What a sad and at times painful documentary this is about cult musician Daniel
Johnston. He passed away last September at 58 years old and I expect most
people had no clue who he was and why the obits were so adulatory towards
him. He suffered from mental issues for most of his life, spent a considerable
amount of time in institutions but at the same time built up this huge inventory
of music - often recorded on cassette tapes by himself - and a very loyal
fan base around the world. Other musicians loved his songs and he was recorded
by over a hundred of them. I came to him through an album of his songs recorded
by K. McCarty that I picked up simply because I liked the cover. I had no
idea who Johnston was. It became one of my favorite albums - though since
then I have heard it slagged off by Johnston fans as a ripoff and insult
to him because she overlayed it with complex musical arrangements. She shows
up a lot in this documentary as she was part of the Austen music scene at
the same time he was and spent a lot of time with him. Johnston had ended
up in Austen through chance - working in a travelling carny show he was beat
up and left in the town. He found a job in McDonalds and began handing out
cassettes to people of his music. She was one of them and after hearing it
thought he was a genius - as did a lot of people.
But his mental condition, delusions, obsession with fighting Satan never
allowed him to gain much popularity. At one time Electra wanted to sign him
but Metallica was one of their acts and he refused to sign with a devil company.
There is a lot of his music available - not quite sure how that came to be
other than a manager and friend who comes across as just as obsessed as Johnston
does - except with Johnston - saving all his music and art and distributing
it on his own. Now his music to be truthful is not an easy listen - often
very crudely recorded, very simple instrumentation on a guitar or piano and
his high pitched some times off key ethereal quaky voice is both fascinating
and a chore to listen to for long. I have a few of his albums and would suggest
Continued Story as a good place to start as I think it is a collection of
some of his best known songs. Or McCarty's album.
What makes the film particularly poignantly tragic and hits so close to the
bone is that Johnston from his early childhood began recording his thoughts
on tape and filming himself. As a teenager he shows incredible creative talent
in his drawing, his short films and songs. He seems slightly off even at
this age but mainly in his awkwardness and weirdness. His parents who were
interviewed through the film tried to keep him in line but this kid clearly
saw no lines. He went off to college where he fell in love with a girl who
married a man in a funeral home - the title of one of his songs - and he
became obsessed with her for all of his life writing song after sad love
songs about her - one of his albums is titled Songs of Pain . While in Austen
he began his series of mental breakdowns diagnosed as bipolar disorder, put
on medication which shut down his creativity, off the medicine and another
delusional episode ahead - one time forcing his father to crash land a plane
into a tree. And so much of this is on tape and we witness the disintegration
of this spunky off-beat kid until he is in his fifties where he was living
with his parents and getting very obese. It just feels so sad and yet I expect
this broken mind sparked his music which is just lyrically strange and wonderful.
By the end of the film in 2005 he seems to be in a better place - doing tours
and being acclaimed by his peers. So maybe a happy ending after all.
