Jack Johnson is the King of Laid Back, and while Jimmy Buffett and others might come close, but Johnson gets the title; casual dress, easy smile, fluid musical style, unapologetic forgetting of lyrics, spontaneity, solo playing of requests and just plain appearing to have fun were on display at Saratoga Performing Arts Center (SPAC) on Wednesday, June 24.
Dressed in sandals, a yellow t-Shirt, loose black jeans and a crew cut which betrayed a little salt within the pepper, Johnson and his three band mates (also very laid back) hung loose from start to finish Wednesday night after an enthusiastically received opening by Hermanos Gutierrez. Los hermanos, a pair of self-described Swiss/Ecuadoran brothers, strummed and slid Latino-influenced guitar strains that were both uplifting and evocative, almost haunting. They later joined Johnson and his band in the show for recent collaborations.
“It’s an honor to be here setting the tone for tonight’s concert, showing the relationship with my brother and taking you on a journey to places we’ve been,” said brother Alejandro Gutierrez, introducing the Hermanos’ set.
The places often included the desert, but roved to the Andes Mountains, sets of spaghetti westerns, and ultimately the universe, with a rising sound that spoke to the fullness of the cosmos with all its sub-rhythms and whirling planets and galaxies.
Along the way, the Gutierrez brothers, who were different in appearance (Estevan with a black western hat, long hair, tattoos and silver and turquoise jewelry, and Alejandro with a simple blue shirt and shorter hair) melded diverse rhythms with a guitar slide on the lap steel, a thumb-slapping style of percussion on the guitar, vibrating chords and clip-clopping effects to recreate the desert cycles of sun, wind, life, perhaps death, and wild-west stimuli, such as crying birds or galloping. You half expected to see Clint Eastwood in a poncho on horseback during the brothers’ homage to movie Westerns.
Often los hermanos’ heads nodded in time with the pulsing of their music and “the relationship as brothers,’ as Alejandro put it.
Jack Johnson and company, which included Zach Gill on keyboards, and later melodica and accordion; Merlo Podlewski on bass guitar, and Adam Topol on drums and percussion, ambled onto the stage at about 8:45 p.m. and rolled out video footage and genre-defying music for their current “Surfilmusic” (Surfing, Film, Music) tour.
Johnson calls Hawaii home and has long been an advocate of climate care, especially as related to the oceans, via his surfer connection.
The band led off with an upbeat, almost calypso version of what can only be described as a medley of “Mud Football”, “Flake” and “In the Summertime” (by Mungo Jerry), inviting the audience to clap along and segueing from water scenes to dated footage of kids on skateboards as the backdrop imagery.
Medleys prevailed in Johnson’s performance with him and the band segueing through multiple songs without commentary or introduction, and fluidly inserting lyrics from artists ranging from Led Zeppelin to Steve Miller, before sliding equally effortlessly back to Johnson’s repertoire.
In what was the second or third number, depending on how you counted the songs that elided in the medley, Johnson started out with phrasing and lyrics from Tina Turner’s “What’s Love Got to Do with it” then shifted to the familiar lyrics, “I can’t always be waiting on you…always be playing the fool” from his own song, “Sitting, Waiting, Wishing” before interjecting a comment.
“All the love songs tonight are going to be for my wife,” Johnson said. “All the breakup songs are gonna be for my friends… I forgot what the second verse is, so I’m kind of up here killing time,” he laughed, and the audience roared its appreciation.
The good-natured glitch was one of at least two recall malfunctions that Johnson grinned off and later described as “sitting around the campfire” music, more evidence of his King of Laid Back nomination.
Johnson continued with a string of old favorites by switching to a ukulele for his classic, “Breakdown,” while Gill simultaneously showed his prowess on keyboards and the melodica, a small keyboard attached to a breathing tube that produced sounds like a harmonica.
After an anecdote about his friend Chris Malloy being advised to bring Johnny Walker Red and cigarettes along on tour although no one on the tour partook, Johnson’s band launched into the darker “Holes to Heaven,” a ballad which includes a line about bribing officials “with cigarettes and booze”.
Johnson was good about connecting the inspiration for songs to his lyrics, as in his introduction to “If I Had Eyes,” a song he wrote after one of his young sons had told him if he had a tail with an eyeball on the end of it, it would say, “Hey Dad, you look good!”
The sweet memory wended its way into the song along with the bittersweet realization that “Sometimes time doesn’t heal, not at all. Just stands still while we fall.’’
The brief moment of existential awareness gave way to a raucous rendition of “Bubble Toes,” with bongos, audience clapping and participation in choruses of “La(t), Da(t), Da, Da Da(t)’ and Gill standing up on his piano stool to do an animated instrumental solo on the melodica.
The song’s staccato lyrics verged on almost scat styling from Johnson’s early work on Brushfire Fairytales (2001) in contrast to the easy-going, folksier “Banana Pancakes” and “Better Together” in In Between Dreams (2005). Both tunes had their turn later in the show’s lineup.
