He’s Daniel Johnston, And He Was Gonna Be Famous
One of the best-loved songwriters in the alternative rock universe is a 44-year-old manic depressive who lives with his parents in Waller. Be careful what you wish for.
(Page 2 of 4)
In high school Daniel was a loner and an underachiever who spent more time playing piano and drawing in the basement than hanging out with others. He was depressed a lot of the time, but his parents thought he was just being a typical self-absorbed teenager. Still living at home after he graduated, he enrolled in classes at the East Liverpool branch of Kent State, across the Ohio River. There, almost by accident, he became a songwriter. “What really happened,” he told me, “is I met this girl who was engaged to an undertaker. But she was very beautiful, and I made up some songs just to please her. And she liked them. And I just flipped out. I was at the piano banging away every day, writing songs. And I turned into a maniac and I never gave up, and that’s what really happened to me.” The woman, Laurie, eventually married the undertaker. But Daniel had his muse. His albums are filled with songs to Laurie and to true love. He would sit at the piano, turn on a cheap tape recorder, and play songs about unrequited love, the misery of being a loner, and following your crazy dreams. Then he’d draw. Then he’d go back and record. His friend David Thornberry, who would go down into the basement and draw too, remembers, “He was an obsessive creator, drawing and writing all the time.” Daniel announced that his ambition was to be as big as the Beatles. He was fixated on fame, says Thornberry: “It wasn’t about ‘if I get famous’ but ‘when I get famous.’ He assumed that if he put in the time, tried to be in the right place at the right time, met the right people, it would happen.”
Daniel began putting together tapes of his music; Songs of Pain was the first, and Don’t Be Scared followed. They were strange, low-fi collections, with Daniel banging haphazardly on the piano. Most young songwriters try to be tough, cynical, or something they aren’t. These songs could only have come from Daniel; they were naked and honest, full of longing and need, sung in a high twang that sounded as though his heart were breaking. It was as if he were exposing himself. They were funny too, with titles like “I Save Cigarette Butts.” The melodies were sunny one song and aching the next, the kind of pure pop concoctions that Lennon and McCartney wrote.
With the songs he would also record TV evangelists and conversations with friends. On one, Daniel, in a fake veejay voice, says, “Ah, that was Dan Johnston on MTV . . . Coming up a little bit later, we have some concert news on Dan Johnston.” And he recorded his mother, upstairs and not knowing she was being taped, berating her son. “We just produced a great big lazy bum!” Mabel yells on one, sounding truly anguished. “And you have no shame. You like it that way!” He recorded civil conversations with her too. “I don’t really mean to be depressing in my songs,” he says to her on another tape, in an apologetic tone. “Sometimes they just turn out that way.” Daniel fought often with his parents, who were bewildered by his drawings and his music and thought he was immature and manipulative. He was torn between their path—God’s path—and the one he was just beginning to figure out—the artist’s. He wouldn’t get a job. He had “grandiose ideas” about wanting to be a famous songwriter, Mabel would later write to a psychiatrist. During this time Daniel had periods of elation, when he would obsessively write and draw, followed by descents into a pit of despair. His parents didn’t know it, but his teenage angst was crossing the line into manic depression.
Daniel dropped out of Kent State in 1982 and the next year moved to Houston to live with his brother, Dick. There, using a toy chord organ and a Smurf ukulele, he recorded his next tape, Yip/Jump Music, in Dick’s garage. After a series of disagreements with Dick’s wife, Daniel moved to San Marcos to live with his sister Margy, where he delivered pizzas, recorded Hi, How Are You, and had a nervous breakdown. When he saw a letter from his mother to his sister that he thought suggested putting him in an institution, he fled town with a carnival, quitting when it stopped in Austin and talking a UT-area church into letting him stay in a back room. It was 1984, and he got a job at a McDonald’s, passing out his tapes to anyone he’d meet there or on Guadalupe Street, the campus drag. “Hi, how are you?” he’d say. “I’m Daniel Johnston, and I’m gonna be famous.”
He found numerous proselytizers in the local music scene, started playing shows, and even got a manager. He also talked his way onto an August 1985 episode of the MTV show The Cutting Edge, which was doing a feature on the Austin music scene. He introduced himself to the world at large by awkwardly holding up his latest tape and saying, in his thin, wavering voice, “My name is Daniel Johnston, and this is the name of my tape. It’s Hi, How Are You. And I—I was having a nervous breakdown when I recorded it.” You can see him, like one of his superheroes, putting on the mask, assuming the character, mythologizing himself. The nervous wreck. The carnival. The breakdown. The cartoons. The woman he loved who would never love him, who had married an undertaker. The songs of terrible beauty, sung terribly. It was all real and it was all a beautiful put-on.
See Satan Die
The Johnstons have a two-car garage. On one side is the family car and on the other is Daniel’s studio. The walls are covered with photos, paintings, and clippings: the Beatles, Star Wars, King Kong, Godzilla, Batman, the Monkees, Captain America, anonymous fifties pinup girls, Marilyn Monroe. There’s a photo of Bill and Mabel in there, as well as some of Daniel’s album art. Shelves hold armies of toy dinosaurs, little dolls, little Beatles. There’s an old piano against the wall and a table on which sit a boom box, a turntable, an ashtray, and a couple of cups of fresh cola, with no ice. On a shelf are more than a dozen notebooks filled with songs; on the piano are cluttered heaps of cheap cassettes. There’s also a microphone on a stand and a little Marshall amp. There’s a rhyming dictionary and a Bible. The rug on the floor is moist with grime.
The garage, his friend David Thornberry says, is a modern-day version of what Daniel had in his West Virginia basement. This is where he goes every day to write music and listen to it and to dream of recording some of the hundreds of songs he has lying around. One afternoon, the two of us sat in his studio and Daniel played me some of his unreleased songs on his stereo. The first was from an album he’s been working on with producer Brian Beattie, who was in Glass Eye and who has been recording Daniel for more than a decade. “Wishing You Well” is a tale of obsession and love, with Daniel singing a beautiful, straining melody to Laurie, whom he hasn’t seen in eighteen years: “And I love you, you’re my wife.” His once boyish voice sounds tired now. As Daniel listened, eyes closed, he held a menthol Kool 100 in his mouth with the fingers of his right hand, moving it barely in and out for a minute or so directly under his nose, the ember occasionally flashing orange as he inhaled. The ash fell directly onto the stain on his chest and sat there.
Daniel searched through a pile of tapes and played a song from a session with a band he has with some local guys, Danny and the Nightmares. It’s a rock song with buzzing guitars and Daniel singing verse after verse about obsession and love.
I became a monster in my mind
Suddenly I wasn’t kind.
“This is a great song, I think,” Daniel said.
“What’s it called?” I asked.
“‘See Satan Die,’” he said and chuckled. Then the chorus finally came, repeated over and over:
Love is all there really is
See Satan die!
When the song was done, he dropped the cigarette into a bowl and lit another. He played a third song, with him singing in a high falsetto a tale of obsession and love. The chorus went:
I feel like Lucifer tonight
What have I done?
“I’m guessing you haven’t played this for your parents,” I said.
He laughed. “I guess not. ‘Hey, Mom! Listen to this!’ Yeah, I’ve got to be careful what I play for my parents.”
My Library
