THE DUKE ON
THE DEVIL AND DANIEL JOHNSTON
THE DEVIL AND DANIEL JOHNSTON
I first watched The Devil And Daniel Johnston five nights past with
the dawn set for tickling the window glass beside me and a head
like a pickled arse perched top my shoulders. Fried with insomnia
and lust and exhausted on account of the scribbling of a novel and
what have you, in this state I hit play on the DVD Disc Spinneroo
doohickey, hit play says I and watched as the aforementioned motion
picture, Jeff Feuerzeig’s most beautiful and harrowing and
distressing and life-affirming 2005 documentary affair concerning
the singer / songwriter / artist of the title and the sundry
terrors and torments and highs and lows rattling around his brain-
bumps, watched as that particular masterwork bled o’er the screen
and on across the carpet.
It swole up there and then and some two hours later it faded from
the screen and I finally fell asleep with its myriad majesties
still racing round the skull like rabid sprites afire with The Lord.
I’ve watched it a further three times since then and still I got
the thirst of a thousand hounds gnawing at the throat for to see it
again.
I announced with great zeal to all who cared to listen, “Hear me
now, you must see this picture, for it is surely a fucking-well
glorious slab o’ cinema!”
I flung emails left and right and did evangelise its wonders to my
lady-friend, Beautiful Ms Gillian, who watched and was similarly
awe-struck.
Sat on a park-bench I yelled at a young lad with the eyeliner and
the elbow-pads and the strides jutting six feet out past his legs
all directions. I yelled and hollered; “You, have you seen The
Devil And Daniel Johnston, for judging by that Pitchfork Media
shirt I dare say you’d love every frame.”
He’d shrugged. “I’ve seen head nor tail of it. The hell is it,
anyroad, pray tell?”
“It’s a documentary about Daniel Johnston.”
“The Banana Pancakes fella?”
“Moses oh, he is not!”
“Well who?”
Here’s who, says I, and then got to telling him all about it;
Daniel Johnston, see, is a singer / songwriter and artist and
sometime filmmaker done made his name on the back of a series of
self-produced, self-recorded, self-analysing cassette tapes filled
with beautiful, fragile, pop songs recorded on tape decks hung o’er
chord organs in basements reeking of religious mania, loneliness
and frustration.
He sang of King Kong and of Casper The Friendly Ghost and of the
unrequited love for an undertaker’s wife (the near-mythic Laurie)
informs his work to this very day. He sang in a high-pitched child-
like voice wrapped round a series of gorgeous, disarmingly simple
melodies, and bounced the lot through a prism of core
preoccupations; Satan, Christianity, lost love, Number 9, Number 9,
Number 9…
Somewhere along the line, for whatever reason, be it the LSD
dabbling or the zealous religious fundamentalism round about him or
just one of these things happens to folks, for whatever reason,
Daniel Johnston got very ill of the mind.
He’s still very ill of the mind, living with his parents who care
for him and make sure he stays on his medication and take him to
the supermarket once a week, when he isn’t off touring the art-
galleries and music halls of the world.
This is the tale The Devil And Daniel Johnston seeks to tell.
Like some delirious amalgam of Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation,
Andrew Jarecki’s Capturing The Friedmans, Ondi Timoner’s DiG!, Chad
Friedrichs’ Jandek On Corwood and Frederick Wiseman’s Titicut
Follies, Feuerzeig’s picture incorporates home movies, cassette
tape recordings, animation, performance footage, fresh interview
material and Johnston’s own super-8 short films for to create a
dazzling tapestry runs the very width and breadth of Daniel
Johnston’s life and work and illness.
It wants to tell you all there is to tell of this most mythologized
of alternative heroes, but it also wants to poke around the fringes
o’ that Genius / Madness divide, it wants to examine the same
Fractured Masculine Brain-Mess Muddle filmmakers have been
obsessing over for as long as anyone cares to remember, certainly
since Jimmy Stewart was leaning against the bar cracking no end o’
wise with an invisible rabbit, it wants to follow the trail of
Fight Club and The Machinist and any number of recent Lonely Male
Adrift In His Own Head pictures.
It wants to do all of this and to tell us any number of
unbelievable stories and anecdotes.
