Jack Johnson's New Surf Music

Jack Johnson hears music in the water. It loops endlessly in his mind as he rides the waves rolling onto the beaches of Santa Barbara, California -- much like those surfing videos he used to watch as a kid, when images of his heroes were always accompanied by the punk riffs of TSOL or Agent Orange.

Johnson -- who grew up surfing in Hawaii and has chronicled the wave-riding life in a series of 16 mm films -- never set out to be a musician. His sweet and rough four-track home recordings first began turning up on soundtracks to his documentaries. The songs were part folk, part blues, with sun-kissed hints of reggae. Soon, surf kids he had never met started paddling up to him on their boards to say, "Hey, I really like your CD!" Johnson had no CD, had never even seen the inside of a recording studio, and he was already being bootlegged.

"I never really wanted to push my music on anybody," says Johnson. But when he met singer-guitarist Garrett Dutton of G. Love and Special Sauce in the spring of 1999, the two collaborated on a version of Johnson's playful "Rodeo Clowns." It appeared on G. Love's album Philadelphonic and became a minor radio hit. Now, with the release of his own Brushfire Fairytales, Johnson is finally contemplating life as a musician, without ever taking his full attention from the waves that are at the core of his life.

Johnson's music is soulful and laid-back, equally fitting onstage as at a seaside luau, though it shares little with the classic surf anthems of Dick Dale or the Beach Boys. "One thing I always keep in my head," says Johnson, "is, 'Will this work on the front porch of my house in Hawaii?' If I'm writing music on a surf trip, the music just seems to make sense."

The songs on Brushfire Fairytales are rich acoustic meditations on life, love and loss that erupt in surprising ways. The opening moments of "Inaudible Melodies" quietly hint at a Hendrix obsession. And on "Flake," guest sideman Ben Harper scratches away on slide guitar just as Johnson's restrained vocals abruptly soar with a euphoric, throaty wail, echoing that of an old Delta bluesman. The album was recorded in just seven days.

"It's the most refreshing music I've heard in a long time, and refreshing is not a word I frequently use to describe music," says Harper, who invited the singing surfer to join him on tour last year. "It's his soulfulness. It's not overstated, it's not understated. It's completely natural."

Johnson still surfs almost every day, hiking across the rugged field outside his apartment to nearby Miramar Beach or taking a ten-minute drive south to where the waves are better. It's how he has lived since his boyhood in Oahu, Hawaii, where his father and two older brothers were all surfers and where they still live. But making music has grown into a genuine obsession, down to the melancholy singing on his outgoing phone message. "Surfing is a huge part of my life, but the words really have nothing to do with surfing," says Johnson, whose tanned face still shows the deep scars of a teenage surfing accident that also cost him some teeth. "I'm not singing about the motion of the ocean. Humans all have the same problems, and they all think it's specific to themselves. I just wanted to sing songs that make people realize that everybody feels pain and happiness."

STEVE APPLEFORD
(May 23, 2002)