Ben Marcus Rules

2001: A Redneck-Looking Joint in Melrose, MT

Sometime around 2001, I was drifting the Big Hole River in Montana with two Santa Cruz guys — Metiver and Locatelli (RIP 1960 - 2007). Because Montana is to flyfishermen what the Mentawais are to surfers, we caught  mass quantities of brownies and rainbows (and whitefish, yuck) putting in at the Stanchfield's Troutfitters in Wisdom and then many miles down to the Melrose Bridge. 

The pickup vehicle came and got us, but we had to gas up at a kind of redneck-looking joint called the Melrose Bar and Gas Station, where you had to walk into the bar to pay for petrol.

When our eyes adjusted from Montana glare to shadow — wearing $10,000,000 of Patagonia top to bottom fly-fishing accoutrement, zero Carhartt, looking California from head to toe — all conversation stopped, and what looked like a ZZ Top/Hells Angels tribute to the Unabomber (RIP 1942-2023) turned and gave us Montana canyon critter stink eye.

Frightening, and yet: What are those nice noises emanating from the jukebox out there in the back of beyond? 

Jack Johnson!?!?!?!

“Hey, I kinda know that dude,” I said, Spicoli-like. Unimpressed, the ZZ Top/Hells Angels decided we weren't worth a beating and turned back to their beers.

Right there in the Melrose Bar and Gas is when I began to realize Jack Johnson was becoming a big deal. I knew him from working at SURFER Magazine in the '90s, and I knew he made music for surf movies with the Brothers Malloy.

But... Melrose? Five hundred and forty miles as the frigate bird flies from the nearest ocean?

Shoots.

Spit Up His Poi and Said “Shoots!”

In 1999, if a Hawaiian kāula had read the clouds, thrown the bones and pig guts, tracked the stars, and marched up to the back porch of the Johnson house at Pipeline to prophesy to a 24-year-old Jack Johnson that he would become an internationally famous recording artist, selling tens of millions of records, touring the world, writing film scores, appearing on Letterman and Leno, earning gazillions of dollars, owning half the properties on the North Shore, and giving away choke kala to kokua as many people as possible — he would have smiled, said “Shoots!” spit up some poi and strummed some more chords.

Platinum records weren't in the cards. Jack was a pro surfer in the early '90s, then a student, kegband rocker and filmmaker in the late '90s. Music was a side hustle — something he picked up on the back porch while do do do looking out his backdoor at Backdoor, waiting for the wind to shift and Kelly to paddle out, strumming a guitar to see if what he felt inside could come out in words and chords.

And yet, all of that happened. Maybe not owning half the properties on the North Shore, but all the rest. 

And you may ask yourself (as his mom has): How did he get there?

It's easier to tell a good story when there's a good story to tell, and that's what SURFILMUSIC is about: How Jack Johnson transitioned from ocean-loving North Shore grommet to aspiring pro surfer to Pipeline face-planter to UCSB student/musician/filmmaker/loverboy to downtime picker and grinner to internationally famous and beloved performer who has sold over 25 million records, given away more than $30 million through his foundations, and still lights up audiences from 8 to 80 — from way down in Melbourne to down in Monterey.

Know Jack

Growing up in Santa Cruz, I knew a freckle-faced strawberry named Karen Gallagher who moved to the North Shore in the 1970s, surfed herself sillier and ran Sunset Beach Surf Shop with a velvet fist in an irons glove, surf-matriarching young talents including Kalani Robb, Pancho Sullivan, Tamayo Perry — and Jack Johnson.

That's how I first became aware of him, working at SURFER Magazine from 1989 to 1999, covering the North Shore every winter — though I was more familiar with the Brothers Malloy, Ventura surfing cowboys who dabbled in film and music.

Around 2005, I helped ocean photographer Clark Little put together a book of his North Shore wave photography - The Shorebreak Art of Clark Little. The photography was pretty much a hobby which had - to his surprise and delight - morphed into a big, worldwide ocean art sensation.