In-between jaunts to this mental hospital or the other, see, Daniel
found himself at the centre of an array of oft-times terrifying and
mostly heartbreaking dramas and escapades and foibles. A trip to
New York to hang with Sonic Youth for a few days ends with Johnston
running off into the night hollering wild-eyed about how Satan is
trying to keep him from staying in the city and dammit, he’s going
no-place, y’hear, so stop tryin’ to send him home. An incredibly
sympathetic deal with Electra Records ends with Daniel firing his
manager on account of how he’s evil, and Electra are evil, and a
band on their roster, Metallica, are hell-bent on beating the
singer-songwriter to death for reasons of Satan and such. His
father flies him back from a show in a tiny airplane, only to have
Daniel pulling the keys out the thing mid-flight and bringing the
lot crashing into a load o’ trees.
Recounting the details of this latter story, Bill Johnston breaks
down, near choking on the tears have him slumped o’er his chair
shaking his head with anguish and fear and disbelief.
Yes, there’s a lot of weeping goes on in The Devil And Daniel
Johnston, and to be sure, it’s got the potential for dragging a
litre or two out the eyes of the viewer, also. But it’ll get a lot
of smiles, too, and even, of occasion, a couple genuine guffaws.
Feuerzeig treats his subject with all the respect and sympathy you
could hope for (his excellent commentary track reveals him to be a
genuine fan of the fella, pointing out this masterpiece and that
work of genius from the stacks of cassette tapes appearing onscreen
now and again, or commenting on the brilliance of Daniel’s super-8
movies), but he also knows that there’s a lot of humour waiting to
be mined out the source material.
At one point, for example, we’re treated to an audio letter sent by
Daniel during one particular spell in the hospital, a letter sent
to his manager in which he performs a jingle he hopes will earn him
a sponsorship deal with Mountain Dew. The jingle, as with sundry
other Johnston compositions, concerns itself with sin and hellfire,
and ends with the singer making distorted demon noises into the
microphone, yelling about “Drink Mountain Dew… oooooooooooowwwwwww”
and so on.
When the tape ends, the manager appears onscreen. “I sent that off”
he says, “But the Pepsi Corporation never got back to me…”
In addition to all this biographical tomfoolery, The Devil And
Daniel Johnston raises and explores a number of questions can’t
help but flitter through the mind when the subject being discussed
is an individual such as this.
For one thing, it makes a fella think long and hard about that
aforementioned Genius / Madness thing, and sheds new light on it
altogether when one interviewee says about he’s always had great
disdain for the friends and acquaintances of, say, Van Gough, folks
who didn’t recognise the incredible talents and saw only a sick man
needing cured. He used to tut with regards those folks, but then he
finds himself in the company of Daniel Johnston and eventually, all
he can do for the good of the afflicted and of everyone else, is
have Daniel put in a hospital.
It’s all well and good saying madness is just an intractable part
of the Great Artist’s psyche and they need it to produce the kindsa
works they’re producing, but what about when that Artist is your
best friend and he’s stood knee deep in a river splashing water
about the place and yelling about deliverance and redemption and
The Devil? What about when that friend is trying to rid the demons
out an elderly woman who ends up bounding out a second story window
to escape, breaking both her ankles in the process?
What then?
Also, a fella can’t help but wonder how much of Daniel Johnston’s
appeal has to do with the kinda appeal brought folks out into the
fog-spun Victorian night to gaze upon John Merrick’s elephantine
face.
Certainly there’s a feeling not far removed from that must hug the
head of the voyeur stood watching a man masturbate through the
bedroom curtains, there’s a definite feeling such as that, I say,
waifts about the place when the footage of Daniel, obviously away
with it, weeping through a performance of Don’t Play Cards With
Satan in a living room or of Careless Soul at a small concert, when
that kinda footage gets to lingering onscreen.
But no matter. Whether or not one feels Daniel Johnston’s songs and
paintings are works of skull-frying, awe-inspiring genius or the
tuneless wailing and artless scribbling of a skull-fried manic
depressive being exploited beyond all sense, this has no bearing on
the film under consideration herein.
Which, I’m reminding the fella in the park, is a marvellous,
marvellous piece of work, up there with the very best flicks of the
year thus far - your United 93’s and Proposition’s and Munich’s and
The Squid And The Whale’s and whatever else you care to mention.
