Melodies from the dark side

By GRAHAM REID

Being eccentric or even downright loopy has never disqualified anyone from a career in rock culture. Indeed, some would argue being slightly off-beam is a prerequisite.

Rock is littered with oddballs: acid-damaged Syd Barrett, who signed out of Pink Floyd in '68 and reality shortly after; those Fleetwood Mac guitarists who went walkabout mid-career; Brian Wilson lolling on his bed for a decade ... These are the well-known ones.

Out there in cultdom are 13th Floor Elevators' Roky Erikson, who signed up for drugs in the 60s, thought a Martian was inhabiting his body, and is a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic living in a halfway house; the late Skip Spence of Jefferson Airplane and Moby Grape, who became a speedfreak schizophrenic; and Daniel Johnston.

Johnston has all the ingredients to qualify as a cult figure: Few have heard of him; slightly less obscure cult figures further up the totem pole acclaim him; and his music is bloody hard to find. The perfect convergence.

He's also slightly wonky in the brainbox, but that doesn't mean his music is rubbish - you can make the case that his art is the better for it.

A couple of Johnston's early 80s handmade tapes, Songs of Pain and More Songs of Pain, have been collated on to disc as The Early Recordings Volume 1. It's great stuff - if you like lo-fi recordings, a wobbly but honest voice singing about Jesus, unrequited love, offering hilarious rhymes and narratives, slightly unnerving stories involving killing, and melodies which we might charitably describe as childlike and free-ranging.

Johnston, now in his early 40s, was born in California to Christian fundamentalist parents and early on became a Beatles fan. He took to drawing in the scrawly manner of John Lennon and wanted to be a cartoonist. He majored in art, then moved to Texas, finally settling in Austin after five months with a travelling circus. And grappled with manic depression.

He recorded lo-fi tapes which were mostly him banging a piano and punctuating his enjoyably oddball songs with funny addresses to his imagined audience: "Now without any further ado I'm going to do a little soft shoe and a little boogaloo for you." He gave away the tapes on the street and became a local identity in Austin.

When 85 MTV filmed some bands, they mentioned Johnston, he appeared on the show and suddenly Sonic Youth, the Butthole Surfers and Half Japanese were hailing him as a true original. The acclaim didn't help, however - he still worked at McDonald's - and Johnston ended up institutionalised twice during the late 80s.

Since then his life has stabilised, he's recorded with Jad Fair and the Buttholes' Paul Leary, Kurt Cobain wore a Johnston T-shirt and Matt (The Simpsons) Groening is big fan.

The double-disc compilation captures his emotion in honestly delivered, funny songs ("I'm a quitter, quit this, quit that") alongside aching songs of love for someone who will never return it. He lost his girlfriend to an undertaker and sings of it on the unaccompanied My Baby Cares for the Dead.

His piano-playing is primitive, clowns and monkeys in cages are recurrent themes, you can hear his mum berate him as he's recording, and he sings about watching the toilet flush. (Cue sound of flushing toilet.)

There's a primitive Lennon quality to some songs (at other times he goes the whole hokey hoe-down) and lines leap out: "All that is made, is made to decay", "I'm the phantom of my own opera" and "She looks at me like a gun cocks". More Dead Than Alive sounds like a shaggy-dog Dylan thing left off The Basement Tapes.

Johnston doesn't fit anywhere in contemporary rock. For that reason alone he's worth hearing. And you've got to admire someone who gives you a tireless quip you can use on your boss: "I don't want to hear about responsibilities, I got less important things to do." I believe he's back living with his elderly mum and dad.

The late Warren Zevon wasn't quite as odd - although throwing himself down stairs while in the grip of the demon drink was one of his things - but this Jekyll and Hyde of sunny California in the 80s, who wrote the lovely Hasten Down the Wind, could also pen, "He took little Susie to the Junior Prom, and he raped her and killed her, then he took her home. After 10 long years they let him out of the home, and he dug up her grave and built a cage with her bones. He's just an excitable boy." Warren knew the dark stuff.

Which may or may not have prepared him for his final album The Wind (Ryko), recorded when he knew he had inoperable lung cancer, which made his smoking skull logo even more apt, and featuring admiring luminaries such as Springsteen, Tom Petty, Jackson Browne, some Eagles and Emmylou Harris.

It isn't a celeb-heavy wake, Zevon's mordant wit is evidenced on the outlaw ballad opener: "Some days I feel like my shadow's casting me, some days the sun don't shine, sometimes I wonder what tomorrow's gonna bring when I think about my dirty life and times."

But the common thread is love, and ineffable regret at love lost or which went unexpressed. As expected the album is uneven: The rollicking Disorder in the House is a minor, one-take rocker with an equally off-kilter Petty and elevated only by Springsteen's blistering guitar.

The beautiful El Amor de Mi Vida is addressed to a former lover now lost to another, the slow swamp feel makes Prison Grove as good as anything he wrote, Rest of the Night is a sub-Springsteen Jersey bar-room stomp.

Zevon sounds frail, which means special resonance on She's Too Good For Me and the heartbreaking farewell of Please Stay. But years ago Numb as a Statue would have blazed harder. However, he manages a dry-eyed take on Dylan's Knockin' On Heaven's Door.

And only the hardest heart could be unmoved by Keep Me in Your Heart: "Sometimes when you're doing simple things around the house, maybe you'll think of me and smile. You know I'm tied to you like the buttons on your blouse, keep me in your heart for a while."

Daniel Johnston: Early Recordings Volume 1

(Herald rating: * * * *)

Label: Dualtone/Elite

Warren Zevon: The Wind

(Herald rating: * * *)

Label: Difrnt/Elite