We asked Kelly Slater and Jack to write forewords. Kelly Slater, because he's Kelly Frickin' Slater, and Jack Johnson, because he and Clark were similar in starting something simple on the North Shore that blew up beyond their wildest dreams

Jack's foreword was called “Brief Moments of Bliss.” He has a way with words, and when I asked director Emmett Malloy who came up with this perfect title SURFILMUSIC, he said, “Jack did. The master word-smither.”

That’s a perfect title, right up there with the title Steve Hawk came up with for the first article on Mavericks in SURFER Magazine: COLD SWEAT.

Clark ordered 10,000 copies of a book that sold for $100 while the $250 Collector's Edition was signed by Jack, Kelly, and Clark. I thought he was lolo, but he sold every one, and now that signed Special Collector's Edition goes for $500 - if you can find one.

Shoots.

Across the Bay in Monterey

So I kinda knew Jack well enough to boldly and perhaps impolitely ask for VIP tickets to a showing of SURFILMUSIC in Monterey showing on July 25.

And it worked! Director Emmett Malloy — one of 123,891 cousins to the Brothers Malloy — kokuaed us on the list. 

I rode shotgun with Alexander Faller Johnson, a fellow refugee from the Swinging Seventies in Santa Cruz. Long before digital media, surfing images arrived in touring “four-wall” surf movies, and we would line up at the Civic Auditorium to shake the rafters for “Free Ride,” “Five Summer Stories,” “Gone Surfin’” and a dozen other surf movies, shot on film.

The Swingin’ 70s

Santa Cruz had a spectacular music scene in the 1970s. Great bands on their way up—and plenty already at the top—made it a point to play town.

Por ejemplo, this was the lineup at the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium between 1975 and 1979 alone: The Tubes, Bonnie Raitt, Asleep at the Wheel, Jackson Browne—twice, once with Joan Baez and Warren Zevon in tow—Crosby & Nash, the Jerry Garcia Band, the J. Geils Band, José Feliciano, B.B. King, Ike and Tina Turner, Toots and the Maytals, the Marshall Tucker Band, Journey, Jimmy Buffett and the Coral Reefer Band, Charlie Daniels, and Country Joe and the Fish.

And then some: Elvis Costello, the Police, Devo, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Patti Smith, AC/DC, Bob Marley and the Wailers, Blondie—and yes, the Ramones, who liked the place so much they came back three times through 1983.

I’ll swear on a stack of surfboards that I also saw Stanley Clarke and Weather Report at the Civic, although memories from that era are glitchy for some reason.

I asked around for other bands we saw. Alex said: “Do not forget Neil Young, UB40, Tower of Power, Bo Diddley, BB King and many others we can't remember because we were busy destroying brain cells!”

In the summer of 1977 Neil Young came to Santa Cruz, rehearsed at Pleasure Point, wrote  and played a string of famously loose, unannounced-because-they’d-be-swamped local shows with Ducks.

In Santa Cruz that summer, Young Neil Young’s acoustic My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue and the electric Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black), were co-written with Jeff Blackburn, his old Santa Cruz bandmate from Ducks. The most famous line, "it's better to burn out than to fade away," actually came from Blackburn, and it took on a much darker weight in 1994 when Kurt Cobain quoted it in his suicide note, permanently tying the song to a legacy neither Young nor Blackburn ever intended. 

Neil Young didn’t fade away - because of that song. 

After surfing Pleasure Point all day, we saw Neil Young with Ducks at the Santa Cruz Yacht Club. Fearless, adrenalized and whacked on that super fine A1, $15 dollar a lid stems and seed Mexican loco weed, we were standing about 15 feet away from Neil, bellowing, “Play ‘Homegrown,’ dude!”

