He writes songs about his wonderful children, insists venues use low-energy
light bulbs and has given away millions to good causes. Is Jack Johnson just
too nice to be a rock star? He talks to Craig McLean.
Ever since he moved down the road – to a solar-powered home entirely built from wood salvaged from another house in his rural neighbourhood – Jack Johnson
has had fewer problems with fans turning up at his front gate. But the
Hawaiian singer-songwriter is still famous enough in the United States
to recently be accorded that honour du jour: the social media celebrity death hoax.
“Was I? I don’t know, maybe,” shrugs the mellow environmentalist who is
so off-the-grid that the only surfing he truly enjoys involves the
world-beating waves that pound the shore near his home on the North
Shore of Oahu, Hawaii’s main island. Still, he’s been online enough to
have heard of one rumour. “There was one recently that was really funny –
everybody started texting and calling me,” he says, a smile splitting
his craggily handsome features. “It was this crazy thing that came out
on the internet – a sex scandal! Somebody put out a press release saying
‘Jack Johnson nude photos released!’ They said they’d found my camera
and they were posting the pictures.” But the release was deliberately
misleading: the photos were of nude statues. “It was just a dumb joke,
but it was pretty funny,” he says.
Rumours of Johnson’s untimely demise wouldn’t necessarily be wholly
exaggerated. The 38-year-old has surfed since childhood, and almost did
die when he was 17. Diving from his board to escape a towering wave, he
smashed face-first into a coral head, broke his skull and his nose, lost
his front teeth and had 150 stitches. It was while recuperating that he
finessed his guitar playing and started on the path to some 15 million
album sales, (with three British Number Ones in a row), a hit single
(Better Together), a Brit Award (International Breakthrough Artist 2006), and becoming the king of easy-listening, campfire acoustics.
But a sex scandal? It couldn’t happen to a less likely musician.
Johnson’s relationship with his wife, Kim, is 20 years strong, and he
lives for his three children (aged nine and under, two boys, one girl;
fiercely private Dad won’t even reveal their names). He founded a pair
of charitable foundations, and donates all of his touring profits to
noble causes. Johnson is the most right-on, eco-minded, sandal-wearing,
guitar-toting campaigner in music. He makes Coldplay’s Chris Martin look
like a fracking petrol-head.
Johnson is such a good guy that even his faecal matter doesn’t smell.
And he should know, because he uses it to nourish his garden. “We don’t
have a sewage line,” he says proudly. “We have an aerating system that
basically breaks it all down to grey water. It sits long enough and it
decomposes and then every so often you got to have the guy come and pump
it out.
“It’s three different tanks underground,” he explains. “It’s pretty
neat. It keeps cycling it through to the point where it breaks down
enough to use – underground we have these little perforated pipes that
water the yard. And,” he adds, warming to his
where-there’s-muck-there’s-brass theme, “a really cool thing we got last
year was an electric car. So now, ’cause we’ve got the solar panels [on
the roof], we can charge the car and don’t have to use a gas station
any more."
He runs his car off the sun? “More or less. We have a
system that’s connected to the grid. As we’re making excess electricity
it goes to the grid and the meter goes backwards. We zero-out,
basically. We had fun doing all that stuff.”
Everyone, it seems,
helped turn the family home into a paragon of green virtue. One of his
elder brothers helped him build the house, having spotted a dwelling
nearby that was about to be demolished. “So we took it apart ourselves,
board by board. So almost our whole house is this house that used to be a
mile down the street.”
Right now, Jack Johnson is a long way from home,
geographically and spiritually and meteorologically. He’s in London, in
the beer garden of a busy canalside pub, in a thunderstorm. “I’m fine to
sit here in the rain,” he shrugs as fat raindrops spatter his sandalled
feet. He’s in the UK to promote his new, sixth album, From Here to Now
to You. A couple of nights previously he played an intimate show in west
London church-turned-venue The Tabernacle. True to groovily chilled
form, the lucky fans in attendance waited for his arrival on stage by
sitting cross-legged on the floor.
After the shadows darkening his last album,
To the Sea
– written in the wake of the death of his father – From Here to Now to
You returns to the feel-good, gently singalong vibes that have been
Johnson’s stock-in-trade since his 2001 debut Brushfire Fairytales.
There is, for example, one song for each of his children. “They come
from a personal place, although I made sure there’s nothing there giving
out little facts that I don’t want people to know about my family. But I
wanted to focus energy on each of the kids.”
So his oldest boy
has the song Tape Deck, which reflects the nine-year-old’s nascent
enthusiasm for the guitar, “even though it’s really about the formation
of my first band …” He’s referring to Limber Chicken, the “punk rock
band” he formed while at high school in Hawaii, who are not to be
confused with Soil, the metal band he formed while studying film and
music production in California. “But I saw him and his cousin jamming,
and now and then I saw this little flame starting up in him.”
Radiate, meanwhile, is for his middle child. “He does this thing where
he walks around the house and you could be calling his name and he’s
just in his world, where he’s painting a picture and he’s walking into
it as he’s painting it and he’s making these noises – whoosh, whoosh,
whoosh. So that song is just about the beautiful energy he radiates.”
