Jack Johnson
SURFILMUSIC Tour

Michael Venn, contributor

Going to see Jack Johnson live is like going to hang out with a bunch of friends at the beach, where you bring a few beers, boards, and guitars, hang out by the fire, strum a few chords, sing along to your favorite songs, tell some stories and jokes, and reminisce about events in your life from 5, 10, 20, or more years ago. It's like hanging out with your old college buddies, except one of them just happens to be Jack Johnson, a surfer who once had a historic wipeout at Hawaii's world-famous Pipeline surf break that changed the course of his surfing future.
 

After he healed from his face splitting, lip busting, teeth loosing, accident at Pipeline, that required 150 stitches and some severe dental work, Jack decided to go to film school, make surf movies, and write and score the music for the films with his buddies. And oh yeah, he also just happened to turn that fateful Pipeline wipeout into a successful music career spanning a quarter century, that includes eight studio albums and two movie soundtracks. So maybe it's not your typical campfire jam session.
 

The night started out just like you'd expect: a multigenerational beach festival vibe, with families and friends hanging out together waiting for Jack to take the stage. Hermanos Gutiérrez opened the show before later joining Jack and the band onstage for a live scoring of his new documentary SURFILMUSIC, but I'll get to that later.
 

Jack took the stage and started the night off with "Inaudible Melodies," which felt appropriate, as it's the opening track from his debut album Brushfire Fairytales. In Jack's now-signature mellow-man vibe, the song felt a little slower than the version we're used to, but it captured the overall feeling of the evening and was a great way to ease into a night that felt more like a career retrospective than a normal concert.
 

Early in the night, he asked the audience to sing along as he started playing the music to "Sitting, Waiting, Wishing." As everyone joined in, Jack began singing Tina Turner's classic "What's Love Got to Do with It" instead, which caused the audience and band alike to break out into laughter. It perfectly captured the lightheartedness of the evening, and Jack and the band—consisting of longtime friends and band members Zach Gill (keyboards, accordion, melodica, and vocals), Adam Topol (drums and percussion), and Merlo Podlewski (bass)—continued to have fun while working out the kinks and wrong chords of opening night on the tour.
 

Throughout the show, Jack told stories about his early film school days, handing in songs to get extensions on college papers, and meeting his musical soulmate and keyboard player, Zach Gill, in the dorms at UCSB. Coincidentally, they both share the same birthday: May 18, 1975. Apparently there was some magic in the air that day.
 

After one fan requested a song, Jack politely declined, saying that the guitar he had was tuned to B-flat and he wasn't able to accommodate the request because that song required a different tuning. He then explained that many of his songs ended up being tuned to B-flat because one of his kids had slightly broken his guitar and, instead of fixing it, he just removed the string. As a result, he tuned it to B-flat because, as he said, Neil Young once said the world was tuned to B-flat.

He didn't remember which of his two kids it was (although they were both in the audience along with his wife, so I'm sure one of them could have finally admitted to knocking over the guitar and breaking the tuning peg). Personally, I think we'd all like to thank them, because a lot of the songs he wrote on that beat-up guitar became some of his biggest hits.

The next song was "Upside Down" from the Curious George soundtrack. Interestingly enough, to illustrate my point about the ageless appeal of Jack's music, the first movie I ever took my son to see in a theater was Curious George when he was about three years old. A few years ago, we went to see Jack play at the same venue when he kicked off the tour for Meet the Moonlight, and tonight my 21-year-old son came with his girlfriend and her family, further adding to the family-and-friends vibe of the evening.
 

The brothers Gutiérrez joined Jack and the band for a live performance of the score to his surf film September Sessions. They played along while younger versions of surfing legends Kelly Slater and Rob Machado caught perfect waves in Indonesia along the romote coast of Sumatra, and as the film played and the waves rolled in the background, the music, the stories, and the imagery carried us deeper into the evening as the sun set behind the pavilion. 

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Up next, Jack told stories about his early days filming surf movies and how, as he put it, "my goal at the end of the day, sitting around the campfire making up songs on my guitar, was to make my friends laugh by incorporating the day's exploits into the lyrics." One such song from that trip was "Holes to Heaven," inspired by an encounter where government officials boarded their boat looking for money and the captain bribed them with cigarettes and Johnny Walker Red Label. Some of you will probably recognize the lyric that came from that story.
 

The night felt like hanging out with friends who started a band, as Jack described it, after hearing Fugazi's "Waiting Room." They sounded folk, even though they wanted to be punk, because they had a bunch of guitars and zero drums. That story eventually inspired the song "Tape Deck."
 

Several times during the performance, Jack broke into snippets of cover songs that seamlessly led into his own material. Most notable were "Take the Money and Run" by the Steve Miller Band and "Badfish" by Sublime, which helped close out the night.
 

Jack then came back out for the encore and performed solo acoustic requests from the audience as best as he could remember them. Sometimes he'd say, "I'll do a verse and a chorus, or maybe even two verses if I can remember the words." The audience sang along and urged him to keep going.
 

Before playing "Angel," his second-to-last song of the night, he dedicated it to his wife of 26 years, Kim, whom he met in college and has been with for more than 30 years. He asked, "How many of you like lifelong love stories?" The crowd erupted in cheers, and he joked that he waited until late in the set to play it because he was worried everyone would start making out and leave if he played it earlier.
 

After the song, he explained why he started giggling while singing. He looked over and saw his keyboard player giving the bass player a back massage. He then started playing "Better Together," and the band slowly rejoined him onstage to wrap up the night.
 

When the songs stopped and the show was over, I don't think I've ever left a concert with a happier or more loving audience. It was a nice way to kick off summer and spend an evening with old friends while making a few new ones along the way.
 

I hope everyone gets a chance to see Jack live on this tour and experience his career-retrospective storytelling, campfire songs, and time spent with friends on the SURFILMUSIC tour this summer.