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Carl
- A 'Fifth' Catholic -
Ireland
11546 Posts |
 Posted - 04/21/2006 : 19:24:45
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This is a new documentary movie about the singer, who I must confess, I've never heard. The film sound's interesting, though. Here's an interview with him:
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/filmandmusic/story/0,,1757359,00.html
'I know the darkness'
Daniel Johnston is a lifelong manic depressive. Is that what makes his songs so haunting? And how does he feel about being the subject of a new film? Laura Barton meets the indie icon
Friday April 21, 2006
The Guardian
'Central to his appeal is the idea that his illness is what makes his work pure and
free of artifice.' Photograph: Eamonn McCabe
"I love that girl so much
I can't get enough of her crazy love"
- Crazy Love, Daniel Johnston
Daniel Johnston is standing on the hotel steps, hauling on a cigarette. His hair is wiry and silvery and unkempt, and he wears a fuzzy moustache that hangs in melancholy fashion past the corners of his mouth. In grey jogging bottoms and sweatshirt he looks a little like a walrus. He yelps hello, stamps out the cigarette and heads back into the hotel lobby, where he orders a Coca-Cola and fishes out another cigarette.
In the indie music world, where heroic failure and outsider status are cherished even more than commercial success, Daniel Johnston is a totem: the lo-fi genius from Texas who composes prolifically, commits everything to cassette tape, has spent time in mental institutions and writes all his songs about a girl named Laurie. His legend began in the 1980s, when he arrived in Austin, Texas, with a travelling fair and stuck around, hoping to make it as a cartoonist before deciding to become a musician. What made his songs stand out was his deft wordplay and the way, sometimes, his voice would catch and unravel unexpectedly. His music, his furious dedication to his art, his belief in his own genius, and - arguably - the pop snobs' recurrent fetishisation of mentally ill artists have won him a glut of famous admirers. For almost the whole of 1992, Kurt Cobain wore a T-shirt of the cover of one of Johnston's cassettes, Hi How Are You. His fanclub counts among its number Tom Waits, Jason Pierce of Spiritualized, Vic Chesnutt, and Matt Groening, the creator of the Simpsons.
Anyone seeking the defining essence of Johnston, both the power of his music, and the way his state of mind informs it, should consult the version of his song Speeding Motorcycle - a hurtling, infectious homage to the freedom of the open road - that cropped up on a compilation by US indie stalwarts and Johnston supporters Yo La Tengo. For a 1990 live performance on a US radio station, Yo La Tengo performed the song, with Johnston contributing the singing via telephone from a mental institution in West Virginia. "Let's go let's go let's go!" he bawls into the receiver, surely yearning for liberation from incarceration.
A new documentary film, The Devil and Daniel Johnston, which garnered Jeff Feuerzeig the best director award at last year's Sundance Festival, attempts to relate Johnston's story, from his childhood in West Virginia - where he made Super 8 films, was infatuated with the Beatles, and rebelled against his religious upbringing - to his life today, living at home in Waller, Texas. While the film celebrates Johnston's art and music, it also charts the story of his depression and his manic episodes - hitting his manager over the head with a metal bar, for example, or scaring an elderly lady into jumping out of a window; his obsessions with satan and Casper the Friendly Ghost; the time he took the keys out of a plane while his father was flying it. In particular, the film captures the strain on his ageing parents, who fear what will happen to their son when they can no longer look after him. The Johnston song that echoes through the film is Some Things Last a Long Time, which serves as a curious summation of Johnston's life: the unrequited love that has lasted a lifetime, the mental illness that has lingered almost as long, and the music that has given him a measure of the fame he always craved.