The Catalyst is being threatened with urban renewal right now and that’s a tragedy. In the Swingin’ 70s, Neil Young and Crazy Horse played there, along with Santana, Steppenwolf, James Brown, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, the New Riders of the Purple Sage, David Grisman, Jack Bruce, Big Joe Turner, Bobby “Blue” Bland, the Doobie Brothers, Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Emmylou Harris, Peter Tosh, the Buzzcocks, the Flamin’ Groovies, Greg Kihn, the Rubinoos, Maria Muldaur, Huey Lewis and the News, Pearl Harbor and the Explosions, and the Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo.

The Talking Heads and the B-52s at the Cocoanut Grove? Forgetaboutit. During the Swingin’ Seventies Santa Cruz was a smaller town with an improbably enormous soundtrack.

Apologies, I’m retro-kvelling and getting whimsical here, but the 70s were the best 30 years of my life, and we got a bit of that live sound and vision energy at SURFILMUSIC across the Bay in Monterey.

The Sardine Factory

And speaking of psycho killers, we had recently watched Clint Eastwood’s directorial debut, the most excellent Play Misty For Me. It’s all set in Carmel and Big Sur and the Monterey Peninsula, and Sardine Factory is where Clint first met fatale femme Evelyn.

So we made a 5:30 reservation for the Donner Party - which we always thought was stupidly funny - had an atmospheric dinner in the atrium and then joined a sellout crowd of people from 8 to 80 at the Golden State Theater, a nearly century-old Spanish-Moorish movie palace. 

The movie started at 8:00, followed by  a Q&A with Emmet, Jack, and Kim, followed by an hour of music with Jack on guitar backed by rocking accordionist/melodicaist Zach Gill.

At one point I had to leave right at the point where Jack kisses the reef at Pipe and comes up broken and dented. When I came back in, there was Emmett Malloy, stalking the aisle, probably gauging audience reaction wirth a hootmetter on his SmartPhone. 

He chastised me: “You left at one of the most important points in the movie! How you gonna write a review?”

I enjoyed the film enough that I didn't take proper notes — a king-sized Modelo and Alex elbowing me to put down my dumbphone didn't help. I was so focused on enjoying the movie I forget to remember it. So I once again rudely asked if Emmett could send me a link and a password to the online version so I could frame by frame it.

And he did! The link is www.YeahYouWishForgetAboutIt.com and the password: youwish. 

Watching it frame by frame, scene by scene, act by act, I understood why I'd missed so much the first time: SURFILMUSIC is a dense, engaging, vivid, possibly Oscar-worthy three-part harmony about Jack's evolution - SURF to FILM to MUSIC -  set largely among people I wrote about during my SURFER years — The Brothers Malloy, Brad Gerlach, Rob Machado, Kelly Slater, Shane Dorian, Tamayo Perry, Taylor Steele and glimpses of Brock Little and Noah Johnson.

So I was engrossed seeing it live live all the way live. Watching it frame by frame, here's how he got there.

Act One: SURF = The Pipeline

Act One is about North Shore surfing — specifically the Banzai Pipeline, no longer the most powerful, challenging wave in the world (Teahupoo in Tahiti has Next Level power and danger and usurped that title) but still the most dangerous as Pipe has injured and killed more surfers than any other spot - from kooks to Koa Rothman. 

During the Roaring '90s I was comfortable enough in the ocean to swim out and watch and get mixed up in the power and the glory and the beauty of that spectacular wave-  diving under waves with Gerry Lopez or Kelly Slater passing overhead - dodging foamballs and skirting cracks in the reef.

Pipe was crowded in the 1990s and I can only imagine what it’s like now. Crowds make people impatient and do things they shouldn’t. Surfers do things to other surfers at Pipe that if done on dry land would get them arrested and thrown in the hoosegow for reckless endangerment.

Seeing what I saw above and below the surface, I got a vividly dangerous appreciation for how shallow and potentially lethal the Banzai Pipeline is.

