rock and roll musings by Tim Byrnes

 LIFE, DEATH AND DANIEL JOHNSTON: THE RETURN OF PUNK ROCK BLUES

     Hell friends, hello neighbors, hello all you perfect strangers. I can see by the clock on the wall that the last piece I posted here was  in June (rip still and again, Robert). How could I let so much time elapse without speaking to you?  I was busy. Busy living and damn near dying. Busy crawling up my own twisted psyche and deconstructing myself out of pain and confusion. Way too busy disavowing anything and everything positive in my life to write about something as small as rock and roll. Oh, I tried. After burning the Bridges of Antimusic I scratched out a couple of pieces for Riftrock,com but that avenue dried up. Not as dramatically as my public near meltdown at anti, but dried up nonetheless.
     I’d look in my morning mirror at the very picture of failure. I convinced myself that nothing was worthwhile, least of all life; least of all my life. Richard Hell would have been proud, which should have told me I was wrong.
     For that, though, it took Daniel Johnston.
     One of the benefits of writing at anti was the contact I made with Daniel Johnston’s brother Dick, who answered the review of ’Fear Yourself’ I had sent him (it was my ‘Album of the Year’ for 2004 at antimusic). He was quite complimentary and we wound up corresponding for a while. I requested an interview with DJ ( at this point I was convinced that I was a real rock critic. I was, of course, wrong). At first I sent him a list of questions that he would give DJ, who would then answer them on tape, which would be sent back to me. That would have been a pretty cool thing but we never got it together. One thing led to another and he eventually sent me Daniel’s (and his) parents’ phone number , where Daniel lives and wished me luck with the interview. During this time I was falling apart personally, veering towards self destruction by closing myself off from  the world and my loved ones. My marriage was disintegrating apace with my self esteem and maybe even my brain, but I held it together long enough to screw up the courage to dial the number Dick Johnston had given me.
     Both his parents answered on different extensions. We three comically talked over each other, each more confused than the other as to just who the hell we were talking to when suddenly the voice of reason, Daniel himself, sounding exactly like himself uttered the magic words :
     “ It’s OK, Mom, Dad. I got it.”
     I wish my tape recorder had been working but it wasn’t. I wish I could find my notes from that conversation, but I can’t. Most of my worldly goods are packed in boxes at various friends’ houses back in the small Colorado town I left last week, just shy of 6 months since my divorce. The divorce was the culmination of about 5 years of slow surrender to the adversities both real, imagined, large and small that had all but crippled me psychically, physically, socially and spiritually. It wasn’t much of an interview anyway, really. I was and remain way too much of a fan of Daniel’s to even pretend to be objective, all star struck and gee-whiz at first (I mean, he answered the phone sounding just like himself!!) but eventually the conversation leveled off into just that; a conversation between 2 guys. We talked about ‘Fear Yourself’, of course. ‘Those guys (producer Mark Linkous and Sparklehorse) came out and worked real hard and were just great.’ he said. (My memories not that bad!) We talked about comic books, a shared passion, and I was surprised to find that Daniel’s a big Metallica fan. I’d almost swear that he uttered the deathless phrase ‘Metallica rocks.”, but I can’t be sure if that was his exact wording. (My memories not that good, either.) We talked about the need for positivism in both pop music and the world at large. He floored me with the statement that he felt that humanity was ‘….. at the dawn of an age of super heroes.’
      Now he very well may have meant that guys in long johns would be flying past skyscraper windows any minute now, but I took it to mean that basically bad things can only be defeated by good people; that corruption and destruction can only be halted by goodness and positive action. That we not only could be our own heroes, but for the very world (if not the human soul collectively) to survive it was imperative for all of us individually to become the heroes that we’re all capable of becoming. We talked some more about tour dates and his art and the then early stages of the Tribute CD (‘The Late Great Daniel Johnston: Discovered and Covered” available now at Amazon etc. Still haven’t heard it all but, rest assured, some kind of review will grace this page eventually) and this and that and the other. We said goodbye and I hung up the phone feeling more energized than I had in months.
     That energized feeling didn’t last too long, at least not long enough. I let the possibility of my superhero -dom to slip through my clenched fists and teeth. I gave in to the ‘bad voices’ that were behind the wheel, driving me slowly crazy. I burned (almost) every bridge I could find. I announced loudly that I was going to end it all. The suicidal drama queen tapes that ALL my friends were sick of hearing.
     Well, a funny thing happened on the way to my death. I sold my guitar, my amp and was on my way to buy the bus ticket. For some reason I thought that I had to kill myself back in New York. What can I say, I was (am?) crazy. In any event, I was driving into town when ‘Love Wheel’ from ‘Fun’ came on NPR. Daniel’s voice came over the radio and straight into my fevered brain. It could have been any DJ song, I’m sure. It was the sound of his voice that caused me to pull over and weep. The ‘superhero’ quote lodged itself in my head for days and I finally realized that I had to stop looking to other people to save me. I had to save myself, or at the very least take responsibility for getting the help I needed. In the words of Lou Reed “my life was saved by rock and roll”. It took a while and I had to lose a lot; a wife, 2 bands, a couple of addresses and a whole slew of self-defeating habits, but as of this writing I find myself swimming once again in that ‘sea of possibilities’ that Patti Smith sang about the first time she saved my life back in the 20th century.
       I’m now living with friends in Denver and auditioning for bands while simultaneously hunting for a day job but more importantly I have taken on the mantle of being my own superhero. I’ve got a few tall buildings left to leap and if it takes more than a single bound, as I’m sure it will, that’s OK. I’ve got plenty of time and lots of help.
      Thank you Daniel.
      It’s good to be back.

Posted by: timbyrnes at 22:20 | link | comments (4)