It's Wednesday night in San Francisco, and Jack Johnson is backstage in a tiny dressing room at the Fillmore, about to play for a crowd of 1,000, most of them blond. Johnson never set out to become a professional musician. This career caught him by surprise, and he's still adjusting. He's not as nervous as he used to get, but it's still hard to eat in the hours before a show. He smokes a little weed from a pipe, plays his songs on his guitar and figures out the set list. Johnson doesn't have a pre-show ritual. No vocal exercises or group prayer. At 11 p.m. he steps onstage alone, wearing the same T-shirt with two tiny holes, baggy jeans and flip-flops he's been wearing all day.

You can see him keeping time with his naked toes as he plays clear melodies on his acoustic guitar and works his way through a relaxed set of songs with a simple message: "Slow down, everyone, you're moving too fast."

Johnson's latest album, On and On, like his 2001 breakthrough, Brushfire Fairytales, is folk music that borrows from roots, reggae and mellow hip-hop, especially Bob Marley, the Meters and A Tribe Called Quest. Johnson's bandmates, bassist Merlo Podlewski and drummer Adam Topol, say they used Tribe's classic second album, The Low End Theory, as a model. "You don't quite hear that when you hear Jack Johnson," Topol says. "But if you listen to Low End Theory, the lyrics are funny and positive. Girls like it. It bumps. And it's all even."

"You know, the whole 'Brothers tend to bug 'cause the beats are hard but gentle,' " Podlewski says, quoting Q-Tip. Johnson adds, "Rock keeps getting hard, but where's it gonna go? We're not trying to do rock. We're trying to keep these folk tunes funky." His songs never take dramatic turns and are always even-keeled, like Johnson himself, whose two older brothers call him Gandhi.

As he plays, the hundreds packed into the Fillmore don't dance but just sort of sway a little and stare at him as if in a trance. They're in love. He's a guy's guy, with chiseled features that recall a Hollywood surfer. He's got surfing scars on his forehead, above his lip and under his left eye. He's got blond strands in his eyebrows and greenish eyes with lots and lots of flecks.

Someone throws her panties onstage. Then someone blows a cloud of weed smoke in Johnson's face. He smiles. A bra comes flying through the air. A guy yells out, "Be my friend, Jack!"

"I am your friend," Johnson replies calmly. "You don't have to ask."

Johnson, 28, grew up in Hawaii, on the island of Oahu in an area called Sunset Beach. The ocean was closer than the mailbox. "We kinda lived right on the beach," he says. That beach is just north of the world-famous Pipeline. Surfers come from around the world to brave its fifteen-foot waves. Johnson's father and his two older brothers are world-class surfers. Jack began surfing as soon as he began walking.

For years, surfing was his life. "You're detached from the world in the ocean," he says. "Surfing is like flying -- floating and harnessing the energy that comes across the ocean. Surfing is just like pushing the reset button." At seventeen, he nearly died in a surfing accident that broke his nose, cost him two teeth and required 150 stitches. "Sometimes when you go beyond your safety zone, it makes you feel alive," he says.

When he was twelve, he became friends with a fifteen-year-old named Kelly Slater, who would go on to become, in Johnson's words, "the Michael Jordan of surfing." Johnson could have gone pro -- in high school he had a contract with Quiksilver that paid him $200 a month -- but he feared the pro circuit would ruin his love of surfing. So at eighteen, he went to the University of California, Santa Barbara and got a degree in film.

After college, Johnson made surf films and recorded songs that he shared with friends. He'd learned guitar at fourteen, to play "Brown Eyed Girl" and other singalongs at post-surfing barbecues, and had begun writing songs at sixteen. "Learning those singalong songs means that when I started writing my own tunes, I wrote melodies that were singalong-able," he says. "I'm not trying to sound like 'This is surf music,' like the new Beach Boys. But that's just how it comes out, because this is who I am."

His professional surfing friends passed his music on in their travels. "It kept spreading," he says. "I'd go to France and I'd be shooting a surf movie, and they'd be like, 'Oh, we love your music.' People would tell me, 'I like your record a lot,' but I didn't have a record out." Johnson's songs, some of which appeared on the soundtrack to his surf film The September Sessions, had begun to circulate as a quasi-bootleg. In Australia, the South of France and Durban, South Africa, the surfers knew about Jack Johnson.

Two years ago, Johnson recruited Topol and Podlewski to help him turn the bootleg that had gone around the world into an album. The three rehearsed the material a mere seven or eight times, then recorded Brushfire Fairytales. Their goal was to make a simple record for the audience that was already buying Johnson's surf movies. They made a million-seller. "A song like 'Bubble Toes,' I don't know if I would've written that song knowing a million people were gonna hear it," Johnson says. "It was like a joke to my wife around the house, and then a couple of friends liked it, and then people asked for it at shows." When his record sales reached 100,000, Johnson was staggered. "I said, 'We don't even know that many people.' "

It's thursday afternoon, and johnson is driving a Chevy Astro down the curvy Ventura Freeway, which hugs the California coast, headed south toward Los Angeles for another show. After the San Francisco concert ended the previous night, he got to sleep on his tour bus around 2 a.m., arrived in Santa Barbara at 6 a.m. and immediately went out to test the waves.

His wife, Kim, is in the passenger seat. Kim is Johnson's manager. They met nine years ago at UCSB in their first week on campus and got married three years ago, on the beach in Santa Barbara, in bare feet. Kim has a master's in education from UCSB and, until recently, taught high school geometry.

Johnson drives with his head turned away from the highway, looking out at the Pacific. "There's a great surf spot right there," he says. "See how the waves are breaking?" He's calm, doing fifty-five miles an hour, making all the curves, not even veering into the other lanes.

"Don't worry," Kim says. "He does this all the time."

Johnson knows the road and the minivan so well because after Brushfire Fairytales came out, the band spent months driving around the country in the same Astro opening for Ben Harper, sometimes sleeping in it. "If I had to do my next tour like that," he says, "I'd say forget it. But sometimes when you're payin' your dues, it doesn't feel like that. There was work involved, but it was fun."

Now, as he starts driving while looking at the highway, he confirms that his love is music, not the music business. "If it gets overwhelming, I won't force myself," he says. "I'll just go back to makin' surf movies and chillin'. We're not trying to tour forever. I'll always write and record. If companies don't want to put it out, I'll give it to friends, like before."

(June 17, 2003)

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