A Surfer’s Music Catches a Wave

About a year ago, Jack Johnson was on the beach at Rincon, his regular surfing break just south of his Santa Barbara home, when a car drove by with music blaring out the window. The folkish song with a lightly blues-reggae lilt caught his ear.

“I remember hearing this bass line and starting to bob my head to it,” Johnson says. “As the car went by, I looked to see if I knew the person driving and at the same time I saw that it wasn’t someone I knew, I just then realized that it was my song.”

It was a head-turning experience, Johnson says, a twilight-zone confluence of his two worlds: surfing and music.

And while most aspiring pop musicians would kill for the kind of momentum that Johnson is currently enjoying, that other world keeps pulling him in the opposite direction.

“With surfing, I didn’t want that [external pressure],” he says, sitting in the dressing room at the House of Blues in West Hollywood, before playing to full houses on two straight nights. “As soon as anyone else had any say--’You have to do this photo shoot’--I didn’t want to do it anymore ....

“We were playing around between Santa Barbara and San Diego before we had a record out or even wanted to. I would continue that for my whole life. But the fact that it’s catching on, I’m honored.”

Surfing had been the public pursuit of the Hawaii native, a star as a surfer and as a maker of surf films. Music was a private passion, something he did mostly for himself and his friends. Though he’d made an album, “Brushfire Fairytales,” released in early 2001 on the tiny independent label Enjoy Records, he never really expected his shambling odes to love and the laid-back life to be blasting from car stereos of people he’d never met.

Imagine how he felt Saturday night as he stood on stage at the House of Blues, with a heavy presence of bubbly high school and college-age girls in the packed crowd, loudly singing along to every song and squealing after every verse and at every one of his bashful grins.

“It’s hard to figure out,” Johnson, 26, says before the show. “I don’t feel I deserve any of it.”

Growing up on the north shore of Oahu, Johnson started surfing at 4 and playing guitar at 14, learning Van Morrison and Cat Stevens songs from a family friend during beach barbecues. In high school he was a rising star on the competitive surfing circuit, but moved to Santa Barbara to major in math at UCSB, where he met his wife, Kim. He switched to the film program in his second year, and by the time he graduated he was gaining a reputation in the surf film world for favoring the classic beauty and spirituality of the sport over the more in-vogue daredevil extremism.

Among the fans of the films was neo-blues singer G. Love, whose music Johnson had used in his films. The two met through a mutual friend several years ago and wound up surfing and jamming together, eventually using some spare studio time to record Johnson’s song “Rodeo Clowns.” G. Love liked it so much that he put it on his 1999 album, “Philadelphonic,” and it became a college radio hit.

Around the same time, a demo tape of Johnson songs was given to J.P. Plunier, the manager and producer of folk-pop star Ben Harper. Plunier and former Virgin Records executive Andy Factor started the L.A.-based Enjoy Records to make an album with Johnson, planning to sell it primarily at surf shops. Johnson figured they’d sell 5,000 copies of “Brushfire Fairytales,” but a year after its release it has reached 130,000 with little radio play. It’s now been picked up for distribution by the major Universal Records, and powerful radio stations, including rock-heavy KROQ-FM (106.7), have started to embrace the acoustic folk-blues shuffle “Flake,” pushing the album’s sales to 8,000 a week and climbing.

Along the way, Johnson’s picked up an intense following, with active trading of live recordings via Internet communities in the manner of jam bands. The appeal was easy to see Saturday. Following a screening of his film “Thicker Than Water,” Johnson--in super-casual green T-shirt, black jeans and thong sandals--was easy-going and natural on stage, backed by a bassist and a drummer.

With a relaxed, breezy, acoustic guitar facility and a pleasant, unaffected voice, he was surprisingly involving. His lyrics are thoughtful, whether calling for the world to slow down (“Inaudible Melodies”) or playfully rhapsodizing about his wife (“Bubble Toes”). And in “Fortunate Fool” he proved capable of creating melodies that evoke the world of pop standards. Closing the show, “Flake” was enlivened by the acoustic slide guitar work of guest Harper.

But as comfortable as Johnson seemed, he’s not sure what to make of his growing legion of fans.

“At some point it could be too many people,” he says quietly. He can’t say how many is too many, but he knows what he’s not willing to give up in exchange for pop stardom. Before signing with Enjoy, he rejected offers from record companies that asked him to forgo surfing and filmmaking and be a full-time musician. And even in negotiating the distribution deal with Universal, he drew a line in the metaphorical sand.

“I voiced my opinion that there may be a point where everyone’s saying that it’s a perfect time for me to do something to promote the record and I may say that it’s a perfect time to chill out,” he says. “I’ll only do this as long as it’s fun.”

He’s not bluffing. Factor, the co-founder of Enjoy Records, says that Johnson already has blown off a scheduled meeting with Universal executives. The waves were good in Santa Barbara and he wanted to stay there to surf.

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Jack Johnson, with Mason Jennings, plays tonight at the Galaxy Theatre, 3503 S. Harbor Blvd., Santa Ana, 8 p.m. $20. (714) 957-0600.