IN THE RECORDING STUDIO at the back of the 1920s Craftsman-style bungalow that serves as Brushfire Records’ Los

Jack Johnson

Jack Johnson takes it easy in Santa Barbara, California

Jack Johnson

Johnson and his Trademark Flip-Flops

Angeles headquarters, Jack Johnson taps out a groove on the snare and high hat while he whomp-whomps a bass drum with his foot. Johnson, 32, has put aside his guitar this November afternoon because this evening he’ll be playing percussion for his piano player, Zach Gill, who’s recording the first few tracks for an upcoming solo album. At the moment, Gill and a half dozen others are standing in the backyard, near an open entrance to the studio. In a scene that merges Home Improvement with Entourage, a woman from the healing center next door pops her head over the fence. “Is there any way you guys can shut that door?” she asks. “We’re doing massages and stuff.”

Someone in the Brushfire crowd quickly obliges. Maybe it’s not what the guys in Pete Doherty’s posse would have done. But Jack Johnson is a low-impact, less-is-more kind of guy. You hear it in his music鈥攃atchy little pop songs backed by spare guitar strumming that even at top volume are pretty inoffensive. You also see it in his Hawaiian country lifestyle. Johnson lives close to Pipeline, near his childhood home on Oahu’s North Shore, and his free time is focused on family and friends, surfing, and using his celebrity status to help slow the despoliation of the islands. Not exactly the setup you might expect from an international rock star鈥攁nd while Johnson doesn’t seem entirely comfortable with that role, he’s stuck with it.

Johnson has sold nearly six million copies of his 2005 release, In Between Dreams. Add in the rest of his discography, which includes a kid-friendly soundtrack for the 2006 movie Curious George, and his total sales top 13 million. He’s something of an accidental icon, a surf filmmaker who became a multiplatinum recording phenom without really trying, and his noncommercial image is part of his appeal. “People see Jack as the anti-bling,” says Mark Cunningham, a champion bodysurfer and former lifeguard at Pipeline. “He’s a backlash to all that crap.”

While he’s not so radical that he gives away his CDs or sells concert tickets for $5, Johnson does have his rage鈥擮K, exasperation鈥攁gainst the machine. At one point during the afternoon, he sticks out his puffy bottom lip, closes his eyes, and earnestly sings a line he loves from Fugazi’s 1990 tune “Merchandise”: “You are not what you own.” Back in the day, he wore a T-shirt that said the same. “It was music that had a real message,” he told me.

Johnson’s music has a message, too, but it’s not so much in the songs as in how he brings them to the public. He’s toured on a biodiesel bus since 2005, and he requires that performance venues buy carbon offsets for every show and compost the organic waste from his concerts. He’s staged the Kokua Festival in Oahu each spring since 2004鈥攑laying with friends like Eddie Vedder, Ben Harper, and Willie Nelson鈥攁nd donates proceeds to the Kokua Hawaii Foundation, which he started to support environmental education in schools.

With the recent remodeling of the Brushfire offices, he and his business partner, Emmett Malloy鈥攃ousin of the pro-surfer Malloy brothers, Chris, Keith, and Dan鈥攏ow operate one of the most eco-minded record companies in the industry. The Brushfire studios run on electricity provided by 32 rooftop solar panels; the building is insulated with blue-jeans scraps and outfitted with compact fluorescent lighting and low-flush toilets. Johnson even recorded Sleep Through the Static, his new album, which hits stores in February, in analog, on a hand-me-down 24-track Studer deck that reportedly once taped a David Bowie album.

Still, the reason millions of people buy Jack Johnson albums isn’t because of his toilets or the fact that he donates 1 percent of his profits to environmental causes. It’s because of his rootsy, campfire vibe and a distinctive sixties sensibility, which he’s reclaimed for the new millennium. “I’m a hippie,” he says. “I just have short hair.”

LET ME BE BLUNT: I’m no Jack Johnson groupie鈥攈is music just doesn’t make much of an impression on me. But he’s a skilled craftsman of infectious pop songs, and I’ve caught myself more than once singing along to one of his tunes on the radio.