Like John John Florence a generation later, Jack grew up with Pipe in his backyard, and the film traces him rolling through old movie footage going back to the 1970s, when Jack was a kid getting pushed into easy waves by his dad and brothers. Growing up with Pipeline in your backyard is about as safe as growing up with a T Rex chained up by your fence. SURFILMUSIC shows Jack’s growth and evolution through his teens to become the youngest surfer to reach the finals of the Pipe Masters Trials. 

In the 1992 Pipeline Local Trials, 17-year-old Jack competed in a six-man heat against Gerry Lopez, Johnny Boy Gomes, Liam McNamara, Marvin Foster, Tony Moniz, and Larry Rios — like stepping into the Octagon with Mr. Miyagi, Mike Tyson, Conor McGregor, Marvin Hagler, Denzel Washington and Kareem Abdul Jabbar all at once. 

According to Kelly Fricking Slater, Jack had the best tube in the heat but got hassled out of catching enough waves and was disqualified — an experience Slater believes quietly turned Jack off competitive surfing.

It’s Never The One You Think It’s Gonna Be

Greg Noll was a big wave surfer who survived some famous wipeouts, but he was fond of saying: “It’s never the one you think it’s gonna be, kid!”

A week later Johnson was surfing Pipe when he took what he thought was a standard wipeout and face-planted into the reef. There are photos of Jack smiling with broken teeth, scars on his face and a dent in his forehead, but the look in his eyes suggest he probably wasn’t smiling inside. That near-death accident put Jack on his back porch with a guitar in his hands, working out chords as his body healed and his mind contemplated the future. 

That transitional part of the movie and Jack’s life is what I missed in the Mens. And when I walked back in, there was Emmet Malloy prowling the aisles - maybe scouting for slack movie reviewers and he found one: “How you gonna review this movie if you missed the most important part?”

Okay okay, I’m trying. So Act One is Jack as a young surfer on the North Shore, during the Hectic Eighties and into the Roaring 90s, when the surf industry was taking in astonishing amounts of money, and a talented kid could make a good living doing what he loved.

Jack was friends with the Malloys and Kelly Slater - who was also interested in music, because being a surfer and a traveling surfer who is paid to surf leaves a lot of time for extracurricular activities - like golf and music. At the end of that winter, Kelly left a four track recorder with Jack, and that was a level up.

ACT TWO: I DIDN’T GO TO COLLEGE, I WENT TO UCSB!

Education is important in the Hawaiian Islands. Punahou, founded in 1841, is generally cited as the oldest independent school west of the Mississippi. That school produced a rock star of a dignified, eloquent, elegant president and other notable alumni include AOL co-founder Steve Case, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, U.S. Senator Brian Schatz, golfer Michelle Wie, surfing champion Carissa Moore, and NFL linebacker Manti Te'o. 

When Hawaiians are meeting each other, one of the first questions they ask is: “What high school you go?”

Jack Johnson didn’t go to Punahou, but his brothers both attended USC on the mainland. Jack chose UCSB and it’s there that he gradually stumbled into his path.

Tar Balls Meet Cute

SURFILMUSIC is also a love story, a soulmate story, a wholesome, positive story in an increasingly, in your face vulgar, dysfunctional world. At UCSB, Jack met the former Kim Baker, a pretty California gal (Sunkissa goldenstatensis) with flowers in her hair and her eyes and her smile.

In the movie, Kim tells how Jack approached her — shily, peaking out from the bushes — but at some point they locked their bikes together, which in California is as legally binding as a Welsh love spoon, a Fijian whale's tooth, a German couple sawing a log in half at the reception or the Scots, who kidnap the bride and groom before the big day, douse them in treacle, flour, rotten eggs and feathers, and parade them through town tied to the back of a truck — on the theory that if the marriage can survive that, it can survive anything. 

