Kurt Cobain once explained that “punk rock should mean freedom, liking and [sic] excepting anything that you like. Playing whatever you want. As sloppy as you want. As long as it’s good and it has passion.” In that case, Daniel Johnston is just about the biggest punk there has ever been. His sloppiness was profound, and his passion was all conquering. Aside from that liberated look at expression uber alles, according to Cobain, he also just so happened to be “the best songwriter on Earth.”
It was this sense of creation as an act of personal therapy that endeared Johnston to so many musicians. David Bowie said never play to the gallery; well, Johnston never really played to anyone but himself, the mere notion of a ‘gallery’ a distant dream. In fact, in 2005, Bowie provided the following tagline for the superb documentary film The Devil and Daniel Johnston: “Daniel Johnston reminds me of aspects that made me love art in the first place.”
Johnston strived to shelter himself in the subsuming world of embalming creation. “In Webster’s terms, ‘nirvana’ means freedom from pain, suffering and the external world, and that’s pretty close to my definition of Punk Rock,” Cobain said. Once more, that is close to encapsulating Johnston’s tireless attempts to permanently tent in the equanimous escape that making music afforded him. It is this that defines him as an outsider artist if you take that term to mean the normal field of artistic desires rather than anything to do with proficiency.
If you take this view, his song ‘The Story of an Artist’ could almost serve as a mantra for the outsider music world in the creative sense. He croons out in boyish tones: “Listen up, and I’ll tell a story/ About an artist growing old/ Some would try for fame and glory/ Others aren’t so bold/ Everyone and friends and family/ Saying, ‘Hey, get a job/ Why do you only do that only?/ Why are you so odd?’”
As is clear from Johnston’s Beatles monomania, his music was not without influence; it’s just that those influences are hard to pick up on with his trademark rudimentary Bontempi electric chord organ sound. His essential outsider moment came at a gig in Austin, Texas, whereby he decided to forgo his trusty keyboard in favour of the guitar, a much more traditionally Texan instrument. The only problem was that he couldn’t play the guitar. Nevertheless, he got through it on the strength of expression.
Thus, it was no real surprise to see him pop up in Cobain’s journal entry of his 50 favourite albums written shortly before his death. And perhaps it is also not surprising that it was one of his earliest, most unfettered albums make the list: Yip/Jump Music (1983).
The album arrived in the summer of a year that began with Johnston’s family increasingly fretting over his physical and mental health. So, his brother invited him over to live with him in Austin, Texas, and he left his piano back at his parent’s home in West Virginia. Lost without his outlet of music, Johnston soon purchased a chord organ and promptly converted his brother’s garage into a recording studio. He soon began to sing: “Everything’s Big In Texas, you know it is / I think I might have made a big mistake.”
It arrived a few months before Hi, How Are You – the record that Cobain would sport on a T-shirt helping to bring Johnston to international attention – and is reflective of the outsider star grappling with his situation and channelling it into his novel exploration of the chord organ. This is, in many ways, a second debut album for him, and if you’re never as sincere as you are on your debut, then this is perhaps why Cobain sees the unbridled record, featuring beauteous cuts like ‘Worries Shoes’, ‘Museum of Love’ and ‘Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Your Grievances’, as his favourite in Johnston’s storied back catalogue.
