Kick Ass Bluegrass
The Johnson Family Band has quickly become the definitive bluegrass band in the Red River Valley. Since their genesis two years ago, they have played venues throughout North Dakota, Minnesota and beyond, including festivals like LogJam, Bella Sol, and Project Earth. Given their musical prowess and ever-growing success, HPR had to road trip with these guys to see what makes them tick.
9/26
Hopes were high and ambition was vast as we prepared to set sail to Duluth. Seating in the van was tighter than most band vans - an unfortunate, yet necessary side-effect of the enormous upright bass inhabiting the bowels of this particular automobile.
We quickly packed up and hit the road, each of us eager to spend the next six hours in close quarters. As overly-intimate as it may have been, the group’s conversation outweighed the discomfort. Pete Hoffman (lead vocals/guitar/cofounder), explained bluegrass on beyond its rugged, shit-kicking exterior.
“There’s such a history to bluegrass music. You can almost hear the history. When you listen to the old, old recordings, you can hear the repression of the African-American slave blues music that was going on, mixing with the immigrant folk tunes that were going on,” he said.
“You can hear the blues of America mixing with the fiddle and dance music coming in from Irish immigrants. It’s a merging of the cultures, and it’s really the history of the foundation of America.”
In their debut album, “Old Ruby,” you can hear this concept come to life, even though, according to Tom Johnson (Dobro/vocals/cofounder), bluegrass is meant to be played live.
He said, “I was scared shitless about recording an album, just because I felt that we’re a live band, and mostly everything I’ve done have been live bands, but it’s always hard to take a live band and put them in a studio to try and recreate a live experience.”
Looking back on his first interests with bluegrass, Johnson said, “I was into more of the blues things that were going on, and I picked up the Old Crow [Medicine] album, and it just seemed fun. It seemed like something you could just sit in a rocking chair and jam out to. I feel like I should be in a rocking chair when I do it.”
After a long, albeit informative six-hour drive, we arrived at the Rex in Duluth just in time to catch the makings of a hellish rainstorm. Lake Superior was angry that evening as she crashed into the shoreline just outside the venue, and the raindrops were heavy enough to blind a man.
As the storm grew uglier, the spirit of the audience inside became all the more exuberant. Even as flood water began to overtake the dance floor, the audience’s enthusiasm could not be quenched. They were overjoyed by flood water, dancing and splashing in utter bliss. It’s almost as if the Johnson Family Band has the power to provoke a complete disregard for personal safety.
9/27
As we drove to Minneapolis that next day, Hoffman discussed the origins of their group one fateful night during finals.
“Tom and I were drinking one night,” he said, “and we just started playing around with bluegrass songs just for fun, not really knowing what we were doing, but it felt kind of good.”
“Right away it felt like something we connected to. It felt right. It felt like we were doing something that other bands weren’t doing.”
What happened from there was a series of bizarre occurrences that accumulated more and more band members. Beginning with Johnson and Hoffman’s original jam session, the roster has come to include Haley Rydell (fiddle/vocals/standard of morality), Ross Cameron (upright bass), “Eddie” Max Velo (banjo/vocals) and Mark Reitan (mandolin/vocals).
“People responded positively almost right away to the music, even when we weren’t very good at it,” Hoffman said. “We’d have a practice at our house, and people would just show up and drink at our practices, so practices early on started to become parties.”
Hoffman also discussed his background with bluegrass, and how it caught his interest with a passion. Prior to the creation of the Johnson Family Band, he spent his summers on a ranch in New Mexico, immersed in a culture far removed from that of the Red River Valley.
“Out there there’s a real community of people who actually live in the mountains, who don’t have electricity, and play bluegrass music at night for entertainment, like they would have in Appalachia. That was my first real exposure to the genre,” he said.
“That mountain environment really attracted me. There was a real connection to the Earth, a real outdoors earthiness to the music… There were like 20-30 men to every woman, and the bluegrass band was getting all the girls,” he said. “The rest of us were all just dirty and smelly watching them pick up chicks all the time.”
Once in Minneapolis, they played another successful show at a premiere venue in the area, the Cabooze. Although there was no flooding of biblical proportions, the audience’s spirit still remained.
9/28
On the ride home the next day, most of the conversation revolved around Tom Johnson’s desire to host a fishing show. He said it will be just like any other fishing show, but with a hippy twist. Each episode would begin with a monologue from Johnson doing some obscure activity, like fashioning a birch canoe, or bathing in the lake. Later in the episodes, Minnesota musicians will show up by some strange and humorous coincidence to fish and banter with Tom.
What seemed to begin as a joke, quickly turned into a full on production. Already he has acquired a full production team, a canoe, and his lineup of guests is already taking off.
What’s next for Johnson Family Band? A new album is already in the making, but they will not be doing any live shows for the month of October because of their love for Halloween. Tom Johnson is an expert pumpkin carver, and Hoffman is an old horror film connoisseur of sorts. The group has opted to take October off to visit as many haunted houses as possible. If you’re anxious to see them, you will have to wait until Nov. 1, when they will be playing, ironically enough, a Halloween party at Fort Ransom.
If You Go
Halloween Party
Fort Ransom
Nov. 1
No cover
All ages
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