Remembering Daniel Johnston

Daniel Johnston’s origin story is legendary. In his early-20s, he worked as a cashier at a Houston-area McDonald’s. He gave out cassette copies of his home-produced songs for free to customers and strangers. The songs were deceptively simple, written on a cheap chord organ and recorded on a $59 Sanyo boombox. The quality was primitive with tape hiss and distortion. But there was a childlike purity to the music as if Mister Rogers was channeling Tom Waits.

Johnston was raised a fundamentalist Christian in West Virginia. He was obsessed with comic book figures like Captain America, the Incredible Hulk and Casper the Friendly Ghost. In his teens, he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, psychoactive disorder and manic depression. He spent months in psychiatric institutions telling everyone he met that one day he would be famous.

He suffered from depression in high school and was a loner who lived in his parents’ basement. He drew his own comic books including a surfing superhero rat named “Ratzoid.” He idolized the Beatles, the Plastic Ono Band, Bob Dylan, Queen and Neil Young. After John Lennon was killed, Johnston was convinced the rocker was still alive in a parallel universe.

Johnston taught himself piano and immersed himself in songwriting. He recorded his first album in the summer of 1981, a 20-song cassette backed by simple keyboards called Songs of Pain. The music was raw and honest with lyrics about Jesus and Satan and his favorite comic book heroes.

After high school, he enrolled at Kent State University. He met a woman named Laurie Allen in an art class and became romantically obsessed with her. She became his muse. “I made up some songs just to please her,” Johnston said. “And she liked them. And I just flipped out. I was at the piano banging away every day, writing songs.” When Laurie moved to Florida with her mortician boyfriend, Johnston had a nervous breakdown. He dropped out of college and moved back into his parents’ basement.

In 1984, Johnston found a job selling corn dogs at a local carnival. One day he took too long inside a port-a-potty and somebody turned it over. Johnston was badly hurt and taken to a hospital. He moved into his older brother Dick’s apartment in Houston and obsessively wrote songs about loneliness, unrequited love and the importance of following your dreams.

One of these songs was “True Love Will Find You in the End.” Inspired by his love for Laurie, the song depicts Johnston’s loneliness and his search for meaningful connection. The lyrics offer a promise that true love’s possible despite life’s challenges and difficulties. The key is not giving up hope.

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
If you don’t step out into the light, the light
Don’t be sad I know you will
Don’t give up until
True love will find you in the end.

“True Love Will Find You in the End” became Johnston’s most popular song. It first appeared on his 1984 album Retired Boxer. Johnston showed up at the offices of the Austin Chronicle and gave a copy of the cassette to editor Louis Black. Black was one of the founders of South by Southwest and copies ended up in the hands of David Byrne, Jeff Tweedy and Kurt Cobain.

Johnston performed at venues in and around Austin. He played short sets then ran offstage and hid. He slowly built a following though some crowd members thought he was mentally retarded or that his songs were a prank. Jeff Tartakov, an old college friend, became his manager and submitted Johnston’s music to record labels.

In 1985, Johnston had a mental health episode on the University of Texas campus. He walked into a stream and began preaching the gospel. The police arrived and had Johnston committed. Tartakov contacted the mental hospital and a nurse told him, “He’s suffering from two delusions. One is the Russians are going invade Texas on New Year’s Day, and the second is that he’s going to be on MTV next week.” Tartakov replied, “Well one of those is true.” That week Johnston was featured on an episode of MTV’s The Cutting Edge.

Johnston was pumped full of drugs and released from the mental health facility. He burned his belongings and then beat up Tartakov with a lead pipe, putting his manager in the hospital. Johnston’s parents intervened and flew Johnston back home to West Virginia. Johnston fired Tartakov and Johnston’s father Bill, a WWII fighter pilot, took over managerial duties.

Despite knowledge of Johnston’s fragile mental health, record companies engaged in a bidding war to sign him. Elektra was interested but Johnston turned them down since they handled Metallica, a band Johnston believed was an agent of Satan. In 1988, he signed with Homestead Records.

While recording in New York City with Mark Kramer (who’d produced Ween and the Butthole Surfers), Johnston was arrested at the Statue of Liberty for drawing Christian fish (“ichthys”) on the inner stairwell. Police tried to have him committed but he ran away. He traveled to the funeral home owned by Laurie’s husband in Maryland and shouted obscenities from the sidewalk. A 68-year-old woman opened a second-story window and told him to shut up. Johnston broke into the woman’s apartment and chased her around believing she was possessed by Satan. The woman jumped out the second-story window and broke both her legs.

Johnston’s mental health continued to deteriorate. In March 1990, he played at the Austin Music Awards. His father agreed to fly them home in his two-seater Cessna. Daniel was reading a Casper the Friendly Ghost comic in the plane with a cover image of Casper in a parachute. At 6500 feet, Daniel felt nauseous and told his father he was going to be sick. Daniel reached over, grabbed the plane keys and threw them out the window.

The plane spun out of control. Daniel yelled for them to “bail out.” Bill aimed for a clearing beyond a thicket of trees. Without power, the plane came up short and crashed into the trees. Somehow Daniel and his father survived with minor injuries. A farmer witnessed the crash and tried to help. Bill screamed, “Stay away, he’s out of his mind.” It was later determined Daniel was in the midst of a psychotic episode. He believed he was Captain America and that Satan had convinced his father to kill them both. Daniel was remitted to a mental hospital once again.

Johnston’s painful struggles with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia took over his life. He took anti-depressants and his weight ballooned out of control. He told people he had “a pain in his brain that feels like it will crush him.” He continued writing songs and drawing illustrations and then signed with Atlantic Records in 1994. After one album, the label dropped him because they didn’t know how to market him. For the next 20 years, Johnston made music with more than a dozen record labels.

In 2017, Johnston’s father died. Johnston crumbled and was forcibly hospitalized. His older brother Dick took over managerial duties. Dick scheduled a “final tour” in several cities. In New Orleans, Johnston walked off stage after two songs without explanation. At the Vic Theatre in Chicago, Johnston appeared in sweatpants and a t-shirt, his arms shaking from medication. His backing band was led by Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy. Without acknowledging the audience, Johnston dove into his 1982 song “The Story of an Artist.”

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.
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.

Johnston released 20 albums in his lifetime. He had no hit records or singles, but his songs were covered by Beck, Spiritualized, Wilco, Tom Waits, Mercury Rev, Lana Del Rey, Bright Eyes, Flaming Lips and Eddie Vedder. In a 2019 interview with Rolling Stone Johnston said, “I forgot to grow up, I guess. I’m a simple kind of guy, just like a child, drawing pictures and making up songs, playing around all the time.”

In September 2019, Johnston suffered from kidney problems. A day after being released from the hospital, he was found dead in his Waller, Texas home from a suspected heart attack. He was 58.