Finally, You Remind Me of You (“your momma made you pretty and your
momma made you sweet”) “is for my little girl”. Any songs for Kim?
“Yeah,” he smiles. “All the love songs.”
This, says Johnson, is
another of his missions: to increase the quotient of positivity in the
world. “Cormac McCarthy said that he was trying to add more darkness to
the world; he thinks there’s too much light. And I don’t agree,” he
says, agreeably. “I think we got plenty of darkness.” Has he read any
McCarthy? “Hell yeah!” he shoots back. He’s just finished The Road, the
author’s post-apocalyptic novel about a father and son. “Oh man, that
messes you up!” We agree that the (spoiler alert!) baby-on-the-spit
passage is particularly gruelling. “It was so gnarly,” Johnson winces.
“The other scene that just kills me is when he tells his kid he has this
gun and it’s only got one bullet, and he tells him that if the
cannibals get him, he has to put the gun in his mouth …”
Johnson’s ordinarily sunny disposition clouds over. “That whole part, I
had to put the book down. I think I punched the book and maybe flipped
it off,” he says, meaning he angrily showed the inanimate object the
middle finger. “And I’m like, ‘What the … Why am I reading this?’ I was
so mad! But then,” he smiles, “I picked it back up. It’s a meditation.”
That said, “I did not want to see the movie.”
Jack Johnson performing with Neil Young, in 2008. (Steve Jennings/WireImage)
In terms of his environmental obsessions,
Johnson isn’t afraid to put his money where his mouth is. While on
tour, he insists on reusable/refillable water bottle stations at venues
and the use of low-energy light bulbs, while his team donate to local
pressure groups in every town they visit.
But even the most
assiduously green international rock star has a sizeable carbon
footprint. Johnson, who has come to London with just some guitars, one
crew member and a manager, acknowledges this. “At one point I wasn’t
sure if I wanted even to keep touring.” He was prepared to stop
performing internationally just to reduce his impact on global warming?
“A little bit,” he nods. “But I wanted to keep my options open. To us,
to make the whole thing make sense, there are two things: we can either
withdraw from this industry if we feel it’s too impactful. Or, you can
be part of it and try and do little changes to make your part of the
industry better.”
Is it an effort being a paragon of virtue?
“Nah, it’s not, it’s really easy,” he insists. “The hardest part is to
talk about it and make sure you’re expressing it the right way. I’m not
gonna pretend I’m doing all the work. We have a great crew now that
helps out with all of it.”
The Johnson Ohana Charitable Foundation
(ohana means family in Hawaiian) has a board that disburses grants from
the pot of the singer’s touring income. Sums are given to groups active
in music, art and environmental education. There is also the Kokua
Foundation, which fosters environmental education syllabuses in Hawaiian
schools.
All of which, you might say, is too good to be true.
Does Johnson mind the mickey-taking that lampoons him as the right-on
rocker? “Not really,” he says evenly. “Well, maybe for a little while … I
don’t get it too much any more. The first years we started to do the
[Ohana Foundation], in 2008, I almost felt like I was on the defensive –
half the people were like, ‘OK, you're doing this for your image, I get
it.’ So they were trying to find holes in it all the time. But this
time around it’s been great. We’ve been doing it for five years and
we’re not really coming out and making a thing of it. I don’t feel like I
have to explain it as much. And to be honest, it really does make my
job easier to explain to my kids – it makes it feel a little more worth
doing.”
All of which raises the question: are the Johnson
children on-board with his environmentalism? They at least seem to have
accepted the household computer rules – no screentime in daylight hours –
and that there will be no PlayStation or Wii console coming through the
door any time soon. “I mean, they have to be a little bit [accepting],”
he admits. “’Cause it is what we do at the weekend sometimes. There’ll
be a garden ‘party’, the ‘party’ in quotes ’cause basically it’s turning
over the gardens at school, pulling out the weeds. And so far,” he adds
with a grin, “they’re not at that age where they’re rebelling. They’re
still, like, ‘This is awesome!’”
Doing it for the kids: Johnson with his wife Kim, and family. (L Cohen/WireImage)
Maybe in their teenage years the children might start questioning how
their life might be if Dad wasn’t so philanthropic. Johnson’s accountant
recently told him how much money he’s given away in the past five or so
years: $25 million, with two lots of $10 million accruing from his most
recent world tours. “I didn’t even know I’d earned that much,” he
jokes. “I could have had way better cars and everything.”
On top
of that, for a decade he and Kim have been part of One Percent for the
Planet. The group’s members donate at least one per cent of their
earnings to an approved list of environmental groups. “Although we’ve
always donated more than that. And it’s your gross earnings too. It’s my
wife’s fault, she’s the one …” he tails off.
So, if it hadn’t
been for Kim, he could have been a proper rock star and had a drug
habit, a mansion, a helicopter, the works? “I’m not gonna say yes,” he
chuckles.
Still, Jack Johnson is not without his vices. As an
obsessive surfer, he does splash out on boards – he owns “dozens and
dozens. And they’re not the most environmentally friendly things – in
general they’re made with foam and resin and they’re a little bit toxic.
But I do splurge on boards.”