“But it was last year” he says.
“Shut up” says I, “It was released in the United UK in 2006 and
that’s as much as we need to concern ourselves with.”
The Devil And Daniel Johnston is available on Region 2 DVD through
Tartan Video, and has a set of glorious extras to compliment the
feature. There’s the commentary track, but also a selection of
Daniel’s flicks and some Deleted Scenes, one of which has Daniel
and his dad travel to South Africa so as the former might appear on
a telly show and also star in some kinda video has him stood in a
field dressed up as King Kong, climbing a ladder represents the
Empire State Building whilst Bill Johnston races about with 1930’s
aviation gear on, a toy bi-plane in his hand.
Also, hidden away in the Featurettes menu alongside a recording of
a brilliantly daft WFMU radio broadcast which begins with Daniel
spoofing Orson Welles’ War Of The Worlds affair, tucked to the side
of that is footage of the man finally, after twenty-something years
of obsessing about her and with God alone knows how many songs and
pictures and writings etched in her name, finally being reunited
with Laurie, his muse.
She doesn’t appear in the film itself outside of super-8 footage
shot by Daniel way back when, since, as the filmmakers themselves
say, it’s better to have her appear in the flick as she appears in
Daniel’s head.
But there she is, arriving at a screening of the feature for to
take questions and what have you, but not meeting the fella himself
till a party afterwards, on account of he was reluctant to come
onstage during the event because he believed this “Laurie” to be a
hoaxer. The two of them hug a half-dozen times and Daniel announces
that this is the happiest day of his life. “I dunno what to say…
Will you marry me?” Folks laugh at this, but it doesn’t seem like
Daniel’s much joking, to be honest.
“So”, I’m saying. “That’s as much as there is to tell.”
The skater / emo / whatever fella, he sniffs a time or two and
then, screwing up his face, he says “I dunno. Does it have robots?”
“Yeah” I lie. “Thousands o’ the bastards.”
I went home for to listen to Hi, How Are You? and think about that
review I need to be writing concerning The Devil And Daniel
Johnston.
Thanks folks.
Fling The Duke An Email or Sign The Mondo Guestbook
the dawn set for tickling the window glass beside me and a head
like a pickled arse perched top my shoulders. Fried with insomnia
and lust and exhausted on account of the scribbling of a novel and
what have you, in this state I hit play on the DVD Disc Spinneroo
doohickey, hit play says I and watched as the aforementioned motion
picture, Jeff Feuerzeig’s most beautiful and harrowing and
distressing and life-affirming 2005 documentary affair concerning
the singer / songwriter / artist of the title and the sundry
terrors and torments and highs and lows rattling around his brain-
bumps, watched as that particular masterwork bled o’er the screen
and on across the carpet.
It swole up there and then and some two hours later it faded from
the screen and I finally fell asleep with its myriad majesties
still racing round the skull like rabid sprites afire with The Lord.
I’ve watched it a further three times since then and still I got
the thirst of a thousand hounds gnawing at the throat for to see it
again.
I announced with great zeal to all who cared to listen, “Hear me
now, you must see this picture, for it is surely a fucking-well
glorious slab o’ cinema!”
I flung emails left and right and did evangelise its wonders to my
lady-friend, Beautiful Ms Gillian, who watched and was similarly
awe-struck.
Sat on a park-bench I yelled at a young lad with the eyeliner and
the elbow-pads and the strides jutting six feet out past his legs
all directions. I yelled and hollered; “You, have you seen The
Devil And Daniel Johnston, for judging by that Pitchfork Media
shirt I dare say you’d love every frame.”
He’d shrugged. “I’ve seen head nor tail of it. The hell is it,
anyroad, pray tell?”
“It’s a documentary about Daniel Johnston.”
“The Banana Pancakes fella?”
“Moses oh, he is not!”
“Well who?”
Here’s who, says I, and then got to telling him all about it;
Daniel Johnston, see, is a singer / songwriter and artist and
sometime filmmaker done made his name on the back of a series of
self-produced, self-recorded, self-analysing cassette tapes filled
with beautiful, fragile, pop songs recorded on tape decks hung o’er
chord organs in basements reeking of religious mania, loneliness
and frustration.