Music critics have been less generous. Rolling Stone, after ignoring Johnson’s 2001 debut album, Brushfire Fairytales, gave On and On (2003) just two stars out of five, complaining that Johnson’s “Hawaiian surfer’s croon evokes the mellow-yellow moan of Donovan but without the weirdness that made that psychedelic folkie compelling.” Blender accused him of writing “lazy dorm-room poetry.” A New York Times reviewer said of one of his 2005 concerts, “About half the show exuded a sleepy charm; the other half was much the same, only without the charm.”

But one thing critics often miss with Johnson is something that doesn’t necessarily come through the speakers: There’s no act. “He’s just Jack,” as Rob Machado, one of his many pro-surfer friends, told me. “No matter what, he’s going to be onstage in flip-flops and a T-shirt. He’s just going to tell stories鈥攁nd they’re real.”

Johnson has a knack for making even the most overt celebrity moments feel authentic, as I saw for myself when I met him earlier today in the rustic one-room house Malloy rents in Malibu. Johnson was using it for a photo shoot with Vogue, but the atmosphere was more Fourth of July barbecue than high-fashion showcase. As Johnson worked with the photographer, Malloy was out on the deck, grilling a fish for tacos. I sat on a step with Johnson’s wife, Kim, and the two Johnson kids, along with a family friend visiting from New York, a guy who runs biodiesel stations in Los Angeles, and Johnson’s publicist. All the while, Johnson was warm and attentive to his wife and kids, and seemed like part of the crew. There were no nannies, no deferential ass-kissing from the FOJs.

After we downed the tacos鈥攕erved on brown recycled paper towels鈥攚e headed for the Brushfire building across town. “I can drive if you want to take notes,” Johnson said as we walked up the driveway to my truck. I declined, and he folded his six-foot frame into the passenger seat. While we headed south on the Pacific Coast Highway, the ocean as calm as a lake and the charred hills still redolent of ash from the recent wildfires, Johnson recounted the now well-known details of his past: He grew up riding waves on the North Shore but chose studying film at UC Santa Barbara over a pro-surfing career. In 1999, he wrote a couple of songs for a surf film he produced with Emmett and Chris Malloy, then stumbled into fame after being noticed by Ben Harper’s manager.

He also tried to explain the roots of his eco-sensibilities. Some of his best childhood memories, he said, were formed when the ocean flattened out and his dad took him to the outer islands off Oahu in a traditional Hawaiian canoe. “Those canoes are only as wide as your hips, as long as six people, and with just a little leg space between you and the person in front of you,” he said. “Everything you’d bring would have to fit into that space. It couldn’t spill over. You couldn’t pay more to bring extra baggage.” The material, in essence, was immaterial. “That’s as happy as I’d ever been,” he added. “It wasn’t about being overloaded with Christmas presents.”

It’s that scale-it-back philosophy that Johnson’s trying to bring to his music career鈥攆ollowing a path, he’s quick to point out, paved by musicians like Neil Young, Pearl Jam, and Willie Nelson.

“I’m not trying to act like I’ve got all the answers and that I’m greener than everyone else,” he said as we turned onto a tree-lined boulevard. “I want to do what I can to help, but sometimes it starts to overwhelm me. It’s hard, because as soon as you put your voice in there, all of a sudden you’re the guy the newspaper wants to talk to. I accept the fact that I’m a somewhat known personality now and I like that I can use it for good things, but I ultimately don’t want to run for president.”

JOHNSON MAY NOT BE hitting the campaign trail, but with a new album in the wings and a worldwide tour to follow, he’s getting plenty of attention. Moments after we arrived at Brushfire Records, Johnson’s PR team grabbed him for a photo shoot with Entertainment Weekly.

As he posed in the foyer, guitar over his shoulder, I noticed a surfboard鈥攁 fat, short fish design that harks back to the loose and smooth soul surfing of the 1970s鈥攍eaning against the wall in a corner. The board and the revamped 1920s house both speak to the humbler, back-to-basics environmentalism that appeals to Johnson: It’s all about embracing the past, returning to the simpler life鈥攂ut with better technology.

