Motorcycle Madness

 You can listen to these songs / Have a good time and walk away / But for me, it's not that easy / I have to live these songs forever. -- Daniel Johnston, "Peek-A-Boo"

"I hope we're not spreadin' it too thin," giggles Daniel Johnston over the phone from his parents' house in Waller. This has indeed been a banner year for the cult singer-songwriter -- there's an acclaimed documentary about his life in national release through Sony Classics, several of his drawings were selected for inclusion in the prestigious Whitney Museum Biennial in New York City, and he's just released three new CDs -- but it's still safe to say that Johnston is in little danger of becoming a household name. His story and his music are both as harrowing as they are compelling, and the sight of this hulking, chain-smoking man-child squeaking and rasping his painful yet tuneful songs of unrequited love is unlikely to ever be anyone's notion of a pop pinup. Still, the Johnston mini-juggernaut plows ever onward.

The most recent feather in Johnston's eccentric career cap is the brand-new rock opera Speeding Motorcycle, lovingly mounted by Houston's Infernal Bridegroom Productions. Two years in the making and funded by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, Motorcycle is a two-act musical narrative culled from Johnston's extensive body of work.

"I've been a fan of Daniel's music for a long time, so the idea of collaborating on the project was very exciting," says Jason Nodler, a founder of IBP who returned to Houston specifically to direct the production after a brief relocation to Rhode Island.

"One thing I can say is that I'm so glad that I'd gotten the play totally on track before I saw the documentary," explains Nodler. "If I'd seen the movie beforehand, it might've totally thrown me off."

The film in question, The Devil and Daniel Johnston, concentrates on the artist's outrageously troubled life, defined by the dangerous, violent outbursts and extended periods of immobilizing depression so often associated with bipolar disorder, the malady with which Johnston has been diagnosed. While the movie is poignant and disturbing, it is barely able to touch on the true reason people are interested in Johnston in the first place: his unique artistic vision.

Which, as it turns out, is exactly what Speeding Motorcycle does concentrate on, making it an ideal companion piece to the film. Johnston's huge catalog of songs ("I think there's something like a thousand," notes Nodler) tends to center on specific, recurring narrative and symbolic themes, making his work ideal for the rock opera treatment. Visual elements were also not hard to come by, as Johnston's "naive" Magic Marker drawings are every bit as distinctive as his songs and even depict many of the same characters and situations.

The prototypical Johnston protagonist is an everyman named Joe whose most unique feature in the drawings is the fact that his head has no top but is rather open like a large funnel, defenseless against the input of a hostile world. Joe is generally depicted as a boxer who fights against incredible odds but never loses heart. Other characters often sung about and drawn by Johnston include an innocent frog named Jeremiah and the famous (though highly distinct from each other) comic book heroes Captain America and Casper the Friendly Ghost, as well as the Fly Eyes, eyeballs with wings that hover about, monitoring the action. Many of the songs consist of quasi-mythological variations on Johnston's agonizing, never-ending, real-life collegiate crush on a girl named Laurie, who spurned his awkward affections in order to marry an undertaker, a love triangle filled with enough intrinsic dark humor and pathos to fuel, well, a thousand songs.

The "Laurie songs," in fact, provide the bulk of Speeding Motorcycle's musical meat. The entire first act of the show follows the travails of the lovelorn Joe (played simultaneously and compellingly by actors Cary Winscott, Joe Folladori and Kyle Sturdivant in a daring act of willful theatrical dissociation) as he hopelessly fights for the attention of his dream girl, tripping himself up tragicomically every step of the way and fixating morbidly on her mortician paramour (Laurie works at the funeral home as well). Joe finally realizes that, as one song pointedly puts it, "the only way you can get her to look at you is to die." At the end of Act I Joe "gets his head smashed" in a car crash. He spends the second half of the show as a ghost (though not Casper). Nodler -- who describes his theatrical sensibility as one part rock 'n' roll, one part Sid & Marty Krofft and one part theater of the absurd -- is clearly the ideal person to bring Johnston's colorful and guileless, yet utterly twisted, vision to the stage.