He sang of King Kong and of Casper The Friendly Ghost and of the
unrequited love for an undertaker’s wife (the near-mythic Laurie)
informs his work to this very day. He sang in a high-pitched child-
like voice wrapped round a series of gorgeous, disarmingly simple
melodies, and bounced the lot through a prism of core
preoccupations; Satan, Christianity, lost love, Number 9, Number 9,
Number 9…
Somewhere along the line, for whatever reason, be it the LSD
dabbling or the zealous religious fundamentalism round about him or
just one of these things happens to folks, for whatever reason,
Daniel Johnston got very ill of the mind.
He’s still very ill of the mind, living with his parents who care
for him and make sure he stays on his medication and take him to
the supermarket once a week, when he isn’t off touring the art-
galleries and music halls of the world.
This is the tale The Devil And Daniel Johnston seeks to tell.
Like some delirious amalgam of Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation,
Andrew Jarecki’s Capturing The Friedmans, Ondi Timoner’s DiG!, Chad
Friedrichs’ Jandek On Corwood and Frederick Wiseman’s Titicut
Follies, Feuerzeig’s picture incorporates home movies, cassette
tape recordings, animation, performance footage, fresh interview
material and Johnston’s own super-8 short films for to create a
dazzling tapestry runs the very width and breadth of Daniel
Johnston’s life and work and illness.
It wants to tell you all there is to tell of this most mythologized
of alternative heroes, but it also wants to poke around the fringes
o’ that Genius / Madness divide, it wants to examine the same
Fractured Masculine Brain-Mess Muddle filmmakers have been
obsessing over for as long as anyone cares to remember, certainly
since Jimmy Stewart was leaning against the bar cracking no end o’
wise with an invisible rabbit, it wants to follow the trail of
Fight Club and The Machinist and any number of recent Lonely Male
Adrift In His Own Head pictures.
It wants to do all of this and to tell us any number of
unbelievable stories and anecdotes.
In-between jaunts to this mental hospital or the other, see, Daniel
found himself at the centre of an array of oft-times terrifying and
mostly heartbreaking dramas and escapades and foibles. A trip to
New York to hang with Sonic Youth for a few days ends with Johnston
running off into the night hollering wild-eyed about how Satan is
trying to keep him from staying in the city and dammit, he’s going
no-place, y’hear, so stop tryin’ to send him home. An incredibly
sympathetic deal with Electra Records ends with Daniel firing his
manager on account of how he’s evil, and Electra are evil, and a
band on their roster, Metallica, are hell-bent on beating the
singer-songwriter to death for reasons of Satan and such. His
father flies him back from a show in a tiny airplane, only to have
Daniel pulling the keys out the thing mid-flight and bringing the
lot crashing into a load o’ trees.
Recounting the details of this latter story, Bill Johnston breaks
down, near choking on the tears have him slumped o’er his chair
shaking his head with anguish and fear and disbelief.
Yes, there’s a lot of weeping goes on in The Devil And Daniel
Johnston, and to be sure, it’s got the potential for dragging a
litre or two out the eyes of the viewer, also. But it’ll get a lot
of smiles, too, and even, of occasion, a couple genuine guffaws.
Feuerzeig treats his subject with all the respect and sympathy you
could hope for (his excellent commentary track reveals him to be a
genuine fan of the fella, pointing out this masterpiece and that
work of genius from the stacks of cassette tapes appearing onscreen
now and again, or commenting on the brilliance of Daniel’s super-8
movies), but he also knows that there’s a lot of humour waiting to
be mined out the source material.
At one point, for example, we’re treated to an audio letter sent by
Daniel during one particular spell in the hospital, a letter sent
to his manager in which he performs a jingle he hopes will earn him
a sponsorship deal with Mountain Dew. The jingle, as with sundry
other Johnston compositions, concerns itself with sin and hellfire,
and ends with the singer making distorted demon noises into the
microphone, yelling about “Drink Mountain Dew… oooooooooooowwwwwww”
and so on.
When the tape ends, the manager appears onscreen. “I sent that off”
he says, “But the Pepsi Corporation never got back to me…”
In addition to all this biographical tomfoolery, The Devil And
Daniel Johnston raises and explores a number of questions can’t
help but flitter through the mind when the subject being discussed
is an individual such as this.
