Voices

I saw Daniel Johnston a couple of nights back, without having heard of him before. Hoss, my musical friend, introduced me to him a few days before. Listening to his recent Mark Linkous produced album gave me only some indication of what to expect. Listening to the album again after Johnston’s short performance (he played only for 30 minutes and we were lucky, for sometimes he exists the stage after 10 minutes), I realised it betrayed the simplicity of Johnston’s singing and playing: that Linkous had lost the joy of great melodies and the happy simplicity of a music which requires no ornamentation. There are albums and albums of the simple, solo Johnston, I hear, which he used to pass out by hand to whomever he thought might like them.

Later, back at H.’s flat, I saw some of Johnston’s art and read something of his biography. What struck me in particular were his pictures of Captain America in whose mouth he would insert speech bubbles. What did he make him say? I’ve forgotten, but there was a sense of apocalypse and of Captain America not as a superhero but as one who would embody all the strength and the weakness of America. Yes, all of it, and all of America’s past, reminding me of the narrator of Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself’. Then I wondered whether there were celebrities who might embody all of our world in a similar sense. That night, I dreamt of celebrities who were like gods and wrote the two peculiar posts that precede this one.

In whose voice were they written? I wanted to write simply but also as though swept along by an all-powerful force. That great force which, I imagine, caught Johnston in those moments when he is able to write dozens of songs and paint, and write. I drank two cups of strong coffee and wrote prose I will regret because it will have to be defended. With whose voice was I writing? Conflation: too many voices spoke. All of them, and all at once. Conflation, too, of ideas with which I would want to stand behind and with ideas which I would not (ideas stronger and weaker than I am).

What does it matter? These voices, and this one too, in which I would write of voices, dissolve themselves into a prior swarming from which no voice can issue without assuming the mask that the condition of speech, of writing. Is it that swarming to which Daniel Johnston comes close in moments of illness? The guy from Yo La Tengo recalls visiting him in hospital; he couldn’t get a word out of him, he reports. But this is because there was too much to say rather than not enough. How many voices there are in all of us!

Hoss admired the passion of Johnston’s performance. Johnston is a big man, and performs in grey tracksuit bottoms and a white tee shirt. He props a lyric book on a high stand which makes it difficult to see his face when he sings and plays guitar. A few songs later, going upstage to play the piano with big, simple chords, Johnston retreated, Hoss noted, as if he felt more confortable at a distance from his audience. No doubt. There are stories that when he hears the words ‘more’ or ‘encore’ he climbs out of the window.

I will keep the pleasant memory of Johnston’s entrance on stage. He carried two cans of different flavoured Fanta which he propped on the piano. Later he reversed their order. Then he bent down for some minutes to get his guitar from his case, his arse turned to the audience. ‘We didn’t have to see that’, said Hoss. Johnston played his guitar clumsily, finding the chords with his fingers. But it was tremendous against his voice, his wonderful voice, so sweet and youthful. To whom should I compare it? Brian Wilson’s? Perhaps this is too lazy. And how should I write about the music itself, the songs?

Ah, but I’ve no strength today having given it all up yesterday morning. All I can remember is the elaborate cosmology Johnston has made from himself, where Caspar the friendly ghost plays an important role. Would it be possible to dream up such a cosmology of my own with celebrities in a starring role and the body of capital streaming? Perhaps this hides a desire for regression – to tell myself those fairy tales without pain. But then there is a powerful Christian inspiration in Johnston’s art where Christ would come to the crucifix as a bridegroom to his bride, in Augustine’s words, and his head does not bow but raises itself erect and with eyes open Christ welcomes his crucifixion.