Hello. Hello.
Hello, I am the ghost of Daniel Johnston.
Many years ago I lived in Austin, Texas,
and I worked at McDonald's.
It is an honor and a privilege
to speak to you today,
to tell you about my condition,
and the other world.
Ladies and gentlemen.
The best singer/songwriter alive today,
Daniel Johnston.
We love you, Daniel!
* I've come this far and I know I can make it *
* I've got a broken heart and you can't break a broken heart *
* I come knocking at your door *
* You don't love me anymore
* But I just can't give up
* 'Cause I don't know what to do about it *
* You must be wrong if you think you don't love me *
* You could smile down and put a happy ending to my song *
* I come knocking at your door *
* You don't live there anymore *
* Is it just a memory?
* Or am I a little crazy for you? *
He was different.
I noticed that from the start that Dan was different.
I had him on a crib in our little bedroom
and I would go in and talk to him, change his diaper,
and I would squeal at him and he would squeal back at me.
That's a small baby communicating, I thought.
Being, uh, six years younger than his four brothers and sisters,
he was pampered by them.
And, uh, they nursed him along.
But we didn't notice at that time
that there was any special talents involved or anything.
When he went to school, they tested the kids,
and Dan was put in the highest group of the highest class.
His teacher was really mad at him and it's understandable
because Dan doesn't follow directions.
You know, when he was in junior high,
he suddenly lost all his wonderful confidence,
and I guess it was the beginning of his illness.
He and his brother decided to make their own movie.
And it was a collaborative effort between the two brothers working together.
And Dan had to change clothes and pretend to be his mother.
Because his mother and I weren't in the movie actually.
Tell about it, Mabel.
Dan is the director and the actor
portraying himself in parts
and his horrible mother in other parts.
I think he was having fun teasing me.
What do you think, Bill?
Yeah, he... he was doin' it for humor.
You are real lazy. Wake up.
Dan's hard to deal with sometimes.
He thought, "I'm artistic. I shouldn't have to do those things."
Time to get up and get ready for school.
Get up in there, breakfast is ready.
He wanted to be comic all the time. He just couldn't get over it.
OK.
They were having too good a time.
I don't think his relationship with me was typical.
Do you suppose he really pictured me that way?
This is ridiculous, what they're showing.
I think it's popcorn and green Kool-Aid.
He was a trial.
I was sort of the star art guy at the high school.
Oak Glen High School.
And I started hearing rumors of this new art guy,
the new art star.
You know, the... the new kid in town,
I had to find out who this was.
A friend of mine told me, "There's this kid, Dan Johnston,
"he can really draw, he's a musician or something."
So he kind of had one up on me, he was a musician.
The guy is a natural, an absolute natural.
He never even had to learn to draw.
He just got better from great.
You know, I had to hang out with this guy.
I had to be around this art.
So we just started hanging out and doing art together, actually.
The eyeball thing was sort of like his intro calling card.
Did it touch you emotionally?
It was his mysterious entry.
It's definitely different.
I'm speechless.
Everybody was, "Who's the eyeball guy?"
You know, he was painting these eyeballs everywhere.
He would actually draw on walls all over the high school.
I thought Dan's was very imaginative.
Daniel, he just exudes art.
He... He can't stop making art.
He never sits and thinks, what am I gonna do?
He just grabs something.
* Listen up and I'll tell a story *
* About an artist growing old *
* Some would try for fame and glory *
* Others aren't so bold
* Everyone, and friends and family *
* saying, "Hey! Get a job!"
* "Why do you only do that only? *
* "Why are you so odd?
* "We don't really like what you do *
* "We don't think anyone ever will *
* "It's a problem that you have *
* "And this problem's made you ill" *
* The artist walks alone
* Someone says behind his back *
* "He's got his gall to call himself that! *
* "He doesn't even know where he's at!" *
He wasn't buyin' them for comic books,
he was buying them for the artwork that was involved on the comics.
And some of the artists were his incentive
to try to be an artist himself.
They were an inspiration to him.
Now talk about the cinema of Daniel Johnston, then.
He doesn't have influences.
He doesn't sit down and consciously watch Chaplin
and then learn, or this is my Keaton period.
It's not like that. He doesn't even know who these guys are.
You know, he gets a Super 8 and he makes a movie.
Dan took himself seriously.
He, for some reason, thought he was going to be
an artist because probably of the attention he got.
The family room would sometimes be almost full of kids
and one of them told me that he's gonna be famous someday.
And I thought, that silly stuff, you know?
He lived in the basement of his parents' house.
They got this perfectly normal ranch house out in the country
behind New Cumberland.
He's got this amazing lab,
like this amazing factory downstairs.
He's turned a garage and two sort of utility rooms
into a bedroom and an art factory,
and he's just got everywhere, magazines, tapes.
In fact, he's recreated it in Waller, where he lives today.
It's a duplicate of the same room.
* I was guilt stricken
* To go away
* She turned without saying
* I could not stay
* And all the while
* she was smiling at me
* Like I was a show on her TV *
They're sort of like this
Christian fundamentalist Glass Family.
They're creative, they're intellectual,
but there's this, like, West Virginia, kind of right-wing Christian thing.
Daniel wasn't havin' any of it.
Spiritually he was separated from them,
socially, every other way he was gone from them.
But at the same time he was of them,
in the sense that he had certain material to draw from.
Bill and I both thought he was
doing too much concentrating on the art
and the music and he wasn't
having a well rounded life.
She would constantly try to get him, "Go to church and save yourself,"
and he just would have none of it.
He'd go to church, even, but he wouldn't participate.
He'd go to church so he could stare at the girls,
try to find a girlfriend.
Literally, all he cared about
was making art and being John Lennon,
and his parents' rules were in the way of that.
All he wanted them to do was just
keep the lights on, keep the power on so he could draw.
Dan was getting to be a problem.
And he wanted to do everything
but he didn't want to do any of his chores,
like help mow the lawn, or wash the car,
or any of those things that I thought he was lackin' in training,
and I had to settle that.
Every bit of the... of the supposed persecution
that Daniel portrays in early music was there,
but, um, but I'm not saying it was without provocation.
He did it. He brought it on himself.
He... He would cause it
to tape record, to film.
Many, many times, Mabel would open the basement stairs door
and she used to call him an unprofitable servant.
"You're an unprofitable servant of the Lord.
"You need to leave the house and get a job."
He turned it, he used to call himself an unserviceable prophet.
I really didn't like it when he put...
He taped me giving him what for.
I didn't think he would do that.
She would really harangue him and, uh, and he... he, um...
It was hard on him. It was.
But he's this sort of like,
coal burning in the basement, you know,
and it's heating up the whole house,
and they're just going insane from it.
So the whole place is just going wild
because he's just such a problem.
When the problem became apparent
was when he first went to college,
at Abilene Christian College.
And, uh, he wasn't getting to his classes.
He was totally confused
and, uh, we thought, well, this is home sickness, you know,
and they sent him to the local doctor
to see if he was complaining about pains in his arms,
which are symptoms of manic depression.
He's going around in a daze, we said,
"Well, we'd better bring him home."
And immediately he snapped out of it.
And then back to being a normal person again.
And we thought, "Well, everything's all right."
So we sent him to a local college.
He goes to art school at
Kent State University branch in East Liverpool, Ohio.
And I am attending the same school.
We found all these kind of lethargic professors
and sort of half-talented students.
And, Daniel, of course, he just scoops them up
and he just mixes them into his art form.
Like everybody's his subject, you know, all of a sudden he's interviewing people
with his little tape recorder and then taking little phrases from them
and cutting them into his songs.
And he meets the love of his life. He meets Laurie Allen.
I was alone in my life
with little to live for,
trying my hand at art,
thinking that maybe I could save myself,
but in my desperation
all my hope would fly away
until there was nothing left of me,
nothing left to say.
And in this nightmare there was a dream
of a girl
so beautiful beyond compare.
The girl of my dreams.
So wonderful. So beautiful.
And I had her boots.
This was so long ago in my idealistic dream
of so many songs.
Laurie.
Yes.
She inspired a thousand songs
and then I knew I was an artist.
He wrote a lot of sweet songs about Laurie.