In one of their medley segues, Johnson and his band switched from the “La(t) Da(t) Da Da(t)s of “Bubble Toes” to “the story of Billy Joe and Bobbie Sue” in Steve Miller’s “Take the Money and Run” before slowing down to the easy, sliding lyrics of “Wasting Time.” Mid-song, Johnson broke stride to converse with Gill, who was on keyboards.
“How you doin’ over there?” Johnson asked Gill, who answered with a grin, “Good.”
Then, with a trademark grin on his face, Johnson turned to the audience. “You guys want to hear Zach sing?”
The crowd roared and Gill proceeded to ham up the remaining lyrics of “Wasting Time” in a mini solo, which the audience loved.
Before bringing on the Hermanos Gutierrez, Johnson explained “three or four years ago, a good friend of mine turned me on to this really good music. I listened to it and said, ‘Wow, I wanna jam with these guys so bad.” The result was correspondence with the Hermanos Gutierrez, exchanging ideas for songs and ultimately an ode to a lost friend called “Hold on to the Light,” which Johnson played next.
A four-song collaboration on stage followed Wednesday night with the Gutierrez brothers, beginning with the up-tempo “September Sessions” and some super gnarly footage of surfers. Estevan Gutierrez contributed on bongos, Gill did an interlude on organ and Johnson called for the audience to improvise “ch” sounds for added percussion before a rock’n’roll finish.
The largely instrumental “Drink the Water” followed, and the collaborative set ended with “F-Stop Blues” and Gill jumping and jamming on the accordion.
“I Got You” was among “B Flat” songs that Johnson performed on an acoustic guitar, noting that he began writing about five songs in B flat, after a “tuney thing” fell off the end of his guitar, bringing one of the strings down to a B flat and opening up an opportunity for Johnson to write a limited number of songs in the new key. “I Got You” was among them, and, in turn, gave Wednesday’s audience the chance to help Johnson whistle an interlude in the song.
The next big surprise was Mark Williams, a trombonist whom Johnson and his band had met in New York City. Williams made his way on stage from the wings as Johnson said, “ [he’s] gonna jam with us now,” adding points to Johnson’s laid-back, improvisational rep.
And jam Williams did, with and without a mute for a medley of “Upside Down”/”Badfish” and then “Staple It Together,” showcasing solos by Topol on drums and Williams on trombone, before morphing into Led Zepellin’s “Whole Lotta Love”.
Williams exited with kudos from the audience afterward, but the jammy style continued with “Where Do All the Good People Go.” It included some honkytonk accompaniment from Gill and rappy, scat-like lyric delivery by Johnson, sliding words together with his easy style.
Thereafter, the whole band took to the wings except Johnson, who was left alone with a guitar and a promise.
“All right,” he said, “This is where I start taking requests,” adding, “This part of the night is kind of like friends around a campfire.”
Johnson accommodated several requests, including “Do You Remember?,” “Washing Dishes” and “Go On,” but not before he related an anecdote from an improvised walking tour earlier in the day in the Spa City.
Johnson proceeded to relate that on “a little walk” near a “carbonated water spring,” the band had encountered an older woman on a bicycle who told them they should try the healthful water from the spring.
“It smelled like a fart,” Johnson laughed, in reference to the sulfur in the water, “but it’s really beautiful here.”
Johnson closed in on his finale with the very personal and evocative story-song, “Constellations,” based on his own experience as a child with his siblings.
“My dad was really good about showing us the constellations,” Johnson said. “He’d tell us, ‘This is this, and that is that, but it doesn’t really matter,’ so we started making up our own constellations.” Lying on their backs with the night sky overhead, that’s what they did, a memory so powerful and fond that it made its way into song.
The closing number, again chalking up votes for the easy-going, spontaneous, “King of Laid Back’’ title, was a medley of “Angel” and “Better Together, for which not only Johnson’s band, but their cameo guest, Williams, returned to the stage.
There were no frills, no crescendos, not even an encore afterward. It was a final tribute to memories, good times, love and classic Jack Johnson:
Our dreams, and they are made out of real things
Like a shoebox of photographs
With sepia-toned loving
Love is the answer, at least for most of the questions in my heart
Like why are we here? And where do we go?
…It’s not always easy and
Life can be deceiving
I’ll tell you one thing, it’s always better when we’re together.
Jack Johnson, with a smile on his face and a song in his heart, has been telling us lots of things throughout his 25-year career, but mostly perhaps, “Hang loose.”
Setlist: Surfilmusic Intro, Mudfootball/Flake/In the Summertime Medley, What’s Love Got to Do With It/Sitting, Waiting, Wishing, Breakdown, Holes to Heaven, Inaudible Melodies, If I Had Eyes, Bubble Toes/Take the Money and Run, Wasting Time, Hold on to the Light, September Sessions*, Drink the Water*, Ganges A Go-Go/Symbol in My Driveway*, Low Sun*, F-Stop Blues*, Banana Pancakes, Tape Deck/Roadrunner, Ones and Zeroes (Intro and First Verse), I Got You, Upside Down/Badfish (with Mark Williams), Staple It Together/Whole Lotta Love (with Mark Williams), Good People, Do You Remember, Washing Dishes, Go On, Constellations, Angel/Better Together
* with Hermanos Gutierrez
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