David Kronke: The devil? Or Daniel Johnston?
The Daily News' Bob Strauss wasn’t wowed by “The Devil and Daniel Johnston,� a documentary about the Texas-based singer-songwriter and his epically poignant battle with madness. And, I concede, when you first hear Johnston, with his cracking, whiny voice, perform his material, it’s initially difficult to get past the amateurism of his self-recorded material (a point more or less made in the film when other Austin musicians were outraged when he won some key local-music awards).
I saw the film last year at Sundance (where, granted, the thin air has inspired ill-advised euphoria for films, particularly by acquisitions executives who spend waaay too much on some movies), so what I saw may differ a bit from the film as released. But there were a couple of things about director Jeff Feuerzig’s documentary that just blew me away.
Feuerzig had access to hundreds of audio tapes Johnston made over the years, many of them stream-of-consciousness burblings. Essentially, Johnston unwittingly kept a real-time audio diary of his descent into insanity. Feuerzig artfully combines Johnston’s rants with his home movies and other point-of-view shots that squarely place the viewer in the mind of someone losing his grasp on reality with an unnerving precision. To get better insight into what such an experience is like, you’d probably have to go crazy yourself.
And then, there’s Johnston’s music. Perhaps due to his mental issues, Daniel has absolutely no censor in his head when he writes his songs – they’re as stripped and close-to-the-bone in their emotional content as anything you’re likely to hear. …
Johnston doesn’t try to find terribly poetic ways to convey his pain; he simply expresses his heartbreak/bewilderment/anguish in a fashion so naked and, potentially, devastating that, here’s guessing, music fans sick of pop’s pervasively slick sensibility find refreshing and perhaps even revelatory. And that tremulous, unprofessional voice just adds to the music’s spiritual street cred.
(An aside: I once referred to Johnston in a review as a “primitivist;� someone somewhere along the editing process, doing some personal editorializing, changed the word to “weirdo.� Go figure.)
Another thing that’s amazing about Johnston’s story is, given his mental problems, he was still able, by sheer dint of his ambition, to insinuate his way into the Sonic Youth brain trust and get New York club gigs (not to mention, he managed to survive New York’s mean streets solo). There’s even a shocking plane crash in “The Devil and Daniel Johnston:� It’s practically a no-budget “The Aviator.�
I spoke with Johnston and Feuerzig at Sundance. Though better than he was at his worst, Daniel’s still a terribly fragile guy but, to this day, incapable of being dishonest. When Feuerzig and I began discussing minutiae about his film, Daniel nodded off – in broad daylight, in a room bristling with the bustle of noisy festival-goers. At another point, he got very – probably too – excited when rewarded with a baseball cap sporting the logo of a festival sponsor. (On the other hand, heiress Paris Hilton lights out for Sundance to gather up loads of upscale freebies she could pay for without putting a dent in her credit cards’ limits, so who’s the real crazy person here?)
When you meet Johnston, you like him almost immediately, because he still possesses that blind optimism he had back in the ’80s, when he was convinced he destined to become pop’s Next Huge Thing. (Well, today he’s huge, at least.)
In his review of the documentary for the Daily News, Bob wrote, “. . . the people who compare him to the Beatles, Dylan and Brian Wilson still end up sounding like fools.� Actually, I do hear strains of Brian Wilson in Daniel’s work, and not just because both of them endured bouts of madness.
Anyone who wants to try to get a grip on Johnston’s music but can’t get their ears around his vocals should try these recordings: “Dead Dog’s Eyeball,� by K. McCarty (formerly of the Austin band Glass Eye), an overlooked classic when it was released a dozen years ago (and recently re-released, with the bonus-for-latecomers-to-the-party extra tracks – why can’t they do things the other way around: Put the bonus tracks on the original release for the folks who are clued-in enough to buy in before a recording gathers a cult reputation, and then take them away for the subsequent re-releases when any joker off the street can pretend he’s on top of the cool music?). Johnston had an enduring crush on McCarty, and she reciprocated enough to appreciate his genius; her takes on his songs pretty much prove he had a compelling pop sensibility.
There’s also “The Late Great Daniel Johnston: Discovered Covered,� a two-disk set featuring performances of Johnston tunes by such established artists as Beck, Tom Waits, eels, Teenage Fanclub, Gordan Gano of Violent Femmes, Death Cab for Cutie and Vic Chestnutt; the second disk offers Johnston’s own takes on his material. Listen to how others respond to Johnston, and then Johnston himself will begin to make a lot more sense to you.
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