And I remember something from listening he wanted to play one for me.
I remember it and he doesn't have it.
It goes...
* Walking down the road I'm feeling lonely *
* But don't be sad
* Be glad you're just one step closer *
* To the girl you're going to meet *
He starts following her around with a tape recorder
and... and his little Super 8,
following her around, making movies and tape recording her
and begging her,
begging Laurie to say, "I love you, Dan,"
into the tape, which she eventually does.
She has no idea.
He's massively
obsessed with her.
This is the kind of love he needed to have.
He needed to have a love that he couldn't really successfully
connect up with.
He had to have the thing to chase.
He could never have a thing he could catch.
So, when she married someone else,
it was even better because then he could really pine.
You know, she was gone.
And it's just God's little joke that it happens to be an undertaker.
So he really liked that event
even though it causes him great pain.
Well, when Dan got depressed,
he took to playing the piano, but I didn't understand the depression.
* I had lost my mind
* I lost my head for a while
* Was off my rocker, out of line, out of whack *
* You see I had this tiny crack in my head *
* That slowly split open and my brains oozed out *
* It's lying on the sidewalk and I didn't even know it *
* I had lost my mind
* Why, I was sitting in the basement when I first realized it was gone *
* Got in my car Rushed right over to the lost and found *
* I said, "Pardon me but I seem to have lost my mind" *
* She said, "Well, can you identify it please?" *
* I said, "Why sure, it's a cute little bugger *
* "About yay big a little warped from the rain" *
* She said, "Well then, sir, this must be your brain" *
* I said, "Thank you, ma'am, I'm always losing that dang thing" *
* I had lost my mind *
We felt that it was, uh, wasting time
to keep him in college
because he was never gonna graduate the way he was goin'.
So we took him out of college and sent him to, uh,
Houston to live with his brother.
Mom and Dad were trying to get him on the right track.
In all of our minds, that meant a productive life.
A well rounded life.
Not a self-absorbed life. A job is part of that.
And in an effort to help,
I said, "Let Dan come down for the summer, work at Astroworld.
"And maybe this will get him on his feet or something."
When he found out that he had to go to Texas
and he would be without his piano,
that put a wrench in his plans.
So he got a hold of this organ
and he takes it into my garage
and he turned my weight bench into a recording studio.
How are you doing, Dave? How's it going?
I'm working on the album now.
On the new release, Yip/Jump Music.
I sound like some kind of MTV person, don't I?
I brought out the chord organ. I just set it up.
I thought I'd play you one of the songs I played on the album.
So, I'll turn on the chord organ here.
I knew he was recording. I could hear him singing.
But I... I had no perception that he was,
you know, in his mind, making this masterpiece.
I wanted to help Dan and I thought I was giving great prophetic advice.
I said, "Dan, you know, someday you're gonna be really good
at something and very successful.
But it's not gonna be your art
and it's not gonna be your music."
We had to say, "Look, Dan, you can't stay up all night.
You're gonna have to go to bed at some kind of decent hour.
And kind of live life with the rest of us."
Margie kind of stepped in and said that she could, uh,
you know, see what she could do to help him.
And we packed him up and off he went into the distance.
I thought, well...
Uh, he needs a place to go and I'm his sister,
and, well, he can come and stay here.
So he came to live with me in my duplex.
Now, I didn't have extra furniture for him.
We got him a mattress that was just on the floor.
But he seemed to thrive in this atmosphere
because he was allowed to make a mess.
I thought everything was fine. Then one day I came home
and he wasn't there, which...
I wasn't too worried 'cause
we didn't tell each other everywhere we were going.
But, uh, when he wasn't there in the morning when I got up,
and he hadn't come home all night, that was not typical.
He made a decision to buy a moped.
And he disappeared on the moped,
- right, Bill? - Yes.
And he joined the carnival and went with them.
We weren't able to contact him.
It's the saddest time in my life,
not to know where your son is and he might be needing help.
When I was with the carnival,
this little girl at the carnival,
her name was Tricia.
She's a carnival girl.
She's grown up with the carnival
and she's about three years old.
All the time she would
come into the corndog stand
when we were open.
And it was slow, you know,
and we would pretend
it was a spaceship, you know.
I would bang on this untuned guitar
and she started singing this little song,
* "Pizza Hut, Pizza Hut, merry-go-round" *
Yeah, I do miss home.
I'm down here and I'm OK.
Because wherever I am, I got music in my heart.
During that time, I had a... a rock inside my chest.
I thought he might be in a shallow grave someplace.
He left the first part of April
and I think it was Father's Day when he called
and let us know where he was.
Collect call from Daniel Johnston, please.
* Speeding motorcycle
* Of my heart
* Pretty girls have taken you for a ride *
* Hurt you deep inside
* The road is ours *
The way Daniel ended up in Austin is so incredible
that it really sounds like an urban legend.
When the carnival came to Austin,
he was going to the bathroom in the porta-potty
and someone was upset about how long he was taking
and they were banging on the door.
And so when he came out,
it turned out it was like
a really big, tough carnie guy.
And he just hauled off and like, socked him.
And really, really hurt him bad.
And Daniel didn't know what to do.
He just started looking for a Church of Christ.
And, uh, he wandered until he saw the University Church of Christ.
And he went in and he just asked them to help him.
And they ended up taking him,
you know, to the doctor and everything
and leasing him an apartment.
He had heard the band I was in, which was Glass Eye.
And we were just getting popular locally.
And he saw a poster for our show.
And he decided that this was a really magical sign
and he really needed to go to it.
And he came to the show
and he gave me a copy of his cassette.
So the next time we played, he came over to me and he was so excited.
You could tell he was like, screwing up his nerve,
like, getting ready to, like,
ask me what I thought of his music.
And he came over and he goes, "What'd you think?"
And I looked at him and I couldn't,
I just couldn't really let him know
how much of an asshole I really was, that I hadn't even listened to his music,
his most important thing in his life. And I said,
"It was great.
I loved it. You can totally open for us."
And so I went home and I listened to it and I was
blown away at its incredible genius.
I met Daniel Johnston, in kind of the classic Daniel Johnston way.
It was a Saturday. I was working at the Austin Chronicle.
I was alone in the office and I was sitting there writing,
and I heard somebody at the door. Not a knock.
But somebody like, shuffling at the door.
Finally I went over and I opened the door,
and Daniel was standing there.
And he was this skinny little kid
who looked fairly demented.
And he had a tape. And he said,
"I just wanted to give you my tape."
So I said, "Great. You know,
I'll give it to a music person.
"If they like it, maybe we'll review it.
"But I'm not promising you anything."
And Daniel goes, "You know,
I wasn't really giving you that to review.
I just wanted you to listen to it.
I'm not trying to get a review or anything."
So Daniel goes away.
And I put it on the tape player
and it just blew my mind.
I mean, it was one of those where I got it right away.
* Get attached to a rolling stone *
* And you're liable to get crushed *
* You're better off to sit at home *
* And watch the toilet flush *
And so then he gives you Hi, How Are You and Yip/Jump Music.
It's like, you know, imagine meeting,
you know, Bob Dylan, and he gives you his first six albums and saying,
"Here's some stuff I'm working on."
So it's this body of music
where you're suddenly hearing
20 amazing songs
and... and they're out of nowhere from this weird little guy.
I played it for a lot of music writers and some musicians
and he was giving it to other musicians,
and gradually over like a period of weeks,
people began to talk a lot about who this crazy kid was.
Daniel Johnston and this really weird music.
* The picture gets all blurred *
* I see shadows dancing on my walls *
* Thoughts scatter like birds *
Daniel, of course, loves The Beatles, worships them.
And, uh, I can see that Hi, How Are You could be like Meet The Beatles!
Come grab this and start the new Daniel Johnston mania!
And in his head, of course, it was there.
He was The Beatles.
And it was from deep inside here.
Hi, How Are You? I'm Daniel Johnston,
and this is what scares me and this is what I love,
and this is what terrifies me.
You just hear that
and, uh, your mind will turn around to his.
You start off hearing this noise,
then eventually you hear The Beatles.
You hear the whole symphony.
He actually didn't just record a tape and mass produce it.