As Johnson explains it, Kelly Slater started riding new high-performance boards in the 1990s that were ridiculously thin and narrow. Slater, who’s known as”the Freak” for his extraordinary surfing abilities, could ride these boards with flair, but lots of other surfers couldn’t. Then the fish and other retro styles made a comeback. “You jump on there and suddenly you can glide again,” Johnson says. “I think about this in terms of music or anything: Sometimes things progress to the point that it’s not really progressing anymore. You get to this dead end, where you need to look back.”

As much respect as Johnson has for the past, at the moment he’s also looking toward the future. Brushfire is a growing enterprise, with a roster of musicians that now includes G. Love, Zach Gill’s longtime band ALO, Matt Costa, Rogue Wave, Money Mark, and Mason Jennings. All share Johnson’s just-kicking-it sensibility. “We do things that feel very handmade,” says Malloy.

Sleep Through the Static continues the tradition, although Johnson ventures further away from acoustic than he’s ever strayed, playing electric guitar on several tracks. This new sound won’t remind anyone of Hendrix, or even a plugged-in Dylan, and Johnson is certainly not remaking himself to win over the critics. “People like Jack, and his records mean a lot to them,” says Malloy. “All people need is another one. It doesn’t have to be different. It just has to be 14 new songs.”

Later, as the sun’s about to set, Johnson moves to the roof with the EW photo team. I head down to the studio with Gill, who sits on a giant exercise ball in front of a piano and plays a few of his songs for me鈥攁t one point the room momentarily goes dark because the lights are on a timer鈥攕tarting with “All Still Family” and then moving on to a lovely dirge he wrote for the 2007 documentary Arctic Tale. He composed the tune for a scene showing a starving polar bear cub that dies as its mother stands by helplessly while the snow slowly covers its body, but the song didn’t make the final cut. Now it, like everything else here, is being recycled鈥攁nd it may well appear on Gill’s solo album.

A few minutes later, Johnson returns and sits at the drums. “Let’s do ‘Family,'” he says. “1-2-3-4 . . .” As they jam, they look for all the world like a couple of friends in a garage, transported somewhere far away, lost in the sound. They aren’t playing for me or anyone else, nothing is being recorded, and the door is shut, so the neighbors have no reason to complain. They’re just making a few footprints in the sand that the tide will soon erase. And no fluorescent lightbulb, biodiesel vehicle, or low-flush toilet is greener than that.

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A FEW MILES FROM THE ENDLESS MALLS and garish tourist attractions of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, there’s an exotic-animal preserve that houses a group of four-year-old liger brothers named Hercules, Zeus, Vulcan, and Sinbad. Ligers, the offspring of a lion father and tiger mother, are the world’s largest cats, weighing up to half a ton each聴double the heft of either parent. They’re hybrids, and you won’t see them in accredited American zoos, which look askance at letting different species breed. But that’s how it is with hybrids: They don’t get much respect and they’re easy to miss, even when they’re right under your nose.

Hybrid Animals

SWEET MIXES: Zane the zonkey (zebra + donkey)

Hybrid Animals

Hercules the liger (lion + tiger)

Hybrid Animals

Hercules

Hybrid Animals

A zorse (zebra + horse) named Zantazia

And yet, when you start looking around, they’re everywhere.

Zorses, wholphins, tigons, and beefaloes. Lepjags, zonkeys, camas, and bonanzees. These are some of the captive-bred mammalian hybrids that exist, and they’re joined by a host of hybrid birds, fish, insects, and plants. Thanks to new techniques that allow scientists to isolate and compare DNA, more hybrids are turning up every year, and we’re learning that some of them聴such as the pizzly, a cross between a polar bear and a grizzly聴can occur naturally in the wild.