Would, though, anyone have taken any notice of Johnston had he not suffered from manic depression? Central to his appeal is the idea that his illness is what makes his work pure and free of artifice - an assumption also made about the likes of Syd Barrett, Brian Wilson, Skip Spence and Roky Erickson, of the 13th Floor Elevators, who has also spent time in Texas mental institutions. "It seemed that Daniel's mental illness allowed him to tap into a place where the music and art he was creating was truly unfiltered and I found it mesmerising," Feuerzeig claimed when explaining his reasoning behind making the documentary. "The most important thing in music is absolute honesty," Jason Pierce has said. "People like Daniel and Erickson - 'cos they're slightly damaged - have this great ability to touch your heart because they don't know where to stop. When a child hits a piano he makes untainted music, and that's there in Daniel. He goes between extremes of naivety and darkness."
There is certainly something naive about Johnston as he sits here this afternoon, thumb rasping at his cigarette lighter, and reminiscing about the time he bought every kind of pen Wal-Mart had to offer "just to try 'em out". He avoids my gaze, staring intently at the coffee table, unless I volunteer enthusiasm for his music, or Feuerzeig's film, at which point his eyes dash up to meet mine, round and glad and unblinking: "What did you think?" he'll demand. "Have you seen it? Did you think it was funny? Did you like the record? You did? How much?" I stretch my arms out to the size of a large trout. "Alright, alright," he smiles and nods. "That's good," and resumes gazing at the coffee table.
One can't help but wonder how aware Johnston is of his own naivety, how much, perhaps, he has embraced it. And similarly one wonders how much he has befriended his mental illness over the years, whether it has now been with him so long that he has learned how to make it work for him. "I know what you mean," he says, and gives a crumply sort of smile. "There is a dark side, it is kind of dark. I know the darkness."
Befriending it, knowing the darkness, was perhaps the best option for Johnston. His time on medication and in institutions has frustrated him enormously. "I was stuck," he says hoarsely. "I couldn't get out of the system; every time I'd come home, if I got upset and raised my voice a little bit or something, Mom and Dad would say, 'back to the hospital'." He gives a sort of comical half-shrug, as if they had just grounded him. "So the last time I got out I said, 'Hey, this time I'm going to stay out.'" It has been nearly 10 years since he was last in hospital. "But I spent almost five years in mental hospitals and it was like a bird in a cage." Certainly in the film there is a startling difference between the industrious chaos of Johnston's basement bedroom, cluttered with cartoons, tapes, pianos and posters of Marilyn Monroe, and the blank walls of the hospital ward.
"I really didn't do that much art and I didn't write any songs," he recalls, "cos they kept experimenting on me. They just kept me like a zombie. They just said take these pills. But the worst thing was runnin' out of cigarettes," he continues, taking a swig of cola and sparking up again. "Trying to bum a cigarette, smoking a butt of a cigarette, I had to have a cigarette. Never enough. And I'd get a carton of cigarettes and I'd give everybody cigarettes and then I ran out and they wouldn't give me any of their cigarettes. And then if we had some money, there was a soda-pop machine and we'd always split up the soda pop with little cups and take shots of soda. But I'd read the Bible all day and watch TV and have a fantasy like I was a wolfman, I remember that. But it was just like endless melodramas, like being in a movie or something, sometimes horror, sometimes a surrealistic dream of being in a mental hospital with a bunch of crazy people."
Johnston's anecdotes are all delivered like this - in frantic scrambles that somehow take a circuitous route via soda-pop machines, MTV and Marilyn Monroe, before reaching their final destination. At one point, in the middle of detailing the delights of his older brother's record collection (Elton John, the Who, Jesus Christ Superstar), he begins a story of a car journey they once took together: "He had a Duster, a Plymouth Duster. And we would be drivin' somewhere and I remember we were playing Seals and Crofts and we were drivin' real far to go somewhere and the song was goin', 'We may never pass this way again.' And we were just drivin' and goin' some place real far away. It was a lot of fun." There is a pause. "He loved the Carpenters too."