He sometimes couldn't duplicate, so he had to sing the entire tape
from beginning to end to hand you a copy.
Go back home. Start again. Song by song. Fill up the tape.
Hand another person a copy.
Fill it up. Go. And finally write another album.
Start the whole process over again.
As far as I know his very first, like,
public show that he did
was done opening for Glass Eye.
And he was so nervous.
He literally was vibrating.
And he also had recently decided,
since coming to Austin, that he wasn't gonna play piano anymore,
something he does rather well.
He decided that he was gonna play guitar
like all the Austin guitar slingers.
And he really couldn't play. That was scary for him, too.
All of a sudden it quieted down like it was church or something.
Daniel comes on stage. It was very unusual
because anyone playing their first show, it's like you're lucky
to get anyone to pay attention.
But everyone was absolutely silent
and he looked so nervous,
he looked like he was gonna vomit the whole time.
* Time is a matter of fact
* And it's gone and it'll never come back *
* And mine
* It's wasted all the time
* Tears, stupid tears
* Bring me down
So when you saw him perform,
I mean, especially in the early days,
when he did the two or three song sets,
sometimes they were God-awful,
and sometimes they were unbelievably brilliant.
I mean, sometimes he just nailed it.
I mean, sometimes it was so abstract.
I mean, some of it was what wasn't there.
Sometimes there was too much not there.
* Tie my brain
* Into a knot
* Those tears, stupid tears
* Bring me down *
People in the audience tended to be like,
"What? Is this is a joke? Is this guy supposed to be cool?"
And they would be looking around at each other like, "How am I supposed to react?"
Because he was so raw and so real in a lot of ways, that people couldn't take it.
He's got a full shift at McDonald's.
And as close as I can tell, he can't do anything.
He can't cook. He doesn't clean very well.
As in a lot of places, you know, they'll give him work,
but then he migrates to the job with the least skill,
which was cleaning tables.
It was amazing that he could keep his job
because everybody was always coming in there wanting to,
"Hey, Daniel. Hi, Daniel!"
And, well, they don't take well to that at,
you know, fast food joints.
But he was employed there for a long time.
And you knew you could find him there,
just in his little hat and his little shirt there,
cleanin' up,
cleanin' up other people's spills and stuff.
When I went to visit him at McDonald's,
I think it was probably the first time I recognized that
he was spacing out, you know.
That there was a disconnection from reality or something going on.
1985 was just an enormous year for Austin music.
It was like everything was about to break,
and... and again, Daniel just came in right at that time.
MTV started sniffing around. And they brought in Peter Zaremba
and the show they had, The Cutting Edge.
They lined up all these bands
and they had a big old barbeque
and Daniel showed up there with his tapes.
This is Daniel Johnston. Local man about town. Musician.
Everyone knows who he is but... Say hi to everyone.
My name is Daniel Johnston
and this is the name of my tape and it's, Hi, How Are You.
And I, I was having a nervous breakdown when I recorded it.
He wasn't scheduled to be on the show.
They had already listened to tapes
and talked to people at the Chronicle and the music critics
and they decided who was gonna be on this special and everything.
But Daniel was unstoppable at that point.
He was so full of confidence.
He always presented himself like,
"I am a very incredible, extraordinary human being
and you're gonna be really happy you listened to this."
How you doing? We are having a casual conversation on national TV.
Daniel is on MTV.
You know, out of nowhere, from my point of view.
And, uh, he's... he's on MTV and I actually do get to see it.
And, uh, he says to me...
This is to David Thornberry from Daniel Johnston.
And, Dave, here I am on MTV, holding up my tape, Hi, How Are You.
And they're recording me tonight. I'm on MTV.
Remember when we used to watch MTV back home?
Look, I'm on MTV, David.
And that was his dream. I mean, literally, that's what he wanted to do,
is be on MTV.
* When I was out in San Marcos *
* A year ago today
* They probably would've put me in a home *
* But I threw all my belongings into a garbage bag *
* And out into the worldness I did roam *
* My hopes lay shattered like a mirror on the floor *
* I see myself and I looked really scattered *
* But I lived my broken dreams *
He always knew where to be at any given moment
and while this was being filmed it was, like, MTV...
He knew MTV is here in town.
And by far he became one of the most memorable things from the show
and he basically just scammed his way into it.
* The wildest summer
* that I ever knew
* I had a flat tire down memory lane *
* But I came back
* After five months and a half *
* And now I'm just trying to explain *
* And now I'm here
* And here I stand
* With a sweet angel
* Holding my hand
* I lived my broken dreams *
Instantly McDonald's expands his hours to, like,
20 or 30 hours a week. They give him more shifts.
Not because he's doing anything, but because he's become a star.
And whoever the manager is, thinks this is entertaining.
And then the other weird thing that begins happening is,
there's all this interest in Daniel.
So you hear record companies are calling McDonald's
'cause that's the only way you can call Daniel. Daniel doesn't have a phone.
So SPIN is calling McDonald's and music magazines...
So you get all these calls...
And in the beginning I think the McDonald's people
were really kind of entertained by this.
But after a while, when you'd call to talk to Daniel,
they were not happy.
They had hamburgers to make.
And then in 1986,
he wins a bunch of awards in the Austin Music Awards.
He wins Songwriter of the Year and Best Folk Act, which is very controversial
and, of course, it goes to Daniel's head in new and different ways.
In a town with a lot of singer/songwriters and a lot of folkies,
who can play guitar,
that might've not gone over too well with some people.
* He was smiling through his own personal hell *
* Dropped his last dime in a wishing well *
* But he was hoping to close and then he fell *
* Now he's Casper the friendly ghost *
In the spring of 1986, um, I started helping Daniel.
The first thing I did was set up his publishing company with Bug Music.
I knew his music was great, but I felt like for him to actually make a living,
he would be better off if other, more well-known artists
were to cover his material.
* He was always polite to the people who'd tell him *
* That he was nothing but a lazy bum *
* But goodbye to them he had to go *
* Now he's Casper
* The friendly ghost *
I thought that he was almost angelic.
And then I got to know him better.
And we started being really close friends.
And for a little while I was his "girlfriend."
And because he was very religious,
this was a very chaste relationship.
But even within the context of that,
it was undeniable after maybe one or two weeks
that something was dreadfully wrong with him.
Something that wasn't angelic and pure and naive
and innocent and beautiful.
So I realized I can't let him keep on thinking
that I'm his girlfriend
because his parents came to visit him
and he introduced me as his fiancée.
I realized that I was going to have to say,
"Daniel, we're not going out anymore, you know.
We're just friends."
And I essentially spent,
oh, the entire summer reminding him.
We broke up.
- Now you're filming? - Dan, this is so wild.
Daniel began hanging out with his manager, Randy Kemper.
And was smoking a lot of marijuana.
And he would not perform live.
Everybody was bugging him to play live, but he just didn't want to.
There were some changes in his behavior
and we didn't really quite know what was going on with him.
You know, when you do stuff like that,
you throw me off, Daniel.
I always kind of imagined Daniel performing like Elton John
with costume changes and Rockettes
and a big grand piano. Just the kind of show that's just ridiculous.
Almost like Andy Kaufman-esque kind of thing.
But unfortunately, he had his mental breakdown.
So he goes to a Butthole Surfers show
and somebody there gives him a hit of acid.
And the trip really begins to change everything.
Again, one of the classic scenarios of Daniel's life
is whenever anything starts getting really good,
you know something really ugly is gonna happen.
The night in question is September 11, 1986
on which Daniel
had a bad experience, uh,
and I guess, uh, he was under the influence
of some sort of psychoactive substance.
You know, I remember a little bit about seeing Daniel that night.
I remember him being sort of difficult to deal with.
And then we had our thing going on and
everybody started saying, "Daniel's freaked out.
Daniel's freaked out. Daniel's freaked out."
I'm coming back to tell you, man.
I'm serious like Billy Graham. Nothing like Billy Graham.
Or nothing like that. Or nothing like nobody you ever heard tell about nothing.
But I'm coming back and I'm telling you there's a supernatural world.
There's a supernatural world
and Gibby, Gibby knows about it.
No. I didn't give him any LSD.
