[Songs My Son Should Know] Daniel Johnston | Story of an Artist

Daniel Johnston may be the only artist alive whom people discuss as if he had been put deep into the earth just the week before last.  This, a haunting feeling, hushing your tones in his presence -- so as not to speak ill of the dead, but, also to give respect to a figure that had succumbed to a sickness that had debilitated a genius into a child.  To be witness to this arrestive regression is to be witness to an imminent, dismal death, exacerbated in morbidity by his life-long narration in the form of hymnals. 

Story of an Artist is, what I believe to be, Daniel Johnston's most autobiographical prose -- daunting and morose in melody -- but also lyrically celebratory in his acceptance of fate.  In this writer's opinion, Story of an Artist is the message scribed and preserved in a bottle, to be cast into the vast landscape so that it may emerge long after his brain had breached asylum. As the years progress for Daniel Johnston, I believe this discovered message becomes gradually, increasingly powerful, written by proxy for an aged casing of a man who was at one time the most revered artist in the the most progressive music city.

The message: There is victory in the spirit of man.

One of the lessons in the humongous, multi-volume set of Advisories, Recommendations, and Suggestions that i will relay to my son is the absolute acceptance of the impaired and disabled; Those whose genius could not be contained by their skulls or their will by their skeletons.  Truly, the strongest humans I know are these very people.  Story of an Artist allegorizes this fickle connection between the infirm and the able, and attempts to provide reason for destiny and circumstance.  I think its an important lesson to know.


In many ways Daniel Johnston IS dead. We can never reclaim the singer whose twenty-year-old, school-boyish-demeanor endeared the very early MTV generation -- when important music was still recorded, accessible, and collected on D-C90 TDK cassette tapes.  We cannot reclaim the visionary painter who's art hangs like relics of "Old Austin", a phenomenon that starts the day after you move to this city.  We cannot reclaim the ambition of a lyricist, whose very simple compositions contained more information than was provided superficially, like binary code translated into verse.

But, this is not to say that the spirit of man cannot persevere through circumstance -- or fate, destiny, or other happenstance.  Its simply possible to have the desire necessary to overcome obstacles.  Stay deliberate.  Keep focused.  Remain inspired.  The story of an artist.

Old Austin, possibly the day after I moved here.