DANIEL JOHNSTON
Alive In New York City + Daniel 8/10 Johnston In The 20th Century (scores in panel, right) SHIMMYDISC The cult outsider’s ’80s/’90s catalogue revived.
DANIEL JOHNSTON was o en described as an outsider musician, but was there ever an outsider who le such an imprint on popular culture at large? A musician and illustrator who emerged from Austin, Texas in the mid-1980s, Johnston’s songs have been covered by everyone from Tom Waits to Spiritualized to Beck, while his artwork has graced galleries from New York to London. He’s been the subject of biographies, photo books and documentaries – Je Feuerzeig’s lm The Devil And Daniel Johnston won the Director’s Award at Sundance – while Kurt Cobain was photographed wearing a T-shirt bearing the cartoon frog Johnston drew for the cover of his 1983 album Hi, How Are You. A straight reading of the facts reveals Johnston to be a polymath and a cultural icon. Many insiders have achieved a lot less.
Yet Johnston – who died in September 2019 of a suspected heart attack, aged 58 – faced challenges that might make even a conventional life impossible. In his youth he was diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder; his later years added diabetes and a debilitating brain illness, hydrocephalus, into the mix. At least some of his life was spent in mental institutions, or in recovery at his parents’ house in West Virginia. It feels dicult to separate Johnston’s songs – innocent, somewhat rudimentary, but with an honest, soul-baring quality that can knock you back on your heels – from the facts of his condition. Perhaps it is fruitless to even try.
A new reissue campaign, ‘Daniel Johnston In The 20th Century’, sees a good chunk of Johnston’s pre-millennial work fully remastered by his friend and frequent collaborator, Kramer, and made available on Bandcamp in 24-bit lossless audio. Much of this era consists of Johnston’s home-recorded material – the tapes that as a young man he’d hand out to passers-by on the streets of Austin. The music he made between 1980’s Songs Of Pain and 1988’s Merry Christmas feel of a kind: a lonely suburban blues bashed out on a stand-up piano or cheap organ and captured in the wobbly delity of a $59 Sanyo boombox. Rough around the
edges? Certainly. But this is Johnston in his element, the recordings on which his reputation rests.
Songs Of Pain is as good as any place to start: a 28-song opus that nds Johnston laying out his favoured themes – loneliness, unrequited love and the promise of Christian salvation – in an adenoidal squeak. 1983’s Yip/jump Music
features “Speeding Motorcycle” – later covered by Yo La Tengo and The Pastels – and the rst reading of “Casper The Friendly Ghost”, a tale of the shunned children’s TV phantom with whom Johnston felt particular a¤nity. That same year’s Hi, How Are You found Johnston expanding his horizons, experimenting with tape collage, a cappella and, on “Keep Punching Joe”, a song about manic depression set to ngerclicking ragtime jazz. But albums throughout this period throw up gems. Play a song like “The Story Of An Artist” from 1982’s Don’t Be Scared
and you hear a talent that is both remarkable and highly unconventional, right as it is blossoming.
As the ’80s progressed, Johnston’s legend spread. In 1988 he travelled to New York, where he hooked up with Kramer to record his rst studio album. Unfortunately, this was a period where
Johnston’s mental health was at its worst, and the resulting album, 1990, is heartbreaking, not always in a good way. “Careless Soul” – a rendering of an old Christian hymn – nds Johnston’s voice cracking with emotion, while his beloved Beatles never sounded so bleak as they do on a sepulchral reading of “Got To Get You Into My Life”.
Many over the years have made the argument that a personality as fragile as Johnston had no place on a stage in front of a crowd of gawping onlookers. “I still wonder if people go see him hoping to witness a nervous breakdown,” his friend Gretchen Phillips told journalist Irwin Chusid.
But then you hear a document like Alive In New York City and you’re reminded of what joy Johnston could bring when he was on form. Recorded and live-mixed by Kramer at an unidentied New York show in April 2000, Johnston rattles through a mix of originals and covers – an uninching, boldly ragged “Funeral Home”, a amboyant take on Wings’ “Live And Let Die”. With bags of heart and some skilful comic timing, he has the audience in the palm of his hand. Perhaps some gravitated to Johnston because of the novelty of his condition. But his music persists because it feels heroic, a feat of overcoming – and in a way that can resonate with any one of us.
His music persists because it feels heroic – a feat of overcoming