Troubled songwriter won cult following by making an art out of his inner turmoil

W‘‘There’s a reason that so many people covered his songs. He was a songwriter’s songwriter.’’ Film director Jeff Feuerzeig

hen a Daniel Nirvana’s Johnston Kurt T-shirt Cobain to wore the MTV awards in 1992, the subject of this enviable superstar endorsement wasn’t around to enjoy the accolade.

Johnston was in a mental hospital in West Virginia after a psychotic episode in which he had seized the controls of an aircraft and forced it to crash-land in a forest.

In 1990, after Johnston had performed at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, his father, Bill, who had been a World War he was II fighter the pilot, was flying his son home in the family’s two-seat aircraft. Convinced that

subject demonic of a

possession,

Johnston took the key out of the

ignition and

threw it out of

the plane. The subsequent crash destroyed the aircraft, but miraculously father and son crawled from the wreckage with only minor scratches.

It was one of several harrowingly manic incidents in the troubled life of the songwriter, who has died aged 58 from a suspected heart attack. He once attacked his manager with a lead pipe because he thought he was a ‘‘servant of Satan’’ and he defaced the Statue of Liberty with anti-Satanist graffiti. On another occasion he broke into an elderly woman’s apartment in the middle of the night, told her she was possessed by the devil and tried to exorcise her. She jumped out of her second-floor window in terror, breaking her ankles.

Plenty of unhinged behaviour in the world of rock’n’roll over the years has been druginduced, self-indulgent and infantile. Johnston’s dysfunction was of a different order. A manic depressive suffering from schizophrenia and a bipolar disorder, he struggled against demons that were beyond his control and for much of the time he fought a losing battle.

Yet he also wrote extraordinary songs that veered between childlike naivety and something more disturbing. Sung in a haunting voice, his songs earned him celebrity fans who numbered not only Cobain, but also David Bowie, Johnny Depp and Tom Waits.

‘‘He’s my generation’s Bob Dylan,’’ said Jeff Feuerzeig, a film director who made the 2005 documentary The Devil and Daniel Johnston. ‘‘We’re not going to see another songwriter like this in our lifetime. He’s up there with Dylan, Lou Reed and Brian Wilson. There’s a reason that so many people covered his songs. He was a songwriter’s songwriter.’’

The 2004 album The Late Great Daniel Johnston: Discovered Covered featured versions of his songs recorded by Waits and some of the most celebrated names in indie rock, including Beck, Teenage Fanclub, Mercury Rev and the Flaming Lips.

Many of his compositions talked openly about his mental state and offered a candid insight into a fractured mind. He lived with his illness every day, and he made art out of it.

‘‘I guess I lean towards the excessive/ But that’s just the way it is when you’re a manic depressive,’’ he sang on Keep Punching Joe. Another song was entitled I Had Lost my Mind. On another he sang, ‘‘In my head, two worlds collide,’’ while on Peek a Boo he cried: ‘‘Save me from myself.’’

He also wrote poignantly about his unrequited love for a woman named Laurie Allen. When she broke his heart by marrying an undertaker, he responded with a song with the title My Baby Cares for the Dead. The youngest of five children, Daniel Dale Johnston was born in Sacramento, California, but grew up in West Virginia with strict evangelical parents. His fundamentalist upbringing had a profound effect and, when he left school, he enrolled at Abilene Christian University in Texas. He dropped out after only a few weeks and joined a carnival, selling corn dogs before he settled in Austin, where he recorded his songs on a cheap boombox.

His first ‘‘album’’ – a self-released cassette – was Songs of Pain. Between some of the songs his mother was heard screaming that he would never make anything of himself. His first professionally recorded studio album came in 1988 and his cult following grew. When Cobain began to champion him, success seemed to beckon and record companies engaged in a bidding war to sign him.

Offered an extraordinarily generous multialbum deal with Elektra Records that would have set him up for life, at the last minute he refused to sign after he discovered that Metallica were on the same label. He was convinced the band were possessed by Satan and association with them would destroy him. He then signed to Atlantic and recorded the 1994 album Fun. When it flopped, the label dropped him and he returned to self-releasing his music as a bedroom auteur.

In recent years he made more money from his art than his music. His cartoon-like drawings, usually done in marker pen, became collectable and were widely exhibited.

Yet it will be the naked honesty of his songs for which he will surely be best remembered. ‘‘You heard about the time I was in the insane asylum,’’ he sang poignantly on a 1992 composition. ‘‘But I bet you never knew/ What I went through/ Just to bring you a lonely song.’’ – The Times