You’d Think That People Would Have Had Enough of Silly Love songs

I listened to all of Brushfire Fairytales on a Saturday night sitting in the world's cleanest, most high tech laundromat on Seabright Avenue in Santa Cruz, playing Second Chance on Scratchers I shamelessly picked out of a garbage can at the 76 Station on Soquel and eating cashews two for 48 cents from Bargain Market Grocery Outlet or whatever. (That sounds like a Jack Johnson lyric right there.)

I listened to Bubble Toes.

It's as simple as something that nobody knows

That her eyes are as big as her bubbly toes

On the feet of a queen of the hearts of the cards

And her feet are all covered with tar balls and scars

I wondered if Bubble Toes was written about Kim, and indeed it was - the tar balls thing was a dead giveaway for anyone who knows coastal Santa Barbara. That song has racked up over 115 million streams on Spotify alone, and even at a stingy $0.001 a stream, that's roughly $115,000 in nickel-and-dime royalties for a song Jack wrote as a private joke about his wife's toes.

Is that meet cute enough for you? If that's not 21st century love, what is?

In the movie, Kim says they knew as freshmen they would “be together.” And they made it official on July 22, 2000 - bike locks apparently having held up in court. Over the next two decades plus Kim has been Jack’s muse, music manager and mother to their children.

Clearly, they are Better Together.

There's no combination of words I could put on the back of a postcard
No song that I could sing, but I can try for your heart
Our dreams, and they are made out of real things
Like a shoebox of photographs with sepia-toned lovin'
Love is the answer, at least for most of the questions in my heart
Like, "Why are we here?" and, "Where do we go?", and, "How come it's so hard?"
It's not always easy and sometimes life can be deceiving
I'll tell you one thing, it's always better when we're together

Mmm, it's always better when we're together
Yeah, we'll look at them stars when we're together
Well, it's always better when we're together
Yeah, it's always better when we're together

Good lord, with apologies for using Claude AI: “Better Together has turned into one of Jack Johnson's biggest sleeper hits — the song has now crossed the billion-stream mark on Spotify, sitting at roughly 1.07 billion plays and still pulling in over 300,000 spins a day. (Do the math at an average of $0.003 to $0.005 per stream.) What's wild is it never even cracked the top 20 on the charts back when it came out, peaking at a modest No. 24 in the UK and barely denting Ireland at No. 72, yet it's gone on to earn Gold certification in the U.S., double-Platinum in the UK, quadruple-Platinum in Canada and New Zealand, and a staggering sixfold Platinum in Australia.

Better Together has essentially become the "Stand By Me" of the 2000s — a song that undersold on release but has become a streaming-era standard for weddings, road trips, and mixtapes, and now edges out even Upside Down and Banana Pancakes for total lifetime streams in his catalog.

If only we could all connect with someone like that, no?

With Kim by his side and an uncertain future ahead, Act Two is about Jack Johnson going to school on the mainland at UC Santa Barbara. He was studying math and wondering why, and then inspired by a professor named Edmund Bratigan - he changed his major to Film.

SOIL

UCSB isn’t much of a party school - not! - and Jack honed his guitar chops playing with a keg band called SOIL, and also made movies. College lit up his creativity and set him on the Yellow Brick Road to understand what he loved, what he was good at and which direction he should go.

To quote Hendrix: “He knew what he wanted but he just didn’t know - how to go about getting it.”

In the movie, Chris Malloy becomes another Pipe victim when he goes head-first over the falls, hits the reef with both feet and does both his knees. He dragged himself out of the water, worrying about his cartilage and his future: “What’s next?”

At the time around 1997, Jack and Kim were cruising around Europe in a van, which is as much fun to people in their 20s as Disneyland is to 10 years olds. They filmed and frolicked and tried to swat away the annoying vultures of “What’s next?”

Movie making is what was next, for both Pipe victims. In 1998  Jack Johnson, Emmett Malloy, and Chris Malloy formed the Moonshine Conspiracy while making their first surf film together, Thicker Than Water a 45-minute documentary shot in 16 mm and scored with Jack’s music - released on May 12, 2000. 

