Jammin' with Jack
By Derek Paiva
Advertiser Entertainment Writer
The mailboxes on the street where Jack Johnson lives have no identifying numbers.
Danny Clinch
Which is perhaps why the sight of an unfamiliar black car cruising down his dead-end street (combined with the advance knowledge that a potentially lost inquisitor is on his way) prompts Johnson to amble down his gravel driveway to greet the stranger. Or maybe he's just a nice guy used to offering directions around the North Shore.
Jack Johnson said he doesn't want musical success to keep him away from the North Shore life he has grown to love.
We'll opt for the "nice guy" part, and keep it at that.
The by-all-outside-appearances unpretentious North Shore home, bought by Johnson and his wife, Kim, two years ago shortly after the release of his debut CD "Brushfire Fairytales," sits on a slope with a rambling back yard that seems to head unchallenged into an uncertain wilderness beyond. Taken in at certain angles, a couple of guest cottages behind the home — one of these housing the studio where Johnson's second CD "On and On" was recorded — actually seem larger than the singer/songwriter/filmmaker/surfer's own modest abode.
Inside the home, a large window overlooks a small front yard and focuses welcome late-morning sunshine on Johnson, seated comfortably on his living room couch. Casually dressed in loose black surf shorts, an olive tee and sandals, his hair close-cropped and a day or so's worth of stubble on his face, Johnson stops chatting and smiles as Kim walks in from the bedroom office to say hello.
The schedule
Sporting sweats and a tank top, her blond hair tied back in a pony tail, Kim hands Jack a glass of iced water. Congratulations are offered to the first-time parents on Kim's pending motherhood. Kim thinks it will be a girl; Jack is betting on a boy.
Willie K & Amy Gilliom
Makana
Kokua Festival
Except for a few dates finishing off touring for "On and On" and a quick late-night talk-show blitz last month promoting the DVD release of Jack's 2000 surf film, "Thicker Than Water," the Johnsons have been home for much of the last few months preparing for parenthood. Jack, for his part, has also been trying to catch up on yard work and months of missed surfing opportunities.
"Sometimes I stick around here for a couple of days when the waves are flat. But I mostly hang down at my parents' and brothers' houses ... because they live down by the surf breaks," explains Jack, clearly happy to be home again. "My whole family is here, so I like being here. We're really close."
Johnson turns a bit on the couch to face the big window behind him, and nods in various directions.
"My brother lives ... across Kam Highway, over there. My mom and dad are a quick bike ride away over there. My older brother lives down the street. All of our friends are here. The waves are so good. And Hawai'i just has a special thing about it, once you become attached to it."
Down the hall, Kim — also Johnson's manager — works the phones and sweats the final details of the couple's other recent project, Saturday's Kokua Festival at Kualoa Ranch. The multi-act music festival is a benefit for the Kokua Hawaii Foundation, a nonprofit organization recently created by the Johnsons to encourage the integration of environmental and sustainable-living education into local schools.
Headlined by Johnson with sets by DJ Logic, Makana, Michael Franti & Spearhead, Amy Hanaiali'i Gilliom & Willie K, and an unconfirmed special guest, the festival is the first of what Johnson hopes will become an annual event.
Times like these
Johnson says goodbye to Kim and heads across the driveway toward his white Chevy Astro. On the way, he grouses genially about some snail trails in his fern garden.
A winter swell has invaded the North Shore today and Johnson seems anxious to check them out from his parents' beachfront home. As the van's engine turns over, a familiar voice drifts from the speakers, courtesy of a Honolulu FM station.
"This sounds like one of my songs," Johnson says, as "Taylor" fills the van interior. He pulls a CD from a collection littering the van's floor.
"Do you like The Shins' CD?" he asks, slipping "Chutes Too Narrow" into the van's stereo. After a brief cruise south on Kamehameha Highway, Johnson pulls on to a small beach road and stops in the driveway of a two-story gray house with towering hedges.
His mother is on the porch; his niece Jackie is on a bike in the front yard. After teasing Jackie for a bit, he introduces his mom and offers a tour.
"That was my bedroom," says Johnson, pointing toward a window overlooking the front yard.
Older and significantly larger than Johnson's, his parents' home boasts an equally lived-in look. We walk past a small guest house where professional surfer Kelly Slater is residing for the winter season. Beyond the large, grassy back yard, a patch of naupaka and some trees, is an unobstructed view of Pipeline.
"I surfed here every day," says Johnson, pointing out several spots that he was particularly fond of.
We sit on some old chairs on a beachside wooden deck and watch the churning surf and wave riders.