For one thing, it makes a fella think long and hard about that
aforementioned Genius / Madness thing, and sheds new light on it
altogether when one interviewee says about he’s always had great
disdain for the friends and acquaintances of, say, Van Gough, folks
who didn’t recognise the incredible talents and saw only a sick man
needing cured. He used to tut with regards those folks, but then he
finds himself in the company of Daniel Johnston and eventually, all
he can do for the good of the afflicted and of everyone else, is
have Daniel put in a hospital.
It’s all well and good saying madness is just an intractable part
of the Great Artist’s psyche and they need it to produce the kindsa
works they’re producing, but what about when that Artist is your
best friend and he’s stood knee deep in a river splashing water
about the place and yelling about deliverance and redemption and
The Devil? What about when that friend is trying to rid the demons
out an elderly woman who ends up bounding out a second story window
to escape, breaking both her ankles in the process?
What then?
Also, a fella can’t help but wonder how much of Daniel Johnston’s
appeal has to do with the kinda appeal brought folks out into the
fog-spun Victorian night to gaze upon John Merrick’s elephantine
face.
Certainly there’s a feeling not far removed from that must hug the
head of the voyeur stood watching a man masturbate through the
bedroom curtains, there’s a definite feeling such as that, I say,
waifts about the place when the footage of Daniel, obviously away
with it, weeping through a performance of Don’t Play Cards With
Satan in a living room or of Careless Soul at a small concert, when
that kinda footage gets to lingering onscreen.
But no matter. Whether or not one feels Daniel Johnston’s songs and
paintings are works of skull-frying, awe-inspiring genius or the
tuneless wailing and artless scribbling of a skull-fried manic
depressive being exploited beyond all sense, this has no bearing on
the film under consideration herein.
Which, I’m reminding the fella in the park, is a marvellous,
marvellous piece of work, up there with the very best flicks of the
year thus far - your United 93’s and Proposition’s and Munich’s and
The Squid And The Whale’s and whatever else you care to mention.
“But it was last year” he says.
“Shut up” says I, “It was released in the United UK in 2006 and
that’s as much as we need to concern ourselves with.”
The Devil And Daniel Johnston is available on Region 2 DVD through
Tartan Video, and has a set of glorious extras to compliment the
feature. There’s the commentary track, but also a selection of
Daniel’s flicks and some Deleted Scenes, one of which has Daniel
and his dad travel to South Africa so as the former might appear on
a telly show and also star in some kinda video has him stood in a
field dressed up as King Kong, climbing a ladder represents the
Empire State Building whilst Bill Johnston races about with 1930’s
aviation gear on, a toy bi-plane in his hand.
Also, hidden away in the Featurettes menu alongside a recording of
a brilliantly daft WFMU radio broadcast which begins with Daniel
spoofing Orson Welles’ War Of The Worlds affair, tucked to the side
of that is footage of the man finally, after twenty-something years
of obsessing about her and with God alone knows how many songs and
pictures and writings etched in her name, finally being reunited
with Laurie, his muse.
She doesn’t appear in the film itself outside of super-8 footage
shot by Daniel way back when, since, as the filmmakers themselves
say, it’s better to have her appear in the flick as she appears in
Daniel’s head.
But there she is, arriving at a screening of the feature for to
take questions and what have you, but not meeting the fella himself
till a party afterwards, on account of he was reluctant to come
onstage during the event because he believed this “Laurie” to be a
hoaxer. The two of them hug a half-dozen times and Daniel announces
that this is the happiest day of his life. “I dunno what to say…
Will you marry me?” Folks laugh at this, but it doesn’t seem like
Daniel’s much joking, to be honest.
“So”, I’m saying. “That’s as much as there is to tell.”
The skater / emo / whatever fella, he sniffs a time or two and
then, screwing up his face, he says “I dunno. Does it have robots?”
“Yeah” I lie. “Thousands o’ the bastards.”
I went home for to listen to Hi, How Are You? and think about that
review I need to be writing concerning The Devil And Daniel
Johnston.
Thanks folks.
Fling The Duke An Email or Sign The Mondo Guestbook
