Lost in America: The Myth and Symbol of Daniel Johnston
Reviewed:
Continued Story + Hi, How Are You by Daniel Johnston (Eternal Yip Eye Music 2006)
The Devil and Daniel Johnston, directed by Jeff Feuerzeig
While the absolute last thing the United States may need right now is another white male to stand representative for a mythic national consensus, a very strong case could be made for outsider folk artist Daniel Johnston. Recently released on DVD, the documentary “The Devil and Daniel Johnston” makes clear how expansive a swath of American values, themes, and realities Johnston’s life and work encompasses. Propelled by his brilliantly individual artistic vision, an audience that yearned for the perceived authenticity of folk and punk, and the massive publicity he received when Kurt Cobain wore a Johnston t-shirt in multiple TV and photo appearances during the early 90’s, Johnston is a poster child for DIY cult indie rock success, despite—or because of—a lack of both conventional stage presence and guitar playing ability.
According to the documentary, Johnston first hits the Austin music scene in the 80’s after having fled the confines of his religiously conservative West Virginian family via a short stint selling corndogs with a traveling carnival. The film sketchily implies that a period of intense drug use culminating in a bad acid trip at a Butthole Surfers concert brings him back to the Christian fundamentalism of his parents: in one of many darkly funny tape-recorded conversations, Johnston neatly out-pontificates the mother who had so often dismissed him and his art as “satanic,” chastising her for not reading the “scriptures” enough. At around the same time as the acid trip, the already manic-depressive Johnston suffers a complete psychological breakdown, beats his manager with a pipe, and is institutionalized for the first of many times. In addition to straddling the apparently not so disparate worlds of evangelical visionary and psychedelic countercultural rocker, Johnston brings heartland revivalism into the heart of New York City cool, turning an exclusive gig at a hipster record store into a lengthy, sobbing call for salvation (making “everyone feel very awkward” according to Jeff Tartokov, his next manager). He poisons himself: he smokes, he works at McDonalds for a time, he becomes obese, he writes extremely dark jingles for Mountain Dew from a mental hospital (“Demons, demons drink the Mountain Dew” he sings). In college, he unrequitedly falls in love with a girl he would never see again (aside from a recent filmed encounter included in the DVD’s special features), but who would nevertheless inspire songs of heartbreakingly pure love for decades. A musician’s musician, he has been covered by Beck, Yo La Tengo, and Tom Waits. He worships fame, has an over-inflated sense of personal destiny, and expresses profound ambivalence towards sex. Like his high-pitched voice, he is infantile, his tyrannical parents saintly for the self-sacrificing devotion they show in caring for an adult at times not only helpless but dangerous. While the Johnston of “The Devil and Daniel Johnston” may or may not be a genius, he is certainly delusional, crashing a plane piloted by his father while under the impression he is Casper the Friendly Ghost. But then again, he might also be prophetic: “God Promises a Safe Landing But Not a Calm Voyage” reads the sign in front of the Church of Christ his father passes on his way home from the ordeal.
For Johnston, the themes catalogued above do not merely unfold one-by-one over the course of years, but often seem simultaneously held in mind, offering a tempting cultural explanation for severe bipolar disorder. His story is not that of a prodigal son who trades a crude and foolish excess for a crude and foolish faith (i.e. Dubya), but of a modern day Walt Whitman, whose mind breaks in encompassing too great a multitude of contradiction. But while Whitman’s great unifying “I” in Leaves of Grass functions as a safely textual repository of antebellum tensions, Johnston’s art is less a buffer zone between his mind and disparate external pressures than a record of their direct collision into one another. Wisely, however, director Jeff Feuerzeig avoids the classic romantic traps of metaphorizing madness as genius and the individual as nation, even as he clearly reveals why such metaphors have long compelled the imagination—and why they especially do in Johnston’s case. While acknowledging the brute but real tautology that mental illness is mental illness, Feuerzieg’s complex portrait nevertheless leaves the meanings of Johnston’s life and work generously available to interpretation, and provides a rich context in which to understand the lo-fi, tape-recorded gems on the recently reissued double-album, “Continued Story + Hi, How Are You.”
The song “Funeral Home,” for example, on which Johnston belts out “I’m going to the funeral home and never coming back,” symbolically expresses a bitter Christian hopefulness about the release death will afford, but also literally alludes to the fact that the woman he secretly loved in college married a funeral home director. As Feuerzieg’s documentary shows, Johnston constantly converts into art everything around him, tape-recording friends talking, doodling his own illustrations into comic books, filming himself as a teenager caricaturing his mother. In “Dem Blues,” an a capella dialogue, Johnston draws imagery from the banalities of his stifling upbringing when he scolds himself for upsetting the “juice” and “donuts” of staid church socials in the excitement of his despair (“I really don’t know what I’m after / You’re stepping on the crackers”). The chillingly simple “I Picture Myself With a Guitar,” however, questions just how much contact with the world his art in the end provides, the title rather solipsistically answering the only other line in the song: “I see your face.”
