Brightest Young Things

All words and photos by Chris Svetlik.

I lived three hours away from Austin most of my life, so it’s pretty foolish that I had never seen Daniel Johnston live before Tuesday night. He’s an unusual fixture in the music industry and a fairly unlikely candidate to ever achieve much commercial success, so the fact that he was able to gain such notoriety in Austin always stood out in my mind as an indicator of how cool that town is. So seeing Daniel was like seeing a little bit of home for me.

The openers were the Capitol Years, a band out of Philly. Pretty good, if somewhat generic indie rock stuff.

Then comes the main act. Daniel ambles out onto the stage nonchalantly like there’s no one else in the room. He says hello politely and abruptly starts into his first song. Certainly every musician is going to sound more polished in the studio than live, but I was actually surprised by Johnston’s performance initially—he’s straight up pretty bad at the guitar, just thrashing and grinding away at the strings, and he generally sings pretty far off key. But man, there’s something about Daniel Johnston. Everything is simple and stripped down and sounds entirely heartfelt. He sings about some pretty crazy and depressing stuff, and he really just states it all really bluntly, even if it makes him sound pretty crazy and depressing.

And then he’s also super endearing. Self-deprecating in a non-pretentious way and just adorable in general, from bashfully admitting that he’s nervous because this is his first show of the tour, to ending a song when he messes up the guitar part and then saying ‘well I guess the song is over now.’

Oh and then there’s the Beatles covers. If most any other band played multiple Beatles covers in a single show I’d have a hard time not thinking it was totally stupid. But again, there’s just something about Daniel Johnston. I think he just really really likes the Beatles, and so he gets really excited about playing their songs, and so he plays them at his shows.

He played a few songs by himself on guitar and vocals, a few where he just sang and a backup guy played guitar, and then for the rest of the show, Capitol Years took the stage again and served as his backup band. The second half with Capitol Years was much heavier than seems his norm, but it definitely worked. The crowd was absolutely eating it up the whole time—he has a pretty dedicated following. And why shouldn’t he? Take a quick listen to ‘True Love Will Find You in the End’—like I got to in the encore—and you’ll immediately be feeling great about everything.

Previously in Live DC:

• 2/9: LiveDC: Theophilus London @ 930 Club
• 2/9: Best Weekend Bets
• 2/8: LiveDC: Kathleen Edwards @ 930 Club
• 2/8: LiveDC: Thurston Moore/ Kurt Vile @ Black Cat
• 2/8: LiveDC: Thurston Moore/ Kurt Vile @ Black Cat
• 2/7: LiveDC: Demetri Martin @ Warner Theatre
• 2/7: LiveDC: Augustana/ Graffiti6 @ 930 Club
• 2/6: LiveDC: All Things Go Presents: Reptar/ Casual Curious/ Fort Lean @ Gibson Guitar Showroom
• 2/6: LiveDC: TYCHO/ Beacon @ RNR Hotel
• 2/6: LiveDC: The Kills / Jeff The Brotherhood @ 9:30 Club