Lest you start thinking I’m all about eighties rock around here, what with our recent segments spotlighting Van Halen, Rush, AC/DC, Scorpions, Billy Idol, and so on, I’m actually not. Honest!
Cue the fuckin’ mellow man, as Andy Samberg deems him, in the hilarious video below. Fork!
I was late to the Jack Johnson party. In 2008, I caught an advertisement blurb in our local weekly free rag (the Santa Barbara Independent), hawking an appearance by University of California Santa Barbara alum and longtime Hawaiian resident Jack Johnson playing Harder Stadium at UCSB.
Of course, I’d heard of Johnson before that. His tunes had played across Southern California for years. His soundtrack to the Curious George movie played nonstop at any and all family gatherings with young children about. Upon reading the ad, I turned to the wifey and said, ‘Maybe we should hit that UCSB gig, see what all the fuss is about.’
That show turned us into fiendish fans, not only eagerly embracing Jack’s catalogue to date with his first four albums, but we also fanboyed up to his label mates G Love and Special Sauce and Animal Liberation Orchestra (more on those two fantastic outfits later in this column). The UCSB gig was a fine performance, showcasing his latest work Sleep Through the Static, still perhaps his most existential album in many ways. As expected, he offered a unique sound, an acoustic surf-rock melange with folk and reggae leanings, his influences ranging far and wide including Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, Radiohead, Otis Redding, Sublime, the Beatles, Neil Young, and Jimi Hendrix, Jack’s all time favorite guitarist.
It might be serendipitous I ‘first’ caught him live at UCSB, because I’m fair sure I probably saw him live long before that in the same vicinity, around the mid-nineties, when he was still an unknown in a raggedy band called Soil, a rival outfit to keyboardist Zach Gill’s band Django. I was out of college by then but I happened to work near Isla Vista at the time and often visited the student ‘burg with fellow work associates to check out I.V.’s local music scene. I also lived on Del Playa for a year during his UCSB tenure, a most notorious oceanfront street known for its radical Halloween antics back in the 80s and 90s, only a few blocks away from Jack’s residence of the time. Though I don’t have an active memory of catching him with Soil, the probabilities I saw both them and Django live are pretty high. It was through that UCSB music network Jack and Zach became close friends and eventually combined forces to form Jack’s core band that still tours regularly to this day, along with Merlo Podlewski on bass and Adam Topol on drums. It’s safe to say Zach Gill and G Love were instrumental in Jack’s soaring rise to global success.
We were so enamored with that first UCSB gig, we promptly turned right around and hit the next tour stop that same week in 2008, at another campus field on the grounds of UCLA. It was about that time we resolved we’d be seeing ‘the fuckin’ mellow man’ anytime he came through our redneck of the woods. Since then, he hits at least one of our local venues every two or three years, mostly at the Santa Barbara Bowl.
The thing about Jack Johnson’s tunes is that they’re simplistic yet tonally complex at the same time. His songwriting is attuned to his inner zen, crafted for years in the surfcat culture. Listening to his songs really does mellow you out! After so many decades of headbangin’ hard rock, Jack’s folksy, jaunty riffs were a breath of fresh air for this old cock-rocker. His voice is a soothing baritone easy on the ears and his acoustic plucking prowess is impressive. He’s funny, a good storyteller, and masterfully improvises as necessary. He’s the kinda dude who jumps onstage at a whim, jams with a wide variety of artists across multiple genres, with the likes of Eddie Vedder, Willie Nelson (he penned an ode to the outlaw country icon called Willie Got Me Stoned), Ben Harper, Dave Matthews, and fellow surf buddy Kelly Slater. He’s also a passionate environmentalist, created his own greening foundation, and along with his wife Kim has spearheaded countless initiatives for ecological and recyclable sustainability. He’s a UCSB boy gone gold, for sure.
