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.
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Daniel’s garage studio is the perfect teenage-boy clubhouse for an imperfect middle-aged teenager, one who sits around all day listening to records and CDs, still thinks of women as girls, and still looks at love the way a teenager looks at his first love, as the one person who will finally understand him. But Daniel has plenty of 44-year-old smarts too. He’s lucid and funny. He has a great memory for historical detail, even if he can’t remember to take his medicine. He knows his reputation and what people think of him (he once wrote a song called “Daniel the Idiot Savant Rock Star”). He’s aware of how strange it is that he still lives with his parents, but he’s also aware of how much trouble he gets in when he leaves their care. And he was certainly aware that I was watching his every move and inhalation, recording them in my notebook. He’s used to that by now.
Devil Town
The trouble for Daniel began with the drugs. A devout Church of Christ member when he arrived in Austin, Daniel didn’t even drink, much less get high (he told a prospective girlfriend that he couldn’t have sex before marriage). But for whatever reason, either because he was swept away in the general enthusiasm of the time or to impress a girl or to break further from his parents, he began smoking pot and then taking LSD. His fragile mind began to slip. Daniel took a panicked bus trip to Abilene to visit his sister Sally and had a terrible vision on the way back of skulls and blood and Satan lying in wait. “The devil has Texas!” he wrote about the trip in “Spirit World Rising.” Back in Austin, Daniel was consumed with fear. He thought his manager, Randy Kemper, was possessed by the devil and hit him over the head with a pipe, putting him in the hospital. A few nights later, after taking acid, Daniel wound up in a creek near UT, singing hymns and calling to Jesus, trying to wash his sins away. The police came and took him to the Austin State Hospital; it was his first stay in a mental institution. Jeff Tartakov, a friend who had helped Daniel set up a publishing company for his songs, went to visit and was told by the staff that Daniel was suffering from two delusions: that there was going to be a military takeover on Christmas Day and that he had to get out of the hospital by Sunday because he was going to be on MTV that night. “I said, ‘Well, I don’t know about the first,’” Tartakov told me, “‘but the second is true.’” It was Daniel’s second appearance on the music network. At a court hearing in the hospital, Daniel said he’d made a terrible mistake taking LSD and promised that he’d never take it again. He was released.
Afterward, thinking that his tapes and drawings were evil, he threw them into a Dumpster. Tartakov fished them out and called Daniel’s father, fearing that Daniel might commit suicide. Bill flew down in his private plane and took his son back to West Virginia and put him in a hospital, where he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Daniel spent a year in bed, taking the heavy-duty antipsychotic Haldol, ballooning to more than two hundred pounds, and thinking he was going to hell. In April 1988 he stopped taking his medication and headed for New York, where he hung out with indie rock stars in Sonic Youth and Galaxie 500 and recorded some of the songs he had been writing, such as “Spirit World Rising,” “Don’t Play Cards With Satan,” and “Devil Town.” He also spent time in a homeless shelter in the Bowery, was arrested for drawing Christian fish symbols on the base of the Statue of Liberty, and spent a night in Bellevue after a street altercation. Eventually he got a bus ticket and returned home, where his parents put him back in the local mental hospital. They didn’t know what to do with their son. “We were dumb enough to think he was just spoiled,” says Bill. But they took him to new doctors, and Daniel was finally diagnosed with manic depression, an affliction that causes sufferers to experience wild, high moods followed by dark, low ones. It is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain, and it can’t be cured, only treated with different medications to try and restore the proper balance. So Daniel got some new meds.
Meanwhile, the notoriety had helped make him a hipster darling. In 1988, after a recording project in Maryland, Daniel returned to Chester in the middle of the night, stopping within sight of the funeral home owned by Laurie’s husband, where he began shouting. An elderly woman yelled out of her second-floor apartment and told him to shut up, and Daniel, thinking she was possessed by Satan, broke into her apartment. The terrified woman fell out of the window trying to get away from him, breaking both her legs. In the aftermath, Daniel, back in the hospital, wrote a fifty-page letter to Tartakov in which he said that he was going to be bigger than Vincent van Gogh. He eventually felt well enough to play at the 1990 Austin Music Awards. It was to be a comeback, a homecoming, and Bill flew Daniel down in his plane. Daniel, though, had once again quit taking his medication and was nervous. The devil, he thought, was waiting for him in Texas. Though the show went well, the return flight to West Virginia was a disaster.
One afternoon, while Daniel was off shopping, Bill, the decorated fighter pilot, sat in his La-Z-Boy recliner in the living room and told me the story of that flight as if he were telling a tale of one of his sorties against the Japanese. “We were in the air just south of Little Rock, 6,500 feet up, and Dan said, ‘Dad, I’m gonna be sick.’ He reached over and turned the engine off. I turned the key back on. Then he threw a can of pop out of the window. I said, ‘Dan, you can’t do that.’ He saw a lake off to the right and told me, ‘Land there!’ I said we couldn’t land on water. He had been reading a Casper comic, and on the cover was Casper in a parachute, and he yelled, ‘Let’s bail out!’ The next thing I knew, he had turned off the ignition and thrown the keys out the window. So now I got a dead engine. He grabbed the controls, and we started going down. I tried to grab them back, and we wrestled with it and ended in a tailspin, going straight down. I could see the tall pines through the window.”
Mabel, sitting on the couch, interjected: “Bill yelled, ‘You’ll kill us!’ and Dan yelled back, ‘I can’t die!’ That was his delusion.” Her son, perhaps convinced that he was Captain America, was trying to prevent his father, who may or may not have been under Satan’s orders, from killing him.
“At the last minute,” Bill continued, “he let go, and I was able to level out above the trees. I headed for a clearing but came up about one hundred yards short. We crashed into the tops of the trees and stopped sixty feet up and then fell straight down. After we got out of the wreckage, a farmer came running up to help, and Dan threatened him. I said, ‘Leave him alone. He’s out of his mind.’”
“You want to see a grown man cry,” said Mabel, her eyes wet and her voice shaking. “Bill cried, to think a son did that. By the grace of God they were hardly touched by injuries. One of the things Bill said after the crash was, ‘We’re not going to have Dan stay with us anymore, and we will be happy.’ But I knew we wouldn’t be happy. Dan needed us. We had promised all our children we’d be there for them. And it was Bill who made arrangements to bring him home.”
My Library
