Psychologist Carl Jung and his mentor Sigmund Freud had a falling out over a woman who was confined to a cell in a madhouse. Freud claimed she was incurable and, furthermore, ugly, and could not understand Jung’s fascination with her. For Freud, she was a hopeless case. Jung, however, saw potential for development and rehabilitation through spending time with this wild woman. So he sat with her, day after day. Freud continued mocking him, at a loss for why he was so obsessed, but still Jung remained with her for hours as she talked more and more nonsense. Gradually, the nonsense transformed into something that Jung could understand. As it turned out there was the smallest trauma that she never overcame and was subsequently doomed to repeat in her mind. Once the secret in her life was identified and talked over with Jung, she was able to enjoy a slightly more sane life. Listening to the music of Wild Man Fischer and Daniel Johnston takes similar patience to that of Jung’s. However, if you hang in there, the layers peel back and you can journey deeper into the raw, wide open psyche of these two men. The rewards are immeasurable.

There has been a recent run of music documentaries focusing on troubled artists who struggle with the ups and downs of mental illness. After all, it’s a great topic and a ready made one too. It’s all there: madness, humor, blooming creativity, tragedy. The Devil and Daniel Johnston is striking because of the wealth of archival material. There isn’t a day that goes by that isn’t in some way recorded by Johnston. Life and his perspective on it remain essential. Each moment is for keeps. Daniel Johnston, for the uninitiated, is a Texas songwriter by way of West Virginia. He made his name with self-distributed eccentric music created by layering tracks of him alone in his bedroom. Think of a higher pitched Neil Young channeling comic books and fundamentalist Christianity and you’re still not close. I’ve read that his early songs were crafted by learning basic piano chords from Beatles songbooks and then rearranging them. His abstract and innocent words hit hard: “Try to remember, but my feelings don’t know for sure / I try to reach out.”

Derailroaded, on the other hand, is a film about many of the same issues featuring a tragic figure and an even bleaker conclusion. Larry “Wild Man” Fischer’s life comes across even more haphazard as he roams from place to place with no anchor of mom or dad or even fans—just a sweet, manic aunt that takes him into her condemned home every so often, and a brother to shake his head and hand Larry some groceries. And he is not as much of an archivist as Johnston, though he is seen with a cheap tape recorder jotting down his song ideas from time to time. With Derailroaded, we watch helpless as Wild Man’s paranoia overtakes him and he is institutionalized once again.

Wild Man Fischer remains unknown and unheralded even though he was recording material of the same spirit decades before Daniel Johnston. He was “discovered” by NBC (just as Johnston was “discovered” by MTV), and then by Frank Zappa, as he was a fixture in late ‘60s Los Angeles street corners where he sang original songs for dimes. Most of the songs he sang were pulled from his boundless childhood imagination, and in the place of instruments he used his voice as a trumpet or percussion.

Laugh In laughed at him, but Zappa made a record with him in 1968—and not just a record, a double album—An Evening With Wild Man Fischer (criminally out of print, though his other albums are available) of primarily a cappella singing and freak story telling. Is Zappa taking advantage of Wild Man? Is this for laughs? This album is really uncomfortable. It is the sound of a screeching, manic man having it out with himself and then abruptly breaking into solo doo-wop. The more I listen, the more his music and personality begin to seep into me, and the more I can ascertain where he was going with his voice and why he deserves four sides. In fact, I start to imagine where a band could take his voice. And then Zappa allows this vision to manifest itself into lush pieces—songs like “The Taster”, “Circle”, and “Merry-Go-Round.” These songs get the full-band treatment, based around Wild Man’s yelps and hiccups and bleats. The hiccups become pianos, the bleats psychedelic guitar, and the yelps remain his own. They end up as great pop songs. The “boop boop boops” now become a revelation as his songs transform into soaring oldies numbers. Which reminds me, in The Devil and Daniel Johnston, Johnston’s friends plead for other artists to cover him so he can make some money. This is a noble sentiment, but it’s been done so many times for him. Wild Man Fischer hasn’t been covered much, if at all, and listening to these pure, untouched melodies, I can think of no greater singer to cover. His songs have unlimited potential.

Beyond eerie similarities in the way their voices crack and the way they structure their sentences, both men are obsessed with fame and greatness. They seem aware, though (Wild Man especially), that the world in which they exist is unjust, and success may not actually happen. This is not only clear in their songs, but also in moments caught on film. It also lives in Wild Man’s lyrics, “I’ve got a head like a ping pong ball / I’ve got a head like a ping pong ball / I wish I didn’t have a head like a ping pong ball / Then I would be a star.” And in Daniel Johnston’s, “You’re gonna make it Joe / You’re gonna make it Joe / You’re gonna make it Joe! / Ever since you were a little kid, you’ve been doing what you did / When the principal asked you what you were going to do, you said you were going to be an artist! / You never did good in school, every time the teacher said stop drawing.” To tie together even more thread, in the song “The Wild Man Fischer Story,” Wild Man also speaks of being the oddball in school, “Now listen Larry, I’m the principal of this high school. You’re not supposed to sing in class. LARRY: WHATS WRONG WITH SINGIN’ IN CLASS?!”