Daniel Johnston was born in 1961 in Sacramento, California to Christian fundamentalist parents. When Johnston was still a young boy, his parents moved the family to New Cumberland, West Virginia, when the father, an engineer, was offered a job with Quaker State. As a young man, Daniel Johnston originally attended Abilene Christian University in Texas, but had to transfer to Kent State because creeping emotional and mental problems began to surface that would continue to dog him for the rest of his life.
His parents, feeling that Johnston was an ill fit for college, suggested he quit school. In 1983 he moved to Houston Texas, to live with his brother, where he worked at the Six Flags' theme ark Astroworld. In the basement of his brother’s Houston house, Johnston kept a chord organ — a wheezing keyed instrument that uses air blown through reeds to make sound — an exceptionally out of tune guitar, and a tape recorder. With barely anything else, Daniel Johnston created his classic album of love lost, pain, confusion, innocence, The Beatles, salvation, and hero worship with an inelegant and brutally messy grace that is scarcely heard in popular music — Yip/Jump Music.
The songs themselves are somewhat arresting and more than a little confusing upon first listen. The first song on the album, "Chord Organ Blues" is literally banged out on a chord organ and is a kind of churlish sounding boogie woogie, driven by Johnston’s feverish and percussive, locomotive slamming of the keys. One would be forgiven, if they did not know what to make of the juvenile and simple scrawl of a song at first. I would imagine that some might even find Johnston’s work to be a case of the emperor wearing no clothes. Though I would forgive that thought initially, hopefully by the time one sifted through the entire album, and listened closely to its final track "I Remember Painfully," one would jettison such wrongheaded notions.
"I Remember Painfully" is a savagely sad and hyper-literary song that defies all songwriting logic. It is a classic and excruciatingly destructive ballad written in a sad and innocently angry hand:
And I remember you at the funeral shaking hands and hanging coats. And I remember you standing pregnant at the art room. It was weird, but what is it now, it’s pain.” And then: “When I saw you at the department store I said, “Have a nice baby.” You were standing happy. I left you with that smile on your face. Years later I was hitchhiking and that mortician picked me up. Then he said to me, he said ‘good luck.’
Yip/Jump Music is Johnston’s most lucid and well-written work, before his psychosis bloomed and his lyrics became increasingly (more) childlike, biblically oriented, and weirdly psychedelic.
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