Alex Johnson is an essential part of Ann Arbor’s music scene. As a teenager, Johnson began the annual “Commstock Music Fest” tradition at Community High School that lasted for almost thirty years and had both a revival show and a reunion show in 2012. Alex Johnson created the Ann Arbor Music Center which now has an impressive total of over seven-hundred students and hosts a rock-band camp every Summer.

In the late ‘90s, Johnson was giving guitar lessons from his home and working , when he felt he needed a bigger and more professional space to use. “Step one– find a place where I could do that. There was a big, sort of burned-out warehouse on Washington Street… You could rent a room in there to teach guitar, have band practice, or sleep if you didn’t mind living without plumbing. It was far less than ideal, but I got a room eleven feet by eleven feet, I put a little paper sign in the window that I made on my printer, that said ‘Ann Arbor Music Center,’ thinking, by giving it a big and established-sounding name, I would trick people into thinking it was big and established.” Johnson started with roughly eleven students.

His plan worked. Fairly quickly, by word-of-mouth, attention was drawn to the small business. Calls began to roll in with requests for lessons, and he attained quite a few students. “That was the beginning of what would become this behemoth.”

The Ann Arbor Music Center hosts Rock Band Camp every year. This program was not in the original plan, but one year Johnson began to notice a pattern that correlated with Summer Camp. “Summers would just die… ‘We’re all going to go broke…’ everyone would lament the Summer… I would ask the kids, ‘well where are you going? Why are you gone for six weeks?’” When Alex Johnson found out that a large portion of his students were leaving for weeks or months at a time during Summer to go to camps, he decided to create a camp of his own. “‘You can hang out all Summer and be a rock-person!’ ‘Cool! When’s the camp?’ ‘Next year…’”

The Music Center ran rock-band classes since before the Summer program started, so there was already a foundation on which to design the camp.

Johnson went to Ann Arbor Rec & Ed and they fully supported the idea. The camp has continued, and successfully so, ever since that Summer day, years ago.

Alex Johnson has a simple mission: To give people, all people, a better way to learn music. “When I was growing up, you’d learn how to play an instrument, but that would not even suggest that you’d learn music. Historically in the world of guitar, bass, and to some extent drums, and even largely piano, things are left out. People who learn guitar, they know how to play songs, but they don’t know what notes they’re playing. They don’t know what key they’re in. They don’t know what scales are for. They don’t know what harmony comes from.” Johnson sees a great divide between kids who want to play out, but don’t have the kind of guidance that they need from their music teachers. “But when you’re working with professional musicians, we all speak the same language.” Music theory is very important to The Ann Arbor Music Center. It is the language that all musicians can and should learn to speak. “Easily ninety-five percent of people who call themselves guitarists, don’t know those things that I said are so important.”

Alex Johnson was a student at Community High School in the 1980s. He had several bands throughout the four-year experience, but the most well-known and long-lasting was called Third Rail. Since the internet wasn’t around yet, Johnson and his band had no easy way of learning the techniques for writing music or setting up a show. They had to figure it out on their own. “We revered the great rock artists of the ‘60s and ‘70s… We were trying to do something that’s somewhere between The Who, Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, and Ronnie James Dio. There were, at times, hippy elements and heavy metal elements. But we got a great response from the kids at school and at the other high schools, and we would put on shows. It felt quite legendary at the time.” Johnson is one of the people who fueled the Rock ‘n’ Roll soul of Community High School.

Alex Johnson created Commstock, the end-of-the-year Community High School music festival. Commstock lasted for nearly thirty years, and had a reunion show and a revival show in 2012. It began with a yearbook picture. “When I was in ninth grade, I asked around because I thought there was a music festival at the end of every school year. I just thought that was part of what you do at Community. I would as teachers and administrator and they would say ‘well no.’ I said ‘well I saw a picture in the yearbook of a band playing on the porch.’ ‘Well that’s just the jazz band playing on the porch.’” The next year, Alex Johnson went to the dean with a proposal for a music festival at the end of the year. The dean agreed, so long as Johnson and his friends would organize it entirely on their own. “The school will become our stage. That was the idea.” Alex Johnson and his close friend Ahvram Novetsky were given 500 dollars as a budget, and they rented a sound system and a stage from the old music shop, Music Mart. “The first Commstock was certainly plagued with technical problems, but we really pulled it off. I think seven bands played. It felt like the beginning of something. As long as I was in High School I was going to insist that that was the end-of-year tradition.”

Alex Johnson has been a great inspiration to many local Ann Arbor musicians for decades. From booking gigs, to teaching guitar, to showing kids how to just plain rock, Johnson has really had a wonderful effect on the Ann Arbor music scene.