“Yippie-yi-ai, Yippie-yi-yo!”

The Mission Mountain Wood Band and Their Place in Montana’s Memory

There are bands that play songs, and there are bands that become a portion of a place — its echoing laugh, its stubborn weather, its folklore told around kitchen tables. The Mission Mountain Wood Band (M2WB), born on the leafy porches and rehearsal rooms of the University of Montana in the early 1970s, belongs to the latter category. This paper traces their arc from campus phenomenon to regional institution, examines the particular ways they braided music and Montana identity, and considers the band’s lingering cultural influence — through reunion concerts, a treasured box set, a made-for-PBS documentary, and political afterlives — upon the state’s social and musical history. 

The origins of M2WB are modest and resonant. In 1971 students Rob Quist and Steve Riddle — both members of UM’s elite Jubileers vocal ensemble — met and began to shape a hybrid sound that drew on bluegrass, country, folk harmonies, and an exuberant stagecraft learned partly in music classrooms and partly on back-porches. They recruited fellow Montanans Terry Robinson, Christian Johnson, and Greg Reichenberg, and christened themselves for the serrated silhouette of the Mission Range. That name was not affectation: their music was rooted in place, and their personalities were shaped by a shared regional upbringing. From these origins flowed a signature approach — four-part vocal harmonies, multi-instrumental dexterity, theatrical interplay, and rollicking audience engagement — that made their shows less a concert than a communal ritual. 

Where M2WB most visibly forged its legend was on the road and at Aber Day, the University of Montana’s famous—and famously raucous—kegger. Beginning in the early 1970s, the band rode a double-decker Greyhound Scenicruiser across the contiguous United States, reportedly playing hundreds of dates a year and traveling to 47 of the lower 48 states. Their Aber Day performances were a social phenomenon: thousands gathered, danced, and stamped up clouds of dust and beer, and M2WB became synonymous with Missoula’s spring ritual. The band’s relationship with Aber Day was reciprocal: they filled the stage with hometown intimacy and, in return, Aber Day offered them a stage upon which their myth could be performed year after year. 

Musically, M2WB resisted tidy categorization — that was part of their charm. They homed in on vocal blend and arrangement, borrowing from barbershop, bluegrass, and the era’s country-rock trends, while keeping one foot in tradition and the other in the vernacular of the college circuit. The group’s repertoire ranged from raucous party anthems to tender ballads, and their concerts often featured extended “planned spontaneity,” rehearsed to the point that improvisation felt inevitable. This cultivated looseness won them a regional fanaticism often compared, in spirit if not sound, to the Grateful Dead’s itinerant devotion. But unlike the Dead’s San Francisco roots, Mission Mountain’s center of gravity was distinctly Montanan — their conservative uniforms of boots, denim, and hats folded the national counterculture into a western, rural idiom. 

Their climb beyond the Mountain State was real, albeit unusual. In the mid-1970s the band decamped to New York, playing in settings as disparate as the punk clubs of the Bowery and national television programs. They opened for national acts, toured extensively, and recorded their first studio album, In Without Knocking (1977). Yet their commercial trajectory was less important to Montana than the cultural one: M2WB exported a distinctly Montanan voice to the country and, in doing so, crafted a reverse-colonial narrative in which the hinterland’s aesthetic found audiences in cosmopolitan venues. Their road stories — a creaky Scenicruiser, onstage mishaps, near-mythical tales of fan devotion — became part of the band’s folklore and contributed to a statewide pride that mixed bemusement with affection. 

The band’s political imprint in Montana is subtle but meaningful. Early in their career they played at a fundraiser for a young Max Baucus; that first brush with politics folded into a later, symbolic reciprocity when Senator Baucus would introduce the band from the Senate gallery as “Montana’s favorite sons.” Decades later, Rob Quist’s turn into electoral politics — most notably his 2017 congressional campaign — demonstrated how the band’s cultural capital translated into civic familiarity and trust. In short, M2WB helped create civic narratives of Montanan identity that blurred cultural performance and political recognition: music became one avenue through which Montanans saw themselves represented on larger stages. 

