Heroes and Villains
The Fall and Rise of Daniel Johnston and His Apocalyptic Pop Star Life
When Daniel Johnston played London’s Institute Of Contemporary Arts a few years back, by all accounts it was painful to watch. In the throes of the illness that arguably fueled his creativity, here was a real life mental break-down in words and music, live on stage. Onlookers reveled in the freak-show. But then, onlookers always have and always will love a freak show, especially one they can sing along to.
The Fall and Rise of Daniel Johnston and His Apocalyptic Pop Star Life
When Daniel Johnston played London’s Institute Of Contemporary Arts a few years back, by all accounts it was painful to watch. In the throes of the illness that arguably fueled his creativity, here was a real life mental break-down in words and music, live on stage. Onlookers reveled in the freak-show. But then, onlookers always have and always will love a freak show, especially one they can sing along to.
When Johnston’s
artwork appeared in a group show of cartoonists at The Royal
Edinburgh Hospital, which provides ‘acute psychiatric and mental
health services’, the freak-show, it seemed, had come home to
roost. Shaky-handed felt tip splodges had long let loose the visions
cluttering up Johnston’s head. Weaned on an overload of trash
culture pop iconography, here was Johnston’s very own bug-eyed take
on comic book Super-Heroes.
As well as creatures
drawn from his own hyper-fertile mind, there were other, more
familiar manifestations. Having already sang about Casper The
Friendly Ghost, the cartoon boy spirit who just wants to be
everyone’s best friend but ends up scaring them away, on his 1983
cassette, ‘Yip Jump Music,’ Johnston now flexed his muscles with
more monstrous fare. Larger-than-life creations such as Godzilla and
King Kong, both scaled-up to gigantic proportions on screen by Ray
Harryhausen’s stop-motion animation technique, but actually only
doll-like models several inches high, marauded their way through city
streets.
Saving the day was
Captain America, Marvel Comics’ star-spangled Super-Hero patriot,
who appeared with his original World War Two sidekick, Bucky, an
early sighting of a teenager before teenagers existed and moulded in
the image of a far darker dynamic duo, Batman and Robin. Staying true
to his obsessions, Johnston made boxers, Kung Fu fighters and other
idealised tough guy archetypes equally immortal.
Here was an instinctive
and unfettered outpouring of idealised nostalgia for some mythical
age of child-like innocence, where all the Scary Monsters and
Super-Creeps could be vanquished by whatever muscle-bound force-field
special powers were going. With a ZAP!, a POW!, and even a WHAAM!,
things could be put right again, and the world would be made safe
once more. In a world where good and evil were as black and white as
the blue collar morality plays of professional wrestling, it was that
simple.
Go deeper, read
in-between the pages, and beyond the Caped Crusaders, Masked Mystery
Men and All-American Boys, Johnston’s world was the same as any
other sensitive kid with an over-active imagination who lost
themselves in fantasy fiction. It was a world of Charles Atlas
cartoon muscle-men kicking sand in eight-stone weaklings faces before
the puny guy goes on a ten-day programme, takes revenge on the big
lug and has all the micro-bikinied beach babes come crawling back; of
smiley Sea Monkey families setting up some kind of picket-fence
goldfish-bowl domestic-bliss homestead by mail order; of X-Ray Spex,
wireless kits and rockets to the moon. It was a world shaded in vivid
primary colour flourishes and wobbly, imperfect perspectives, and
everything approved in triple-A fashion by the Comics Code Authority.
But the times they
were-a-changing, and even in the parallel universes of the Golden Age
and Silver Age comic-book heroes, things weren’t quite so black and
white anymore. Suddenly Super-Heroes had private lives and all the
neuroses that came with them, and hiding their insular, independent
and oh-so-secret identities behind a mask became a very obvious
metaphor for split personality. ZAP! and POW! just weren’t enough
anymore.
Here were fractured,
dysfunctional lives weighed down by the responsibility of saving the
world and dictated to by their own self-made myth. Literally, the
contemporary, grown-up superhero, spaced-out terminal adolescents
with far-off galaxies on their minds and the allure of the
dressing-up box to define themselves with, didn’t know who they
were anymore. Spider-Man was an angst-ridden geek with girl trouble,
and The Silver Surfer wandered the universe’s expanse alone,
pondering the meaning of existence.
Even Captain America,
the doyen of apple-pie, All-American values, had moved on. Revived
from suspended animation after being preserved in a block of ice,
stars-and-stripes outfit and all, he was recast, according to
Bradford W Wright in his 2001 study, ‘Comic Book Nation: The
Transformation Of Youth Culture In America’, “haunted
by past memories, and trying to adapt to 1960s society.” Bucky was
dead, and in the 1970s, high on civil rights and Watergate, Captain
America embraced multi-culturalism via The Falcon, one of the
first African American Super-Heroes to go mainstream. In
the new publication there was even a letters page headlined ‘Let’s
Rap With Cap.’
As for the
Super-Villains, the Arch-Nemeses, Evil Masterminds and plain old Bad
Guys, well, they had their own problems, and it seemed even they
weren’t all bad after all. It was something, it seemed, to do with
Society. Worlds had well and truly collided.
