Songs of Pain
daniel johnston’s sweet originality
Halfway through an awkward phone interview with Daniel Johnston, I bring up King Kong in an attempt to make some connection with the singer-songwriter. In previous interviews I’d read, Daniel went out of his way to mention monster movies, and the original King Kong happens to be my favorite movie. For a few minutes, we find some common ground talking about the Peter Jackson remake from a couple years ago. “Man, up on that mountain, when that girl started doing cartwheels, you just knew they were having a good time,” Johnston says. “It was like they were havin’ an orgy up there or somethin’.”
This is the Daniel Johnston humor that one comes to know and love on his early and best home-recorded records—a charming mix of sweetness and bizarre originality delivered in a high-pitched yelp. The moment we share is short lived. Our conversation soon settles back into the earlier strained back-and-forth, and eventually tapers to a close.
Besides the usual stiffness of a phone interview, standing between us is the reality of Daniel’s serious bipolar disorder, which, combined with his medication, affects his attention span and renders his thought process muddled. Going into the interview, I knew it would be difficult or impossible to get Johnston to open up. In fact, our conversation on the whole is an absolute success when compared to some of his more unhinged or troubled interviews and public performances over the years.
Johnston has attracted a varyingly dedicated cult following over the course of almost 30 years of recorded music. In the early 1980s, he recorded a series of rudimentary albums directly onto cassette tapes accompanied by a cheap keyboard, most notably the seminal Songs of Pain and Hi How Are You? While Johnston’s frenetic and unpretentious music often draws the most attention, his drawings are also popular with fans and musicians alike. Kurt Cobain, for example, wore a Johnston original t-shirt (the album cover of Hi How Are You?) for years. Johnston became a hometown legend by handing his tapes out to anyone who would take them, eventually ending up on MTV in a special about Austin, Texas.
Unfortunately, his mental state deteriorated at the tail end of his most fertile creative period, and he was in and out of mental institutions during a time when artists including Kurt Cobain, Yo La Tengo, and the Butthole Surfers championed his work. At one point he became obsessed with the idea of the devil, and in a particularly harrowing episode of mental illness, caused his father to crash a small plane by trying to wrest the controls away from him. Johnston has persevered through his health setbacks and the fickle nature of the music industry to gain recognition as a genuine, if extremely erratic, artist.
Like many artists from what is now increasingly considered a “golden age” of independent music in the mid to late 1980s, Johnston has benefitted from his work’s canonization in young, hip circles. An album of Johnston covers and a documentary film in the past few years have helped to raise his profile for a new generation of listeners.
“We’re reeeee-ally making the better money this time,” he says in response to a question about his current tour. “I was starving for years, but you know, I haven’t worked since 1986 when I worked at McDonald’s. So it’s great to be able to live off my music.”
Johnston credits his newfound financial viability to the fact that his father, Bill, and his brother, Dick, have taken over his management and finances. Besides their apparent skill in sorting out his money, the family model is also a thousand times more charming than any PR representation could hope to be—I spend a baffling but ultimately endearing morning trading phone calls with Bill while he wonders out loud where Daniel “had gotten off to.”
The team also seems to have figured out how to successfully manage a Daniel Johnston concert experience, a notoriously hit-or-miss affair that has frustrated many fans and critics over the course of his career. At his show Thursday night at the Highline Ballroom, things are far from perfect, but they are also far from disastrous. Daniel tells me he doesn’t rehearse much, but many of his straightforward and best-known songs don’t demand a great deal of technical precision. He reads from a music stand and often makes a racket striking his pick against the side of his guitar—he has tremors resulting from his medication—but the lyrics and melodies of his best songs speak for themselves.
His bittersweet anthem “Living Life” connects with immediacy, and his cover of “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” by his beloved Beatles is a fantastic reminder that Johnston’s simple and sometimes arbitrary rhymes have a precedent in the greatest pop-song writing of all time. Johnston takes a short break after his eight-song acoustic set and returns with the opening band, Spanish Prisoners. It is sometimes glaringly obvious that any preparation between Johnston and the rest of the band had been minimal—at one point the Johnston sings in a different key than the band, who patiently continue. Still, they add the necessary momentum to the ecstatic “Speeding Motorcycle,” and they find the haunted core of “Walking the Cow” by haltingly building the complexity of the arrangement as the song progresses. Johnston returns to the stage for a single encore, a quiet take on his classic “True Love Will Find You in the End.”
The show is a happy reminder of what makes Johnston’s music special—its ability to convey complex emotion nakedly and viscerally. His strengths as an artist do not lie in public self-assessment—when I ask him a question during the interview about his artistic process, he launches into a description of his household routine (make a drawing, watch a movie, eat some food, make some music). A question about whether he thinks his music has progressed over the years prompts a hesitant, “Yes.” His inability to completely explain what makes his music significant shouldn’t devalue his music, though. At its best, his songs are as poignant and idiosyncratic as nearly any pop songs of the past three decades, and they do not need to be improved upon by explanation.