I think at that point it was pretty much known that, uh, he was not necessarily
"an" unstable character, but slightly unstable "of" character.
So that's the kind of person you really wouldn't want to engage in the, uh...
In the LSD experience.
Are you Daniel Johnston?
I used to be Daniel Johnston.
And who are you now?
You know, I don't know. I don't know.
In December of 1986,
Daniel was taking a lot of acid and was just not himself.
Was very, very delusional.
And there was one violent incident with his manager in which he attacked him
and, uh, put him in the hospital with a concussion.
Dan was imagining all kinds of things
and he thought of himself as God's man
to straighten things up and so caused a lot of trouble.
All the family met together for Christmas.
Mom and Dad couldn't come that year and so we had decided
since all of the siblings were in Texas, that we would
get together and have Christmas.
So we're all making these Christmas ornaments and his Christmas ornament
is this black number nine.
We asked and said, "Dan, that's not an appropriate Christmas symbol.
"What does that mean? And why are you doing black?
"That's not gonna look good hanging on the tree."
I remember staring at him while we were talking and saying,
"That doesn't even look like Dan."
His face doesn't look like Dan to me.
He was in some kind of manic state.
We get up for a family portrait
and he would hang a Beatles album
on a Christmas tree.
Well, I went to take it down off the tree
and he came for me.
And he had super strength.
And in just a very brief struggle, he broke my rib.
So they were rolling around on the floor
and it was just
not the way our Christmas gatherings usually are.
He was talking in different voices
and was accusing us of teaching the children Satanist practice.
And that whole night we didn't wanna go to sleep
because if he believed we were Satanists,
he might try to do something to harm us
if he's the "Hero of Good" or something.
He decided to make a dash
to go up to the attic space where the kids were playing.
And at that point, Sally went to the phone and called the police.
We had to call for some assistance and
remove him from the house. And my husband took him to the bus station
and then stayed and watched to make sure he got on it,
so that we would all feel safe.
I remember going upstairs with Margie
and laying down on the bed and we just both wept
like he was dead, you know. Because we didn't know who he was.
* Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer *
* You'll go down in history
* Yeah! *
I'm lying in bed. I have pneumonia.
And the phone rings and I have like a 103 temperature and the phone rings
and somebody says, uh, "Do you know a Daniel Johnston?"
I go, "Yeah, Daniel and I are friends."
He goes, "Well, I think maybe you should come here."
I go, "Well, I really don't think I should. I'm sick."
"No. I really, really think you should come here."
I get to campus. I have a 103 degrees temperature.
It's 1986 and it's Christmas, so there's nothing there.
There's no cars. There's no people.
This campus is completely empty.
It's weird. It's eerie. It's quiet.
These people I don't know are leading me down and we start walking down
to go towards the river.
And we look over and there's the water.
And there standing in the middle of the water is Daniel.
And he's standing in the water, he's about knee-deep,
splashing the water, and he's looking at us, his eyes are like white.
At one point he looks up and starts singing,
* Running water, running water *
And then he's preaching. And he's talking about baptism.
And he's talking about evil. He's really whacked.
We're tryin' to talk him into coming onto the shore.
It's going on and on and on and it's getting real weird.
All of a sudden, we look over there.
A couple of police cars have pulled up.
They forced me out, they came...
People were... People were afraid.
They were afraid to come up to me.
They didn't want me to splash them with water.
What was I doing down there? What was going on?
I knew exactly what was going on.
I wanted to take my life only a few nights before.
I hit my best friend over the head with a lead pipe.
I thought there was nowhere to go.
I thought the military takeover was going to happen over Christmas time.
But it didn't. You know what I mean?
I thought, I knew, I saw. I knew, I saw.
I went inside the building of U.T.
I saw... I saw the things, the programming,
the confusion, the Coke, Coca-Cola,
the Snickers, all the candy,
and everything being used as a drug, the confusion, the mind control,
spiritualism, the cultural upheaval, flip.
Man, yes, it's really happening. They were really doing it, man.
I'm talking, if you don't know about it. I'm talking like Nazi Germany.
All great artists are crazy,
but there's a difference between
the abstract great artist being crazy
and this person doing damage to you or to himself,
and how involved do you wanna be?
We'd spent our whole lives, we're those kind of people
who love the notion of the crazy artist.
You know, Van Gogh cutting off his ear.
And we've read those books and we've,
you know, collected the art
and we've seen the movies
and we really loved the crazy people
because they were the pure people.
You know, they didn't have any commercial sense.
And yet, he was a real sick person.
And it was really, "What are we gonna do?"
And so, I mean, we do the most pedestrian thing possible.
We commit him.
And you actually felt,
I mean, a certain amount of guilt.
I mean, it was like, if I was around Van Gogh...
You know, I've always had contempt for those people
who didn't understand genius,
and here I am given my shot and what I'm saying is,
please put him in the hospital 'cause we don't wanna have to deal with him.
We don't know what to do.
When I went to see him in the hospital,
they wanted to know what my relationship with Daniel was.
And I had been working informally as his publicist.
But, um, I needed to tell them something a little better than that.
And I assumed that Randy Kemper,
after having been beat over the head with a lead pipe
did not wanna continue managing Daniel.
So I said I was his manager.
I helped get Daniel out of the hospital
because I didn't fully understand why he was there.
All I knew was he needed to get out of there.
And as soon as I did get him out,
I began hearing from other people asking me,
why did I do that.
But it seemed like he was doing well enough.
He was back in his home.
And it seemed like everything was OK,
although it was very borderline.
It's like true in science fiction
and it's the new supernatural age,
you know, they spoke of in Revelations.
And Number nine, number nine,
The Beatles' song, Number nine.
He was obsessed with the Devil and Satan.
Do not get that number, 6-6-6.
Do not get 6-6-6 imprinted on your hand.
I had never really heard him talk about the Devil before,
and he became so obsessed that it was all he could talk about.
You must not give in to the Devil, ladies and gentlemen.
The world in confusion, ladies and gentlemen.
Somebody is manufacturing these.
They're spreading those around.
They might be mounting them up around.
Evil, ladies and gentlemen, evil.
Over the next few days,
he began to throw literally everything he owned away.
He threw all his drawings away.
He threw master tapes away.
And he was down to just three of four possessions
the last time I went to his apartment.
He still had his tape deck.
He still had his guitar and maybe one or two other things.
And as soon as I saw this,
my immediate fear was that he's gonna kill himself.
It's better to die, ladies and gentlemen.
And live forever.
And that is what I intend to do.
I went home that night, not knowing what to do.
The world is turning to hell.
I did not know very much about his relationship with his family,
but I figured they need to know this.
And I called his father that night
and he was in Austin within 24 hours.
He was thin as a rail and losing weight
and, uh, all kinds of things.
His depression finally caught up with him.
Evil!
Because he, he was losing it.
Number nine.
When Daniel's father took him back to West Virginia,
Daniel announced his retirement.
And instantly became a living legend in Austin.
He pretty much spent the entire year of 1987 on medication.
A little tired.
Haldol is a control drug, and at times he was a vegetable.
And we finally talked to the psychiatrist
and she said she would have
a psychiatrist examine him.
They wire your brain up and make sure you got what your brain activity is,
and check if there is any brain damage or anything.
And he checked out OK.
But, uh, we took him
to the University of Pittsburgh...
Psychiatric Institute.
They had, uh, seven people
interview him for a whole day.
The reason...
Um...
They said he's on the wrong medicine.
Yeah.
Every medicine he reacted different to.
And we kept trying, and we tried, and tried different ones.
He literally spent the entire year in bed.
He calls it his "lost year."
During this period, I was continuing to work on building his relationships
with bands like Sonic Youth and Jad Fair of Half Japanese.
I had become friends with Steve Shelley of Sonic Youth.
Steve turned a lot of people on to Daniel's music.
And as Daniel finally started to show some improvement,
Steve invited him to New York City
to check out a recording studio,
just basically to hang out a little bit,
get to know each other and have some fun.
We're on our way to the studio.
One day he's scheduled to do some recording at Noise New York,
with Steve and Lee from Sonic Youth.
