Daniel Johnston

“With the arrival of the Beatles and rock music, the numbers a record could or should do changed, and consequently so did the idea of the profits an album was supposed to generate. Overnight, selling five thousand copies of an LP effectively meant having failed the target.” So says music historian, teacher and producer Ashley Kahn, back in the spring of a few years ago. Within these few lines lies the summa of what you're about to read. That Daniel Johnston has always loved the Beatles is common knowledge. Obsessed with the Fab Four, he was for a long time a fervent collector; on more than one occasion he's recalled how, as a teenager, he wished he were one of them. Now, the world is full of people who wish they were Mick Jagger, Elvis or Tony Manero. Escapism through emulation, whether by choice or necessity, is certainly not modern society's worst evil. What matters is observing (and possibly understanding) how things play out. Charles Manson wanted to be one of the four from Liverpool, and ended up masterminding a massacre. Liam Gallagher wanted to be remembered as John Lennon, and refounded Britpop more than twenty years after his death. Daniel Johnston too wanted to be one of the Beatles, but it's precisely in his formal failure that the music world gained a Daniel Johnston. A fifty-two-year-old with his mental health struggles (from Wikipedia: “Has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. Both conditions have been recurring problems throughout his life”) in a context where many merely play at being “crazy.”

But the music world hates the different and the deformed of every era. Be it Tiny Tim, the Legendary Stardust Cowboy or Wildman Fisher. It tends to flatten them out. And when it can't, it ridicules them. Because, as our colleague Giona A. Nazzaro teaches us, there's popularization — the paternalistic, populist kind, and therefore unacceptable — and there's popularization, the work that makes available to the curious information and fragments of time left forgotten in the attic of official history. Of the two, tonight we witnessed the apotheosis of the first. It's hard to make out any traits of the artist Daniel Johnston beyond the physical ones, buried as he is under the attempt to squeeze him into the hipster-pop image being tailored onto him. Behind him stands a thoroughly respectable band (including two quarters of Calibro 35 and the usual Afterhours member moonlighting) but one that has little or nothing to do with the core of Johnston's own output. The musicians come out with bass lines vaguely reminiscent of Chili Peppers, over-polished openings worthy of PFM, fiddle flourishes fit for a Celtic music festival in Pontida, and by the end it feels like watching Pavarotti And Friends, with Daniel Johnston cast as the poor soul who can't manage on his own and needs help. A rotten deal.

The crowd seems to enjoy it, especially the three Beatles covers (“Get Back,” “The Fool On The Hill,” “I Am The Walrus”). Daniel, on the other hand, almost always cuts those songs off abruptly, just as the band still seems not to have grasped that it's the substance that interests him, not the form. During the other songs, meanwhile, gaps keep opening up in the crowd. Looking around, then, at the fake-blond shaved heads, the handlebar moustaches and the lavish, extravagant outfits, we sense that if he had played all of “Yip/Jump Music” (whose thirtieth anniversary is being celebrated this year) exactly as “Yip/Jump Music” actually sounds — instead of only indulging in “The Beatles” and “Casper The Friendly Ghost” revisited and corrupted — many of them would have stayed home. Because it's easy to complain about the dumbing-down of today's music scene, but when the chance actually comes along to experience something genuinely unprecedented, people miss the point entirely. Belittling it, burying it. So the venue ends up packed with uppers playing at being hipsters, even though just a few kilometres away the far more fitting My Bloody Valentine were playing at the Orion and Dirty Beaches at Circolo degli Artisti; all gathered together, passionately, to witness the standardization of the unstandardizable, the flattening of diversity, the death of outsider spirit in favor of yet another display of pop omnipotence from John, Paul, Ringo and George.

Speaking of his psychological struggles, Daniel once said, in an old interview far more sincere than most of what we saw tonight: “I was disoriented, I couldn't connect with friends, so I simply turned to art.” There it is: art. And art is precisely the right note to end this report on. That thing which doesn't always have to be clear, conformist and comforting, but can also be deeply uncomfortable, strange and disturbing; something one could easily call heresy. Especially when it delves into the darkest corners of the human mind, and saves it. So let's rebel, because not everything that glitters has to belong to them.

Photos by Raffaella Midiri

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google