The soundtrack of Jack’s sincere, heartfelt, dare I say “soulful” music struck a nerve. Johnson’s debut album, “Brushfire Fairytales” was recorded in December 2000 at Grandmaster Recorders and King Sound in Los Angeles and produced by J.P. Plunier, released January/February 2001 through Enjoy Records, distributed via Universal, with the label later renamed Everloving Recordings. The core band was Johnson on vocals, guitar, and piano, Adam Topol on drums and percussion, and Merlo Podlewski on bass — the same trio that would anchor his live sound for the next two decades. 

Commercially, it became a slow-building phenomenon rather than an overnight hit: it was certified Platinum by the RIAA in November 2002 for one million units shipped in the U.S., and by some retailer estimates has gone on to sell over 2.5 million copies worldwide, with additional Platinum and multi-Platinum certifications in Australia, the UK, Canada, and New Zealand. 

DAD ROCK AND DON HO

Critically, the reception broke fairly cleanly along a fault line: Rolling Stone called his sun-kissed acoustic melodies and unfailingly positive vibrations "pretty much impossible to hate," while the Washington Post placed his sound at the "mythical intersection of dad rock, Don Ho, and the acoustic solo discs Eddie Vedder will one day make when he's angst-ed out and retired to Maui" — a backhanded compliment that captured the album's love-it-or-shrug-at-it reputation. 

THE SEPTEMBER SESSIONS

Their second film was “The September Sessions,” directed by Jack Johnson, produced by Kelly Slater and Emmett Malloy, with Chris Malloy as cinematographer/art director and starring Kelly Slater, Shane Dorian, Rob Machado, and Ross Williams on a boat trip in Indonesia - living the dream and filming it in 16 mm.

None of these guys knew what they were doing, but what did Jack say about that: “When I think about making things. Whether it’s music, or films - just anything in life. Friendship is the most important part of the whole thing. We found this combination of friendships where… none of us could have made it on our own. I always loved making these things, I never dreamed that I was actually gonna get to… you know.”

The alchemy of these talented surfers who had film making and music as side hustles worked, and worked well. Their surf movies were soulful, beautifully crafted and the soundtrack struck nerves outside of the surfing world.

2004: A BROKEDOWN MELODY

 Released September 16, 2004, directed by Jack Johnson and Chris Malloy, produced by Emmett Malloy, starring Kelly Slater, the Malloy brothers, Tom Curren, Rob Machado, CJ Hobgood, and Johnson himself. This one landed right as Jack’s second album In Between Dreams featured the songs ?????  and was about to launch him into the mainstream. 

ACT THREE: MUSIC

Jack Johnson could sing for his mother. He could sing for Kim. Anyone else walked in the room, and the guitar went back in the case. That's not false modesty for the documentary's sake — that's a kid with a four-track recorder and zero interest in being seen.

STATE STREET, OPEN MIC

Somewhere in there, singing to friends in a small room stopped being enough, the way it stops being enough for anyone who's any good. Everybody wants their sound out in the world, wants it accepted, appreciated, loved — Jack just took longer than most to admit he wanted it too. He started showing up at open mic night at Roy's, off State Street, in Santa Barbara. People noticed. Something was different there, even before anyone knew what to call it — a guy who wasn't chasing a record deal, just musically working out what he felt on a Tuesday night in front of strangers.

Emmet Malloy, digging through a box years later for SURFILMUSIC, found the original four-track tapes. Not confident yet. Really, really good anyway.

RODEO CLOWNS

The song that changed everything wasn't engineered to change anything. "Rodeo Clowns" was just a tune Jack had been kicking around with a longtime friend — the two of them trading parts back and forth in that half-joking way songwriters do until one of them stops joking and says holy shit, that's good. What made it land wasn't polish. It was the opposite — something almost impossible to quantify in music that simple, heard without the baggage of Jack Johnson being famous yet, because Jack Johnson wasn't.