And he's just as happy as can be, joking around,
talking about making movies. He says he's gonna make a movie someday
and all he has to do is act naturally.
He's there to become famous. That is his one and only goal in his mind.
How has New York been for the last two days?
It's the greatest city on the Earth.
This is day number three for you here.
Yeah, it's happening for sure.
- If I can make it here, I can make it anywhere, right? - That's what they say.
There were two primary goals of this trip.
One was to, uh, meet Kramer
and check out the Noise New York recording studio,
with the possibility of recording for Shimmy Disc.
And the other was to do some recording with Moe Tucker,
the drummer for The Velvet Underground.
This session was put together by Jad Fair.
And this would allow Daniel to meet Jad for the first time.
As Daniel's manager, I'm in touch with Steve Shelley on a nightly basis.
And all of a sudden, one night I get a call
that Daniel has been arrested that day.
It seems that they decided to take him to the Statue of Liberty.
And while Daniel was touring the Statue of Liberty,
like any tourist would want to,
he apparently was drawing graffiti inside the stairwell.
Christian fish. Hundreds of them, from what I understand.
I guess it's the anti-Satan symbol. Um...
A couple days after that, there's a bizarre gig at Pier Platters.
I say bizarre because he's proselytizing the audience.
Trying to force his religious beliefs on the audience, basically.
Jesus Christ is number seven.
Satan is number six.
Number eight is eternal death.
And number nine, number nine, number nine,
is the human number.
Remember these things and don't listen to the lies that people will tell you.
Number seven is Jesus Christ.
When Daniel performed at Pier Platters,
it was like the cream of the crop of the New York underground music scene.
During the song Funeral Home,
he actually gets the audience to sing along with him.
So you've got everybody singing along
about going to the funeral home and dying.
* I'm going to the funeral and I'm never coming back *
Sing along with us, won't you?
* Funeral home
Louder.
* Going to that funeral home
* Got me a coffin
* Shiny and black
* I'm going to the funeral
* And I'm never coming back
* Got me a coffin
* Shiny and black
* I'm going to the funeral
* and I'm never coming back
* Funeral home
* Funeral home *
It became more and more fanatically religious as the show went on.
He has a bit of a breakdown, starts crying at one point,
and is just obviously right on the edge.
And it was my belief and the belief of others around him
that things were getting a little bit out of control.
* You'll be called to meet your God *
* Careless Soul
* Oh, heed the warning
* For your life
* Will soon be gone *
The concert made everyone feel very awkward.
And after the show, walking back to Steve's place,
Daniel and Steve had a bit of a falling out.
He told Kramer that if he can't get anywhere, he was gonna sleep in my hallway.
Yeah, but that's just an idle threat.
When's the next train to...
I mean, I can't imagine him staying in the bus station,
and actually getting on the bus all by himself.
I know the members of Sonic Youth were looking all over for Daniel.
He had been spotted in various places,
and they just felt this responsibility to his parents to get him home.
Keep an eye peeled for Daniel. He might just be a...
If you see a wandering guy in white.
Steve didn't really want to deal with it.
So Lee and Thurston were driving around,
driving around. They finally spotted him
in a hotel parking lot, I believe in Jersey.
- There he is. - Really?
Yeah. He's walking over here.
Let's go get him.
Steve is totally, totally pissed off.
- He's freaked out. - Yeah, he's freaked out and he's not gonna...
He was gonna call my parents and my parents will put me in a mental home.
The best thing to do at this point, you have a bus ticket,
- I think you should use it. - I'm not going home.
I'm on a mission from God and I have two more weeks to spend in this town.
The situation here for you now is not the best that it could be.
And we really don't know what to do,
I mean, you're a long way from home,
and we don't...
Listen, I called my manager
and I started to talk to him about it and was I going to...
- Jeff? - Yeah, I was going to warn him
not to say anything to my parents.
I was going to say, "If you say anything to my parents,
I'm gonna fire you."
And I was saying, "This is a warning
and this is a threat." And he says,
"I don't wanna hear any of your damn threats."
And he hung up on me. My manager.
Now, don't you see the Devil? The Devil Satan
is trying to stop me from staying in this town?
Don't you see how clear that is?
He just would not go home
and was determined to stay in New York.
He ended up on the Bowery, in a men's shelter,
where he was assaulted once or twice, lost some possessions.
At this point, Daniel is homeless and hungry and having the time of his life
while everybody else is completely freaked out.
His parents, myself, his hosts.
We don't know what to do, whereas Daniel
doesn't even realize there's a problem.
Finally, a couple of friends made arrangements to take him to the bus station,
to buy him a ticket to go back home.
They thought they saw him getting on the bus.
The next thing they know, two days later, Daniel is spotted back in New York City.
He'd spent some time in Bellevue, a day or two,
was released due to a clerical error and actually opened for Firehose
at CBGB's that night.
After the CBGB's gig, he did his two songs and left.
All anybody could think of was we've got to get him home
before he either kills somebody or gets killed.
His goal in New York was to become famous.
And I think he accomplished his goal by the time he left.
* At The Cross At The Cross *
When Daniel returned home from New York,
he was hospitalized almost immediately
and let out way too soon in my opinion.
Just a few weeks later he traveled to Maryland to record with Jad Fair.
Putting Jad and Daniel together was... was...
I mean, I think they're both geniuses.
So if you put them together, you know, I don't see how that could miss.
I think you get like two,
you know, two giants together
and, um, it's gigantic.
* If I'd only known I could have said something sooner *
* But I didn't, so I didn't and now it's done *
* The last thing I'd do was the first thing you did *
* What we once had is all gone *
He had a white T-shirt on
or white painter pants maybe or something, he has...
- Actually he was dressed all in white. - All white.
During that time period.
He... He thought it would be the Christian thing to do, to dress in white.
- Yeah. - - David invited Daniel
and... and me to his home to have dinner.
Back then, the movie, uh, My Dinner with Andre was very popular.
And we decided, well, let's have My Dinner With Daniel,
and film that.
And we'll just be talking during dinnertime.
So I went to college right across the river from where the funeral home is.
There was this girl there, and as soon as I saw her, you know,
I swear to God, it looked like she was glowing, you know.
Daniel wanted to, uh, direct.
Stand right there, the cameraman, and you sit in the chair.
He had very specific ideas for everything.
You know, he would figure out shots, he'd change angles.
I mean, at the beginning of the evening it was a film I had in mind.
Very soon it became, you know, somebody else's film.
Film the... the chair, OK?
The highlight probably, though,
was when Daniel started playing the songs.
I mean, at one point when he started weeping,
you know, this is... You know,
wh-where are you gonna see a performance like that?
* I saw my own heart laying
* Black with blood
* Don't play cards with Satan *
* He'll deal you
* An awful hand *
When we dropped him off at the bus station,
I... I don't think anything really seemed strange.
I don't think he seemed different
from how he had been all week long.
He had a ticket to go to his parents' home,
in Chester, uh, West Virginia,
which is only about a five-hour, uh, bus ride.
And we... we thought he'd be fine.
Just some great, great music and art came out of this week.
But unfortunately, he went off his meds again
and had problems when he left.
He took a bus back to West Virginia,
got off a little too soon and was completely delusional,
thought that everybody was possessed by Satan.
It was very early in the morning, maybe 6:00, 7:00 in the morning.
He was making noise in the street.
An elderly woman came to her window, asked him to be quiet,
and that set off another major incident.
And the next thing she knew,
he was coming up the stairs in the apartment building
and pounding on the door.
And whatever he was saying and whatever his demeanor was,
was enough to terrify her such that
she felt like the only thing she could do
was jump out of the second story window.
And, of course, she broke both her ankles.
And she was an elderly woman, from church.
The law pretty well takes over when he gets into trouble.
The law stepped in and, uh, took Dan away from us.
He was quite busy during this time writing me audio letters
with all sorts of instructions.
Earth to Jeff Tartakov, ten four come three.
This is a message from Daniel Dale Johnston.
Here with a few ideas I'd like to do.
First of all I wish that The Beatles would reunite
and back me up as a band.
He continued to want me to get in touch with people like Yoko Ono.
But he also had some additional ideas.
He wanted to be a spokesperson for Mountain Dew.