Sometimes playful, sometimes haunted, and often both at once, Johnston’s lyrics on “Continued Story + Hi, How Are You” are always powerfully direct. The buoyant melody of the cartoon based “Casper,” for instance, carries the starkest of opening lines: “He was smiling through his own personal hell / Dropped his last dime in a wishing well.” “Despair Came Knocking,” ploddingly spoken over descending pairs of atonal guitar notes, figures depression as a visitor who comes by only to sit smoking in morose silence. While many tracks feature a full band and exhibit a polished blues and Beatles inspired pop sensibility, the lo-fi rawness of songs like “Despair” more compellingly frames the dark simplicity of his words. And no amount of studio production could better deliver the lines “I’m a loner, I’m a sorry entertainer” than the dissonant plastic-strung-banjo-sounding guitar Johnston bangs on solo in “Sorry Entertainer.”
The roughness of the recording shines for other reasons, too, especially on “Hi, How Are You,” which unlike “Continued Story” was not recorded in a studio but by Johnston onto cassette. Songs are accompanied or interrupted by conversations with friends, strange mechanical pulses, bits of other recordings, ticking, a running faucet, and the loud clicks of the tape recorder as it stops and starts, infusing the album with the authenticity of a found object and the suspense that accompanies chaos, rather than the security of a planned product. Soft static suffuses the background of every song, rendering the air in whatever garage, basement, or trailer Johnston recorded them sonically palpable. While this makes Johnston’s voice muddied and distant, it also establishes an unsettling intimacy: you can actually hear the room in which he sings his nervous breakdown.
Strange dislocating things happen even in the packaging of the album, blurring the boundary between error and intention. The CD begins by continuing the story with which it ends, the earlier “Hi, How Are You” (1983) following the later “Continued Story” (1985), which in turn begins with a song that repeats the words, “It’s over, It’s over,” again and again. The lyrics included in the liner notes only vaguely follow the order of the actual CD, and list a song called “The Dead Dog Laughing In The Cloud” in the place of “Sorry Entertainer,” which does not appear at all in the printed matter. In addition to cover art by Johnston (who has received a great deal of attention for his drawings as well as his music), the CD includes a reprint of “Daniel Johnston’s Symbolical Visions,” the “Rosetta stone” of his work according to former manager Tartokov, because it explains many of Johnston’s most recurring images, among them a boxer with an opened skull emitting light beneath a large, hovering Satan: a cliché potently rendered of an artistic mind raw to demons both within and without, but that nevertheless retains the ability to transform them into objects of striking beauty.
Continued Story + Hi, How Are You by Daniel Johnston (Eternal Yip Eye Music 2006)
The Devil and Daniel Johnston, directed by Jeff Feuerzeig
While the absolute last thing the United States may need right now is another white male to stand representative for a mythic national consensus, a very strong case could be made for outsider folk artist Daniel Johnston. Recently released on DVD, the documentary “The Devil and Daniel Johnston” makes clear how expansive a swath of American values, themes, and realities Johnston’s life and work encompasses. Propelled by his brilliantly individual artistic vision, an audience that yearned for the perceived authenticity of folk and punk, and the massive publicity he received when Kurt Cobain wore a Johnston t-shirt in multiple TV and photo appearances during the early 90’s, Johnston is a poster child for DIY cult indie rock success, despite—or because of—a lack of both conventional stage presence and guitar playing ability.
According to the documentary, Johnston first hits the Austin music scene in the 80’s after having fled the confines of his religiously conservative West Virginian family via a short stint selling corndogs with a traveling carnival. The film sketchily implies that a period of intense drug use culminating in a bad acid trip at a Butthole Surfers concert brings him back to the Christian fundamentalism of his parents: in one of many darkly funny tape-recorded conversations, Johnston neatly out-pontificates the mother who had so often dismissed him and his art as “satanic,” chastising her for not reading the “scriptures” enough. At around the same time as the acid trip, the already manic-depressive Johnston suffers a complete psychological breakdown, beats his manager with a pipe, and is institutionalized for the first of many times. In addition to straddling the apparently not so disparate worlds of evangelical visionary and psychedelic countercultural rocker, Johnston brings heartland revivalism into the heart of New York City cool, turning an exclusive gig at a hipster record store into a lengthy, sobbing call for salvation (making “everyone feel very awkward” according to Jeff Tartokov, his next manager). He poisons himself: he smokes, he works at McDonalds for a time, he becomes obese, he writes extremely dark jingles for Mountain Dew from a mental hospital (“Demons, demons drink the Mountain Dew” he sings). In college, he unrequitedly falls in love with a girl he would never see again (aside from a recent filmed encounter included in the DVD’s special features), but who would nevertheless inspire songs of heartbreakingly pure love for decades. A musician’s musician, he has been covered by Beck, Yo La Tengo, and Tom Waits. He worships fame, has an over-inflated sense of personal destiny, and expresses profound ambivalence towards sex. Like his high-pitched voice, he is infantile, his tyrannical parents saintly for the self-sacrificing devotion they show in caring for an adult at times not only helpless but dangerous. While the Johnston of “The Devil and Daniel Johnston” may or may not be a genius, he is certainly delusional, crashing a plane piloted by his father while under the impression he is Casper the Friendly Ghost. But then again, he might also be prophetic: “God Promises a Safe Landing But Not a Calm Voyage” reads the sign in front of the Church of Christ his father passes on his way home from the ordeal.
