Episode Five

(Taken from the Munster Records box set sleeve notes)

SONGS OF PAIN

(From Wikipedia: source chosen as an example of the type of information on Daniel Johnston that is readily available)

Songs Of Pain was recorded in 1980 and 1981, and handed out to friends by Johnston. It was rereleased on cassette by Stress Records in 1988.

All songs feature Johnston on vocals and piano, except for ‘Premarital Sex’ where he plays organ. The opening track, ‘Grievances’, introduces themes that reoccur throughout Johnston’s career. He sings about his unrequited love for “the librarian”, which refers to a girl named Laurie Allen who has functioned as a muse in many of Johnston’s songs. This has been described as the quintessential Daniel Johnston song, including by Johnston himself. Not only the lyrical, but also the musical, theme of the song has been alluded to in later works. The word “grievances” has also been reused in other song titles, like on ‘Mabel’s Grievances’ (More Songs Of Pain) and ‘Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Your Grievances’ (Yip/Jump Music).

Other themes on the album are premarital sex (‘Joy Without Pleasure’, ‘Premarital Sex’), Christianity (‘A Little Story’) and marijuana (‘Pot Head’). Between some of the songs are recordings of Johnston’s mother screaming at him that he will never make anything of himself.

Daniel Johnston: “Those were the days. Me and all my friends used to pretend we were Bruce Springsteen or on David Letterman. They’d come over to the house and we’d make up really weird songs on piano.

“So I started thinking, if I’m writing these songs I’ll go ahead and pretend I’m writing an album, so I started doing them on cassette tape and giving them to my friends. I always wanted to be famous, and my friends made me feel like I was famous because they made me feel so special. They would [pretend to] interview me, and stuff.

“All those four cassettes [Songs Of Pain, Don’t Be Scared, The What Of Whom, More Songs Of Pain], it was all albums I made for my best friend Dave Thornberry. I’m sure glad I made those tapes because I didn’t have copies. It’s the only reason the songs survived.”

Listen to the music. A deep rumble, all too familiar to any of us who used those cheap two-track cassette recorders to record on during the late 70s: a cough and a clearing of the throat, nervous. A slightly too fast honky-tonk piano chimes in – resonant, and evocative of Tin Pan Alley: the voice starts, near-falsetto and wavering, weaving its way through the song’s many separate sections: the words funny and melancholy and self-deprecating all at once… “The librarian said, ‘You can’t buy no respect’/I said, ‘Hey, lady, what can you expect when I’m lying on the floor?’… “I’m heading out West/Gonna find me the best/Well, I played the game but I failed the test/If I can’t be a lover then I’ll be a pest/Yes, I will”.

Immediately, you find yourself intrigued, drawn in.

Maybe you could think of these early Daniel Johnston recordings as stories or diaries, not music. But they’re not. They’re music.

Bill Johnston: “Daniel was the last of five children I had, and I paid for piano lessons for all of them. And Daniel got most of his lessons from his brothers and sisters, not from the teacher, because we were living in the country and couldn’t get to the teacher very easy. And then he’d just wing it by himself and learnt, more or less, by ear. And he banged on that piano eight hours a day, every day, as a teenager. He liked The Beatles – and of course he got into rock’n’roll and wrote 3-400 songs of his own while he was a teenager at home before he had mental problems, and they’re still what are selling today.”

What did you think of the songs?

“Well, the noise of banging on the piano all day and all night was a little bit bothersome to us but we could always close the door. The piano was in the basement and the TV room was upstairs so it didn’t bother us too much, but it was continuous. He would show us his songs, and he played and sang them for us all the time – not all of them, but a lot of them. At that time, I didn’t have any favourites.”

Daniel was born in Sacramento, January 22, 1961, to a fundamentalist Christian family, the youngest of five children. His father William Johnston was an engineer and a war hero.

