Music Arcades: Jad Fair and Daniel Johnston: It's Spooky

When I bought this at Rare & Racy in Sheffield, the guy behind the counter (the one with whom I shared a lift back from an Ornette Coleman gig), he grinned. "Have you heard this?" he winked conspiratorially. I shook my head. "It's strange," he said, "definitely out there." All of which, coming from him, was clearly an unequivocal endorsement.

When was that? According to my records, it was Winter Solstice 2001 — so by that time I'd already seen Johnston live (at the Crossing Border festival, Amsterdam, 2000) and had an album of covers of his songs.

It's extreme, all right, in the opposite sense to, say, Ronald Shannon Jackson — though the audience for each seems to cross-over, as if the two poles of expression were meeting round the back as do extremes of left-wing and right-wing thinking. It's no surprise to find that Johnston is cited by Wikipedia as an exemplar of outsider music.

I've since seen the film and been to the tribute concert (where I sat behind Howe Gelb, Jason Pierce, and Polly Harvey, who were all minding their own business, though members of their entourage were obnoxious in that can't-you-see-I'm-with-someone-important way).

But after all that, and this, I… well, I don't really get it. Obviously I like some of the songs: I don't go to such lengths solely on the strength of others' hyperbolic praise. But I hear that praise from other artists, and the exceptional accolades bestowed on Johnston in the film, followed in the next sentence by hand-wringing concern about his "delusions of grandeur", and I have to ask: are you helping?

Of Jad Fair I know next to nothing.

Here's a video from the CD-ROM part of the CD:

Lucy asked me who had been singing that version of Happy Talk. When I told her, she said, "I thought it might be him" (she came to the film). I told her the Boy had looked baffled, verging on irritated, when listening to it. "I liked it," she said, "but I'm not surprised he didn't."