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Jacks Urges Fans to Serve Their Communities
Jack Johnson is currently promoting the United We Serve program on his Web site. “This summer, President Obama is asking all Americans to serve their country as part of the United We Serve campaign,” it says on JackJohnsonMusic.com. “The United We Serve campaign is one of the key on-going initiatives from the White House designed to make it easy to get involved, to build communities, and move the nation forward.” The program is looking for people to get involved in their individual communities nationwide, as part of what the program is hoping to make an historic summer of service.
Johnson’s Web site includes a quote from President Barack Obama. “We need your service, right now, at this moment in history,” the quote says. “I’m not going to tell you what your role should be; that’s for you to discover. But I am asking you to stand up and play your part. I am asking you to help change history’s course.” The concept is simple; if everyone does their part in their individual communities, it will affect the country on a nationwide scale. Each person can make a difference and benefit the area in which they live while working as a part of a larger goal. Visit Serve.gov for more information.
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More on Sharing Music
We’ve talked about sharing music on this blog before, and how Jack Johnson is a supporter of it, but I recently came across an interview with Johnson that I had not read before where he touches on the subject. “Speaking for myself, and not my record label or anyone else, I am totally down with it.” he said. “For me, none of this would have happened if it weren’t for bootlegging or any of this. This all started because of sharing music, so it is like a new style of grass-roots. With folk music, the kind of music we put out, it’s all about sharing. Sitting around my house singing the songs to myself would be silly.”
What Johnson said makes sense from his standpoint, but I can also see how the advent of sharing music irked some already established artists, such as Metallica. Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich has been a big critic of sharing music over the years. For artists trying to make it, though, they benefit from anything that brings their music to more people, whether they make money from it or not. There are definitely two sides to the issue, but I think it does more good than harm for the most part.
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Waiting For the Right Opportunity
Jack Johnson is certainly not the kind of person to compromise his beliefs or integrity just to make a buck. When Johnson was an up-and-coming artist, major labels were swarming all over, looking to mold and market the young singer/songwriter, but Johnson held strong and waited for the right opportunity to present itself, one that felt right. Johnson talked about giving his demos to Ben Harper producer J.P. Plunier in an interview, and how that got things going for him. “After hearing them he gave me some pointers, but then nothing came of it since I had to work on a surf film that took up a year of my time,” Johnson said. “Afterwards, I finally met Ben, and his producer mentioned that he and a partner of his, Andy Factor, were starting their own label (Enjoy) and wanted me to be their first artist.”
Johnson knew he had found a home after fending off the major labels for so long. “I know it’s a cliché, but it really was like ‘selling your soul to rock ‘n’ roll,’” he said of his conversations with major labels. “They were looking for someone who was willing to do anything to be a star, and that wasn’t for me.” I think it’s safe to say that every Jack Johnson fan is glad he didn’t change his image or his style in order to sell records.
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Jack and Dave Back in the Day
Did you know that Jack Johnson opened for Dave Matthews back when Johnson was in college? Well, it’s not exactly what you think. Johnson and his band at the time, Soil, opened for Matthews before either of the two were well-known artists like they are today. Johnson talked about the band and the experience in an old interview. “Yeah, it was fun; it was called Soil,” he said. “It was just like a really fun party band. “We actually opened for Dave Matthews once right before he was very famous. It was about a month before he got really big I remember. We opened for him and then about a month later, it was like ‘wait a minute, we opened for that guy but it wasn’t even sold out.’”
Johnson also said Soil opened for Sublime once around the same time. It’s funny that Johnson opened for Matthews just a month before Matthews and his band really made it big. I remember the explosion of DMB once the song “Too Much,” began getting airplay and play on MTV. It took Johnson longer to reach that kind of status, and he did it without the rest of Soil, but there’s no doubt that he made good on the promise that Matthews surely recognized during that show all those years ago.
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Jack’s Desire to Travel
Jack Johnson grew up in the beautiful paradise that is the Hawaiian Islands. Some people born in such a magnificent place would never have the desire to leave. Though he always has and always will love his home state, Johnson always had the desire to explore the world, and music gave him and avenue that would take him across the globe. “I’ve always played music and [my home state of] Hawaii is somewhere I want to go back to and somewhere I love,” he said in an interview once. “But it’s also a pretty small place. You can drive an hour and you’re on the other side of the islands.”
“I’ve always wanted to see the rest of the world,” he continued. “Music is kind of one of those options that ended up taking me to places I never got to see before.” At the time of the interview, Johnson was in Ohio on tour, and he noted that he was looking forward to return to his native land for a while. “As soon as I get back from this trip, I’m going to go back to Hawaii and surf for a couple of weeks,” he said.
