The Night I Played With Daniel Johnston
On How Some Things Last A Long Time & Making The Magic Happen
‘I’m OK because wherever I go I know I have music in my heart’ Daniel Johnston
I’m a little confused about how it all came about, but back in 2010 the writer/spoken word artist Everett True sent me a message to ask if I would improvise something on guitar behind him while he did a spoken word piece to open a show for the astonishing Daniel Johnston. I think Everett’d only recently moved to Oz and we had a mutual friend. I told him I’d love to but I wasn’t the greatest guitarist in the world. Good, he said.
The show was at Monster Children, a small Darlinghurst art gallery frequented by switched on kids, hipsters and skater punks.
There’d be no chance to rehearse or even meet before the show, it was a see you at soundcheck and we’ll work something out kinda deal. I love a strange gig. Millie Hall, teen saxophonist in Holiday Sidewinder’s magnificent band Bridezilla, who had been playing some shows with my band, and also loved winging it, had agreed to join.
We had no idea what to expect, what Everett would do, what we’d play, if many people actually knew of Daniel Johnston - beloved in certain circles but very much a cult artist - if many people would show up. We needn’t have worried.
The scene that greeted us was well on its way to becoming this.
Millie and I met Everett outside and we went inside to get set up. We met Daniel and his brother Dick, and Brett who played guitar with Daniel, all very sweet. There was a bit of an argument going on because Daniel wanted to go and buy candy and Dick, who travelled with him to look after him, wouldn’t let him. Not because he was mean, but because Daniel was diabetic and the candy was going to kill him. Daniel did not care about this fact, and was obsessed with getting cash so he could sneak off and buy candy, and it had been the ongoing theme of the tour. The day before he’d convinced someone to give him ten dollars and made himself sick on candy from the hotel vending machine. Dick was understandably frustrated and concerned. There was some kind of candy/comic book compromise made and they slipped away while we prepared.
Everett was travelling with the group on the tour, attempting to interview Daniel for a book that hasn’t come out yet. His stories about this are very funny and touching, and their relationship went back a long way. Everybody knows Everett gave Kurt Cobain his own much loved Daniel Johnston t-shirt that Kurt then wore - often -which directed much attention to Daniel’s remarkable music and story and introduced him to the world as an important artist, as well as sparking a bidding war between record labels who wanted to sign Daniel. Amazing and wonderful how a small chain of generous actions can change the course of a person’s life.
I’ll let Everett take it from here - this is the first part of the Daniel Johnston 2010 Australian tour story published on CollapseBoard.
Sydney (Monster Children)
The conversation between Loene Carmen, Millie from Bridezilla and myself went something like this.
“Looks like it’s going to rain. Let’s go inside.”
“Might not rain.”
“Let’s stay in the courtyard. There’s more room here – and look, here are some beers.”
“It’s going to rain. Let’s go inside.”
“Have you seen the line of kids outside? It’s crazy. Let’s stay outside.”
“There’ll be more atmosphere inside. Also, Daniel’s supposed to be playing an art gallery, not a courtyard.”So it was the three of us stood, hemmed along one side of Sydney’s Monster Children gallery, sweat dripping from every conceivable pore, no microphone except a clip-on one, Millie blowing sweet gales of sound down her saxophone, Loene wrestling tempests from the guitar, as people asked others asked others, “Is this Daniel Johnston? He looks pretty different in real life.” Meanwhile, close on 500 kids queued patiently outside to get a glimpse of some fellow who might possibly be an Englishman, might not, who cares, it’s free and it’s a happening scene.
I performed the piece about giving my mother a Daniel Johnston T-shirt, and the one about being fucked up on alcohol, and… Bangs alive, I don’t know. Plenty. Drenched in sweat and tiredness and wondering how much longer I could keep the energy going.