Hybrids evoke wonder and fear, magic and folklore. Their very existence unsettles our concept of what’s out there, now and in the past. In fact, scientists are currently debating the extent to which hybrid breeding may have occurred during the evolution of man. Some contend that interspecies hanky-panky between humans and chimps聴resulting in, yes, “humanzees”聴went on for a million years or more after the two species split off from a common ancestor. Even now, there may be ghostly traces of this forbidden genetic lambada in our chromosomes.

Sound hard to believe? That’s the hybrid calling card. They strain credulity聴even when they’re staring you in the face.

AT THE INSTITUTE OF GREATLY Endangered and Rare Species (TIGERS), outside Myrtle Beach, the ligers share a 50-acre spread with some 80 other nonhybrid cats, bears, primates, wolves, and raptors, as well as a white crocodile and an African elephant. Animal trainer Bhagavan Antle, 47, runs TIGERS with a crew of assistants who live on the grounds, eat vegetarian meals, and learn how to work safely with the menagerie.

I first meet Antle at the fenced-off preserve on a cold, wet January day. Inside a safari-themed lodge used to greet visitors who pay for private tours, he shows me recordings of his numerous media appearances and movie gigs. He’s provided animals for such Hollywood films as Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, Forrest Gump, and Dr. Dolittle.

Antle, who wears a ponytail and hoop earrings, is something of a hybrid himself. Raised on an Arizona cattle ranch, in the late seventies he became a disciple of Swami Satchidananda, whose claim to fame was saying the opening blessing at Woodstock.

Antle’s exotic-animal career just sort of happened after he started working at a health clinic affiliated with the swami’s ashram, Yogaville, in Buckingham County, Virginia. In 1982, a visitor to the clinic gave Antle a tiger cub. Later, another visitor聴one who worked for “tiger in your tank” Exxon聴asked him to lecture on health issues, cub in tow, at a company gathering. By the mid-eighties, Antle had become a full-time exotic-animal guy, breeding and training large, charismatic species for exhibition and rental to the entertainment industry. To his astonishment, a few years later, his male lion Arthur successfully mated with one of his tigresses. A second liger litter arrived in 2002.

A movie that Antle had nothing to do with made ligers famous. In 2004’s geek-glorifying Napoleon Dynamite, Napoleon sketches a liger in his school notebook and declares, “It’s pretty much my favorite animal … Bred for its skills in magic.” Antle, one of the few liger owners in the world, did the rounds with Anderson Cooper and Matt Lauer. “We had such a big splash of exposure,” he says. “We saw the valuable public appeal. It was like opening a chapter of myth that had come to life.”

After Antle finishes showing me around, three of his assistants appear on the lodge’s deck with Sinbad. The supersize beast has lighter stripes than a tiger and a lion-shaped head with no mane. His arms look stubby and his pectoral muscles are sagging. As we watch through a glass wall, a woman offers a chunk of meat from atop a platform, to make Sinbad stand and show off his 12-foot frame. The assistants guide him around using chains and a baby bottle, and then Antle invites me out for a closer look. He walks up and snuggles Sinbad’s muzzle. “Hi, bud,” he coos, as if he’s playing kissy-face with a kitten.

Sinbad could remove Antle’s head with a single chomp, but I’m more enchanted than scared. It’s like seeing a Sasquatch or centaur in the flesh. “In our core belief, people don’t want to accept the idea that two distinctly different-looking wild animals can reproduce,” Antle says. “Ligers make people understand that hybridization is real.”

CHARLES DARWIN UNDERSTOOD that hybridization is real, and it deeply confused him.

In The Origin of Species, he devoted a chapter to hybrids, but their existence was a riddle he never really solved. Hybrid animals like mules, Darwin noted, are usually sterile. He deemed it a “strange arrangement” that nature would afford two species the “special power” to create hybrids but then prevent these offspring from propagating. He offered squishy theories about why this is so聴nobody knew anything about genes then聴and on how hybrids fit into his overarching theory of natural selection.

Nine years later, in a book that examined variation in domesticated animals, Darwin explored hybrids more closely聴there was even a mention of ligers, which had first been bred in England in 1824. Darwin asserted that hybrids might inadvertently push back the evolutionary clock, resurrecting traits that were better left behind. He used the mixing of human racial groups as an example, stating that foreign travelers frequently remarked on “the degraded state and savage disposition of crossed races of man.”

