Don’t let the bare feet, the guitar, and the Hawaiian “endless summer” vibe fool you. When you’re on top of the world, as Jack Johnson is these days, staying down-to-earth is a full-time job.
by Daniel Duane
It’s hard to walk fast in flip-flops and baggy surf trunks, but Jack Johnson is a pro — slapping his tan feet lickety-split over the empty green lawns of the Waikiki Shell, an outdoor concert venue in Honolulu. Surrounded by a phalanx of employees, he’s got his security chief out front, dressed all in black, his tour manager to the left, also in black, and two of his young female publicists, just off the jet from Los Angeles, working their iPhones and struggling to keep up. Johnson’s wife is roaming somewhere nearby, going through a similar routine: khaki shorts, khaki shirt, several women helping her organize kids’ activities, and a walkie-talkie for barking orders.
It’s the pre-kickoff day for the Johnsons’ fifth annual Kokua Festival, a two-day mid-April music benefit named for their environmental foundation. Already this morning Johnson has smiled his way through a free concert for busloads of ecstatic Hawaiian schoolchildren (“How you all doing out there?! All right!! Hey, do any of you kids like playing kickball?!”). His own toddler sons were front and center in the audience, with a bleached-blond surfer-dude babysitter hovering nearby. The moment the show ended, Johnson handed his guitar to a roadie and skipped down an outdoor staircase to the sun-bathed asphalt yard holding his production crew’s temporary office, a computer-and-fax-machine bank for the PR team, and a huge open-air catering tent in which the barrel-chested Dave Matthews was eating fish tacos with his wife and kids and bellowing in his big, underwater drawl, “Well, just last week I was talking to the Dalai Lama…”
Twenty minutes was all Johnson had to eat lunch with his sons — a plate from Wahoo’s Fish Taco, a classic postsurf lunch spot on Oahu, where he lives. Then one of those L.A. publicists appeared, telling him and Matthews it was time for their press conference. So up and at ’em again, striding fast over to a little side stage bedecked in flowers, hanging Hawaiian leis around their necks.
Johnson talked for more than an hour about how the rock industry can help save Mother Earth. “If I look back five years ago, I was trying my hardest, I was recycling,” he told the press. “But then I remember hearing Crystal, one of the girls in the office, saying, ‘I just got off the phone with the Waikiki worm lady,’ and I was like, ‘Come on, we’ve got to have serious people here. Who’s the Waikiki worm lady?’ And sure enough, now I’m always calling up the Waikiki worm lady saying, ‘If I get maggots in my worm compost, what do I got to do?’ ”
Then it’s Q&As with Hawaiian TV crews before making that high-speed march in his flip-flops — with his security guy and tour manager and PR flacks — back through the empty concert grounds. He enters his private dressing room, emerges with one of his sons sleeping in his arms, lays the boy on a giant dog-shaped pillow nearby, picks up his other son, carries him to that surfer-dude babysitter, and beckons me into the dressing room: Okay, let’s do the interview.
It’s not easy maintaining an easygoing life. Not when you have the best-selling album in the country for three straight weeks. Not when you’re coming off of playing major venues in Australia and Japan and are about to co-headline the Coachella festival before embarking on a 34-city tour. Not when you have to deal with renting the huge Waikiki Shell and inviting 30 nonprofits and a dozen musicians, who are donating performances, and keeping them all fed with fish tacos.
“It’s pretty intense,” Johnson tells me. “Kind of like a wedding because of so many friends and family and the hosting aspect. It’s draining.”
His wife Kim helps maintain their sanity through an elaborate jigsaw puzzle of nonoverlapping access levels, including “VIPs” who have good concert seats and entrée to a tent with free organic wine and tuna tartare but not to Jack or anything backstage. A peaceful backstage scene is critical to Johnson: Today there’s zero alcohol, not one cigarette, no extraneous humans. There’s nobody here who isn’t crucial to the concert production, an actual performer, or a performer’s wife or child. Within this controlled inner circle the vibe is pure family: kids wandering around, crayons scattered on a table, everybody standing in the same line for the same food.
Also critical: setting some ground rules for our interview.
“If we could leave my kids’ names out of the article, that’d be great,” he says in a voice that’s at once low-key and firm. Kim had already hit me with this request, and their thumb-breaker publicist had looked me in the eye like a hypnotist, lowered her chin, and intoned, “We do not put the kids’ names in articles.”