Shortly after we finished, Joseph (the gallery owner) announced that as there was no room inside, Daniel would be performing on the street and please could everyone keep the beers out of sight and not block the road… so Daniel and his guitarist Brett Hartenbach stepped up to the plate, steps slippery, Daniel being passed his lyric book by his brother Dick, maybe taken aback by the strangeness of the scene, maybe not, who knows with Daniel? Two songs in, and he’d reduced the audience to tears. Two songs in – ‘Life In Vain’ and ‘Silly Love’ – and he was gone, sloped off around the corner to smoke a cigarette, the magic still lingering for days afterwards.
Sometimes, all you need is a massive heart and naked vulnerability. It was, without a doubt, the shortest set I’ve seen Daniel play. It was also, without a doubt, one of the most moving.
“He can do that, you know,” remarked his brother afterwards. “Make the magic happen.”
And that was it. He wandered off into the humid dusk after his two songs that did indeed make the magic happen. No goodbyes. No photo ops. He had more important fish to fry.
For anyone reading that has never heard Daniel’s song ‘Story of an Artist’, I urge you to take a minute and listen. Its probably the most concisely beautiful song ever written about both the glory and the hopelessness of the irresistible compulsion to make art your life.
Daniel wrote so many songs that just cut straight to the heart with an aching purity and utterly charming, disarming lack of artifice that is beyond rare. They are the kind of malleable songs that can sound almost throwaway in their simplicity when you first hear them, but then they nestle under your skin and grow in meaning while you’re not listening and the next time you hear them your knees buckle underneath you. The kinds of songs that blossom in different ways when sung by someone else.
Young Australian singer-songwriter Jack Colwell, who died heartbreakingly a few weeks ago, wrote an essay for The Guardian on why Daniel’s song ‘Some Things Last A Long Time’ is his most perfect song of all time. He confessed ‘I have tried to write a song this beautiful, but it seems impossible.’ describing it’s otherworldly beauty thus: ‘I like to imagine where a song takes place, but I can never put my finger on it here – somewhere in the land between dusk and dawn, a space I have only been in dreams. Though there is one thing that is certain. Heartbreak floods every beat.’
The hauntingly gorgeous version recorded by Lana Del Rey smooths the rough edges of the original but doesn’t transcend it. Daniel only ever performed the song live twice. Andrea Marr from The Corrs also covered the song, describing it as ‘a song that saves you’. She says his music stops you in his tracks … each breathe and sound is almost like a tortured Van Gogh stroke….
Thinking about Jack and the difficulties of trying to make music your life that we spoke of and reading his essay about Daniel reminded me of this crazy little special show - just another weird and wonderful pitstop in the world of making music. You know, loose connections, that’s what it’s all about.
And that made me think about what it is to choose to be an artist (honestly that word always feels way too elevated and maybe pretentious for what I do but its the word people use so I’ll go with it) or to not actually have a choice about and to just be wired that way, which seems to be the case with most of the musicians I know. We just do it because we have to.
Daniel Johnston recorded his songs over and over in his garage on cassettes and then gave them away. I read these little messages Jack sent me, a boy I’d only met a few times but we had a shorthand to knowing each other through recognising we were wending our way through the same world trying to do something similar for reasons sometimes unknown even to ourselves; compelled to make records and write and perform in a world that didn’t necessarily always welcome us with open arms. You have to carve out your own little space.
Re-reading these messages breaks my heart, especially because I know that Jack has an incredible second album in the can that he worked so very hard on and was so excited about, and I have no doubt his friends will make sure it gets out into the world and I deeply wish he could be here to feel some love for that and something about the tragedy of it all also makes me feel more determined than ever to hustle on, to keeping doing what I do.
Music matters. Songs can save us. Listening to them, and writing them.
Like writing songs, writing Loose Connections helps me make sense of all the wonder, weirdness, beauty and tragedy of the world. Thanks for being here.
Lo x
PS: Hitting that heart button makes my heart happy ( so does a little alliteration)…
There it is in your beautiful words, love light and beauty. How we live with music.
So beautiful. What a moving account.