“Oh man, that’s the first one I’ve messed up tonight,” Jack Johnson told his first Tampa crowd in seven years. He had just flubbed on the last verse of “Rodeo Clowns,” his contribution to G. Love’s 1999 album Philadelphonic. It’s a nearly 20-year-old song, and it’s the one that first put the 42-year-old former pro surfer, filmmaker and seaside folk philosopher turned songwriter on folk-rock fans’ radars — so the slip up was understandable.
“That’s pretty good for me though,” Johnson, who doesn’t mask mistakes onstage, went on to say. “You guys are pretty lucky.”
Lucky, indeed. In the middle of a week that opened with a music festival shooting which left 59 concertgoers dead, a little luck, and a whole lot of positivity, was just what music lovers needed. A spirit of defiance in the face of fear and apprehension was tangible in the crowd, and some — like Kelsey and Joe Mitchals who brought their two year old daughter and eight week old son to the show — knew that a Jack Johnson show, complete with the most laidback of vibes, would be a remedy for the post-Vegas, post-Petty blues.
Officials at MidFlorida Credit Union Amphitheatre didn’t leave anything to chance though, and the beefed up security — think extra Sheriff’s deputies, some decked out in full camo — was a subdued acknowledgement of the horror music fans had to endure over the last 72 hours.
For more than two hours, however, Johnson and a three-piece band of longtime friends (Culver City Dub Collective’s Adam Topol on drums, bassist Merlo Podlewski and former Django Reinhardt singer Zach Gill) did their best to give a packed room full of flip-flop wearing fans something of a reprieve from it all. And for the most part, it worked like a charm.
In front of a backdrop as stripped-back as any one of his simple folk tunes, Johnson opened with “Hope” before packing the 28-song set with fan favorites (“Banana Pancakes,” “Breakdown,” and “Flake” all elicited big singalongs) and subtly slick guitar work (“Holes To Heaven,” “Inaudible Melodies,” and “Good People” were all accentuated with punchy chords and warm, bright tone). Surprisingly, Johnson with a Telecaster in hand is even more fun to watch than he his strumming out rhythm on a Taylor acoustic, and where cuts from earlier albums like Brushfire Fairytales, On and On, and In Between Dreams (all released between 2001-2005) didn’t need a boost, Johnson was smart enough to bring his excellent choice for an opener — Toronto tropi-pop jazz outfit Bahamas — out to beef up a mini-set of songs that featured “Big Sur” and “Subplots,” two highlights from a new album All the Light Above It Too, released less than a month ago.
And while “Staple It Together,” “If I Had Eyes” and “No Other Way” unfolded into medleys that included covers of Led Zeppelin, Sublime and Jane’s Addiction, big cheers came early in the set when Johnson flipped “Sitting, Waiting, Wishing” into “I Won’t Back Down” by Tom Petty, the Gainesville rock icon who, in the last 36 hours, managed to die twice (once by news headlines and later in the day by an announcement from family). The Petty worship was especially poignant on a cover of “You Don’t Know How It Feels” from Petty’s carefree 1994 album, Wildflowers. The song features a pre-chorus (“...let me get to the point/let's roll another joint/and turn the radio loud…”) as freewheeling as the song’s harmonica parts, but the rest of it is a rock and roll reminder that biological clocks really do tick at an alarmingly fast rate that nobody should ever take life for granted.
“There's somewhere I gotta go. And you don't know how it feels,” are the last words Petty sings on the song. “No, you don't know how it feels to be me.”
That sentiment — a muted one about empathy and kindness — is one that quietly ran through the air as a crowd that felt larger than the anticipated 14,000 took in the performance. All around, parents kept their kids out late on a school night — a couple seated in section five couldn’t stop hugging their two teenage kids. People shouted lyrics to songs they knew and even swayed to the ones they didn’t. They wore shirts that explained how they felt inside (one read “Be Kind To Other People,” Bahamas drummer Jason Tait wore one that said “Protect Trans Kids”), and where Johnson didn’t shy away from his political songs (including his Trump-ruffling new single “My Mind Is For Sale”) he never had to soapbox to get a point across because somehow, buried in that sandal-rock that gets panned by so many elitists armed and ready with criticisms about easy-going pop-folk, is a message.
“We were victims together but lonely,” Johnson sings on “If I Had Eyes” before unfurling a metaphor about building things with bent nails. “We're falling, but holding.”
These days, things do feel like they’re all going to shit, but leave it to the simple man from Hawaii to remind us that the ability to hold it all together isn’t as out-of-reach as it seems sometimes. Nah, every now and then you just have to lean on the stranger next to you, sing a song and allow yourself to remember that you’re still alive. What a lucky feeling, indeed.
Have a look at more photos from the show below and listen to a playlist of songs from the set here.
Setlist
Hope
Taylor
Sitting, Waiting, Wishing / I Won’t Back Down (Tom Petty)
You and Your Heart
Staple It Together / Whole Lotta Love (Led Zeppelin)
Upside Down
Flake
Holes To Heaven / Badfish (Sublime) / Boss D.J. (Sublime)
Inaudible Melodies
My Mind Is For Sale
You Can’t Control It
If I Had Eyes / Foxey Lady (Jimi Hendrix)
Good People
No Other Way / I Would For You (Jane’s Addiction)
Rodeo Clowns
Subplots [w/Bahamas]
Breakdown [w/Bahamas]
Big Sur [w/Bahamas]
You Don’t Know How It Feels [w/Bahamas] (Tom Petty)
Banana Pancakes
Shot Reverse Shot
Wasting Time
Bubble Toes
Mudfootball
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Do You Remember [solo acoustic]
A Pirate Looks At Forty [solo acoustic] (Jimmy Buffett)
Willie Got Me Stoned and Stole All My Money
Better Together