This is Daniel Johnston speaking from a mental hospital.
They tell me I'm crazy here,
because I love the Mountain Dew so much.
I can't get enough of the Mountain Dew.
* I was sinking deep in sin
* Far from Mountain Dew
* I had problems out within
* Nothing that I could do
* But the Mountain Dew came to me and I drank it all up *
* Now I'm happy as can be, oh Mountain Dew *
* We drink Mountain Dew
* We have nothing better to do but drink Mountain Dew *
* We drink Mountain Dew
* No thing better to do than to drink Mountain Dew *
Yahoo! Mountain Dew.
It's the new sensation.
The best, the greatest, the most fantastic.
The most sensational soda pop in the cosmic universe.
Mountain Dew!
Out come the demons.
Demons, demons, demons, drink the Mountain Dew.
I sent that off to the Pepsi Corporation,
but unfortunately never got a response.
So it's 1990, we hear Daniel's better.
We hear he's gotten... Put on a lot of weight.
But we hear, you know, he's doing his meds, he's under control.
So we invite him to play the Austin Music Awards show.
And to come and play South by Southwest.
And everybody's very excited about this.
Now his rep has really, really grown.
Tartakov has really been getting those tapes out there.
Tartakov's really working it.
Daniel sends me a comic,
about how Daniel's coming back to Austin to play the Music Awards.
How he's gonna get laid. How all the girls should be ready for him.
And the last page is this whole thing about the Devil
being really excited that Daniel's coming back to Austin,
'cause of all the mayhem he can cause.
Whenever Daniel was gonna perform, starting around now, he went off his meds,
for a couple of weeks before the performance.
Because he knew the performance would be better the crazier he was.
The more real he was, the better the performance would be.
But nobody really knew this at the time.
* I took my lucky break and broke it *
Try it again.
As a professional, you know, performer,
I haven't performed, you know, for two years. So...
I'm barely doing it now.
He flew to town with his dad.
Did two in-store appearances at record stores.
Hundreds and hundreds of people turned out.
People were coming up for autographs
and he would give them so much more than just an autograph.
He would take a full sheet of paper and draw a frog, an entire scene.
This was really the highlight of my career, up until that point.
Because I was able to see an audience, a large audience, respond to Daniel.
Palmer Auditorium had 3,000 people there that night.
* Never knowing where you go
* Always running
* Never stopping to see where you're at *
* Never looking back
* Nothing seems to slow you down *
* Running water
* What are you running from?
* You always seem to be on the run *
Daniel was scheduled to play about a 15-minute set,
but he's not a very good judge of time.
So he walked off the stage after three songs.
Oh, my God...
Daniel.
- Dad? - - Yeah?
You wanna do another, Dan?
They want me to do another song?
- You wanna go back? - OK.
When he finally came out, it was as if
The Rolling Stones had come back on stage.
* But if this really is love
* Then let's get it on, on
During the song Do You Love Me? the chorus goes, Do you love me now?
And you could hear girls in the audience screaming, "Yes!"
It was Daniel mania.
* Tell me now
* Do you really love me?
The audience was stomping and screaming.
You could feel the entire floor shaking.
* When they said that love was dead *
* They were just playing with your head *
* Love is real
* That's the way that I feel
* I love you
* Do you really love me?
* Tell me now *
Thanks a lot.
He was the hit of that show.
He got standing ovations. Nobody else did.
But then, he was feeling funny.
And right after his last performance we left.
We passed up interviews and we left.
Well...
It shouldn't have happened, but Dan was secretly duckin' his medicine.
I was giving it to him, but he was chuckin' it.
Captain America?
No, he thought he was Casper.
He was reading a Casper comic book.
There's a picture on the front of the book,
of Casper and a parachute.
And Dan decided, "Let's... Let's bail out.
"Let's jump out." I said, "No. We can't do that.
We don't have any parachutes."
So his mind was gone.
Eventually, he took the key out,
turned the engine off, and threw the key out the window.
How did you recover the flight?
Well, he grabbed the controls, took the plane away from me.
He's stronger than me.
We were kind of going straight up and then straight down.
But he kind of let go in time for me to get it out of the spin.
Nothing down there but trees.
But I'd had training on ditching in trees,
so I didn't stall it in,
I flew it into the trees, between two big ones.
And we got out safe.
But the plane was a total loss.
The family came and got us, got me.
We put him in a hospital and left him there for five months.
There's Dan. He's had a good time,
because he thought that was great, coming down in a spin.
He was all mixed-up.
He felt like he did something good
and he wanted us to be proud of him.
There's Dan being rolled into the emergency room.
They passed a Church of Christ,
and to Bill and Dick's amazement,
this sign was on the Church of Christ
bulletin board out front.
"God promises a safe landing
but not a calm voyage."
* In the sky
* The number seven
* The Devil defeated
* The new Jerusalem *
The Johnstons moved to Waller, Texas in late 1991
and I believe Daniel began having some problems fairly immediately
and ended up back in the Austin State Hospital.
During this time his career continued to, uh, reach for the stars.
Bands were covering his songs left and right.
Kurt Cobain of the band Nirvana wore his T-shirt on MTV
at the MTV Music Awards Show
which was seen by millions of people.
He had had the shirt for a few months.
Apparently, a writer that I had given the shirt to,
a guy named Everett True, had given it to Kurt.
And the next thing you know, he's wearing it not only on national TV
but everywhere he goes. And over the next several months,
every single photo shot he did, he was wearing this shirt.
And just a tremendous amount of publicity came Daniel's way due to this.
Suddenly everybody knew who Daniel was.
It was just incredible that a... a T-shirt could fuel this kind of a frenzy.
The T-shirt had many, many thousands of fans
that wanted to know more about the T-shirt.
And wanted to hear the T-shirt, and see the T-shirt
and get to know the T-shirt.
Meanwhile, Daniel's in a hospital
and has no idea who Nirvana even is.
And within a matter of days,
I get a call from a guy named Terry Tolkin,
who's an A&R executive for Elektra Records.
And we got into a long conversation that ended with him saying,
"Well, I'd really like to sign Daniel."
Terry and I met for a couple of days,
hung out and discussed, uh, everything
that needed to be discussed. And then it was time
to take him over to the hospital and meet with Daniel.
And we sat in the waiting room, Daniel came out,
and we had a business meeting for about 30, 45 minutes,
and it went as well as a meeting can possibly go in a mental institution
between a vice president of a record label and a patient.
We were trying to structure a contract
that took his delicate situation into consideration.
It's not every day that a major label signs somebody
who's in a mental institution.
They were looking out for Daniel's best interests.
There was a clause in there about his mental health,
about providing a doctor,
about how he would never have to tour,
about how he could never be dropped for failure to promote a record.
And they looked at it as a long-term project.
It wouldn't be just one record, it would be a career.
It was probably the most one-sided contract in the favor of artists' rights
that had ever been drawn up, up until that time.
We obviously had to get Daniel well, get him out of the hospital.
And over the next few months, Daniel continued to improve,
but it was very slow.
We bided our time, did what we could for him
and just kept waiting for the day when he would be released.
Yves Beauvais of Atlantic Records contacted me around that time,
wanting to know what was Daniel's situation.
And I told him, "Well, we're fairly close to signing with Elektra."
His boss, Danny Goldberg, who was the head of Atlantic Records,
formerly worked with Kurt Cobain as their manager.
And he, uh, wasn't familiar with Daniel's music,
but he certainly knew who the guy in the T-shirt was.
And the next thing you know, I've got a bidding war on my hands.
Daniel's in a mental hospital
and I've got two major labels trying to outbid each other.
Suddenly, we're looking at a $100,000 possibility.
Once Daniel was released from the hospital, I was trying to get help for him.
I was working with his parents, trying to make doctor's appointments for him.
And Daniel thought he was fine. He did not want to see the doctor.
And Elektra wanted him to sign this contract
and Daniel was paranoid about that.
He was afraid that Elektra was Satanic.
Um, they had a band on their roster called Metallica.
He was concerned that they were going to beat him and kill him.
And, uh, he could not be convinced that he was safe.
His delusions would just not go away.
He was convinced that Elektra was evil and that I was evil.