Kelly Slater — who by then had his own reasons to know a good tune when he heard one — made it the favorite record among their friend group before it was ever officially recorded. People were dubbing tapes and just giving them away, the most grassroots way a song can catch fire. When Jack got back from a trip to Ireland, he played it for Kim, and she told him flatly that it was a really good song. Small sentence, big moment — that was the turning point where Jack started believing he might actually be a songwriter and not just a surfer who happened to play guitar when the wind or the tide or the swell were wrong.

From there it moved the way word-of-mouth moves in a small scene: a guy named Scott knew Garrett, who knew G. Love of G. Love & Special Sauce, and Garrett had his guitar in the trunk of his car and did Jack the favor of playing "Rodeo Clowns" for anyone who'd listen — play it again, play it again. Somewhere in that chain, an A&R guy heard it and said the thing every unsigned songwriter dreams of hearing: come into the studio, we can cut this song. Jack's reaction, by his own account, was something close to what? Nobody sets out to be the next big thing off a four-track tape and a favor from a friend's friend. That's just how it happened.

RENT'S COVERED, GO PLAY MUSIC

None of it would have gotten off the ground without the people underwriting Jack's uncertainty. Kim was in grad school while "Thicker Than Water" was coming together, and Chris Malloy was quietly paying their rent so Jack could keep making music instead of taking a normal job. The following year, Kim flipped it: I've got a job now, it's your turn — rent's covered, groceries are covered, go do what you want to do. That's the kind of support that doesn't show up on a resume but shows up on every album that follows.

Once "Rodeo Clowns" was out and the label calls started coming in, it was exciting and, frankly, confusing — Jack has said as much himself, admitting they probably should have hired an actual music manager. Instead, Emmet and Kim picked up a book called “How to Manage a Musician” and more or less winged it from there, a system that, by any reasonable standard, has worked out fine for twenty-five years running.

INDONESIA, 1999

The album almost got made by accident, the same way everything else had. Kelly called at exactly the right moment: let's make another surf film, and write some songs while we're at it. That became “The September Sessions,” shot in Indonesia with a boatload of friends who, in Kelly's words, didn't question much about whether Jack was going to make an album — he just was.

It fits Jack's whole arc, honestly. His father sailed from California to Hawaii by himself in his early twenties without knowing how to sail, and Jack remembered looking down at the Pacific as a kid and wondering if he could ever do something like that himself. Jump in before you're ready, and find out if you can pull it off. That's not a metaphor he came up with for the cameras — it's just how he's operated the whole time.

BEN HARPER PULLS OVER

Every origin story needs one lucky break that isn't luck at all, just preparation meeting the right car radio. Ben Harper heard Jack's music, pulled over, and knew immediately: this is the cat. He called producer J.P. Plunier and told him he already had the same tape in his own car. When Plunier sat down and actually listened, what struck him wasn't the production — there wasn't much — it was that Jack was telling a story he understood.

That connection became “Brushfire Fairytales,” recorded in December 2000 and released the following year — the album that turned a surf-movie side hustle into a career. They needed a bass player and brought in Merlo Podlewski, who'd go on to anchor Jack's sound for the next two decades alongside drummer Adam Topol. And at one of Harper's own shows, backstage, Jack had one of those surreal, career-affirming moments — hearing someone behind him singing along to his own lyrics, turning around to find it was Ben Harper himself, hugging him, having somehow absorbed the words to songs that had barely left the four-track.

THE ROOF

From there it stopped being gradual. Jack went out with Ben Harper on tour, and Harper is on record saying it never felt like Jack was opening for him — it felt like the two of them went out together. A year into it, someone asked Jack from the main stage how he'd gotten so big, so fast. His honest answer: I don't know. Filling out a form somewhere around that time, under occupation, he wrote "musician" and admitted it sounded ridiculous even to him — this is what I'm going for, I guess.

