Daniel Johnston is a singer song-writer and artist from Austin Texas. He’s been a huge cult figure since the 80’s and had a dalliance with something close to fame in the early 90’s when Kurt Cobain wore one of his shirts on a big time music magazine. I don’t honestly know the history well enough, but it seems in retrospect that Daniel might have been a precursor to the digital age of music sharing. In the 80’s he would make tapes and albums and give them out to just about anyone. These tapes got passed from person to person, often ending up in different parts of the country or other nations just through hand to hand contact, like some kind of musical virus. Lacking the equipment or resources to mass print copies of his music, when Daniel ran out of albums and someone asked for one, he would go home and re-play the entire album to record it, just so he could give the person a tape. He also did the drawings for his album art. One of Daniel’s albums is called “Hi, How Are You?” and has a drawing of a frog, as if it is asking you. This is the image Kurt Cobain was wearing. There’s something about this phrase and Daniel’s life that feels very poignant to me: there’s an openness to Daniel’s process of sharing, and to that question, that makes me really happy. Daniel is Bi-polar, and spent a lot of time in the 80’s and 90’s, suffering a great deal because he was mis diagnosed or mis-medicated. He once flew in a small plan with his father and almost crashed them. Both were lucky to survive. He’s now found a much more even keel and by most reports is doing well, if living quietly in a small Texas town.
There was a point in my life when Daniel Johnston scared the hell out of me because I thought I was too similar. That something was wrong with me that couldn’t be fixed and that I could end up in pretty bad shape. (It hasn’t helped that a few people have compared me to him!). Ultimately though I’m starting to be ok with that and I’m starting to be ok with myself. I love his work because there’s a really simple beauty to it that I hope to match with certain things I do. There’s one song of his, probably his most well known (because every single person on earth has done a cover version of it) that never let’s go of my heart and honestly it’s hard not to cry whenever I hear it. There’s a simplicity and directness to it, and openness, a “Hi How are You?” about it. The song is called “True Love Will Find You In the End.” It's been covered by all kinds of folks from Beck to Wilco. And you can hear Daniel’s version here. I named this blog “Hi How are You” because I hope my work can have the same effect that Daniel’s work has on me. I hope it can be direct, honest, I hope it can be passed from one person to another like an old tape. You can check out more info about Daniel and his work here. Or see a documentary about his life (which I recommend) called “The Devil and Daniel Johnston”:
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Music has been my nanny, friend and lover since a very young age. One of my first memories is both traumatic and incredibly silly, and has a lot to do, I think, with why music is important to me and the complex relationship I have with it. When I turned five I got a radio/cassette player for my birthday, along with the tape of the soundtrack to the movie La Bamba. The song La Bamba was one of my favorites (that riff! That exotic Spanish! So fun!). The day after my birthday I spent a good few hours on my front porch, the antenna of the radio pulled up as my microphone, listening to, dancing and singing along with, La Bamba. On repeat. For two or three hours. We lived in a house on a cul de sac at the bottom of a street that wound down a hill. Towards the end of my concert, I saw two men in white shirts slowly making their way down that hill towards our house, stopping at each door on the way. As they walked between houses they were watching me. (Notice if you will, the similarity between this and the stalking in my vision of In The Hall of the Mountain King). But I kept singing and dancing and rewinding. The closer they got the more they stared. Finally they left the house next to mine and were headed to my door (like all good Witnesses, walking the paved path back to the street, not cutting thru the grass). And as they came towards me they were smiling. They were laughing. Now I’ll grant you that in retrospect, a 5 year old white kid shaking his booty to La Bamba and singing “babababalabamba” at the top of his lungs is pretty effing cute and probably deservers a good hard laugh. But these guys were strangers and they were laughing at my concert. The five year old me did not take this well. I immediately broke into sobs and ran inside with my radio, screaming for mommy. I don’t think my mom wanted to talk with them anyway, and them breaking the heart of her little birthday boy didn’t go over well. Shall we say their visit to my home was not successful that day? After that, for the longest time, I was terrified to sing in public, or even to sing. I put all my music interests into instruments. And though I wrote songs throughout high school I never sang them. Singing has always been something I wanted to do, but I’ve had to force myself into nervewrecking situations to do it (even today I need at least three quick shots before I’ll put in for karaoke). I sing at home all the time, and am getting a bit more comfortable. But those effing Witnesses. I coulda been an American Idol. Music has always been a huge inspiration for me, and an important part of my life. One of my earliest memories involves singing the hell out of La Bamba on my front porch at the age of 5 (see the full memory of that story in blog form soon). I was very fortunate to go to a school where music was part of the curriculum. One of the best things for me was a program called Music Memory, which was actually a competition (and oh how I love a competition). We would listen to pieces of classical music: Bach, Beethoven, Handel, Haydn, Tchaikovsky, etc. And we’d have to be familiar with the full piece we were studying, as well as able to identify the composer’s name, name of the piece, year it was written. We’d have these competitions where they’d play an obscure 30 second section of one piece and we’d have to recognize it and write down the info. Looking back it seems a bit of a strange way to get kids into music but it worked for me. When I was old enough I took up violin (which I played for 10 years and still hope to pick up again) and to this day I love orchestral and symphonic music. One of my favorite pieces from that program, and one that I have always had a huge emotional reaction to, is In The Hall of the Mountain King from Peer Gynt, by Grieg. Took me many years to put together that this was actually incidental music for a play by Henrik Ibsen (and clearly if you’ve heard the song, it does not sound like incidental music!). Gaye Stearnes, my elementary school music teacher, often encouraged us to close our eyes when listening to music for the first time. I still remember that the minute this piece came on I had a story in my head: a man was walking up a narrow path through woods, up a hill or mountain. And every once in a while he would look back down behind him on the path. Listening, I saw this all very cinematically. Sometimes when the man looked back, he would briefly see a troll’s head poking out behind a tree, watching him. As he went higher, the troll got slowly closer. (Dude thinking of this while listening to the music still gives me chills). And as the music sped up, so did the chase until finally the man was sprinting uphill, running for his life. He finally came to a small clearing where the path out was blocked and he had to turn to face the troll, during the big huge choral sequence at the end of the song.
Honestly I don’t remember how this vision ended. I just remember the chase. At any rate, ever since that moment, this piece of music has been a huge part of my artistic DNA. It’s one of the pieces I go back to over and over whenever I feel stuck. It’s so sharp, it’s so dynamic, it’s so emotional and so exciting. Pretty much any time I’ve felt stuck, I’ll pull this out and a listen or two will get me out of my funk. Love it. |