A year later, we attended the 2009 movie premiere of Jack’s concert movie En Concert, in which his pals the Malloy brothers compiled show footage and backstage antics from the Static 2008 tour. It was hosted at the Arlington Theater, a most sentimental venue here in town for your webbie. I saw my very first movie there (Return of the Jedi) and countless flicks since, plus an impressive array of live acts over the years, Chrissie Hynde, the Moody Blues, Robin Williams, Elvis Costello, and many more. Jack cut a short solo acoustic set after the movie and we were stoked to bear witness.
In fact, one of my very favorite pix of me and the wifey, taken by a Santa Barbara Independent photographer, is us attending the En Concert premiere sitting front row at the Arlington, rendered in black and white blur avant-garde style. Here, at bottom left center, we can be seen chatting with folks behind us, in a lesser avant-garde fashion. :)
In 2010, we wagered a trifecta of Johnson gigs on his To The Sea tour, the first at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles and two more locally a week later at the Santa Barbara Bowl. It was a Jack Johnson-y kinda week. Lots of margaritas, weed in the air, and general Jimmy Buffet heir apparent vibe. G Love opened in Hollywood, ALO opened at the Santa Barbara gigs. It’s always fun when fellow Brushfire Records label mates open for Jack, because audiences will often get a group jam at the end of the set.
For that first Hollywood bowl gig, we entered one of his greening auction drives for front row tickets in the Pool Circle at the Hollywood Bowl and won. Front row at the Hollywood Bowl is a truly epic time. Loyalist Show readers may recall we had that prime locale for the Police reunion in 2008.
The pair of 2010 Santa Barbara Bowl shows were more intimate affairs, thanks to Jack, G Love, and Zach’s pre-show warmup jams in the Jerry Garcia glen below the main amphitheater. We were maybe too up close and personal at those acoustic sets, so much so that Jack asked me at one point if he had spinach in his teeth. I figured while he probably appreciated my smokin’ hot wifey front and center, maybe less so the grizzled Gen X veteran too old to be fanboying at that minimal distance.
In 2013, Johnson threw a one-off gig at the Arlington with his band and frequent collaborator Paula Fuga. To say I was elated to finally catch a full band Jack gig at my favorite venue would be a radical understatement. I was in my happy place. To be fair, I’ve yet to see anyone attending a JJ show not in their happy places.
In 2014, Jack launched his From Here to Now to You tour and again offered a pair of local SB Bowl shows, and yes, we attended both as usual.
In 2015, Johnson returned to UCSB to receive an alumni award and threw a brief acoustic set with Zach. It was at a cocktail hour before the event where your webbie finally met the fuckin’ mellow man face to face. He’s as effusive and chillax as you’d expect, but in that brief meet-cute, your webbie got a vibe he may have a darker side, perhaps from growing up in the territorial surfcat culture of north shore Oahu. Even the fuckin’ mellow man might have a demon or two in the closet. We all do, right?
Jack and company dropped their All the Light Above It Too record in 2017, replete with supporting tour. Once again, another pair of SB Bowl shows were announced. Once again, I hit both nights. Once again, groovy mellow surf-jazzy times were had by all. Yet I’d already seen him live earlier in the summer. The wifey was overseas in that June of 2017, and I didn’t have a lot of JJ pals among my former cock rock associates, so I elected to round-trip a solo attendance of the Monterey Pop Festival’s 50th anniversary, where Jack was headlining alongside the likes of G Love, ALO, Gary Clark Jr., and Norah Jones. I went despite already having tickets to the SB shows in the fall because I love Monterey, and the notion of catching Johnson there on the same fairgrounds where Hendrix and the Doors once were known to ply their trade was too appealing to pass up. I wrangled my way through that GA crowd to rail-side. It was fantastic. Finally, a non-SoCal crowd! Were they more behaved? Err…no comment.
