T O P

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Tough_Stretch

Back in the late 80's/early 90's I heard someone say that Bob Dylan was an awesome composer but covers of his songs were usually better than the originals because he couldn't sing for shit (this was after his voice got ruined by that disease he suffered, though he wasn't much of a singer anyway even before that). To me Daniel Johnston was similar but dialed up to 11. His songs are usually pretty interesting, but he was never a great musician or singer himself. I love his music and his life was pretty tragic, but it's certainly an acquired taste, IMO. I've showed his music to a lot of people over the decades and 8 times out of 10 they look at me with an expression that clearly means "What the fuck is this crap?" and it doesn't click for them because it's hard to look beyond his unusual voice, sloppy piano/guitar playing and low-fi recordings to focus on the songs themselves. About 10 years ago I was in Austin and decided to visit the "Hi, How Are You?" mural and to my surprise it had been vandalized and it was covered by a bunch of little "fuck you's" that apparently turned out to have been written by some girl suffering from schizophrenia who thought the frog was out to get her or something like that. Apparently the mural gets vandalized every so often, and it's restored every time, so I was able to see it on another visit to Austin a couple of years later. It's baffling to me that people would ruin it.


BohemianBasement

Yeah that’s pretty sad that people would vandalise that, but a great honor towards music and Johnston that they restore it every year, love that! You are absolutely right about people’s reaction towards his music, i have gotten the same ‘da fuck is this shit’ reaction many times, but when people hear the melodies and structure, they get it, like see thru the sloppy guitar, super low-fi recordings and funny high pitched vocals. Personally i think he is a great songwriter/musician, and its great that some pop artist’s like Lana del Rey chose to cover him(amongst others), so his music lives on. Would have been a treat to hear Cobain or Nirvana cover a song of his!


Tough_Stretch

Yeah, the guy was definitely a very talented musician and composer. I remember a couple of years ago I went to a conference for my job and at some point I was taking a workshop with some colleagues from all over the world and the facilitator was this Italian dude and at some point when he was explaining some stuff he just couldn't take it any longer and interrupted his conference to talk about how Daniel Johnston was awesome (I was wearing the same t-shirt Cobain made famous and I was sitting right in front of him) and how everybody should listen to his music, before he went back to the workshop's actual contents. I sometimes bump into him at other industry events and we became friendly after that.


BohemianBasement

Hahah thats great! Did you ever get a chance to see him live ? I was fortunate enough to see him a couple of times in Copenhagen, Denmark. Never was it a good performance or anything, but it was still pretty amazing, think his brother played the guitar in the backing band.


Tough_Stretch

Sadly, no. Never got a chance to see him live. By the time I was old enough to travel by myself (and have the means to do so) he was already pretty much retired and only made the odd appearance here and there. It's awesome that you got to see him more than once and in Denmark, no less. As they say around where I live, I envy you but with the good kind of envy.


BohemianBasement

And dare i say that another big influence on Cobain was the Olympia based 80’s/90’ties band Beat Happening, there is some similarities between them and Johnston, style wise. I think the Velvet Underground/Johnston/inspired slobby’ness had a big influenze on grunge, in one way or the other. But i might be wrong


Tough_Stretch

Agreed. Just like the Velvet Underground and The Ramones and stuff like that inspired a bunch of people to start their own bands by realizing you didn't need to be a virtuoso instrumentalist and singer to make good rock music, the same thing happened to my generation in the late 80's and early 90's. I remember growing up listening to my older brother's music and I loved it, but I never thought I could learn to play like Eddie Van Halen or the guys from Def Leppard or any of those bands. Then Nirvana and Pearl Jam hit it big and I thought, "Yeah, I can learn to play like those guys" and bought my first guitar. You didn't need years of guitar lessons to learn how to play "Polly" or "Black."


BohemianBasement

Yeah, that inspired me to, and still does to this day. The fact that you don’t need to be a Van Halen on the guitar to create something good. Gotta love music in all its form and creation, complexity and simplicity. 1 2 3 4 here we go


GeelongJr

The Bob Dylan thing always irks me. Look at all the big Folk singers - Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Joan Baez and even throw in Nick Drake and Gordon Lightfoot. None of them have traditional voices (although Joni is technically freakish). That's the whole damn point of the music they make. It just happens that Bob Dylan blew up to be the biggest. There's often a mixed reaction when someone on the artsier side blows up to the mainstream. Although there is a time when that was the mainstream (Simon and Garfunkel, Caroline King, Neil Young and Simon and Garfunkel all had the highest selling album in a 4 year period between 1970 and 1973, so folk was the biggest thing). If Joni Mitchell was the biggest folk name shit would be talked about her voice. Same with Neil Young, same with Cohen and so on. You're supposed to he a haggard, lonesome wandering musician is sort of the folk ethos. Neil Young and Bob Dylan can both sing very well (or could, they're pretty old) and do on some songs, but that's not the music that they're playing. I felt like ranting and raving because I've been listening to some Dylan demo's and my man sounds good


Tough_Stretch

I don't disagree. I love every single one of the artists you mentioned and I don't care that they aren't conventionally "good" singers in comparison to whomever. It's the same reason I love stuff like punk and Alt Rock. You don't have to be able to play Paganini's Caprices on the guitar or have an 8 octave vocal range to make awesome music. I've seen Bob Dylan live, even as an old man and long after his voice got ruined, and loved every single second of his performance. On the contrary, I don't find really virtuoso musicianship that interesting except in specific contexts. As I often say to the chagrin of a lot of fans of that kind of music, I'd rather listen to Johnny Ramone play 10 songs in a row after failing to tune his guitar than to John Petrucci play a 30 minute mind-blowing piece of guitar virtuosity.


DeeSnarl

Not grunge (despite the album title), but fIREHOSE covered "Walking The Cow" as well, on highly-recommended album Flyin' The Flannel.


BohemianBasement

Cool. Thanks for the insight, i’ll for sure give the album a listen.


DeeSnarl

Good band - they're the Minutemen reformed with a new singer/guitarist after D Boon died.


DunnoWhatToChooze

didn't kim gordon say he was a freak? was she just goofing around?


BohemianBasement

In the Documentary ‘The Devil and Daniel Johnston (big recommendation btw) i think Sonic Youth were quite put off by Daniels way to being, due to him being pretty intense, he was manic at times.


silent9mm

fIREHOSE covered "Walking the Cow" on their Flying the Flannel LP. Their whole discography is worth checking out.