Daniel Johnston
Musician who suffered from psychiatric problems but created a unique and compelling body of work
DANIEL JOHNSTON, who has died aged 58 following a suspected heart attack, was an artist, singer and songwriter whose eccentric, haunting and childlike music was championed by such figures as Kurt Cobain and Tom Waits; his work was informed by his schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, and he spent several periods of his life in psychiatric institutions.
He was born on January 22 1961 in Sacramento, California, and grew up in New Cumberland, West Virginia; he was the youngest of three children of Christian fundamentalist parents – Bill, an engineer and Second World War fighter pilot, and Mabel (née Voyles).
He listened to music voraciously: to pop, rock, jazz, show tunes – but above all to his brother’s Beatles records, which inspired him to start writing songs on the piano. “I had all the Beatles songbooks, and I’d learn them backwards, forwards, inside out, everything, to see how they worked,” he recalled.
He began recording his music on a cassette player in his teens, but around the same time showed the first signs of mental illness. He dropped out after a few weeks at Abilene Christian University in West Texas, then studied art at Kent State University in Ohio.
It was at this time that he recorded his debut album, Songs of Pain (1981), a response to his one-sided relationship with Laurie Allen, a fellow student at Kent State with whom he had fallen deeply in love after she said she liked one of his tunes. Though she was friendly towards him, his passion for her remained unrequited, and she eventually married an undertaker.
Johnston poured his feelings into his music, his high, wavering voice and primitive musical backing adorning songs that were lyrically accomplished and nakedly confessional (and often interspersed with recordings he made of his rows with his parents). He began giving away cassettes to friends: lacking a copying machine, he simply recorded the songs again for each tape he gave away.
Two more albums followed in 1982 but, strained by his altercations with his parents, he went to live with his older brother, Dick, in Houston, where he worked on a fairground ride called the “River of No Return” and recorded his fourth album, Yip/jump
Music, recorded with a Casio toy organ as accompaniment.
Moving to live with his sister in San Marcos, he recorded Hi, How Are You: The Unfinished Album (1983), but had a breakdown and joined a travelling carnival, which left without him after he was attacked with a metal pole in Austin, Texas, and taken to hospital. He remained in Austin, working in Mcdonald’s and occasionally performing in coffee houses. He met Jeff Tartakov, who ran a small local record label. “I could relate to what Daniel was singing about,” Tartakov recalled. “This loner … who hid himself away recording all these songs about unrequited love – that was such a universal theme.”
He became Johnston’s manager, setting up a publishing company to sell his songs to other musicians. Johnston’s profile began to rise when he appeared on an MTV programme about the Austin music scene, even more so when Kurt Cobain wore a “Hi, How Are You” T-shirt to the MTV Music Awards.
But Johnston was admitted to a psychiatric hospital after taking LSD at a Butthole Surfers gig, and most of the next six years was spent either incarcerated or living with his parents. He was convinced he had made a pact with the devil, and that his mother and father were Satanists.
He was arrested after an elderly woman apparently jumped out of a first-floor window when Johnston was attempting to exorcise her; his 1990 album State of Mind carried songs with titles like Devil Town and Don’t Play Cards with Satan.
That year Johnston came close to killing himself, and when his father was flying him back from a gig in Austin, Johnston, convinced that he was the cartoon character Casper the Friendly Ghost, turned the ignition key and killed the engine. “I just turned it back on,” Bill Johnston recalled. But his son grabbed the key and threw it out of the plane window.
Remarkably, Bill was able to crash-land among trees, and while the aircraft was destroyed, father and son were largely unscathed. Bill Johnston discovered that Daniel had not been taking his medication, and assumed control of his son’s drugs regime.
As Johnston’s reputation spread, not least thanks to champions like Cobain, Flaming Lips, Beck, Tom Waits and Sonic Youth, Jeff Tartakov secured a record deal in 1993 with Elektra Records, but Johnston refused to sign the contract from his hospital bed, claiming that the label’s biggest act, Metallica, wanted to do him harm.
Bill Johnston sacked Tartakov and took over the management of his son, who would spend most of the rest of his life living with his parents in Waller, Texas. There was an album on Atlantic, Fun (1994), but nothing more until 2001, when the first of six more albums appeared.
In 2004 The Late, Great Daniel Johnston featured covers of his songs by such artists as Waits, Beck and Sparklehorse, while his own final recording was a compilation album, Space Ducks (2012). In 2017 he played a few live dates that he said marked an end to his touring career.
Johnston’s outsiderish art was also acclaimed: cartoon-like and intricately executed, his pictures were peopled by superheroes, imaginary creatures and the recurring figure of a man with the top of his head removed. His work featured in the 2006 Whitney Biennial exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the 2006 and 2008 Liverpool Biennials. In 2013 the photographer Jung Kim published Daniel Johnston: Here, the result of a five-year collaboration.
In 2005 a documentary, The Devil and Daniel Johnston (2005), was nominated for an Oscar and won the director’s award at the Sundance Festival. “When they made the film I thought it was going to be funny, you know?” he told the Telegraph. “But when I saw the final edit it seems tragic: Danny goes to the mental hospital, Danny goes to jail. But I can see the humour in it.”