"I get completely haunted," he says. In his most vivid dream, Johnson is standing on the beach with a guitar, gazing into the shore break. "Our stage crew was there, the band were all set up, it was a normal show, but the ocean was where the crowd should be," Johnson recalls. "I was thinking, 'What's going on here?' " Johnson and his band played on as the tide crept up. "We were knee-deep, then waist-deep, and still playing. I had a feeling like, 'When do we stop?'
"You've got to listen to your dreams," says Johnson, sitting at a picnic table in the quiet, grassy back yard of his home in Santa Barbara, California. He's wearing his usual outfit — board shorts, a T-shirt and flip-flops — and talking in a relaxed surfer's lilt. "That's when I know I've got to take a break, kick back and get out of the public eye." In the past, when anxiety dreams have set in, Johnson has pissed off promoters by canceling gigs to return home early; these days, he insists on traveling for no more than a month at a time, and never during the winter, when the waves pick up on the North Shore of Hawaii, where Johnson grew up and still lives most of the year. (He went to college in Santa Barbara, ninety minutes north of Los Angeles, and keeps a house there.) "If I could go canoe-paddling or sailing every day while I was on tour, I wouldn't be itching to get home so bad," he says. "Just get me out in the ocean, really. Growing up, I would try to surf for three, four hours a day. I've become dependent on it. It's hard when you start an addiction at age five."
More than a quarter-century later, at thirty-two, Johnson still surfs as much as possible and
still values a simple, humble way of living, close to nature, even as the demands of stardom have made life more complicated. It's the way he was raised, and the way he raises his two young sons with his wife of eight years, Kim. In Oahu, the Johnsons live in a modest single-level home, perched on the side of a hill where Jack can see the surf below. He doesn't get cable, which means no TV reception at all — "That's a time-killer, man," he says — and he happily admits that he lives outside the pop-culture loop. (He says that on a JetBlue flight recently, "I got sucked into the show about the bisexual," meaning
Tila Tequila. "I couldn't believe that was on TV.")
Johnson spends his days outdoors: fishing, surfing, kayaking, swimming or just doing yardwork and looking at the waves. At night, when his boys — ages four and two, whose names Johnson wishes to keep private — are sleeping and the house is quiet, he'll stay up late reading
The New York Times online or digging into a book.
He's a voracious reader and sometimes quotes passages and life lessons he's picked up from Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Campbell. The folk songs Johnson writes come to him easily — he doesn't force them. "A lot of artists fall into a thing where they're constantly trying to create art," he says. "But I think you can forget to take things in. You've got to fill up the mind. When I get home from a tour, I put away the guitar and surf a lot. After a while, the songs just start comin'. It's not like some torturous process that I go through."
In the days I spend with him in Southern California (and during the time I was with him on the North Shore in 2006), Johnson frequently busts out a melody, whether we're riding in a car, sitting on the beach or in the middle of lunch. "There are two parts of a song for me," he says.
"The choruses have to come from some place I don't really know. It might be something I heard somebody say but somehow morphs into something catchy. I don't really know how it happens — I'll just be walking down the street and find I'm singing some little line that somehow snuck in the back." Then he constructs the verses. "Those are what tell the story, or help convey some idea or feeling."
Rolling Stone
ME! But you already know that.
me too!!!