Johnson put on a show at the SB Bowl in 2018 for an entirely different purpose…a fundraiser for victims, families, and first responders of Montecito’s terrible mudslide calamity that took the lives of 23 residents and destroyed over 100 homes. In his typical fashion, before the gig he joined our local ‘mud brigade’ civilian volunteer teams in cleanup efforts. One of the tradeoffs of living in paradise is our proximity to wildfires and their plethora of side effects, including the dry tinder of shotgun canyons, flooding from fire scars, and ashen airborne particulates often in the wind. It was a good show, yet shadowed by our community’s somber mood for obvious reasons.
When Jack hit the road in 2022 for his Meet the Moonlight tour, after a longer hiatus due to the pandemic, he did indeed host another pair of SB Bowl shows, but after a decade of dedicated fandom, we decided one date night at the Bowl was sufficient enough for our old asses, and so we let the tradition of attending dual SB shows go. At least, that’s what we said at the time. The future is a waxy thing.
In 2023, a unique Johnson gig manifested at one of our smaller venues in town called the Lobero Theater. It was thrown for locals only, an anniversary celebration for the venue marking its 150th year of operation, requiring folks to stand in line for the better part of five to six hours to get tickets sold only at the physical box office. Did I tough it out? With an alternating line-holder JJ-fangirl pal of mine, I surely did. However, the night of the show, a weather front of strong winds resulted in a power outage for much of downtown Santa Barbara. While the crowd’s cell phone lights lit up the audience in the 604 person capacity space, there was no way to power up the mics, amps, speakers, and instruments. The fire marshal was close to shutting the whole evening down, but Johnson’s management prevailed. They soldiered on, taking an enraptured audience through an unplugged set of hits, Jack joking about how apropos it was we were all jamming in the dark since that was ‘how it was’ 150 years prior at the Lobero shed. It was certainly a singular Johnson concert given the circumstances. Despite an occasional stretch to hear their un-miked vocals, the crowd was absolutely entranced. Afterwards, most of them thought it was as intimate a show as they’d ever see at the Lobero or within Johnson family ranks.
Johnson’s body of work speaks for itself. I’m of the old school mind his first four albums are his best stuff. Like many JJ fans, I’m partial to his In Between Dreams album and its tent pole tracks: the seminal Banana Pancakes (wifey’s favorite), Good People, Staple It Together, and my very favorite Jack track Sitting Waiting Wishing. I do like his sophomore effort On and On, and his debut Brushfire Fairytales has one of his best songs in Flake. Sleep Through the Static boasts some of his more nuanced songwriting, motivated by his father’s passing. I’ll be transparent here in saying his work after To The Sea hasn’t quite charmed me as much as his earlier stuff. It turns out the fuckin’ mellow man can get mellower. Not that that’s a bad thing. But I guess there’s mellow Jack, and there’s sleepy Jack, if you get my drift. :)
Yet my favorite record of his is indeed the live En Concert record that accompanied his concert film in 2009. Jack is one of those rare artists who sound better live than in studio, a difficult tier to achieve. He’s a stellar axe man and I’ve often wondered why he hasn’t yet put out a full rock record in homage to Hendrix, his gunslinger influence of choice. When he, Zach, Merlo, and Adam covered the Kinks’ All Day and All of the Night at one of the 2010 shows at the SB Bowl, I was blown away. They slayed it. I do think they should consider a true rock record. They’re that good. If the soccer moms and restaurateurs and Gen Y eco-warriors of the world take umbrage with the mellow man ramping up the tempo, I think they’ll live. After all, a spin of Upside Down is always within earshot here in Southern California. Truly, you can’t cruise around SoCal for more than an hour without hearing a Jack Johnson tune in an elevator, or a surf shop, or Costco, or a bar, or another bar, the library at UC Santa Cruz, Disneyland, a gas station bathroom, a weed dispensary, your grandma’s house, a county fair. He is nothing if not prolific.
The fuckin’ mellow man.
He’s good people.
See what I did there?
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