched strings.

"You get a little bit more edge to the top of it," said Johnson, who concedes the arrangement may eventually cause excessive stress to the instrument

Johnson enjoys playing smaller venues like the Bluebird, although he admits the intimacy of the room and high percentage of musicians in the audience will put him on his mettle.

Im a soloist at heart-I like to bounce around and do a lot of different things," he said "People here who haven't seen me before might find out I play guitar a little better than they expect."