Darwin’s hybrids-are-bad dictum became orthodoxy during evolutionary biology’s “modern synthesis,” in the 1930s and ’40s, which firmly connected genetics to natural selection. Harvard ornithologist Ernst Mayr, a leading neo-Darwinist, set the tone by dismissing hybrids as an evolutionary dead end.

Mayr’s verdict involved a surprisingly contentious question: What exactly is a species? Darwin had seen it as an arbitrary designation for animals that have similar physical features. Mayr came up with a concrete definition known as the “biological species concept.” A species, he declared, is a reproductively isolated group that can interbreed.

By this formula, a species was a fixed unit that was improved over time by forces like random mutation and mate selection, not by having “gene flow”聴biologese for doin’ the nasty聴with other species. “Species were rocks,” says Michael Arnold, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Georgia who studies hybridization in both plants and animals.

But maybe they aren’t. Arnold is part of a growing camp that sees species as more liquid than solid, and he rejects the idea that hybrids are always evolutionary losers just because they often can’t reproduce. “A lot of us have been hammering away on this for many years,” says Arnold. “They used to call us the Mongol hordes at their gates, but now we’re inside.”

Arnold is pushing a profound reconceptualization of evolution, one in which hybrids are more than bit players. Forget the tree of life, with new species neatly branching off from a common ancestor. It’s a web of life, and hybrids help genes flow in unexpected directions.

But what about their famous sterility? Some hybrids can reproduce, and Arnold stresses that rare events have an “overwhelming importance” in the evolutionary process. Hybrids often have desirable traits聴some are more fit than either parent聴and there have been instances when hybrids were able to find enough fertile hybrid partners to create a new species. This process appears to be under way right now in the U.S., involving a hybrid of the Pecos pupfish and the sheepshead minnow that has greatly multiplied and expanded its range. And some scientists contend that matings between gray wolves and coyotes thousands of years ago created an entirely new species: the red wolf.

More commonly, though, hybrids mate with one of their parent species, influencing the mix of what gets passed along to subsequent generations; essentially, they provide a bridge for genes to cross the species divide.

In a paper about hybridization and primate evolution that Arnold co-wrote last year for the journal Zoology, he offers several examples, including chimpanzees and bonobos. DNA studies suggest that these two great apes swapped genes sometime after separating from a shared ancestor at least 800,000 years ago. Arnold believes these ape cousins occasionally mated but that the resulting “bonanzees” did not establish a new species. Instead, they hooked up with either chimps or bonobos. Bonanzees ultimately vanished, but they left genetic footprints in the genomes of their descendants.

In addition to comparing genomes for evidence of unusual gene flow, scientists increasingly are using DNA analysis to confirm the existence of heretofore unknown natural hybrids, whose existence argues that this process still occurs. On April 16, 2006, a hunter in Canada’s Northwest Territories shot a polar bear whose fur had an orangish tint. Research showed that this animal had a grizzly bear father, making it the first confirmed wild pizzly ever found. (Pizzlies had been bred before in captivity.) In 2003, DNA analysis done by the Forest Service confirmed that five odd-looking felines found in Maine and Minnesota were bobcat-lynx hybrids, dubbed blynxes. Other DNA-confirmed hybrid mammals reported since 1999 include the forest/savanna elephant in sub-Saharan Africa, minks-polecats in France, and a sheep-goat in Botswana.

How much, then, do hybrids contribute to evolution? Nobody really knows. That’s what’s so exciting about these new DNA discoveries: The story is still unfolding.

LEAVING ASIDE THEIR evolutionary import, there’s a simpler reason hybrids fascinate. Some are astonishingly beautiful.

In Ramona, California, Nancy Nunke raises zorses and zonkeys at a six-acre spread called the Spots ‘N Stripes Ranch, which mainly exists to breed zebras and miniature horses for show and for sale to private animal owners. After I pass through a security gate, Nunke greets me at her house and then points out her one zorse and two zonkeys, who are peeping at us from nearby corrals.

