THE DEVIL AND DANIEL JOHNSTON

From The Devil and Daniel Johnston website:

Daniel Johnston is a manic-depressive genius singer/songwriter/artist, revealed in this portrait of madness, creativity and love.The Devil and Daniel Johnston is a stunning portrait of a musical and artistic genius who nearly slipped away.

Director Jeff Feuerzeig exquisitely depicts a perfect example of brilliance and madness going hand in hand with subject Daniel Johnston. As an artist suffering from manic depression with delusions of grandeur, Daniel Johnston's wild fluctuations, numerous downward spirals, and periodic respites are exposed in this deeply moving documentary.

Click here for the rest.

Back in the early 90s, my buddy Shane was living in an apartment a block away from the state mental hospital in Austin. That was the first time I ever heard of Daniel Johnston: he was the crazy musician living in a unit upstairs, an outpatient apparently, whose strange behavior was such that the police came to visit him often. One rumor I recall is that Johnston was so disturbed that his kitchen sink sometimes doubled as a toilet--that's just a rumor, of course.

"Crazy dude. What band is he in?" I asked Shane, "Sound of Pain?"

"No, no, I think it's Songs of Pain," replied Shane.

A couple of years after that, our buddy Vince turned me on to the crazy guy who had lived upstairs from Shane. It turned out that Johnston was a completely underground solo artist, and Songs of Pain is the name of one of his numerous crudely recorded cassette tapes floating around Austin at the time. Johnston's music blew me away of course, but it was hard to separate it from the legend that had grown up around him.

"Yeah, he's totally insane, but that's what makes his songs so great," Vince told me, "listen to how sincere he sounds." Johnston sounded like he was totally falling apart contemplating his unrequited love for some woman who tortured him endlessly. "He also has Christian issues--I heard that he was saved back in the 80s by that guy in brown robes who's always preaching on campus at UT." Fundamentalist Christianity and the toll it takes on the psyche is a major recurring theme in Johnston's work. "He's even got an actual album, studio recorded, that made some headway in the charts," Vince said, "Kurt Cobain was wearing a Daniel Johnston t-shirt when he accepted Nirvana's MTV video award."

Our buddy Garth later told me about an incident where Johnston was supposed to make an MTV appearance, but had been committed, once again, to the mental hospital. Johnston tried to explain that he had to be on MTV, but was, they say, kind of treated like the proverbial loony bin guy who thinks he's Napoleon:

"Riiiiight, Daniel, you've got to go be on MTV."

"No, really, I've got to be on MTV."

"Sure, sure. Here, why don't you put on this nice straightjacket?"

Needless to say, Johnston missed his appearance.

I managed to pick up a couple of his boombox recordings and listened to them constantly for like six months. He is incredible. I only wish I could write songs as great as his, but then, I suppose I would have to be as tortured as he has been in order to pull it off. And that's what makes his work so compelling: Johnston has a Van Gogh like ability to translate deep and intense emotional pain into art. His songs are simple and Beatlesque, making them the perfect vehicles for mining the depths of his sorrow and anxiety. I've never heard anything like him.

I bet this movie is going to be incredible. Hopefully, it'll help restart his music career, which he can now do because he has apparently finally found the right combo of meds to pull him out of his hallucinations. Thing is, he doesn't really need musical success these days, at least as far as the money is concerned: Johnston's visual art, cartoonish and quirky, has become celebrated and expensive in the world of "outsider art." His stuff is going for thousands of dollars a shot.

Here's a sample of that art; somthing similar was painted on the outside of Austin's Record Exchange for years:



Pretty cool. The pic, by the way, is courtesy of The Daniel Johnston Museum of Love, which also provides this download of Johnston's song "Big Business Monkey." Not his best tune, not as painful, but fairly representative of the sound of his early underground stuff.

Anyway, you should go see the movie. I know I am.

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