For Johnston, the themes catalogued above do not merely unfold one-by-one over the course of years, but often seem simultaneously held in mind, offering a tempting cultural explanation for severe bipolar disorder. His story is not that of a prodigal son who trades a crude and foolish excess for a crude and foolish faith (i.e. Dubya), but of a modern day Walt Whitman, whose mind breaks in encompassing too great a multitude of contradiction. But while Whitman’s great unifying “I” in Leaves of Grass functions as a safely textual repository of antebellum tensions, Johnston’s art is less a buffer zone between his mind and disparate external pressures than a record of their direct collision into one another. Wisely, however, director Jeff Feuerzeig avoids the classic romantic traps of metaphorizing madness as genius and the individual as nation, even as he clearly reveals why such metaphors have long compelled the imagination—and why they especially do in Johnston’s case. While acknowledging the brute but real tautology that mental illness is mental illness, Feuerzieg’s complex portrait nevertheless leaves the meanings of Johnston’s life and work generously available to interpretation, and provides a rich context in which to understand the lo-fi, tape-recorded gems on the recently reissued double-album, “Continued Story + Hi, How Are You.”
The song “Funeral Home,” for example, on which Johnston belts out “I’m going to the funeral home and never coming back,” symbolically expresses a bitter Christian hopefulness about the release death will afford, but also literally alludes to the fact that the woman he secretly loved in college married a funeral home director. As Feuerzieg’s documentary shows, Johnston constantly converts into art everything around him, tape-recording friends talking, doodling his own illustrations into comic books, filming himself as a teenager caricaturing his mother. In “Dem Blues,” an a capella dialogue, Johnston draws imagery from the banalities of his stifling upbringing when he scolds himself for upsetting the “juice” and “donuts” of staid church socials in the excitement of his despair (“I really don’t know what I’m after / You’re stepping on the crackers”). The chillingly simple “I Picture Myself With a Guitar,” however, questions just how much contact with the world his art in the end provides, the title rather solipsistically answering the only other line in the song: “I see your face.”
Sometimes playful, sometimes haunted, and often both at once, Johnston’s lyrics on “Continued Story + Hi, How Are You” are always powerfully direct. The buoyant melody of the cartoon based “Casper,” for instance, carries the starkest of opening lines: “He was smiling through his own personal hell / Dropped his last dime in a wishing well.” “Despair Came Knocking,” ploddingly spoken over descending pairs of atonal guitar notes, figures depression as a visitor who comes by only to sit smoking in morose silence. While many tracks feature a full band and exhibit a polished blues and Beatles inspired pop sensibility, the lo-fi rawness of songs like “Despair” more compellingly frames the dark simplicity of his words. And no amount of studio production could better deliver the lines “I’m a loner, I’m a sorry entertainer” than the dissonant plastic-strung-banjo-sounding guitar Johnston bangs on solo in “Sorry Entertainer.”
The roughness of the recording shines for other reasons, too, especially on “Hi, How Are You,” which unlike “Continued Story” was not recorded in a studio but by Johnston onto cassette. Songs are accompanied or interrupted by conversations with friends, strange mechanical pulses, bits of other recordings, ticking, a running faucet, and the loud clicks of the tape recorder as it stops and starts, infusing the album with the authenticity of a found object and the suspense that accompanies chaos, rather than the security of a planned product. Soft static suffuses the background of every song, rendering the air in whatever garage, basement, or trailer Johnston recorded them sonically palpable. While this makes Johnston’s voice muddied and distant, it also establishes an unsettling intimacy: you can actually hear the room in which he sings his nervous breakdown.
Strange dislocating things happen even in the packaging of the album, blurring the boundary between error and intention. The CD begins by continuing the story with which it ends, the earlier “Hi, How Are You” (1983) following the later “Continued Story” (1985), which in turn begins with a song that repeats the words, “It’s over, It’s over,” again and again. The lyrics included in the liner notes only vaguely follow the order of the actual CD, and list a song called “The Dead Dog Laughing In The Cloud” in the place of “Sorry Entertainer,” which does not appear at all in the printed matter. In addition to cover art by Johnston (who has received a great deal of attention for his drawings as well as his music), the CD includes a reprint of “Daniel Johnston’s Symbolical Visions,” the “Rosetta stone” of his work according to former manager Tartokov, because it explains many of Johnston’s most recurring images, among them a boxer with an opened skull emitting light beneath a large, hovering Satan: a cliché potently rendered of an artistic mind raw to demons both within and without, but that nevertheless retains the ability to transform them into objects of striking beauty.
posted by R at 8:50 AM
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