If Daniel Johnston were born in a different time and place, he might have been burned as a heretic or confined forever to an insane asylum. But in this age, the self-taught singer-songwriter, given to paranoid delusions about Satan and violent outbursts, has become a revered figure in the underground art and music world. He has just published his first book of art, simple called Daniel Johnston
The astonishingly prolific singer-songwriter and visual artist planted himself into the Austin, Texas, music scene in the early ‘80s and went on to become a cult figure among musicians and pop-music fans through the dozens of self-made cassette tapes he recorded and distributed over the next decade or so. The tapes’ titles range from the brutally direct (“Songs of Pain”) to the cheerful (“Hi, How Are You”). Their covers are adorned with Johnson’s simple drawings of naked baby-men, or alien frog creatures with large eyeballs perched on the ends of long antennae.
The tapes look and sound deceptively primitive. Johnston has the kind of voice that is definitely an acquired taste: a passionate, high-pitched quaver that see-saws in and out of tune, and ahead or behind of the beat, according to its own weird logic. But the songs themselves, which have been praised (and covered) by the likes of Sonic Youth, Tom Waits, Pearl Jam, Beck, and the Flaming Lips, are sometimes difficult to listen to for another reason: they are so raw and so brutally honest that it’s hard to distance yourself from the tortured soul who wrote them.
That quality is exactly what Jeff Feuerzeig seeks to convey, and often does, in his heartbreaking documentary “The Devil and Daniel Johnston
Johnston, now in his mid-40s, grew up in a family of right wing, Christian fundamentalists in New Cumberland, VA. He was a gifted teenager who spent much of his time drawing wild cartoons (disembodied, floating eyeballs have always been one of his trademarks) and making clever little home movies with his older brother. In scratchy clips from old Super 8’s, we see Johnston playing dual roles, as himself and his mother, who, in her hair curlers and housecoat, yells at him mercilessly and feeds him a green Kool-Aid and popcorn concoction for breakfast.
Johnston had a room in the family basement that he turned into a mini-archive of comic books, magazines, cassette tapes and vinyl albums. (The room he lives in as an adult, in his parents’ current home in Waller, Texas, is a re-creation of that earlier room.) As a teenager, Johnston recorded his thoughts and feelings onto cassette tapes. Later, accompanied by piano, he would turn those thoughts into painfully direct and heartfelt songs, which he would copy and distribute to friends and strangers alike.
Johnston was a smart, creative kid who somehow lost his footing on the way to adulthood. His mother, distressed by his wild drawings and even wilder imagination, tried to coerce him into respectability, calling him “an unprofitable servant of the Lord.” (Johnston’s lifelong best friend, an artist and poet named David Thornberry, recalled that Johnston responded by calling himself “an unserviceable prophet of the Lord.”) As much as they tried to set him on the “right” path, enrolling him at a Christian college in Abilene, Johnston’s voracious creativity could not be suppressed and soon bizarre illustrations of eyeballs, Casper the Friendly Ghost, and Captain America began flowing from him at a somewhat alarming rate.
Johnston eventually left Abilene and enrolled at an art college, Kent State, which was a much better fit for his unique sensibilities. At Kent, Johnston would meet the girl of his dreams and life-long muse in Laurie Allen. As Johnston tells it, she would inspire a thousand songs in him. But as it were, a lifetime with Laurie was not in the cards and it was around this time that Johnston would begin his long and devastating downward spiral. Before completing college, Johnston ran off and joined a carnival without telling his parents or siblings of his whereabouts. Forced to quit that gig, (apparently, he was beaten up by a carnie thug for hogging a porta-potty) he found himself in Austin, Texas where he landed a job cleaning tables at a McDonald’s. There, he fell in with a group of local musicians, among them singer Kathy McCarty, who came to recognize the extraordinary but rather delicate nature of his talent. Next Page
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