I’m a little late to the table with this, but gimme a break …. it’s been a busy week.
I remember reading about Daniel Johnston way before ever hearing his music, but got my first taste via a compilation video called Mouthful of Sweat, which I bought for its inclusion of angry noise-rock bands like Missing Foundation, Prong and Cop Shoot Cop. Daniel's contributions ("Funeral Home," "I Did Acid with Caroline" and "Don't Play Cards with Satan") were *nothing* like the feral, aggressive music I bought the video for, but the songs were just as powerful, albeit in an entirely different way.
At once childlike, surreal and intimately heartfelt, Daniel's music hinted at a much more complicated story than the descriptor "Lo-fi indie songwriter" could ever begin to encapsulate. I had to write an obit for the man for work this week, which you can find here. Given the nature of my organization’s relationship with its affiliated songwriters, composers and music publishers, it wasn’t really prudent to get into the specifics of Johnston’s otherwise largely acknowledged mental travails, although those aspects of his personal and creative life are essentially an inexorable part of his story. The man himself was entirely open about his struggles in that capacity.
That particular aspect of Daniel Johnston — his role as a pivotal figure in so-called “outsider” music (i.e. naive, self-taught) has always made me somewhat uncomfortable. There seems to be a sort of voyeuristic quality and not-so-vague exploitative element to celebrating the more eccentric parts of his art and music, which seems sort of brazenly inappropriate considering that the issues he was grappling with were very real. By the same token, much of the greatest art, music and literature throughout the ages has been produced by similarly troubled individuals. To not celebrate Johnston’s entirely distinctive and prolific work is to deny his life’s greatest endeavor.
When I think of Daniel Johston’s music, meanwhile, I am instantly transported back to a specific era of popular culture. I am reminded of discovering bands like Galaxie 500, King Missile, The Clean and Bongwater, hanging out in long-since vanished live-music venues like Maxwell’s in Hoboken, the Knitting Factory in on East Houston Street and the Thread Waxing Space on Broadway. His music played regularly in similarly long-shuttered esoteric record stores like Pier Platters in Hoboken, Rocks In Your Head in SoHo and Downtown Music Gallery. His songs evoked a specific, intangible sensibility that really did influence and inform a whole legion of artists more inclined to more purely expressing themselves rather than simply catering to trends or shifting units.
May he finally find peace.
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