“I was with the Flying Eagles in China in 1945. I was there when the war ended. I always claimed I was the one that stopped it. I always liked airplanes, and used to make model airplanes when I was a teenager – I would make one every Saturday in the backyard and fly it. After the war, I went to aeronautical engineering school and found work building big processing equipment. When that work dried up in the 50s, I moved to California and built government [Minutemen] missiles. I ended up at the Quaker State Oil Refinery in West Virginia, and that’s where I retired from, 20 years ago.”

Listen to the music. The same distracting rush of wind in the ears: the same barroom piano: the same plaintive voice: words that seem to cover the story of a – wait, is this the story of Jesus, told via home-recorded basement music that in snatches recalls David Bowie’s ‘The Laughing Gnome’ and Elvis Costello’s ‘Oliver’s Army’?: pauses for emphasis: hope shining through the cracking, emotional voice: … “But there’s a happy ending to the story/I think you’ll be glad to know/He came back to life in glory/And up from the grave He arose”…

            You’re more than intrigued. You want to listen and listen on.

Daniel Johnston: “I got the title for Songs Of Pain from a John Lennon lyric with the Plastic Ono Band, feel your own pain. I had a girlfriend who was already engaged to be married to the undertaker, so there were a lot of songs about that. I’d just met her and she was already going steady. We were best friends. I loved her a lot, but I lost out.

“All the songs were about things we used to do. ‘Like A Monkey In A Zoo’, I rearranged the chords of ‘Hey Jude’, and it was about how my friends would come over and I’d play some songs and often I’d make some tapes, and on those tapes it was like I was the clown, or I was in a zoo.

“‘Grievances’ was one of my favourite songs, for sure. A lot of my later songs are related to ‘Grievances’, the same way The Beatles would relate one song to another.”

Listen to the music. The third song, ‘Joy Without Pleasure’, is deeply moral. It even has a spoken line about sex at the end to emphasise the song’s message. The next song is hyper-playful, with a jaunty piano to match, a slight tape hesitation and a switching back on, the singer gleefully revealing a human side that many would blush to mention – “Now when Syd discovered masturbation/He just couldn’t keep a good thing down/But it didn’t help much his condition/Never relaxed, never relaxed, never relaxed”.

            And then… wait… what? The singer’s mom chastising him, clearly having been recorded on the sly – wait, what is that? Why’s she on the tape at all? What’s going on here? There are songs of pain and words of chastisement among the youthful vigour, humour and bursts of optimism. ‘Like A Monkey In The Zoo’ trades on the singer’s feelings of inadequacy over a barrel-rolling piano that would fit right in with the bar scenes in Oliver! ‘Wicked Will’, meanwhile, is The Beatles’ ‘Rocky Racoon’ given a West Virginian face, the piano notes tumbling over one another in their delight at being heard.

Overwhelmingly, there is a deep-rooted belief in – and desire for – true love. On ‘An Idiot’s End’ the singer absolutely gives the game away: “To know her is to love her/And I love her but I don’t know her”. Every mood change is climactic, every chord change traumatic.

And… wait… what? This singer doesn’t have the right kind of attitude at all. At all… “Well I made some mistakes but/I ain’t learned a lesson/That I don’t wanna hear about responsibilities/I got less important things to do” he sings on the riotous ‘Lazy’.

“I’m a quitter, oh yeah/Quit this, quit that, quit everything…”

Well, we can all relate to that, can’t we?

Brett Hartenbach (friend and musician): “When Daniel made these recordings in the late 70s, he’d record them on his boom box. But if he’d have had a 48-track studio, he would’ve used it. He was trying to be The Beatles. People look at him now as if he was trying to be cutting edge and lo-fi. He wasn’t. This was just what was coming out of him.

“There’s a point in the documentary [The Devil And Daniel Johnston] where Daniel whispers, ‘My mom just sent me another mic so now I can do overdubs’. I think, lucky for the listener he had to do it that way, because it came out different and special and more pure than if he had gone into a studio.

“There was nothing in-between. He would sit in the basement, turn on the tape recorder and start playing.”