Not Fade Away
Obituaries
Outsider artist and songwriter
(1961-2019)
“I’M definitely a loser,” Daniel Johnston told Uncut in 2006. “In the course of my life, I’ve lost pretty bad, but I’ve got a lot of great songs to show for it.” Johnston suffered for his art in a very real sense. He was diagnosed with manic depression and schizophrenia as a teenager, and the songs and visuals that poured out of him dealt with inner demons, personal struggle and thwarted love, rendered with the kind of unguarded candour that often made him seem impossibly vulnerable.
Johnston was prolific from a young age in West Virginia, making surreal home videos, creating oddball comic books and writing songs inspired by his Beatles obsession. “I was a total Beatlemaniac,” he explained. “I used to put on a John Lennon accent at school and came out of my shell. Those were the days, really. And that’s what led to [1981’s cassette-only debut] Songs Of Pain.” Johnston’s songwriting gathered pace once he moved to Austin, Texas, in the early ’80s. While employed at Mcdonald’s, he would hand out homemade tapes (decorated with childlike cartoons) to anyone who showed an interest, before achieving wider exposure when MTV came to town in 1985.
Johnston’s mental health deteriorated after taking acid at a Butthole Surfers show the following year, resulting in one of several spells in hospital under medication that dulled his creative faculties. But he’d recovered enough by 1988 to accept Sonic Youth’s invitation to travel to New York and record with producer Mark Kramer, convinced that it was “my fate to be famous”. His reputation spiked in the early ’90s when Kurt Cobain declared himself a fan, citing Yip/jump Music as a favourite album and often wearing a T-shirt featuring Johnston’s distinctive ‘Hi, How Are You’ alien frog logo. It led to a major label deal with Atlantic, but he was dropped in the wake of poor sales for 1994’s Fun.
His singular songwriting was celebrated ten years later on The Late Great Daniel Johnston, a twodisc compilation that included covers by a host of admirers: Tom Waits, Beck, Bright Eyes, Sparklehorse, The Flaming Lips and more. “I think a lot of people thought I was dead,” remarked the album’s subject, who went on to inspire Jeff Feuerzeig’s acclaimed 2006 documentary, The Devil And Daniel Johnston, and enjoy sell-out tours of the US and Europe. “It made me look at my songs in a different way somehow. There seems to be a lot of meaning in there.”