Elektra had to be evil because they were tied to me.
And so the deal died.
And this was the deal I had been working for seven years for.
This is the deal I had been working for 30 something years for.
It was what I had been building towards my whole life.
Jeffrey Tartakov is really a lot like Broadway Danny Rose.
Have you ever seen that movie?
This guy loves his acts.
Never took a lesson.
He lives
to make them successful.
And that's the way Jeff always was with Daniel.
Jeff literally was like that old time kind of manager
you hear about, and you read about, and people make movies about.
This sort of person who lived for the good of his client.
The man would be perfect for your room.
He literally devoted his life 100% to Daniel Johnston,
for all the years where nothing was happening.
And then right when Daniel was poised
to get an international bidding war on his... on his career,
he just completely dropped him like a hot potato for absolutely no reason.
- I gotta make a few changes. - What kind of changes?
Like management.
What do you mean "management"?
Like, what do you mean "management"?
I was fired so many times over the years,
and over these months specifically,
that it's hard to tell which one actually counted.
But I continued trying to work things out,
until I received a call one day
from a guy named Tom Gimbel,
who informed me that he was Daniel's new manager.
I felt like a failure at that time.
I felt like I was the biggest failure and loser in the world.
* I love that girl so much
* I can't get enough of her love *
* Crazy love
* She walks on down the street *
Living with Dan in the same house is something that is not easy
to get along with at times.
We have kind of worked out a system that works a little bit for us.
It's past noon and Dan has been asleep since we got up this morning.
We get up about 7:00 and he's still sleeping.
That gives us that half of the day without Dan.
And we appreciate that as a relief because the minute he gets up,
he'll want us to make him some tea, he'll want something to eat,
he'll wanna go... "Are we goin' shopping today?"
Every other day he wants to go shopping.
We try to take him somewhere every week.
And we take him to church with us at least once a week.
And we take him to the mall or to a local Wal-Mart once a week.
And then his friends come to... to see him, and take him to practice.
The band that he's working with now will practice once a week.
Yeah, I think... You wanna do it one more time?
Turn the... OK, that's good.
Testing! OK.
* Imagine a world without rock 'n' roll *
* There'd be no *
Wait a minute. Wait a minute. I can't hear my vocal.
We moved here from Ohio about two and a half years ago
and then we were driving down the road one day,
toward my grandma's house, who lives here,
and, uh, we saw this guy being attacked by dogs.
And I told Bridget, "Man, this looks like Daniel Johnston.
"I... I think this is Daniel Johnston."
And, uh, she's like, "Oh, no. That's not Daniel Johnston."
So we... What we did was, um, we stopped anyway, you know, to help the guy out.
And Bridget got out of the car and she kicked the dog right in the face
and it ran off.
And then, um, Daniel was like,
"Hey, do you guys play guitar?"
* He's a man obsessed
* He couldn't be a lover
* So now he's a pest
* He played the game
* But he failed the test
* And now he's a pest He's a pest *
* He's a pest
He said, "Well, how about, um...
"How about I come over some time?"
And I said, "Yeah, yeah. Are you Daniel Johnston?"
He's like, "Yeah. I'm Daniel Johnston. You know who I am?"
And I thought, well, this is amazing, man.
Daniel Johnston in Waller. I had no idea that he even lived here.
* The only way you could get her to look at you is to die *
- * Why don't you die? * - We got his number
and we called him up the next week
and he came over to the house
and we recorded four songs with him
in, like, one hour.
* He's a man obsessed
* He couldn't be a lover
* So now he's a pest
We were wondering why we moved to Waller to begin with, you know, we...
Now we know why we moved to Waller.
You know... Because, you know, it was heaven sent.
* He's a pest
* Man obsessed *
Daniel started listening to The Beach Boys,
like, after we played Pet Sounds for him. I think.
He said he never heard Pet Sounds before,
but we played it for him one night
and he was floored by it.
And so he went out
and bought like every Beach Boys record
you could possibly imagine.
I don't know if Brian Wilson and Daniel are very much alike.
Every time I read something about Daniel in a magazine or something,
it mentions Brian Wilson.
I honestly think Daniel is far more brilliant than Brian Wilson is.
Of course the Beach Boys' music is really far-out,
but, um, it's not quite Daniel Johnston.
I read the story of Brian Wilson that he wrote himself.
And he tells that his father was not a fair manager.
Bill is a fair manager
and is not after the money for himself.
He's after it for Dan.
Brian Wilson had a lot of the similar characteristics
and infirmities that Dan has.
And he went through the same stages of development
that Dan has gone through.
And reading his history,
it smacks a whole lot of exactly what's happening to Dan.
We're learning from it. We don't want to make the same mistakes.
Uh, he did well actually in the end.
And we'd like Dan to do well, too,
because he needs to.
His new songs for the movie?
It just depends on when he's in the mood, he will.
Yeah, I don't even know my old songs.
Now that's the thing.
He doesn't remember the tune and he doesn't remember the words.
* I had a dream about you
* You were the queen of quite a few *
* And I was there but you didn't care *
* I didn't matter somehow *
By the time Glass Eye broke up in 1993,
Daniel was still in the mental hospital.
And he'd been there for a long time and I rather thought,
the possibility existed, sad as it was, that he might never produce anything again.
And a lot of the music that he had recorded
was, to the general populous, unlistenable.
And I felt like people would maybe never get him
and he would just be like a flower that bloomed in the desert,
you know, and was forgotten.
So I thought that I would do some of his songs,
some of my favorites. And do them in such a way
that they kind of bloomed
and became from like say a ballpoint and notepaper sketch,
they kind of came into more of a full color painting.
So, I decided to make the record.
And it was so fun working with material that was so good.
And it's probably the best thing I've ever done.
And, if I'm remembered for anything ever, it will be for that record.
After the FUN and Kathy McCarty release,
Daniel and I did not talk for four years.
I went into such a deep depression
that I just wanted to have nothing to do with the guy.
I really could not even listen to his music.
But I still had this fascination with his artwork.
I continued to compile my collection purchasing drawings from other sources.
- How's it going? - - How you doing today?
Pretty good. Seen Daniel lately?
Actually, he came by a few months ago.
We're almost out of what he brought us.
I'll take what I can get.
The black and white ones.
Oh, yeah, not bad at all.
I was occasionally contacted
by galleries around the world, wanting to show his art,
and if it sounded like a good thing,
I would help them out.
We had shows in Berlin, Eindhoven, Paris, Barcelona,
London, Manchester, New York City,
Washington D.C., Los Angeles.
There were really more than I could count, during these four years
that Daniel and I were not even talking.
He was beginning to get reviewed in art magazines
and his art was becoming as well known as his music.
Zero One.
Uh, do we know for sure what time Daniel's actually gonna play?
I sort of said around 9:00. Yeah, OK. Yeah, 9:00.
We're at the corner of Melrose and La Brea.
He's here right now.
You wanna get some tape, Don, and we can get started?
The hardest thing to find in art
is somebody that comes up with something new,
somebody completely original.
No, it's double stick, so you can put it on the back.
Oh.
I'm not looking for people that are part of movements that much.
I... I'm more interested in people who are their own movement
or they're moving beyond any movement.
Or, you know, are doing things that no movement has thought of.
I think Daniel Johnston is his own movement.
He's doing things as original in his way
as Joseph Cornell did or Westerman
or even going back to Marcel Duchamp or Man Ray
or somebody that just comes up with stuff that,
you know, who would've thought it?
Well, I think it's wrong to put him in that outsider art thing.
He's as much as an inside as any major artist.
He's just going in his own direction, doing his own thing,
which more artists should do.
An unidentified collector has just bought
98% of the show.
And the show has not even started yet.
We've sold practically every drawing that he brought,
except for four. That's what happened so far.
And the show has just, uh... You know, we haven't...
Nobody's showed up yet.
You know, we're gonna have to start taking orders, I guess.
I mean, last year his stuff sold pretty fast but not this fast.
Yeah, there are some themes. You know, I mean, with the artwork.
I do some Captain Americas, you know, some ducks.
I do a lot of ducks and they're like my armies
and sometimes I use them in my battles against Satan.