Tragedy and transformation mark the band’s later history. After the original M2WB era ended in the early 1980s, several members formed The Montana Band; in 1987, a plane crash claimed the lives of Terry Robinson and other members of that later iteration. The crash was a rupture not only for the musicians’ families, but for the many audiences who had come to view M2WB as a kind of communal touchstone. Yet the band’s surviving members patiently stitched the fabric back together through reunions, tribute concerts, and the careful curation of recordings and memorabilia. The 2005 box set Private Stash and the 2009 MontanaPBS documentary Never Long Gone: The Mission Mountain Wood Band Story are deliberate acts of cultural preservation, transforming ephemeral live moments into archived artifacts that sustain the band’s presence in Montana’s collective memory. 

What does the Mission Mountain Wood Band mean to Montana? Their significance is threefold. First, they offered a model of regional modernity: they proved that music born of small towns and university corridors could travel, adapt, and touch national stages without shedding its localness. Second, they anchored social rituals — most notably Aber Day — turning those events into communal calendars of belonging. Third, their afterlives — the documentary, the box set, reunion shows, and Rob Quist’s civic visibility — show how music can be an enduring form of public memory, one that informs political biography, tourism narratives, and local mythmaking. Contemporary Montana Americana scholarship situates M2WB among a constellation of state-born sounds that together narrate Montana’s cultural evolution; authors such as Aaron Parrett frame them as central to the story of “boot stomping” in Big Sky Country. 

In the archival turn of recent years, Montanans have embraced the band as a “treasure” — a regional jewel whose value depends not on record-sales but on stories. Local reportage and retrospectives repeatedly emphasize the odyssey-like nature of their career: the Greyhound that carried them, the posters by Missoula artist Monte Dolack that framed their branding, the rooms full of college kids who stamped and sang until the lights blurred. In each retelling, the band’s texture shifts slightly — sometimes raucous, sometimes tender — but the kernel remains: a group of friends who became a social phenomenon and then, through deliberate preservation and communal remembering, a piece of Montana’s cultural patrimony. 

If there is a final note to strike, it is this: M2WB’s genius was not merely musical but performative — they staged Montana back to itself in a way that made the state recognizable to its inhabitants and intriguing to outsiders. The stamps of their influence — from studio albums to the frames of Monte Dolack prints, from tribute concerts to a PBS film — ensure that their music is never simply “oldies.” Instead, it functions as a living archive: an invitation to remember and to remake. Their chant — half-holler, half-hymn — still threads through the state’s gatherings, a reminder that culture is built not only by institutions but by the people who dance on the lawn, the students who pack a field, and the small-town boys who learned harmonies in assembly halls and then taught a state how to sing. 

Works Cited

Parrett, Aaron. Montana Americana Music: Boot Stomping in Big Sky Country. Arcadia Publishing, 2016. 

Ellis, Simone. “In Without Knocking.” The Montanan: The Magazine of The University of Montana, University of Montana Archive, archive.umt.edu/montanan/s06/knocking.shtml. Accessed 6 Dec. 2025. 

“Never Long Gone: The Mission Mountain Wood Band Story.” MontanaPBS, montanapbs.org/programs/NeverLongGone/. Accessed 6 Dec. 2025. 

Ballard, Michael. “'The Defining Story of This Band'.” Flathead Beacon, 6 Nov. 2009, flatheadbeacon.com/2009/11/06/the-defining-story-of-this-band/. Accessed 6 Dec. 2025. 

Lincoln, Marga. “Mission Mountain Wood Band to help Helena celebrate 150 years with free concert.” Montana Right Now, 15 July 2014, montanarightnow.com/bozeman/montana-treasure-mission-mountain-wood-band-rocks-on-for-nearly-half-a-century/article_9f586f56-3ee1-11e9-bc2e-a34e602ec582.html. Accessed 6 Dec. 2025. 

Kolpack, Dave / Great Falls Tribune. “Quist's quest for the House follows a familiar trail.” Great Falls Tribune, 24 Mar. 2017, greatfallstribune.com/story/news/local/2017/03/23/quists-quest-house-follows-familiar-trail/99568132/. Accessed 6 Dec. 2025. 

“Mission Mountain Wood Band.” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_Mountain_Wood_Band. Accessed 6 Dec. 2025. 

Dolack, Monte. “Mission Mountain Wood Band.” Monte Dolack Fine Art, dolack.com/products/mission-mountain-wood-band. Accessed 6 Dec. 2025.