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Kitchen Gardeners International
Jack Johnson is currently featuring the community group Kitchen Gardeners International on his Web site. The group is running a camping to encourage people to increase the amount of locally produced food the use for 4th of July celebrations. “Kitchen Gardeners International, a nonprofit from Maine, has launched the Food Independence Day campaign to encourage 50 states, 50 governors, and 50 first families to celebrate July 4 with locally sourced food,” it says on Jack Johnson.com. “You can pledge to join in the celebration of ‘edible independence’ by eating healthy and delicious foods from your own local farms, gardens and communities.”
“Local foods are patriotic, whether you’re buying them from producers in your area or growing some of your own,” it says on the Kitchen Gardeners International Web site. “They’re good for our local farmers, our economies, our health, and that of the planet. Best of all, they taste great because they’re fresh from the soil. This July 4th, we’re asking our nation’s first families not only to lead by example but to eat by example by sourcing their holiday meals as locally, deliciously, and sustainably as possible.” The group gives people a number of options to help with this cause, including signing their Facebook petition, contacting your state’s first family and more.
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Jack’s Path
Jack Johnson has always said that the surfing accident the experienced was not the thing that dissuaded him from pursuing a professional surfing career. “That choice was something I was always planning on doing,” he said of attending college in an interview. “I knew I didn’t want surfing as a profession. When I was a senior in high school, I already had a pro contract. In surfing, like anything, anytime you decide to make something completely public it is like it’s not yours anymore, and surfing was always something I wanted to keep mine. Nobody else has their hands in it.”
One has to wonder if he would have stuck to his guns if a great career did not present itself they way music has for Johnson. The musical path has been so fitting for Johnson that he didn’t have to think about using surfing as a career, but if it had not worked out so well perhaps he would have reconsidered. On the other hand, some people are just meant to live a certain way and Johnson seems like the kind of person that was destined to live a laid-back lifestyle. Traveling the world playing music and surfing in your spare time sounds pretty good.
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Breaking Through
It must have been a great feeling for Jack Johnson early in his career when he began to see the way people were responding to his music and accepting the positivity that came with it. “It’s crazy to actually play a show where you are headlining and people actually come out and pack a place,” he said in an old interview about a sold-out show in Solana Beach, CA. “It’s a really good feeling because the music I try to play is positive and it’s nice to know that people are into positive music.”
While it was a new experience for Johnson, it may have been even more so, as well as nerve-wracking, for his family. “It was a pretty surreal scene for my two brothers and their wives when they saw me play at one of the East Coast shows,” Johnson said. “They know it was weird for me to be playing in front of all these people - they were more nervous for me than I was for myself.” The more people that became exposed to Johnson’s music, the more the demand for his songs grew. Just to think that it all started with his surf trip buddies requesting copies of his music makes one realize how far Johnson has come over the years.
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Jack and Ben
It’s a well-known fact that Jack Johnson and Ben Harper are good friends, developing a relationship on tour years ago. Johnson was an up-and-coming musician at the time and Harper had already established himself as a versatile artist with plenty of meaning behind his work. Johnson was a big fan of Harper when the two embarked on their first tour together. “Doing the shows with Ben is not work at all, although the constant touring can get a little grueling,” Jack said at the time. “But at least once a day during that tour, I would trip out ... opening for a guy that was a favorite of mine for the past seven years!”
Johnson’s music has a similar vibe to that of Harper’s. “It’s because his music was the first kind of my generation that I really connected with,” Johnson said. “And it changed the way that I approached my own music—not in just copying Ben’s style of music, but in staying true with what I want to do with my own music.” There are definitely similarities between their music, but Harper pushes the genre limits a bit more, creating tracks infused with blues, gospel, folk and roots music. Any Jack Johnson fan that has not listened to Ben Harper’s music should definitely check it out.
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Surfing Always Seems to Help
The hectic nature and seemingly endless travel of touring can often come as a bit of a shock to an up-and-coming musician. Jack Johnson, however, was more prepared than most when he began touring in the early stages of his music career. “It’s fun but at the same time with all the different surf films I’ve done, I’m kind of used to it,” he said in an old interview. “Those are even tougher because with this stuff we’re traveling America. I’m used to doing trips where we’re in uncharted territories. We’ll go down and try to find these islands off of India. We’ll find a fisherman that can take us down to a bay and jump onto a boat that we’re taking out for a few weeks and we’re catching fish for food. It’s funner in a lot of ways and also a lot more challenging. This can get a little more monotonous and it’s kind of like every day is the same.”
Yet again surfing somehow helps Johnson in his music career. Whether it’s giving him inspiration or time to write, or providing him with traveling experience, surfing has found a way to help this artist in his chosen profession. His tales from his surf trips are always fascinating, and ring of a lifestyle that is lost on most people.
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