Daniel Johnston “I Had Lost My Mind” “Living Life” “Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Your Grievience”

Last weekend the little lady and I netflix’d The Devil and Daniel Johnston, a marvelous and heartbreaking biography of the troubled Austin artist, singer-songwriter and pioneering home recordist who’s been a touchstone for a couple generations of indie rockers. The filmmakers truly do justice to a life that is the stuff of tall tales.

Picking up the strand from Lindayism like a month ago, I’d highly recommended this DVD to pretty much everybody. It has moments of hope and is full of beauty, although it’s ultimately harrowing in its depiction of Johnston’s psychosis. It’s amazing how much archival stuff they were able to use–audio tapes of family arguments, Super 8 films of the crush that became a lifelong muse, video of some of his most disastrous performances.

The film demonstrates how the urge to document, to tell stories, has been intimately intertwined with Johnston’s creative play since his teens. It also shows those who fetishize, and even seem to goad along, his illness to be as ill-equipped as his family and friends when it’s time to actually face the ugly results.

It was amazing to see how shrewd and self-conscious Johnston could be even in his disconnected moments–a stark contrast to his image as an inspired naif. And his illness aside, the man’s music has never shone as incandescently as when paired with the imagery in The Devil and Daniel Johnston. Here’s one case in point:

Oh, so I’m not going to front like I’m a D. Johnston expert. I’m not.

I just want to share a couple tracks originally from 1980’s Songs of Pain, but taken from last year’s The Late Great Daniel Johnston: Discovered Covered. This double-disc comp presents Johnston originals and covers of the same songs by various alt-rock luminaries.

And I want to tell you what I love about his music.

“Living Life” is rough-hewn but plaintive. Johnston’s childlike voice shuffles through yearning, hope, joy and sadness beyond his years at the time. The tape warble on his vocals and the basement acoustics reverb around the piano lend the proceedings a timeless but distant warmth, like a yellowing photograph whose exact age or era you can’t quite place.

He’s singing about the span and scope of life here, but highlights a basic conflict that anticipated his later struggles, like the little rumbles before the Big One: What do you do with the artist? Not to be too precious about it, but how does someone who feels so deeply, devotes his waking hours and his dreams to a basically impractical pursuit, deal with the dulling concerns of the workaday world? Johnston evades pretension in tackling this pretty Big Issue (I fear I haven’t) by being plainspoken, bleeding honesty onto a magnetic reel.

If I have the story straight after watching the film, “Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Your Grievience” comes from a time when the only instrument Johnston had access to was a chord organ, a fan-powered keyboard that’s a cousin to the accordion. So he pumps away, channeling his loneliness and his anger at limitation into a letter to himself, a mini-sermon against loneliness, limitation and anger.

For better or worse, he’s never alone when he has his quixotic ambition, his outsized imagination. During a closing breakdown/vamp of the chorus starting about 2:28, he leads the audience in a singalong. Thus the exile, jury-rigging a studio from scraps in his brother’s garage, conjures a stadium of fans to keep him company.

The Late Great Daniel Johnston at Newbury Comics. (and at iTunes.)
The Devil and Daniel Johnston at Target.