Mental illness and Rock

Art by Scalder

“I’m full of dust and guitars”. Syd Barrett uttered these words to a Rolling Stone journalist in an interview in 1971. This haunted statement provides one of the most harrowing insights into the mind of a mentally unwell rock musician. The words betray a consciousness that is both empty and ruined, yet which still holds a place for music. At the time, Barrett was well known as a former songwriter and guitarist in Pink Floyd and as a solo artist in his own right. In the neon raddled excess of the late sixties psychedelic period, fans were fascinated by his playful outsider’s take on the daily world. He had a childlike ability to turn the ordinary inside out, conjuring odd psychedelic fantasies from the grey mundanity of contemporary English life. The elaborate alternative England that is palpable in his best work with Pink Floyd is an archaic, imaginative place, teeming with scarecrows, cross-dressers, gnomes and bicycles. However, as the late sixties snaked darkly into the early seventies, it became obvious to his former bandmates, his fans, and most likely to Barrett himself, that he was experiencing serious mental illness (most likely LSD abetted schizophrenia).

Barrett was not alone in undergoing a form of mental breakdown during the late sixties. He was only one member of an ‘exclusive’ club of talented musicians around which a pervasive and enduring rock’n’roll ‘type’ developed, namely the ‘drug casualty’; where the flame of youthful brilliance is snuffed out by a spectacular and rapid mental deterioration normally attributed to overindulgence in psychedelic drugs. This stuff utterly fascinates music fans. Any half-hearted flick through the pages of Mojo and Uncut magazines will reveal how entranced we are by the myth of the ‘drug casualty’. Indeed, in Barrett’s case this interest intruded into his personal life. Up until his death, he was sporadically bothered by people who arrived at his house in Cambridge on some sort of deluded pilgrimage, hassling a man who had more interest in painting and pottering around his garden, than he did in attention and his own past.

While Syd was perhaps the best known example of this myth, there are plenty of others from his generation who share elements of his unstable back story. For example, Rocky Erickson from The 13th Floor Elevators, former Beach Boy Brian Wilson, and Peter Green from Fleetwood Mac. Again, there is a ferocious appetite for printed material relating to stories pertaining to their mental breakdowns. It sells magazines. Stick a big psychedelically coloured picture of Barett’s stoned young head on the cover of Mojo over the words ‘Meltdown’ ‘Burnout’ or ‘Frazzled’ and you have a formula for success as tried and tested as putting Ben Stiller and Will Ferrell in a wacky movie about sporting underdogs. People want to know all the grisly details about these musicians’ eccentric stunts. At times, the musicians themselves seem to become gruesomely detached from the music they made, surrogate Kerry Katonas for 40-year-old rock fans who relish the finer points of how Brian Wilson filled a recording studio with sand, how Syd Barrett shaved off his eyebrows, or how Rocky Erickson underwent electroconvulsive therapy. These stories are played out in exhaustive detail and from multiple perspectives on a monthly basis in our favourite music magazines. And they are just the so-called acid related breakdowns.

Of course, it can reasonably be argued that because the artists mentioned above belong to a different era, stories about their mental collapse have now entered rock lore, and fan’s preoccupations with them are as harmless as recounting Marianne Faithful’s alleged brief encounter with Mick Jagger and a Mars bar. However, when this fascination is transposed into the setting of a modern audience and its relationship with a troubled performer, things become more unsettling and problematic. The vampiric relationship between the media, fans and Amy Winehouse flap uglily around the mainstream media for all to see. It might be worth turning our attention, therefore, to a performer in the alternative bracket, Daniel Johnston.

For those not familiar with him, Daniel Johnston’s story is marked out by a long struggle with both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Much of this is documented in Jeff Feuerzeig’s 2005 documentary, The Devil and Daniel Johnston. Feuerzeig’s film chronicles Johnston’s career trajectory from the beguilingly fragile cassette recordings he recorded as a hyper prolific youngster in the 1980s, through the mental illness that saw his life see-sawing from one damaging event to the next (attacking his manager, believing that various people and places were under the control of Satan, and wrestling the key from the ignition of a small plane that was subsequently successfully crash-landed by his father). Throughout this catalogue of illness-related hurt and chaos, Johnston maintained an adoring fanbase within the indie rock ‘hood. Bands like Sonic Youth, Half Japanese, Nirvana and Teenage Fanclub queued up to sing his praises. He played to hordes of worshipful fans, and all the while was (and still is from time to time) deeply, troublingly ill.

Just what is at the heart of Johnston’s relationship with his fans? There are some questions that are hinted at, but which remain largely unanswered in Feurzeig’s documentary. For example, at what point does adulation become exploitation? Do people go to his shows because they want to be infected by the giddy, innocent, Beatles on Hersheys rush of his best material, or because they want to see the crazy man-child that Sonic Youth once toured with? Recently, he played the Whelans venue in Dublin as part of a tour with some noted and venerable luminaries from the alternative music world, including Jad Phair, members of ‘Teenage Fanclub’ and ‘Yo La Tengo’. The gig was something of a success but afterwards, something about it still did not seem right to this journalist. What was it? Was it that a few whoops from the room felt a bit too extreme, a bit too patronising? Or was it a case of a hyper sensitive journalist over-thinking the occasion?

Certainly, according to some accounts, the time he played before, a year or so previously in the Vicar Street venue, an element in the audience were there to see him off the back of the documentary, and received his show in a strange and patronising manner. Anyway, this time around the tone was less one of condescension and more one of adulation. Yet, on the surface there is not much in Daniel’s current live performance (apart from an anxious tremor perhaps) that should distinguish him in any way from fleets of ‘sincere’ indie bands that played the same venue to more muted responses during the year. However, he was revered where others were overlooked. This could be one of the key points in the enduring love-affair with artists who are mentally unwell. What other bands often affect could be what Daniel Johnston actually does. At the core of much music is a very conscious leap from a self-aware way of thinking to a mock innocence. People who could quite coolly sing about fucking their girlfriend’s sister will instead construct a ditty about falling in love with a duffle-coated girl on a park swing in Glasgow. While not always, sometimes much of this is coolly calculated, affected, and as much a carefully spun shell of artifice as the one which surrounds the gurning tosser who chooses his best lucky shirt to wear to Krystle.

So maybe we are drawn to the mentally ill rock artist not just because of sensationalism, but because something special about their songwriting cannot be faked. If, for example, Chris Martin decided to pull all his toenails out with a pliers and run naked through Notting Hill batting cars with an umbrella, would Coldplay suddenly become more artistically credible? It’s doubtful. It’s nice to think that if Syd Barrett’s and Daniel Johnston’s songs were buried in a time capsule and dug up in hundreds of years, that they would be judged on their own merits; As things of precious wonder that stand apart from the details of the mental turmoil from which they were created.