Then it was Leno, introducing him as a pro surfer. Letterman, with an album sitting at number three in the country. Saturday Night Live in March 2005, Ben Stiller dressed as a scarecrow in a sketch alongside him. Jack Johnson somehow never did an MTV Unplugged - but he says seeing Nirvana on that show in December 1993 inspired him: “"I remember watching Nirvana Unplugged in particular and thinking 'Wow, those songs still work even without all the distortion. They're still just beautiful songs.' I would play them on acoustic guitar, like a folk version, and my friends would pay attention. I started learning that a really good song can be played in any form." 

It's a strange kind of fame — a guy who used to shut down if anyone but his mom was in the room, suddenly doing bits with Ben Stiller on national television, with that ??? Talking Heads song in his Gulliver: “Well, how did I get here?”

Harper's read on it is the right one: Jack didn't grow into the arena, he stepped into it fully formed. Everyone else just had to catch up.

KOKUA

What Jack did with the platform matters as much as how fast it arrived. In 2003 he and Kim started the Kokua Hawaii Foundation, and the first Kokua Festival followed in 2004 — raising money for environmental and education causes around the world, built on the same friendship-first instinct that had gotten Jack there in the first place. As he puts it in the film, nothing worth creating comes from anywhere but relationships — the foundation exists because of friendship, same as the band, same as the movies.

GOODBYE, TAMAYO

And then the film does something few music documentaries have to do: it grieves. Tamayo Perry — the North Shore lifeguard, Pipe Masters Trials winner, and one of the watermen who shaped that whole world — died in a shark attack off Oahu's North Shore in June 2024, at 49. SURFILMUSIC doesn't rush past it. There's a paddle-out at Waimea, an outrigger pushed into the water in Tamayo's honor, and Jack, on a stage decades removed from Roy's open mic night, playing an old song that suddenly means something different than it did the day he wrote it.

At the Moonshine Film and Music Reunion in 2025, Tamayo's image was up on the screen while Jack played, and the room felt it. Chris Malloy talks about it as a big family sharing stories that matter more with each year that passes. Harper, reflecting on Jack's music generally, nails what makes it work: an intensity built for surfing, carried into songwriting with an ease that doesn't sound like it came from technique — it sounds like it came from somewhere real. Emmet has his own stories. Kim talks about being embarrassed, at this point in life, to still be the subject of those not so silly love songs, and how she falls in love with the guy all over again.

Q AND A

So that’s what the movie is about, but words don’t do justice to the surfing and travel images, the interviews, the familiar faces and exotic places and cameos by everyone from Sonny Miller (RIP   ) to Ben Stiller. 

After the movie, Emmet, Jack and Kim took the stage for a Q and A. One answer intrigued me. Jack was inspired to write “Good People” when he had to refuse several times an offer to write music for a reality show filming on the North Shore.

And I’d always wondered about the lyric that was either “We’ve got heaps and heaps of what we sow,” or “We’ve got heaps and heaps of worthless souls,” which came through loud and clear when he and his radcorrdonist jammed on some of their Greatest Hits.

For Alex and I, veterans of the Swinging 70s in Santa Cruz, this had the fun vibe of all those surf movies at the Civic and when Santa Cruz had one of the best music scenes in the state and the country - because all bands on their way up made it a point to play Santa Cruz.

That was cool.

OSCAR WORTHY?

I enjoyed SURFILMUSIC as much as I like the Charlie Sheen documentary, because both were put together with love and brains. Communicating with director Emmet on this - because Jack checks his email maybe once a month - I wondered if they were going to jump through the hoops to make this an Academy Award contender.

It’s easier to tell a story when there is a story to tell, and the evolution of Jack Johnson is the dream for tens of thousands of musicians around the world - to make music expressing what they are experiencing and feeling, and have the world embrace it.

Jack Johnson did that, and this is how he did it.