If you told Jack Johnson that his laidback, simple brand of acoustic rock was good background music, he’d be strangely OK with that.
Indeed, Johnson, donning lifeguard chic, faded jeans, a T-shirt and black Teva sandals, positively glowed in his performance last Thursday night at the Orpheum Theater as he played to a mildly attentive adult frat party. The show started on its back, with a lulling, slightly wistful acoustic opening song quartet, which set the tone for the entire night. Though Johnson engaged the audience with an occasional rhetorical question or off-hand comment, talking to his adoring (mostly female) fans in the middle of songs, he was most content to do his own thing guitar and allow the audience to do its own thing dance, talk, smoke.
‘I’m not that passionate about music, really,’ Johnson said nonchalantly, slowly waking up in a 2 p.m. phone interview a day prior to his show. ‘I play the guitar. Now I do it more. But if the waves are good when I go home to Hawaii, then I might not pick it up for two weeks.’
With Johnson, AGE, there is no pretense he is a surfer first and a musician second, maybe third. Surfing is his true passion. Growing up on Oahu, he surfed quasi-professionally with his father and brothers as soon as he could swim.
Ah, what a life. Digging his toes in the sand, downing a Corona, watching the flames of the campfire leap towards the sky, surfer-boy decides he wants to learn guitar. Johnson’s friends taught him the basic chords from Van Morrison and Beatles songs as a teenager, and he began writing his own songs when he was 18. He then majored in film at the University of California Santa Barbara and started making critically acclaimed surfing movies featuring some of the world’s best surfers his best friends as well as his original music.
Enter Ben Harper. He admired Johnson’s fresh, honest lyrics and music and asked him to tour with him two years ago; their opening show was actually at the Orpheum on Feb. 1, 2001.
‘Ben asked me to open for him,’ said Johnson, his voice husky from singing and other extracurricular activities. ‘So I said sure … and now it’s all slowly happening.’
Johnson’s chill, laissez-faire attitude is culled from years of ocean rhythms and beach combing and often lends itself to understatement. By all accounts, it’s already happened. His 2001 record Brushfire Fairytales became the album of Summer 2002; its twangy, sun-kissed single ‘Flake’ became the national anthem for 13-year-old pool party popsters and slightly more mature road trippers and beachgoers alike as much a BBQ staple as Pet Sounds and hot dogs.
How weird was it to turn the FM dial from Britney Spears to Creed to Pink to … bluesy, rootsy Jack Johnson?
‘I’m more insecure than anyone about my music,’ laughed Johnson incredulously. ‘I don’t know why people like it; I trip out everyday. I guess they are just fed up with the popular stuff they want a real person singing about real things.’
Though Fairytales is somewhat lacking in the lyrics department (note the opening lines to ‘Bubbletoes:’ ‘It’s is as simple as something that nobody knows / that her eyes are as big as her bubbly toes.’), Johnson is unmistakably genuine from the bottom of his flip-flopped feet. His inspiration for writing stream-of-consciousness lyrics sometimes about girls and pain, sometimes about the media and the environment comes from Bob Dylan’s poem, ‘Last Words for Woody Guthrie,’ a characteristic rant and rave Dylan initially recited in 1963 to honor his dying idol.
‘I love the way it’s one long thought,’ said Johnson. ‘I try to write music the same way, to open my head and let the thoughts spill all over one another.’
And though the set list on Thursday night didn’t include Johnson’s interpretation of Dylan’s words (he usually sets a portion of the poem to acoustic guitar), it did incorporate snatches and pieces of his other influences: a little of Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Rosalita,’ a taste of Led Zeppelin’s ‘Ramble On,’ a toke of Bob Marley’s ‘Stir it Up,’ and an outright cover of G. Love’s ‘Stepping Stone.’ The frequent covers seemed gratuitous, but Johnson tempered them with his casual approach, playing each as if it wasn’t intended but simply stuck in his head.
A highlight of the show, albeit not as well received as crowd favorites ‘Flake’ or ‘Posters,’ was a rousing version of ‘Sexi Plexi,’ a slinky groove from Fairytales. Johnson’s soulful, unpolished voice, driven by his band’s soft-bass stylings and allusive drumming, warbled seductively: ‘Sexy sexy do your thing / Learn to be shy and then you can sting.’
Another highlight, though nonmusical, came when Johnson displayed a piece of artwork given to him by a Boston art-student friend. The painting resembled Biscaretti’s ‘Anisetta Evangelisti,’ with its yellow background and alcohol-guzzling chimp, but featured ‘Jack Johnson’ sprawled across the top in red paint.
‘Looks like a monkey drinking a beer,’ observed Johnson, who opted for hot tea during the show. ‘Wonder what my friend is trying to say?’ Johnson and crew also treated the crowd to a smattering of new songs, including the politically poignant ‘Times Like These’ introduced as a ‘peaceful anthem’ as well as the mushy ‘Cupid Only Misses Sometimes,’ among others.
The new songs are set to appear on Johnson’s upcoming album, dropping just in time for another hazy summer, sometime next May. Though the album is complete it was recorded over three weeks in Johnson’s newly constructed Oahu recording studio Johnson maintains he needs a break to recuperate from the current tour before promoting the new album.
Not that the recording sessions were exactly grueling.
‘If the waves were good, we didn’t record until late afternoon,’ he remembered. ‘I felt guilty for taking time off, but we couldn’t pass on the opportunity to be in the water.’
Though Johnson joked the new album would be ‘all synthesizers and horns,’ it’s hard to imagine him straying far from his sandy roots. He’s not trying to keep fans or gain fans in fact he’s not trying to do much of anything.
‘Music is secondary to life,’ he concluded, predictably countering the rock star credo.
And while the waves of musical change will no doubt wash hundreds of John Mayers and Michelle Branches into the sea of musical irrelevance, Johnson will continue to stay afloat either still making music or simply surfing into the sun.