Daniel Johnston
Bumbershoot, Sun Sept 2, 3:00 pm, PCC Northwest Court Stage

Daniel Johnston has just returned from a week-long stint in Johannesburg, South Africa. "We went there to make a film for one of my songs, 'King Kong.' I played a show with a gorilla mask on... there were kids running all over the park where we were filming. It was really fun!"

Johnston is audibly happy and upbeat. For low-fi aficionados familiar with the 20-year career of the cult pop underdog, such news may be a pleasant surprise. While Johnston's appeal lies in his charmingly off-kilter songs about unjaded rock-star ambitions, unrequited love, and the traps and comforts of childhood nostalgia, much of Johnston's notoriety comes from his unfortunate public struggle with manic depression. This illness has led him in and out of various institutions and has greatly affected his ability to produce the work he is so widely loved for.

But now, thanks in part to a new antidepressant, 41-year-old Johnston says he feels better than he has in many years, and is enjoying the most sustained creative output he's ever experienced.

Born in California and raised in West Virginia, Johnston moved to Austin in the early '80s with his devoutly religious parents. Drawn initially to piano and then guitar, he began recording his inimitable brand of music on a cheap boombox. He handed out home-dubbed tapes (the covers lovingly illustrated with his own childlike cartoons) to the locals. The titles of his darkly humorous confessionals were telling: The first was Songs of Pain, followed by Don't Be Scared (eventually picked up and distributed by the local label Stress), and Hi, How Are You?, a disconcertingly autobiographical assembly of short, Lennonesque compositions that were rife with incisive lyrical wit and crudely banged out on toy instruments.

Homestead Recordings reissued that collection on vinyl in 1988, fertilizing Johnston's growing cult following and attracting a startling on-slaught of more famous fans. Kurt Cobain, Johnny Depp, Eddie Vedder, Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo, and even Simpsons creator Matt Groening began name-checking Johnston as a burgeoning savant. The convergence of these big-name accolades, with the growing hysteria over the New Alternative Rock Order, brought MTV to his doorstep. The invasive pressure of such an impersonal media microscope proved to be too much, and Johnston retreated to solitude, spending more time alone, drawing and struggling with ever-increasing mood swings.

A series of unfortunate events, including an ill-advised introduction to LSD and the certainly overwhelming experience of re-recording "Pale Blue Eyes" with Lou Reed and Moe Tucker, led to Johnston's sporadic residency in state mental institutions. Despite (or perversely, perhaps because of) such manic-depressive obstacles, a few major labels, including Elektra and Atlantic, began vying to add him to their rosters. Atlantic ended up securing the rights to release 1994's Fun, produced by Johnston's friend, Butthole Surfer Paul Leary.

The recording of Fun proved to be anything but. Impaired by seemingly inappropriately dispensed psychotropic medication, Johnston was unable to contribute much more than vocals and minimal keyboard embellishments to his major-label debut, while the rest of the production was fleshed out rather fantastically with string sections and a full band. And although the intimate, furtively personal nature of his songs remained intact, Johnston was ignored outside of college radio. Atlantic dropped him theoretically long before it did legally, leaving him in the muddy waters of underpromoted, perpetually overlooked artists on its roster.

Luckily Brian Beattie, whose previous credits included the Dead Milkmen and his own band, Glass Eye, had forged a friendship with Johnston back in Austin and reconnected with him while producing "Casper the Friendly Ghost," an older song of Johnston's that would appear with appropriate childlike deviance on the soundtrack for Larry Clark's film Kids.

Speaking with Johnston today, it's clear that his reunion with Beattie was anything but a step back--in fact, it could be the happy ending to his story. "We did a lot of recording. We have another record already in the can to follow up this one," he tells me joyously, "this one" being Gammon Records' reissue of Rejected/Unknown--a strong, almost classic-sounding collection hewn from two years of collaboration with Beattie.

Johnston's still dwelling on some sad stuff, to be sure. Songs like "Wedding Bell Blues" and "I Lose" are just as grim as they sound, but Rejected occasionally paints a more optimistic future: "There's nothing left of your depression as long as you are entertained," he chortles sweetly on "Party." When I ask him what he finds most difficult about his work now, he simply seems grateful to have found some peace and security.

"I'm making a living, and I have a lot more opportunities. I've been flying all over the world and doing shows," he says softly, with delighted confidence. "My records are doing really well. There's no complaints about it. I'm really happy."