Daniel Johnston, famed musician, died Sept. 11 of a heart attack at his home in Waller, Texas. Though not well-known outside the confines of music-fanatics, his work has inspired the likes of many well-known musicians, including former Nirvana front man, Kurt Cobain.
“Hi, How Are?” Daniel Johnston’s ‘83 (officially released in ‘89) album cover, featuring a cartoon alien-frog staring at the viewer, the eyes extended upwards like an antenna, the date underneath “Sept. 83” and then underneath that, “Daniel Johnston” graced a t-shirt the former Nirvana front man wore to the ‘92 MTV Video Music Awards.
Cobain once referred to the singer as the “greatest” songwriter of all-time in an interview. Johnston, although somewhat unknown to the general population, had a rabid following among music enthusiasts and musicians themselves.
His songs have been covered by the likes of Tom Waits, The Flaming Lips, Bright Eyes, Beck, Wilco, Yo La Tengo, Sparklehorse, Beach House and Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, for the soundtrack to the movie “Where the Wild Things Are.”
In his teens Johnston spent most of his time making home movies with his parent’s Super 8 film camera, drawing surreal cartoon characters and performing music on piano and chord organ, recording it on a $59 Sanyo monaural boombox.
He was one of the forebears of the “lo-fi” indie scene that cropped up in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, recording all of his albums at home on DIY equipment, the likes of which birthed some of the most well-known indie bands of the era, including Sparklehorse, The Mountain Goats, Pavement, Neutral Milk Hotel and Dayton’s own Guided by Voices, a major band in the scene.
Johnston’s story, his slow rise to quasi-fame and the mental illness that plagued his life and influenced the genuine honesty and heartache in his music was covered in the 2005 documentary “The Devil and Daniel Johnston,” which won the Documentary Directing Award at the Sundance Film Festival in the same year.
The film, which is hard to watch at times and uplifting at others features extensive interviews with Johnston himself, as well as many of his contemporaries mentioned above and from close friends and members of the band Sonic Youth.
Nolevart Sikeem/YouTube)
Growing up in rural West Virginia, Johnston was obsessed with the Beatles, often quoting and covering their songs on his albums. Johnston, in an interview with Pitchfork, even credited listening to their music as a seminal moment in his own career.
“I started listening to the Beatles and got more into the knack of songwriting.” said Johnston. “And then, finally, my dad bought me a book called “Complete Beatles,” and because I knew what the chords were at that time, from piano, I knew, I played every song in that book again and again, and I did develop a rapport with the Beatles songs.
“I began to re-work because of what Ringo said in an interview. He said, ‘We took other people’s songs and rearranged their chord structures to write songs,’ and I go, ‘Wow!’ and I started doing that with their songs. And it was like magic, rearranging the chords. It was like a mathematical situation.”
“It was just a phenomenal theory for me. Of course, if the Beatles heard about this today they’d roll over in their graves, but you know, that’s what I did and it was revolutionary to me and that went on forever. This book was like a bible to me and I knew all their songs and I played them, and then I kept doing this again and again and again. I kept writing with the Beatles theory over and over again. Millions of songs.”
Eventually, moving to Austin, Tex. with his family, Johnston became a part of the city’s early ‘90s indie film and music scene which spawned the likes of “Boyhood” and “Dazed and Confused” director Richard Linklater.
It was in Austin that Johnston got his big break, getting positive write-ups in the Austin Chronicle and appearing on MTV’s “The Cutting Edge” in ‘85. From there a deal was struck with Elektra Records which was ultimately axed by Johnston himself, fearing that fellow label-mates Metallica were Satan worshipers and Johnston a long-time Christian feared they would hurt him.
Ultimately, Johnston signed with Atlantic, but the partnership only produced ‘94’s “Fun” considered by many to be one of Johnston’s lesser attempts.
Johnston suffered from manic depression and schizophrenia, something that haunted and ruined his potential all throughout his life. Though, through the pain and heartache, he wrote songs about pain (even titling an album “Songs of Pain”) with an honesty that few people possessed, as his lyrics were dense and filled with genuine emotion.
“Most of the people who are big Daniel Johnston fans are other song-writers,” said Kathy McCarty, a long-time friend of Johnston’s. “The first time I heard his cassette, it was like ‘This guy is an incredible, genius songwriter.’ You can look at some of his songs and go, ‘What a great arrangement, what a great middle eight, what a great turn of phrase!’ I never thought he was like a freak show or like ‘Listen to this guy have a nervous breakdown on this record.’”
McCarty’s former band Glass Eye often shared the stage with Johnston in the early days of their careers. In 2005 McCarty recorded some of Johnston’s best songs with her then-current band Dead Dog’s Eyeball.
A year before that, a laundry list of the best indie bands and artists from the early aughts covered 18 of Johnston’s best songs for a compilation album, the title, “The Late Great Daniel Johnston” inspired by famed fellow-Texan country-folk singer Townes Van Zandt’s “The Late Great Townes Van Zandt.”
In one of his most often covered songs “True Love Will Find You in the End” Johnston wrote about finding love, saying, “How can it recognize you unless you step out into the light. Don’t be sad, I know you will, but don’t give up until true love will find you in the end.”
It was one of his more lyrically simple songs but it rings true for a lot of listeners and most likely Johnston himself, who spent a lifetime dealing with heartache and mental illness, but ultimately was loved and adored to great intensity by many, many people in the end.
Richard Foltz
Executive Editor