The recurrent anecdote in the story of Johnston is that of Laurie, the girl with whom he tumbled head-over-heels in love when she walked into his classroom at art college. Laurie was engaged to a local undertaker, and she and Johnston were never more than friends, yet in her memory he has found inspiration for dozens of songs. "Oh Laurie, uh? Wanna know about Laurie?" he smiles softly at the mention of her name. "Well, Laurie was a girl that I really liked a lot. When I found her, she already had a boyfriend. But it was just magic. She had a magical quality. It was only over a few months that we would talk, she worked at the store, and she loved me, I know she did. But it was like a sister and a brother type thing, and I was afraid to really try anything. But I was just so obsessed. When I wrote a song I would think of every moment I had with her."
It has been suggested that in Laurie, Johnston found the ultimate muse; a sort of latter-day equivalent of Petrarch's Laura, perhaps. It has long been suspected that Laura never really existed, that his muse was in fact the laurel garland awarded to the champion poet of his day, and for Johnston, Laurie has perhaps served a similar purpose: better the imagined, perfect love, the yearning tragedy of love unconsummated, and indeed the fame that accompanies it, than the humdrum reality of a love come true.
But Johnston's Laurie really does exist. Recently, a screening of The Devil and Daniel Johnston reunited him with his long-lost love, now divorced from the undertaker. "She came to the film and she was more beautiful than ever," Johnston sighs. "And I kept saying to her, 'Will you marry me?' And I was huggin' her and kissin' her, and I'd never got that close to her, I'd never kissed her that much - I'd only kissed her once back in the old days. She said she'd call me, and she called me once, but she never called back again." He gives a wistful sigh. "And it's been like four months . . ."
· The Devil and Daniel Johnston is out on May 5. |
Edited by - Carl on 04/21/2006 19:29:46 |
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vilainde
>> Denizen of the Citizens Band <<
Niue
7443 Posts |
Posted - 04/22/2006 : 01:44:06
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I can't fucking wait for this movie to be released. My 2nd fave artist ever.
Denis
I love Guitar Wolf from the Erath! |
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Cult_Of_Frank
= Black Noise Maker =
Canada
11687 Posts |
Posted - 04/22/2006 : 12:04:30
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Really? I've never even heard of him. :(
 "If we hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominos will fall like a house of cards. Checkmate." |
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vilainde
>> Denizen of the Citizens Band <<
Niue
7443 Posts |
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Broken Face
-= Forum Pistolero =-
USA
5155 Posts |
Posted - 04/22/2006 : 14:58:44
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i wish i knew more Johnston. All i have is REJECTED UNKNOWN which i got for 2 bucks at a going out of business sale
-Brian
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vilainde
>> Denizen of the Citizens Band <<
Niue
7443 Posts |
Posted - 04/23/2006 : 02:35:29
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My fave album of his is 1990.
Oh, Brian, just wait for the song swap.
Denis
I love Guitar Wolf from the Erath! |
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ObfuscateByWill
* Dog in the Sand *
USA
1887 Posts |
Posted - 04/23/2006 : 11:06:10
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There's a trailer available here.
Very gifted.
*Take a bite of the chocolate coffin. |
Edited by - ObfuscateByWill on 04/23/2006 11:07:28 |
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a guy in a rover
= Cult of Ray =
United Kingdom
535 Posts |
Posted - 04/24/2006 : 14:58:18
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Read that article myself, the film definitely sounds very interesting. As for Johnson, he is one of my favourite artists. His music touches you in a way that most peoples cant, I think that's partially due to his illness, there's a certain innocence to it and yet at the same time it is somewhat disturbing.
A pig or a goat well, they wouldn’t let you be mistreated
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mosleyk
= Cult of Ray =
USA
607 Posts |
Posted - 04/24/2006 : 15:47:54
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| Thanks for the movie tip. I actually saw him open for believe it or not RL Burnside. Talk about an amazing show! |
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starmekitten
-= Forum Pistolera =-
United Kingdom
6370 Posts |
Posted - 04/24/2006 : 15:54:47
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I still haven't heard anything, I can't play music on my franken-computer brokenpieceofshit, but it looks interesting. There's an exhibition of his pictures on in London soon I might go to for interests sake.
forum ebook - "on the road" theme - help wanted |
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The Devil And Daniel Johnston.