Nunke introduces me to her zorse, Zantazia, which, at seven months old, is still a zoal. This delicate creature has a sorrel coat, a horse’s long and thin face, and white stripes on her head, neck, torso, and legs. The offspring of a quarter horse mother and a Grevy’s zebra father, she may end up standing taller than both.

I reach out to stroke Zantazia’s neck, but she backs away. Nunke says zorses and zonkeys are friendly, but they have to set the pace. “It’s like if you walked down Main Street and someone threw his arms around you,” she says. “You’d say, ‘Hey, buddy, back off.’ “

Nunke has a soft spot for all “stripeys,” which she thinks are more playful and affectionate than horses. “Horses will rub on you because they have an itch,” she says. “A zebra will rub on you because he’s your best friend.” Zorses inherit the souls of zebras, she adds. “If they have one stripe, you train them exactly like you train a zebra. The z is totally in them.”

We walk over to meet the zonkey brothers, Zane and Zebediah, who have donkey faces and ears, caramel coats, and a dizzying array of black lines. “They’re the most striped zonkies in the world,” Nunke boasts. “What a good boy,” she says, patting Zane’s striped neck. Zane brays, and he looks so much like a zebra that his hee-haw startles me.

Nunke says some purists believe it’s wrong to breed hybrids, that they pollute the natural order. “Here’s how I feel about it,” she tells me, a bit of swagger in her voice. “Whatever God didn’t want to cross, he didn’t make genetically capable of crossing.”

OF ALL THE HYBRIDS that are theoretically possible, none shocks the mind like a cross between humans and apes, and there has been at least one attempt to create a humanzee. In 1910, Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov, a Russian pioneer in artificial insemination, proposed seeding a female chimpanzee with human sperm. At a zoology conference in Austria, he noted (oh-so quaintly) that this method would avoid the ethical dilemma of forcing the two species to actually have sex. Sixteen years later, with the backing of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, Ivanov traveled to Africa and gave it a try.

The details of Ivanov’s experiments only came to light in 2002, when a Rus-sian science historian, Kirill Rossiianov, produced a 39-page paper about the work. The study was published in English in the journal Science in Context, and when I came across it I was astonished. I struck up an e-mail correspondence with Rossiianov, then, late last year, met with him in Moscow. We spoke at a tea shop around the corner from Red Square, the outr茅 topic making me feel like we were Cold War spies trading state secrets.

Over a ten-year period, Rossiianov was able to unearth Ivanov’s diaries and lab notes from the Soviet archives. According to Rossiianov, Ivanov and his son, a biochemistry student, set up a lab at the botanical gardens near Conakry, French Guinea. On the morning of February 28, 1927, they wrapped two female chimps in nets and inseminated them with sperm from a local man. On June 25, they inseminated another chimp with human sperm, this time using a special cage and knocking her out with ethyl chloride. None of the three became pregnant.

Rossiianov, a shy man, told me Ivanov’s work repulsed him. “What do you think about the ethical dimension of Ivanov’s experiments?” he asked. “Because, I dare say, I found them disgustful. Even now I find it terrible difficult to understand.”

And Ivanov had plans to take things further. He also asked Soviet authorities for permission to impregnate women in his own country with sperm from an orangutan named Tarzan, who lived at a primate station in the republic of Georgia. He got a green light, and at least one volunteer came forward, but Tarzan died before any tests took place. Ivanov, convicted of counterrevolutionary activities unrelated to these experiments, was sent to the gulag in 1930, ending his career.

So we still don’t know whether humans and chimps could successfully hybridize, but it may have happened in the distant past. A paper published in Nature last year offers compelling evidence that our ancestors had prolonged sexual relations with chimpanzees. The study, led by geneticist David Reich, of the Harvard Medical School, compares large stretches of DNA from humans and chimps.

