return to worldwidereview.com,
the home of critical reviews
From: blp Category: ArtFilmsMusic Date: 11 January 2007 Time: 07:28 AM Review: A friend said I should get this out on DVD recently, then it turned up on E4 and saved me the two quid. Johnstone's music is much much better than I'd thought, especially the early stuff, which is not just childlike, but genuinely the work of a child recording his strange, simple poetics to a haunting keyboard accompaniment. I think before I'd only heard his collaborations with Jad Fair, with Fair singing. They have similar high pitched nerd Yank styles, but Fair, who was shown singing here a bit, is more annoying. While the documentary was still on, I got onto Amazon and bought Johnstone's early album Hi, How Are You? and very much look forward to putting it on. Johnstone is, in the words of one interviewee here, 'deeply religious'. He's also bipolar and an acid casualty, given to seeing the hand of satan in everything and, occasionally, when off his medication, he's behaved in seriously life threatening ways towards the people around him, even crashing his father's light airplane once in the throes of a devil panic (his father cried as he told the story). A friend, now the editor of an Austin newspaper, related how, upon committing Johnstone to an insane asylum years ago, he felt as if he was betraying not just Johnstone, but Van Gogh, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Antonin Artaud and every other tormented genius who'd ever been 'misunderstood'. You can see his point; however much these people might seem like your best friends in theory, in practice Johnstone, at least, sweet as he seems, is basically opaquely unreachable. There's something irreducibly different about him that hardly anyone's ever likely to really understand or relate to, let alone aspire to be. To give a small example, his numerous love songs are all written for someone called Laurie whom he hasn't seen in years - like a sort of slacker Dante and Beatrice - or, more appropriately, Petrarch and Laura. But then the music, at its best, almost completely compensates. And maybe God really is looking out for him. It's a stone miracle that Johnstone made it to Austin, Texas, haven of liberalism in redneck Texas, home of the Butthole Surfers and one of the richest experimental music scenes outside NY. It was obviously the place, probably the only place for thousands of miles, where he was going to find an audience, but he didn't know it. He was traveling with a carnival that was pitched outside the town and, for no very good reason, a carny worker punched him in the head (he'd been taking too long on the porta-potty). He ran away to the city, found a church, and they looked after him and got him an apartment. Then he went out and started handing out tapes of Hi, How Are You? to an exceptionally receptive and open- minded public - many of whom, if Richard Linklater's Slacker is anything to go by, even shared his tendency to expound wild conspiracy theories. Years later, another experience of physical threat was the trigger again for Johnstone to find professionally helpful friends. He'd moved out of Austin to live with his folks and some kids saved him from an irate dog. They became the members of his band. 'We were wondering why we moved here', said the guitarist, implicitly endorsing the idea of a divine hand in it all, 'and now we know.'