Daniel's art mirrors his songwriting in many ways.
The same characters, the same themes.
There are plenty of drawings that refer to unrequited love.
You'll find the same characters such as Casper The Friendly Ghost,
Captain America. Frankenstein appears quite often.
You have Joe The Boxer and the Eternal Struggle, the Eternal Battle.
For two years, all Daniel drew were fight scenes
of a boxer fighting a creature in the ring.
The boxer clearly represented Daniel while the, uh, creature was evil.
This was Vile Corrupt from the Hi, How Are You album.
The piece titled Daniel Johnston's Symbolical Visions is in many ways
the Rosetta stone of Daniel's art.
It has all the figures and symbols that appear in so many of his drawings.
From Kathy McCarty's glasses, to a baby block,
to the man with the sawed-off head, to torsos.
All of the familiar figures are there,
666, eyes, the pyramid.
If you listen to all of Daniel's music and know the songs
and then look at the drawings, they have added meaning.
Sometimes it's very hard to fathom what goes on his mind.
I can see what he's thinking just day by day in his drawings.
He will, uh, put captions on his drawings
that are coming right from deep inside.
And, uh, by looking over his shoulder every day,
I can get a little bit of what goes on in his mind.
A friend of mine that saw his art that's in the mental health field said,
"I know Daniel's going to heaven, he's already been to hell."
She was lookin' at the artwork and she said, "This is hellacious.
I mean, someone tortured..." And I don't even see it that way.
A lot of his artwork I see as very happy
and he really believes in love.
I think he looks for that superhero idea
of someone's gonna rescue or save and be the good guy.
It's not really a coincidence but,
I did a tribute album of Daniel's songs
and later I went on to marry Daniel's best friend.
The very first time I went to Daniel's apartment,
Daniel handed me a book of poetry and said, "Oh, you might like this.
These are my friend Dave's poems.
Why don't you read them?"
And I loved them.
He was instantly my favorite poet.
Two or three years after Dead Dog's Eyeball came out,
Dave emailed me and said, "Hi, this is Dave Thornberry.
"Do you remember me?"
And I wrote him back like, "Do I remember you?
"I read your poems all the time, still."
And I went to visit him, and as soon as we were together,
it was like, we have to get married. And we did.
And it was very romantic. We got married two days after we saw each other
for the first time in 13 years.
Daniel never really talked to me directly about Laurie.
But, of course, I knew that all the songs were about someone.
I mean, I knew that he had loved and lost, you know, in his life.
And I don't think I even ever really thought that all those songs
were about the same person.
But after we had broke up, so to speak,
I began to know more about Laurie. He talked more about Laurie.
And I began to know like, how huge an obsession,
his obsession with Laurie was.
* Love could save me somehow
* But I just can't make it
Most of my songs are about her.
You know, because she does, did, and hopefully will love me,
you know, it keeps me goin'.
I'm always thinking about another angle
about it when I'm writing a song.
I think art has always been inspired by beauty.
I think there have been many artists, uh, throughout history
who had a major inspiration,
whether it was a girl, or even just a philosophy.
That's what I like about life and about art.
Is that when you write a song, it's just the way that you saw it
or just the way that it was.
I think art is the greatest frame of mind
to express a certain feeling and you'll always have that feeling.
It's always there.
* So magical *
Laurie is... is his muse but in a completely passive way.
Laurie is the 17 syllables of haiku
for him to hang his creativity on.
That's what she is. She's a structure for him to build on.
She's not the love of his life. I mean, but she is.
When I first met Daniel in '85, he was burning with her.
I mean, she was in his eyes all the time.
I mean, when he talked about her it was just intense.
And what's so weird about Daniel is that went away
and it came back more intense later on
because he realized it was a really good story.
* True love will find you in the end *
* You'll find out just who was your friend *
* Don't be sad, I know you will *
* But don't give up until
* True love will find you in the end *
* This is a promise with a catch *
* Only if you're looking can it find you *
* 'Cause true love is searching too *
* But how can it recognize you *
* Unless you step out into the light? *
* The light
* Don't be sad, I know you will *
* But don't give up until
* True love will find you in the end *
For as much as Daniel has expanded the myth of Laurie,
it really wasn't that big of a deal,
except in Daniel's mind.
But what happened with Jeff really was a big deal.
And as far as, like a story that breaks your heart,
that's the story that breaks my heart about Daniel's life.
Daniel told me that he was sorry about the way he had treated me
and he admitted that I had been unjustly fired,
and he told me that he was not right mentally at that time.
And he really said all the things you would hope to hear from somebody
who had behaved the way he had behaved.
He was very sincere
and I believe he truly felt bad
about the way things went down between the two of us.
Even though I wasn't his manager, I still had the back catalog
and I couldn't just stop.
It just made no sense.
I didn't know what would happen with this music.
It would have disappeared forever.
It wouldn't exist today if I stopped.
Stress Records is my baby. It's a company I started about 23 years ago,
and today it exists for the sole purpose
of spreading the word of Daniel Johnston to the masses.
I do that by dubbing his cassettes and distributing them myself.
I advertise them over the internet.
I take mail orders daily. I work the telephones.
I send them out to people I know. I do everything I can.
I do it because people need to hear this music.
The music of Daniel Johnston is something that I think
everybody needs to at least be exposed to.
There's really nothing to even to compare it to.
It goes way beyond Dylan's basement recordings or early Robert Johnson
or any other body of work that I can think of.
Daniel's been so much better these last few years,
it's a miracle.
It's even difficult for me to grasp the fact
that he's playing internationally and touring.
In Daniel's life, everywhere he's gone,
he leaves this incredible wake behind of creation and destruction.
He's done all kinds of things, both bad and good,
but they're all mythic.
And they're all barely believable, yet they're all true.
And the kinds of things that he's done in his career,
are the kinds of things someone would only do
if they were so self-sabotaging
that it was completely mystifying.
But in terms of creating a legend,
he's done absolutely everything right.
* He was smiling through his own personal hell *
* Dropped his last dime down a wishing well *
* But he was hoping too close *
* And then he fell
* Now he's Casper the Friendly Ghost *
* He was always polite to the people who'd tell him *
* That he was nothing but a lazy bum *
* But goodbye to them he had to go *
* Now he's Casper
Is Matt Groening here tonight, in the audience somewhere?
And somebody said, "You gotta listen to this guy."
And I said, "Which tape should I get?"
And, uh, I was told, "All of them.
"And it's right. They are all fantastic."
There's more comics now than there have ever been before
- and The Simpsons comic looks great. - Thank you.
I love that. And the superhero, the guy turns into a superhero.
There should be a Daniel Johnston comic book.
- Yeah, there should. - I wanna do, I wanna do comics.
That's what I'm shooting for.
Good to see you. I'll see you around.
I've got to go see your film.
Fantastic. Keep up the fantastic work.
- Call me. - I wanna do some music for you. OK?
- OK. - OK.
- OK. It's a deal. - All right, then.
- See you. - Bye-bye.
- Good luck. - - You, too.
OK.
Yeah!
* And so the legend grew
* And all the people that he knew *
* Go and spread the news of Casper *
* The Friendly Ghost *
Thank you.
Good night. Thanks a lot.
- Thank you. - - More! More!
More!
More! More!
I don't think Dan would have gotten as far as he did without our help.
And he, uh, his own words was,
"I don't know what will happen to me,
if you don't help me."
So we have, for years.
He does love us, I can see that.
I guess I want the impossible, I want Dan to be whole.
And be able to take care of himself.
And we're worried now, we're running out of time.
* Oh my lord
* I am so bored
* Held the hand of Satan
* Oh, Laura
* What has happened to you?
* Held the hand of the Devil
* I was on MTV
* Everybody was looking at me *
* Held the hand of the Devil *
* Your picture
* Is still
* On my wall
* The colors
* Are bright
* Bright
* As ever
* The red is strong
* The blue is pure
* Some things
* Last a long time
* Some things
* Last a long time
* Your picture
* Is still
* On my wall
* I think
* About you
* Often
* I won't forget
* All the things we did *
* Some things
* Last a long time
* Some things
* Last a long time
Bye-bye, Dave.
Bye.