Some of these new
complexities were explored in Science Fiction novelist Philip Jose
Farmer’s fantastical 1973 study, ‘Doc Savage – His Apocalyptic
Life,’ a fictionalised biography of the 1930s pulp hero and his
team of genius misfit outsiders. Beyond pulp fiction, Doc Savage
himself has appeared as a Comic Book Hero several times. During the
1940s Golden Age he appeared in ‘Shadow Comics’ and ‘Doc Savage
Comics’, both published by Smith and Street. Between 1972 and 1977,
Marvel Comics published two series of Doc Savage comic.
This took in the 1975
release of the feature film, ‘Doc Savage: Man Of Bronze,’ a campy
flick which starred Eon Ely in the title role. On the small screen
Ely had previously played Tarzan, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ similarly
outcast ‘King of the Jungle,’ who was similarly analysed by
Farmer. DC Comics published their version of Doc Savage over 24
issues between 1987 and 1990, as well as a four-part mini-series
between 1991 and 1992. In 1995 Dark Horse Comics took Doc Savage back
to his roots by teaming him up with The Shadow.
Today, in glossy TV
appropriations of Super-Heroes such as ‘Smallville’, which looks
at the teenage years of Superman as he comes to terms with his powers
amid a hormone-driven emotional torrent, and the eponymous ‘Heroes,’
identity crises are the norm.
But how to heal the
fragmented self in such schizophrenic times? This was the question an
entire generation, Daniel Johnston’s generation, born into an
uncertain if mind-expanding era, had to face. The solutions to such
unsolvable problems varied. Some blasted off and became cosmonauts of
inner space, the finest minds of their generation blitzed, bent out
of shape and all too often obliterated by psychedelic hallucinogens.
Others reached for the
stars in more unconsciously productive ways. Johnston’s ethos of
wannabe-Pop Star fantasy-wish-fulfilment was similar in spirit to
Mingering Mike, the Vietnam deserter who, between 1968 and 1977
‘made’ more than fifty albums on thirty-five imaginary record
labels. Mike’s make-believe career as a soul singer, songwriter and
producer was elaborately drawn out on cardboard, with grooves drawn
in and the whole package wrapped up in intricately hand-designed
gatefold sleeves complete with liner notes and including
‘soundtracks’ to dreamt-up Kung Fu flicks. With Mike’s entire
back catalogue stumbled upon at a flea-market in 2003, he too has
become a cult figure, and in 2007 a coffee table book of his album
cover art was published.
The difference was,
while both Mingering Mike and Daniel Johnston were Pop Stars in their
own heads, and while Mike too recorded some of the 4000 songs he’d
written straight onto cassette, Johnston kept it real and took it
straight to the top.
So, are Daniel
Johnston’s drawings and songs therapy? A not-so silent scream from
an inside-out pop cartoon pop-up world made in his own wonkified
image? Kind of. But, like a Saturday morning serial from an allegedly
more innocent age, that’s not the whole story.
With a simplistic,
naïve optimism, Johnston resembles a real life embodiment of Booji
Boy, the character created by Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh to sing the
Johnstonian titled 1981 single, ‘Beautiful World,’ as a satire of
what the band saw as the infantile regression of Western culture.
Significantly, perhaps, Mothersbaugh also composed music for Pee
Wee’s Playhouse, featuring manic man-child Pee Wee Herman, and for
the Rugrats cartoon series. Devo had appeared too in an episode of
early 1980s outsider-teen high school sit-com, ‘Square Pegs.’
Today, Daniel Johnston
sits in his house in Texas that was built right next door to his
parents on the proceeds of his art and album sales. He hasn’t had a
real job since 1986 when he worked shifts at McDonald’s, pre-dating
the slacker culture of Douglas Coupland’s ‘Generation X’ by
half a decade.
Inbetween watching
horror movie DVDs – strictly the old-school Boris Karloff and Bela
Lugosi variety, not modern day Slasher stuff - he’s racked up five
albums worth of unreleased songs, is building a recording studio with
his brother, tours with his occasional band Danny and the Nightmares
and draws and draws and draws. The freak-show, it seems, is over.
In a way, the rest of
the musical world has only just caught up with Daniel Johnston’s
DIY sensibility. When he paved the streets, handing out home-made,
customised copies of his ‘Songs Of Pain’ cassette, for all its
naked self-expression was a need to connect, the notion of seizing
the means of production was probably the last thing on his mind. More
than a quarter of a century on, artists releasing their own lo-fi
howls on cottage industry micro-labels in limited presses on vinyl,
cassette and CDr is all the rage. It’s perfectly possible today to
eke out an existence to distribute one’s wares in such samizdat
fashion without any need for big budget studios and corporate record
executive bullshit.
Then again, these days
Daniel Johnston is beyond such activities. Cult Status is fine, but
he’s a Major Artist, after all. A real-life Pop Star. And, ZAP!,
POW!, WHAAM!, how Super-Heroic is that?
Commissioned by alt.gallery, Newcastle to accompany the exhibition, Daniel Johnston: It's A Beautiful Life, that ran from September 5th-November 10th 2007. The essay appeared on the alt.gallery website in December 2007
ends
Comments