It can be hard to separate an artist from his art. Can anyone listen to "Beat It" these days and not feel a little...icky? Stories of Phil Spector's "eccentricities" are a little more disturbing to hear now that someone is dead. So when one learns that a performer one once thought of as merely screwy and eccentric is in fact, batshit crazy, it can kind of take the fun out of the art.

We first became acquainted with the work of Wild Man Fischer because Dad, being a Frank Zappa fan, had the album An Evening With Wild Man Fischer and he thought we'd get a kick out of it. Hearing Larry "Wild Man" Fischer shriek songs about killing Jennifer Jones, (in a tune with the imminently singable chorus, "Miss Jennifer Jones is lying dead on my porch, doo doo doo doo") or singing the incredibly catchy "Merry Go Round" (as good a pop song as "Sugar, Sugar" or anything by The Turtles) only became more entertaining once we learned that Frank Zappa had "discovered" him singing for dimes on the streets of Los Angeles. Obviously, Wild Man Fischer wasn't a normal guy, but then again, 1960s drug use turned a lot of normal guys into kooks, and really, if he was making records and hanging with the likes of Frank Zappa, he couldn't be that bad off, right?

Well, the documentary Derailroaded: Inside the Mind of Larry "Wild Man" Fischer puts that notion to rest. The tale Fischer sings about in the song "The Wild Man Fischer Story," about being committed to a mental institution--twice--is absolutely true. Whether his stint in the hospital merely exacerbated his condition or in fact, caused it, is perhaps open to debate. But the fact that the guy suffers from extreme paranoid schizophrenia is undeniable.