“Hey, and one favor I’d really like to ask,” Johnson adds. “If you could only mention the North Shore as much as you have to. It’s just that a lot of people already know I live there, and I go biking with my kids and tourists want us to stop and take pictures. I’d just like to limit that as much as I can.”
Well, how about his favorite surfing breaks, then? Is there some far-flung dream wave he’d like to ride again?
Johnson rubs a hand over his buzz-cut head and squirms in his wicker chair.
A tough one?
“Sort of.”
Want to just say, “Yes”?
He laughs, liking that suggestion. “Yeah, okay,” he says. “Yes.”
The success of Jack Johnson is both baffling and obvious. Baffling in that, unlike Jimmy Buffett, with whom he’s often compared and who writes good-time anthems — life recipes, really — about sailing off to Margaritaville and getting lost, Johnson, 33, pens impossible-to-interpret lyrics that rarely seem to mean anything at all, except when they’re about loving his wife or making banana pancakes or falling asleep in front of the TV. That formula has sold 15 million albums worldwide — and makes him ripe for parody. Saturday Night Live has spoofed him twice now, once with a faux commercial that showed Johnson shilling his invention of “shoes that look like feet” for the “laid-back lifestyle.”
But the strength of Johnson’s music is in its simple, strumming-at-the-beach-bonfire vibe. It’s inoffensive. It feels good. It’s the mellow soundtrack for the surfer (and, equally important, the wannabe surfer) life. You can hardly walk into a board shop and not hear Johnson crooning about “who needs sleep when we’ve got love?”
That is the obvious part of his appeal. As is the fact that his music is rooted in authenticity. He was born on the beach, the youngest of three sons of a surfer-contractor father. The world’s most prestigious wave, the North Shore’s Banzai Pipeline, was his backyard. Surfers like Laird Hamilton and Gerry Lopez hung out on the family lawn; unsurpassed surf champion Kelly Slater was a childhood friend; and Johnson himself became a fully bonded member of a tribe that’s harder to join than the Mafia: a cadre of lifers who dominate the pecking order at local breaks. At 17, Johnson made the finals of the trials of the sport’s premier contest, the annual Pipeline Masters. Not a week later, he hurt himself terribly, hitting Pipeline’s reef and nearly ripping the lips clean off his face. It was not the only time he was punished there. “I got a couple new teeth because of Pipeline, and 150 stitches,” Johnson says, looking over his body for scars. “I’ve had stitches on my ear, my elbow, my knee.” But even now Johnson, who still surfs twice a day when his schedule permits, can paddle out in any swell at any break on the North Shore and get friendly smiles and priority on at least a few good waves.
What this means for Jack Johnson the rock star is that remaining a hometown surfer is more important to him than money or fame — and he’ll do anything to protect that status. That’s been obvious since he was first discovered. After graduating from UC–Santa Barbara, he made a surf flick with some friends and recorded a few offhand tunes as soundtrack filler. The movie was called Thicker Than Water, and it became a cult hit, in large part because of the low-key, unassuming way it showed the most recognizable surfers on Earth shredding the world’s best waves without identifying any of them, as if it were just raw footage of anonymous, moody buddies squinting their way through the tropics.
Early cassettes of his tunes circulated as bootlegs in the surf community even before the film was released. The musician Ben Harper, himself a surfer, was so impressed that he played on Johnson’s first album and invited Johnson to perform on his 2001 tour. Johnson became surf-rock’s first equivalent of a bull rider singing country-western ballads or a Compton Crip rhyming in a jail cell. He had that kind of cred.
“He was a good surfer,” says pal Slater, “but never seemed competitive enough in his personality to follow the competitive surf thing.Jack was able to connect his music and his film work and his surfing into something that was his own.”
Major labels called, and Johnson is famous for the big offers he turned down. The deal he finally struck, with Universal, sounds like something a seasoned megastar might negotiate, not an unheard-of singer-songwriter. Johnson got absolute creative control over every aspect of his music and even his album art, and he insisted on producing everything under his own label in his own studio, with Universal acting only as a distributor. More interesting still is what he did after touring for his third straight platinum album, In Between Dreams: He simply dropped out, stopped touring, stopped giving interviews, and went back to surfing.