"This is where we'd spend at least 50 percent of our time as kids," remembers Johnson. "When the waves were good, we'd surf for a couple of hours, come in, grab a bowl of cereal and sit right here.
"On the weekends, we'd spend our whole days out here sometimes."
Rainbow
Virtually raised in the ocean by his North Shore surf legend father Jeff Johnson, the singer was always aware of the importance of caring for the environment.
"But I guess as a kid, you're not thinking about the responsibility so much," says Johnson. "It's just beautiful. And it kind of just seems normal because you're used to it."
A decade in Santa Barbara for college, followed by travels around the world filming his two surf movies, gave Johnson a new appreciation of how one-of-a-kind his home was.
The goals of the Kokua Hawaii Foundation and Festival, Johnson says, are hardly grandiose. Initial plans involve launching recycling and gardening programs at O'ahu schools, and donating materials and teaching resources to instructors for introducing environmental studies.
The idea is "to get the kids used to recycling (and) thinking about reducing and reusing," says Johnson."We thought that the small part we could play in this was getting into kids' minds early that this is the way to live, and it's an easy and fun way to do things. That if we're going to consume things and produce waste, we need to do it responsibly, learn to have as little impact as we can and make our ecological footprint as small as possible."
Johnson has so far spoken and performed at assemblies at several North Shore elementary schools, touting the importance of the three environmental R's: recycling, reducing and reusing. The Kokua Hawaii Foundation's first recycling program was launched at Sunset Beach Elementary last fall, and Johnson hopes to add more O'ahu schools to the list.
"There are a lot of great nonprofit (environmental awareness) groups already doing great things, so we want to make sure we don't just come in and double up on something somebody is already doing," says Johnson. "We want to communicate and work together with everybody ... bring together all the groups that are already here."
On the home front, Johnson has a spot in his back yard for compost, employs a recycling service and takes his used plastic grocery bags back to Foodland. He tries to commute with his bicycle whenever possible, and plans to buy a diesel engine car so he can run it on bio-diesel — a low-emission fuel made from recycled vegetable oil and produced locally.
"It's just small steps ... like what we're trying to do with (Kokua Hawaii)," says Johnson. "We're not trying to be preachy at all. We're learning as we go along."
Taylor
Ben Stiller is trying to convince a skeptical Johnson that his idea of dressing the singer up as a scarecrow for the "Taylor" video is a good one.
"We can have straw coming out of your arms," says Stiller, enthusiastically, rolling off his umpteenth stupid idea. "Your hands will look different because there's straw coming out. And then we pan up and they think it's gonna be Jack Johnson, but you know who it is? It's the scarecrow. And you do, like, a little dance."
The "Taylor" outtakes reel continues with Johnson laughing off faux-director Stiller's suggestions, and Stiller botching surf terms while trying to impress a couple of indifferent North Shore surfers. Switching off his parents' television, Johnson explains that Stiller simply liked his music and expressed a desire to work with him.
Johnson stops by his parents' guest house to check on their house guest. Slater asks him if he's up for some afternoon surfing. The two agree to meet at Hale'iwa Beach Park in a couple of hours.
"Is that gonna be 'regular time' or 'Kelly time?'" asks Johnson, joking about Slater's usual tardiness.
Johnson selects a couple of boards from storage and places them in the Astro. We head back home.
Tomorrow morning
Beyond the Kokua Festival, Johnson has few set plans for 2004 and seems quite happy about it. There will be some traveling, and perhaps the beginnings of his third surf film or album. Other events — one penciled in for some time in February, for example — are a bit more certain.
"This will be our first kid, so I'm pretty sure that's going to be time consuming," says Johnson, smiling.
With the success of "On and On" beating down any mention of a sophomore slump (after debuting at No. 3 on the Billboard album chart in June, it concluded 2003 at No. 85 on the magazine's list of the year's best-selling CDs) Johnson is anticipating a mostly pressure-free writing and recording of his third CD.
I'm really excited at how much has happened," admits Johnson. "But truly, I'm not looking to always take it a step further. I'll do another record, but I don't know how much I'll put into promoting it or touring with it. It might be way mellower than the first two. It might just be a lot of acoustic guitar and voice. ... I wouldn't mind putting out one that was even more folky sounding (where) maybe only a fraction of the people would want to hear it."
He confessed being happy with the comfortable predicament he's in.
"Ideally, if I could just keep putting out records ... without a lot of hype, and keep enough fans who like buying the records that I could at least break even, that'd be fun.
"If I can live around here, record, spend a lot of time surfing and not be on the road all the time, then I'd keep on doing it."
Reach Derek Paiva at dpaiva@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8005.
