Working Through the Sadness of Daniel Johnston’s Last —for Now—Tour
daniel johnston music
Peter C. Baker Benjamin Shapiro John Cassidy Condé Nast
Peter C. Baker writes about Daniel Johnston’s recent performance in Chicago, with Jeff Tweedy, of Wilco, which was billed as Johnston’s final tour.
https://www.newyorker.com/verso/static/the-new-yorker/assets/favicon.ico
The New Yorker
On the fifty-six-year-old singer-songwriter and visual artist Daniel Johnston’s current tour, which is being advertised (perhaps misleadingly) as his last ever, there are no opening bands. Instead, the audience sits for “The Devil and Daniel Johnston,” Jeff Feuerzeig’s full-length documentary, from 2005, on Johnston’s life, artistic output, and painful struggles with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, for which he has been institutionalized several times, and which have sabotaged his chances at anything resembling a traditional career in music.

It’s an unusual way to kick off a show: What other singer would preface his set with an airing of other people’s perspectives on his life’s darkest moments? In one story recounted in the film, a manic, delusional Johnston chases a sixty-eight-year-old woman whom he doesn’t know around her apartment until she jumps out her second-story window, shattering her ankles. In another, Johnston is riding in a small airplane piloted by his father when he decides to yank the key from the ignition and throw it out the window, sending the plane plummeting toward the ground. (Johnston and his father, the only people onboard, both survived.) He gets arrested for drawing hundreds of “Christian fish” on a stairwell inside the Statue of Liberty. He fires his tireless manager for no good reason. He turns down a lucrative, long-term deal with Elektra Records because the label is home to Metallica, a band that he’s sure is in league with Satan.

In addition to the lack of an opening act, Johnston is touring without a fixed backing band, and even without instruments of his own. Instead, in honor of his notional retirement from life on the road (more on that in a moment), he’s backed by different big-ticket musicians in each city, all of whom cite Johnston as an influence, from the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, in New Orleans, to the indie-rock stalwarts Built to Spill, in Portland. At Chicago’s Vic Theatre, where I saw Johnston sing last week, he was backed for two nights by a local five-piece that included Jeff Tweedy, of Wilco, on guitar, and Tweedy’s son Spencer, on drums.

This setup––the relatively high-profile backing acts, the pre-show documentary screenings––makes a tidy metaphor for Johnston’s history as musician. For years, his national reputation has been boosted by the public attention of other musicians. One major reason that his lo-fi, home-recorded, intensely personal, and remarkably unself-conscious-sounding music became known outside of Austin, Texas, was because Kurt Cobain wore a Daniel Johnston T-shirt during Nirvana’s performance at the 1992 MTV Music Awards. Today, many listeners first find their way to Johnston’s songs of love, loss, and alienation after hearing him covered by someone better known––Wilco, Lana Del Rey, Beck, Tom Waits, or Eddie Vedder, to name just a few. And, as Johnston’s renown has grown, the reception of his music has become inextricably entwined with the story of his psychological burdens: you would have to search hard to find an article about Johnston that does not mention mental illness.

We love knowing our artist’s stories, love to stitch their output into larger arcs of striving and seeking. In doing so, we always risk flattening the complexity of a life in service of a good story, or of our own sentimentalities. But this dynamic is particularly acute, and particularly fraught, in Johnston’s case. For as long as Daniel Johnston has been winning fans, there have also been people worrying aloud that Daniel Johnston fandom tends too much toward the romanticization of tortured minds, or toward paternalism of the mentally ill. “I still wonder if people go see him hoping to witness a nervous breakdown,” his friend Gretchen Phillips told the music journalist Irwin Chusid in “Songs of the Key of Z: The Curious Universe of Outsider Music.” “Do they perceive him as their equal, or as someone they need to coax and make feel safe? As much as the audience may genuinely love his songs, I sense a lot of condescension.”

I think this is overstated, but I can’t deny that I showed up for Johnston’s Chicago performance feeling nervous on his behalf. In late September, a few days before the tour began, the Times sent the writer David Peisner to visit Johnston at his home in Waller, Texas, forty-five miles from Houston. Peisner reported that Johnston had been forcibly hospitalized twice in the previous three months, for medication adjustments. His father had just died. The “last tour” conceit had not been Johnston’s idea but his brother’s, and the backing bands were selected by a booking agent; in most cases, Johnston wasn’t even familiar with them. There was almost no preparatory communication happening. Instead, the bands had been instructed to pick their favorites from Johnston’s back catalogue, write their own arrangements, then send over a set list so his brother could print out the lyrics for him. (This setup brought to mind the run of mostly dissatisfying albums Johnston made with high-profile producers in the nineties, which often sound like two distinct musical visions pasted awkwardly together.) Informed by Peisner that the tour was being billed as his last, Johnston was intrigued. “Why would it be?” he asked.

The day after the tour started, in New Orleans, I read online that Johnston had abruptly left the stage mid-performance, with no explanation, then left again during the closing number, when he accidentally knocked his lyric sheet off its stand. (“Many of the fans who filled that theater left with questions they didn’t expect to ask,” one reviewer wrote.) I worried that Johnston had been nudged into something that he wasn’t ready for. I worried that, by worrying like this, I wasn’t giving him enough credit as an adult capable of deciding for himself what he was or wasn’t ready for.

At the Vic, Johnston shuffled onstage in sweatpants and a long-sleeved T-shirt, took a seat in a chair, set his packet of lyrics on a stand, and, barely acknowledging the audience in front of him or the band behind him, launched into one of my favorite of his songs, the haunting “The Story of an Artist,” first released in 1982:

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.

Thanks to decades of smoking, Johnston’s voice is deeper and more ragged than it is on the recordings to which he owes his reputation; after the show, my wife noted that he sounded like one of his old tapes played too many times. But he was clearly marshalling his entire self for his delivery, and the result was stirring:

We don’t really like what you do

And we probably never will

We think you have a problem

And that problem’s made you ill.

Yes, the instrumentation sounded a good deal more like late-career Wilco than like Johnston’s 1982 version, where the only sonic ingredients are his younger self’s high, plaintive warble, simple piano-playing, and an ambient mix of room noise and tape hiss. And, yes, the performance was inseparable from sadness––inseparable from the story of the artist sitting onstage in front of us, grown old, arms shaking from his regimen of powerful medications. But Johnston, through the force of his concentration, was also burrowing through the sadness to that temporary zone of freedom that is the goal (or one goal) of most music. For the first few seconds, I was relieved. Then I was just listening.