“I don’t write much on tour, when I’m in the public eye,” Johnson tells me, adding that the two-year sabbatical helped refill his creative well to produce Sleep Through the Static, his new album. “Just doing this interview — it’s going to be a month until I can write a song.” He laughs. “I’m just kidding. But as soon as August comes and I’m done touring, there’ll be a few years where I won’t do any interviews.”
“The standard musician motivation,” says Johnson’s agent Tom Chauncey, “is ‘I want to be big, I want to be famous,’ and that is so not Jack. He stays who he is, how he lives. He doesn’t lose his priorities. He will not tour from November to January, when the waves are good.”
“I’m a pretty unlikely celebrity,” Johnson says. “I’m a pretty normal guy. I never really had dreams of being famous.”
It’s a suspect claim for a guy who has been organizing his own bands since high school, but it’s consistent with the Hawaiian surf-culture ethic of humility: Never show even the slightest ambition, lest you be ridiculed. But the remark also reveals some genuine discomfort he feels toward the loss of privacy and control that has come with his increasing fame. “At some point,” he says, steering the conversation toward a subject he’s more eager to discuss — his environmentalism — “I realized you can either talk about all these personal things and let people into your life, or you can try to direct all that attention onto things that you’re interested in. Not just pushing the attention away from me, although that’s positive, too.”
Eight thousand fans pour through the gates of the Waikiki Shell on day two of the festival, and from the moment they get inside they enter the Jack Johnson world as he wants them to see it. No longer built around surf imagery, Johnson is working overtime to brand himself as a positive environmental role model and to present the Jack Johnson experience as a morally and socially uplifting one.
He has always had a strong eco-streak, donating 1 percent of his gross income to such causes. He also started the Kokua Foundation to promote environmental awareness in Hawaiian schools and helped raise a million dollars for a North Shore land conservancy trying to protect a huge swath of Oahu from developers. As far back as 2004 he hired a consultant named Michael Martin, a specialist in social-cause marketing for rock stars, to develop a contract “eco-rider,” which “strongly encourages” all of Johnson’s venues to have — in lieu of the standard dressing-room demands for green M&M’s and Dom Pérignon — recycling bins and compact fluorescent lightbulbs.
More recently, Martin ran a focus group in order to tailor Johnson’s environmental message to his fans. “They all said things like, ‘Jack Johnson is love, Jack Johnson is gentle, he’s hope,’ ” says Martin. He also developed the Kokua Festival Passport. It’s a concert program — part eco-awareness, part shrewd marketing — that encourages fans to wander the site tasting “organic and natural foods,” such as Stonyfield Farm yogurt and Kashi cereal; purchasing “sustainable products,” like organic-cotton Jack Johnson concert T-shirts; and visiting booths in the Kokua Village, like the Honolulu Toyota dealership booth, where you can learn about financing options on a new Prius. You can get merit stamps for things like refilling your water bottle instead of buying a new one, trying on Simple brand sneakers, and buying a CO2 offset sticker. Collect at least three stamps and you can join Johnson’s All At Once Social Action Network and qualify to win prizes like side-stage seating.
And it works. So beautifully, in fact, that while all these fans roam the vendor booths, eating all those free samples and waiting for the music to start on the big stage, Johnson is able to sneak unnoticed around the perimeter and pop up on a small side stage in a designated kids’ area. It’s hard to say what exactly he’s doing: keeping it real, playing hide-and-seek, staging YouTube clips about his commitment to children.
What’s not hard to say is that he looks utterly at ease, saying hello to a dozen perplexed tots and chatting softly about the one Jack Johnson album he figures they might know, the soundtrack he recorded for the 2006 animated film Curious George.
“I actually look a lot like Curious George, don’t I?” Johnson says, with a smile so winning that all the kids giggle and move closer. For 15 minutes he strums and sings with perfect ease, as if he were at a birthday party in somebody’s living room:
We’ve got three R’s we’re going to talk about today / We’ve got to learn to / Reduce, reuse, recycle / Reduce, reuse, recycle…
Then, of course, duty calls. He has to introduce the first act of the main event, and then meet with a little girl from the Make-a-Wish Foundation. His publicist gives him the nod, his security chief and tour manager appear from nowhere, and he does that lickety-split flip-flops thing again, slapping his feet fast across the grass as he zips around the perimeter of the crowd, still largely unnoticed.
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