The researchers, who contend that the two species diverged from a common forebear about 5.4 million years ago, found that the chimpanzee and human X chromosomes are more similar to each other than they are to any other chromosomes. The best explanation, they suggest, is that matings between chimps and early humans would have produced fertile female hybrids, who then mated with chimps themselves and had similar-enough X chromosomes to produce fertile male hybrids. They estimate that this went on for 1.2 million years after the initial split between the species. Eventually, only humans mated with the hybrids and the hybrids disappeared, leaving behind nothing but genetic traces in our chromosomes.

BHAGAVAN ANTLE, the liger trainer, keeps pretty busy聴his many gigs include working parties and performing at a venerable Miami theme park called Parrot Jungle Island, where he displays a liger and a gigantic “crocosaurus,” a saltwater/Siamese crocodile. This entails a lot of animal shuttling, and Antle invited me to join him on a road trip from Myrtle Beach to Miami, where he would take a liger to a fundraiser at an exotic cat sanctuary and, later, a Super Bowl bash.

We meet at the Myrtle Beach facility, where Antle and his team lead Hercules the liger and two tigers into a trailer with small windows. Antle and I ride in an RV; joining us are three assistants and a diapered, nine-month-old orangutan named Apsara, who’s a hybrid, too. (She’s a blend of Bornean and Sumatran orangutans, which are different species.) The infant, which has a comical mess of wild orange hair, rides in a baby sling worn by an assistant. Except for the occasional meep meep, you wouldn’t know we’re rolling with an orang.

During the two-day trip to Miami, a truck-and-trailer hauling the big cats is always right behind us. We refuel at crowded truck stops, pull into strip malls to buy groceries, and even park one night behind a Holiday Inn. No one notices any of the exotic animals until we’re stopped at the agricultural checkpoint at the Florida state line. The officer, a good ol’ boy with slick hair and big sideburns, checks the paperwork and stumbles on the word liger. “What’s that?” he asks.

“A mix of lion and tiger,” Antle says.

“Those exist?”

Antle nods and takes out his business card, which shows him sitting with three tigers and Jay Leno. “Jay Leno!” says the officer. “That beats all!”

He waves us on without bothering to peek inside the trailer at one of the rarest creatures in the world. I guess Jay Leno is pretty much his favorite animal.

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“DO YOU HAVE anything stronger than Red Bull?” asks David Milch as he ambles into a convenience store in Imperial Beach, California, and begins scanning the aisles.

“Try the red can in the cooler in the back,” the guy at the cash register says, and Milch soon finds a drink called CL-One and holds it up in the air.

Brian Van Holt

Brian Van Holt

“This is the worst thing you got?” he calls to the cashier. The guy nods, and Milch takes out three cans. “Now you’re talking.”He buys the drinks and asks for his change in lottery scratchers.

One of television’s most visionary and successful writers and producers, Milch is in this funky beach town, which borders the even funkier Tijuana, Mexico, to shoot his new HBO series, John from Cincinnati. It’s still early on this brisk March morning, and Milch is looking for something to pull him through the long day ahead. He’ll be coaching actors, writing bits of new script, hashing out details with the director, and even schmoozing with neighborhood residents hanging around the set. Milch, a large-framed man dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt, is the rare Hollywood big shot you might mistake for a regular guy. But John from Cincinnati is anything but regular. Coming right on the heels of Deadwood, the controversial postmodern western Milch created for HBO, the unconventional seaside drama is Milch’s biggest gamble yet.

The show, which debuts June 10, revolves around three generations of Yosts,a family of SoCal surfers with more than a few issues. Mitch Yost (played by Bruce Greenwood) is the pater-familias, an embitteredsurfing legend whose competitive career ended early after he injured a knee. Mitch runs a surf shop with his wife, Cissy (Rebecca De Mornay), who mocks and snarls at his mix of self-pity and Zen awareness. Their son, Butchie (Brian Van Holt), is another faded surf star; he has a serious thing for heroin, as did Milch for many years鈥攈e was literally riding high during much of NYPD Blue, the 12-season hit he created with producer Steven Bochco in the early nineties. The third-generation Yost is Butchie’s son, Shaun (Greyson Fletcher),a hot-shot teen surfer who lives with his grandparents and is being pursued by a shady surf-company owner (Luke Perry) whose scheming knows no bounds.

