Probably the most commonly asked small-talk question on the shiny dance floor of the always-classy Bimbo’s 365 Club Wednesday (August 22, 2007) night was, “Have you seen the movie?” The Devil And Daniel Johnston, the 2004 documentary, has done for Johnston’s career what the “Pink Moon” Volkswagen ad did for Nick Drake. It turned him from a cult figure into a universally beloved one, it turned your secret favorite undiscovered genius into everyone’s favorite undiscovered genius. Johnston’s name used to be like the password that gained you access to the secret club. Either you knew the words to every song, or you’d never heard of him. Luckily for Daniel, he didn’t die at age 24 like Nick Drake did. He is alive and (more or less) well, kept stable with medication, obese and gray and living with his parents in suburban Waller, Texas.
If you’ve seen the movie, you already know the major plot points in the Daniel Johnston legend. Raised in a tight-knit fundamentalist Christian family in West Virginia, Johnston eventually he ended up in Austin, Texas, got a job at McDonald’s, and charmed his way into a role as pet of the early ’90s Austin music scene by handing out cassette tapes he recorded in his parents’ basement and his brother’s garage. He even managed to hustle his way onto MTV. But along with his tremendous (if untutored) talent as a songwriter, Daniel had an uncontrolled, florid bipolar disorder that often blossomed into full-blown psychosis. Over the years he beat a friend over the head with a pipe, crashed his father’s small airplane, terrified an old lady so bad she jumped out a window, and had a total freakout during a trip to New York City, such that Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth was compelled to drive around New Jersey looking for him, and found him on the side of the road, raving about Satan in the pouring rain.
Thanks to the miracles of modern medicine, Daniel is not only stable, he’s on tour. I had expected to see an audience of aging gen-Xers in the Bimbo’s crowd, but they were nowhere in evidence. Everyplace I looked was 22-year-olds in skinny jeans. Opening for Daniel was the Ohsees, a local outfit headed up by the multitalented John Dwyer, formerly of the Coachwhips. Dwyer announced that they had a new drummer, and it was his 21st birthday.
There was a long interval between the Ohsees leaving the stage and Johnston’s entrance. The skinny-jeaned, art-schoolish crowd got restless, chanting “Dan-iel! Dan-iel!” for a good few minutes. Eventually he shambled out, and the cheers were rapturous. Dressed in a gray long-sleeved t-shirt tucked into his sweatpants (“SWEATPANTS?” yelled a kid standing near me, sounding actually offended), Daniel did what he does best. In his cracked high tenor, much more cracked and scratchy than it once was, Daniel sang about love and heartbreak and god and the devil, hunched around the microphone so that it almost seemed he didn’t know or care that any of us were even there. He played the first few songs on an odd little square wooden electric guitar that had the tuning pegs in the body itself, in recesses above and below the strings. His guitar playing, never his strongest suit, was especially wobbly this evening. After a few numbers, another guitarist, Brett Hartenbach, played while Daniel just sang. The reason for this became clear: his hands were shaking. My armchair psychiatry “degree” leads me to think that the tremor is a side effect of anti-psychotic meds.
In old footage, Johnston always looked and sounded about sixteen, skinny with brown curly hair and wild sad eyes. Now that he’s so overweight and gray and palsied, I had to keep reminding myself that he’s only 46. He looks ten years older, at least. But there was nothing diminished about his spirit or the power of his music, and the art-school kid crowd was right there with him. The resurgent love for Daniel Johnston’s music does not appear, as I’d feared, to come out of an ironic it’s-great-because-it’s-terrible thing. They were loving him because he is utterly authentic, free of artifice, expressing out loud a kind of adolescent turmoil that saner people hide at all costs. “Mean girls give pleasure/it’s my greatest treasure,” went his opening number. “All of your problems are probably fake/and she tastes just like ice cream and cake.”
