Last night Terry and I watched "The Devil and Daniel Johnston." I am apparently the only person of my generation to NOT have seen this yet.
I have never been cool and always thought the underground was a place below my feet filled with dirt and worms, so naturally I had never heard of him before.
Daniel Johnston is an artist and songwriter who had a cult following in the 1980's and 90's. He was incredibly prolific and quirky, leading people to believe he was a genius - he's been compared to Bob Dylan, etc. Johnston had brief mainstream exposure when Kurt Cobain repeatedly wore a t-shirt of Johnston's album, "Hi, How Are You?"
Here is a great article from the Guardian about the movie:
Just how important a role the devil has played in the life of songwriter Daniel Johnston emerges about three-quarters of the way through a new documentary film about his life. In the movie, Johnston's father Bill recounts a story about a journey back from a concert appearance in 1990 - the kind of journey which would usually be made in Bill's light aircraft.
Things had started off well that evening. Daniel had made a two-song appearance at the Austin Music Awards in Texas, and after his performance - which had been well-received - Daniel and Bill made their way back to the plane for the flight home to West Virginia. After take-off, however, it became apparent to Bill that all was not well with Daniel - he had started to believe that it was Satan, and not his father, piloting the plane. Daniel overpowered Bill, reached for the plane's keys, and took them from the ignition. He then opened the window of the plane, and threw them out.
To say "But don't worry, it all turned out OK" might be factually correct, but if Jeff Feuerzeig's film The Devil And Daniel Johnston makes one thing abundantly plain, it's that when you're dealing with an artist who has fought a longtime battle with mental illness, it's a vain hope to think that anything can ever be particularly straightforward. Yet in spite of the many drawbacks of working with Daniel - these would include mood swings, and a tendency for the artist himself to abscond suddenly and without warning - the understated case made in Feuerzeig's film is that so great is Johnston's talent, and so deeply do musicians and associates respond to his music, that they will put up with a lot in order to help bring it to a wider audience.
It's not hard to see why Johnston inspires such a devotional response. Often fragile, incredibly honest, and sometimes as uncomfortable to listen to as it is enjoyable, his music was born in isolation - his early cassettes were recorded in his parents' house - and comes with its own vocabulary and obsessions, from deep within its own world.
James McNew, bassist with erstwhile Johnston collaborators Yo La Tengo thinks it's this which particularly marks Johnston's music out as great. "I thought it was beautiful," he says. "I had never heard anything like it. It felt like you weren't supposed to hear it, that you were hearing something taped by a guy in the privacy of his own room. It just seemed so personal and so private, I couldn't get it out of my head. I still can't."
Other musicians have been just as vocal in their praise of Johnston's talents. Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips, meanwhile has touched on an inescapable point - whether it's possible to separate the music from the problems of the person who made it. "The simplicity of the lyrics comes from true inner anguish," he has said. "Madness shouldn't be thought of as people in mental hospitals peeing on themselves. Who's to say at what level all of us don't have some inner struggle?"
Johnston's struggle has been long, and occasionally violent, and perhaps despite his best intentions, it's this which dominates Feuerzeig's film. A recent posting on Daniel's website amplifies the fact that it's a struggle that's still continuing: two weeks ago his European live appearances were cancelled, as were speaking engagements that were to have followed screenings of the film.
"His family agrees that mood changes seem to be surfacing," said the announcement, "that limit his capacity to cope with all the activity."
When he was growing up in the late 1960s and 1970s, there was no reason to suspect that Daniel Johnston was anything other than a particularly creative child. When the family bought a Super-8 camera, Johnston and his brothers made movies, with Daniel as director and star. At home, he made audio diaries, chronicling his everyday life, and his rows with his mother. On enrolling in high school, it was his prodigious drawing talent for which he was most praised.
By the time he was 18, however, his creativity had found another outlet. Having met and become hopelessly obsessed with a local girl called Laurie Allen, he began writing songs - hundreds of them - about his love for her, and his romantic despair at her recent engagement to a local undertaker. Johnston's output in his late teens and early 20s proved to be a symptom of his worsening manic depression. Nonetheless, after appearing on an MTV special about Austin, Texas bands, in the mid-1980s, Daniel started to lead a double life: by day McDonald's employee; by night, a minor musical celebrity. His illness was never very far beneath the surface, however, and after suffering a breakdown, he began a long cycle of musical productivity, interspersed with confinement in mental institutions, that would come to mark the pattern of his life in the 1980s and 1990s. At a question and answer session after a screening of The Devil And Daniel Johnston, he arrived slurping a jumbo coke from a burger joint, and seemed in good spirits: looking older than 43, but witty and self-deprecating. Seeing the film, he said, made him embarrassed about some of the things that he's done in his life, but that some good things had come out of it. Unknown to him, the film-makers had arranged for him to meet Laurie Allen, now divorced from her undertaker husband.
"Wow, I tell you..." he enthused. "I fell in love with Laurie Allen when I went to college. When she got married to the undertaker, I went sort of psycho. "Then there she is. She was actually there. She was so friendly and she knew all the songs, and she was more beautiful than ever. It was really great to see her." In fact, Daniel hoped there might be a chance to see her again. "But it's almost too much. I love her too much," he said. "I feel like dying. It takes too much out of me. It's almost too much to stand. It's too great a reward to think I stand a chance..."
Johnston's life has been undeniably filled with incident, but at the Q&A, it was to the music the questions returned. Daniel has four albums worth of material to be recorded, and at least one of his themes, love, is still present in the songs. But does Satan appear in any of them? "Oh no," he said finally, "that's kind of worn out ..."
This movie bothered me for a couple reasons. While, it was so exhilarating to be let into the mind of a manic depressive, bipolar mind, it was also very unnerving. The endless amounts of footage and audio made me feel as though I really got an intimate glimpse at mental illness. On one hand I'm scared of Daniel Johnston because he is mentally unstable - known for spontaneous violence - but then, it's also so sad how illness takes over his mind completely, rendering him incompetent and unaware of reality.
I also felt a lot of contempt for all the indie rockers who hail him as some kind of god. There seems to be a huge blur between genius and mental illness. A lot of people seemed to ignore how truly sick he was just to get him up on stage for some crazy show.
He is coming to Philadelphia this summer and now - I'm torn. I feel like if I go see him, it will be out of curiosity surrounding his mental illness - to experience his mythic quality - who knows what he'll do? But then, I don't want to be there ogling him. And while his music is incredibly unique due to the fact that he is a completely different human being that the rest of us, I wasn't like, blown away.
So, I don't know what I'll do - whether I'll go see him or not - but this movie did really effect me whether I liked his music or not. I have never glimpsed at mental illness so intimately and there was nothing cool or genius about it.