The wild card, as if the Yosts weren’t wild enough, is John (Austin Nichols), a bizarre stranger who shows up on the beach and signs on for surfing lessons with Butchie. John makes clich茅d oracular pronouncements (“The end is near”), tendsto robotically repeat what’s said to him (including the idea that he may be from Cincinnati), and surfs effortlessly the first time he tries. Milch keeps you guessing:Is John an alien? Jesus Christ? A brain-damaged savant? Throw in a thuggy, opera-loving heroin dealer from Hawaii, a lottery winner who buys the spectacularly decrepit Snug Harbor Motel (home to several ofthe show’s characters), and an ex-cop who raises birds in his living room, plus a plotline that includes levitation, resurrection, and medical miracles.

Now that’s stronger than Red Bull.

Zany and profound, John from Cincinnati is The X Files meets Six Feet Under meets Twin Peaks, with surfboards and a dollop of Thomas Pynchon. Which makes it quirkier than anything HBO has ever bankrolled. No one involved would talk specifics about the budget (Carolyn Strauss, president of HBO Entertainment, referred to the show as “pricey”), but the fact that the first of its ten episodes will air in the hot slot following the series finale of The Sopranos suggests that the network has lots of chips ridingon Milch’s latest venture.And one of the mostsurprising and endearing qualities is that its depiction of surfing is spot-on.

From sixties beach-party flicks that feature Annette Funicello posing on a board like she’s walking a tightrope, feet pointed forward rather than sideways, to Patrick Swayze standing on the beach in Point Break and announcing that he’s “waiting for my set” (true surfers wait for a lull), Hollywood has mangled surfing in every which way. A character may be a regular-foot surfing a right break in one frame, and in the next he’s a goofy-foot on a left. Dialogue usually devolves into one-word sentences like “Rad,” “Dude,” or “Gnarly.” Baywatch producers cast Kelly Slater鈥攖o the world champ’s lasting humiliation鈥攁s Jimmy Slade, who in one episode battles an octopus that lives in a cave and collects lost surfboards. And Blue Crush may have given female surfers a little respect in the water, but onshore it was still a ditzy melodrama. At best, Hollywood presents entertaining caricatures of archetypes; see Sean Penn’s Jeff Spicoli, who seems stoked more by the stinky green bud than the barreling green room.

Milch, a 62-year-old native of Buffalo, New York, has never surfed and has no intention of learning now. Who’d have guessed that of all the outsiders who’ve portrayed the sport on the big and small screens, he would be the one to grok it?

TODAY’S SHOOT will take place four blocks from the ocean, in some dingy old buildings that set designers have made over as the Snug Harbor Motel. Van Holt,the 37-year-old who plays Butchie, is sitting outside his trailer dressed in character: filthy jeans, a crusty ball cap, and corduroy slippers patched with duct tape. Blond and blue-eyed, with square shoulders and a rugged jaw, he’s every surfer girl’s dream. In fact, he looks remarkably like Bodhi, the Swayze character in Point Break. But Van Holt, who grew up surfing Huntington Beach and can still hold his own in the water, says he loves the 1991 cult classic鈥攂ut cringes about it too, especially the scene where Gary Busey, playing an FBI agent, jumps on his desk, tucks into a big-wave crouch, and hollers “Whoaaaa!”

“I wanted to strangle somebody,” says Van Holt, laughing.

Best known for his role in 2001’s Black Hawk Down, Van Holt says he felt “possessed” after first seeing a John from Cincinnati script. “This is my calling,” he remembers thinking. “I am Butchie. I was meant to be Butchie.” Van Holt craved an audition. But when casting began in June 2006, he was about to leave on a surf trip to Indonesia; he’d be living on a chartered boat for two weeks, moving from one reef break to the next. The boat did have a fax machine, and a few days into the trip a fax arrived, offering him an audition the next day. “I’m in the fucking Indian Ocean,” says Van Holt. “I drank my sorrows away.”