Rock icon Daniel Johnston’s visit to South Africa is a coup for art and grunge
Kathryn Smith
Where singer-songwriter Daniel Johnston of Texas is concerned, people fall into two categories.
Those who know (of) him are always armed with anecdotes ever more extreme, chaotic and hilarious than the last about this figure that has infiltrated more muso headspace than there are drive-through fast food restaurants in well, Benoni. The rest tend to say: “Daniel who?”
Until a few months ago, I was one of them. Now, after listening to his latest indie offering Rejected Unknown for almost two months without respite, it’s DJ all the way.
A figure who has been described as a “sadly compulsive 1980s weirdo”, Johnston is an astonishingly prolific musician and aspiring artist-cartoonist who has been granted exhibitions in numerous galleries across Europe and the United States.
He turned 40 this year. Born in Sacramento, California, he has relocated several times from West Virginia, Houston, San Marcos, Austin and now to desperately suburban Waller, Texas, where he lives with his parents and records music from his garage/basement.
The youngest of five children growing up in a Christian fundamentalist household, his biography is as diametrically opposed to “conservative” as possible, with jobs ranging from carnival ride operator (on The River of No Return) to corn-dog merchant and a short art school stint at Kent State University.
He eventually dropped out of college to pursue his burgeoning songwriting career that began by recording his songs played on cheap children’s instruments on even cheaper tape recorders. Working at McDonalds, he used to give the cassettes away to pretty girls and interesting-looking customers.
Johnston’s career has been peppered, and at times seriously jeopardised, by his manic depression, which he, or rather his parents, try to temper with medication.
A self-confessed, die-hard Beatles fan, Johnston has often identified with The Fool on the Hill “as I lived on a hill and I used to think, ‘Hey they’re singing about me!’ because I am kinda crazy sometimes”.
Living almost solely on a diet of junk food, he’s on the highest possible dosage of Lithium because all the cooldrinks he consumes flushes it right out of his system. Over the years, the combination of excess sugar and drug side-effects have wreaked havoc with his weight.
In moments of delusion or simple frustration, which have either landed him in hospital or police custody, or both, he has beaten up Sonic Youth’s Steve Shelley, caused his father’s aircraft to crash-land and during a recording session, pushed a woman out a window.
But this kind of sensationalist hype easily makes way for the other kind the hyperbolic press that has waxed lyrical about his “genius savant” songwriting talents in such illustrious publications as the New York Times, Village Voice and, closer to home, the Austin Chronicle.
As he recounts tales of severe antisocial behaviour, he’s purported to comment, just as matter-of-factly, “I’ve just been talking weird, trying to make things interesting,” and that’s that.
Melodies that bite and don’t let go, poetically pragmatic and confessional lyrics with a wicked wit, and a voice that belongs in the body of a 20-year-old is where Johnston is most definable. Although he only started recording in earnest in the mid-Eighties, he started composing at the age of nine. “I used to bang around on the piano, making up horror movie themes. When I got a bit older, I’d be mowing my lawn and I’d make up songs and sing them. No one could hear me ’cause of the lawn mower.”
Although not massive commercial success stories, his songs have been covered by many post-rockers, including Sparklehorse, Kathy McCarty and Yo La Tengo, as well as Mo Tucker, ex of The Velvet Underground.
Johnny Depp’s band P, featuring Gibby Haynes of the Butthole Surfers, recorded I Save Cigarette Butts, a track Johnston says he wrote about a college girlfriend. “I used to save cigarettes from the ashtrays for her because she was poor.” His songs, performed by himself or others, have been included on the soundtracks for films such as Kids, Before Sunrise and Slacker.
Johnston will be in Johannesburg next week as a guest of the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) Cape Town (directed by Thomas Mulcaire), where he will perform in a music video clip for his song King Kong, part of a project by Berlin-based artist Peter Friedl.
“Obscure American musician, King Kong and boxers in Johannesburg?” you may well ask.
Well, it goes something like this: Most of Johnston’s creative output has been fuelled by an unrequited love interest called Laurie Allen. Thus far, his Allen-inspired production has included 23 albums, five singles, thousands of drawings and a T-shirt bearing the phrase “Hi, How are you”, which, when Kurt Cobain wore it on stage at the MTV Awards in September 1992, cemented Johnston’s status as a cult figure with no equal.
His cartoon drawings often feature his own interpretations of comic book superheroes, in particular what appears to be his alter ego, Captain America, battling the forces of evil.
Allen, who has continued to reject Johnston’s advances, has since married an undertaker. Needless to say, many of his songs circulate around the issue of funerals love at the graveside, so to speak.
The film will be shot from the rooftops of Johannesburg’s CBD, complete with gorilla suit and piano loaned from the estate of the late Todd Matshikiza, who penned the South African musical King Kong.
So, in his King Kong, there are no prizes for guessing who is the all-powerful but ultimately defeated primate and who the desired Fay Wray. Add the South African King Kong to the mix and it all makes perfect sense. In fact, I’ll go out on a limb and guess that the Friedl/Johnston collaboration is destined to become one of the most interesting art/music collaborations since Warhol invented the Velvet Underground.
The ICA and Johannesburg-based arts consultancy The Trinity Session have also pooled their resources to bring Johnston to the Bassline in Melville for a one-night-only special event on June 14.
As Johnston has been known to (strategically) “lose his lyric book”, beat up fellow musicians and generally leave audiences glad he doesn’t collapse from sheer nerves by the end of a set, it should be a night to tell your grandkids about.