Speeding Motorcycle

by Austin Powell With a vintage video camera perched on his left shoulder, a 25-year-old Daniel Johnston stares solemnly into a mirror. “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 about my condition and the other world.”

This haunting sequence opens Jeff Feuerzeig’s award-winning documentary, The Devil and Daniel Johnston, released last year by Sony Pictures Classics. The film is a magnificent, but often disturbing, glimpse into the artist’s complex mind, portraying Johnston’s troubled life story—from his sketches and cassettes to his cult-stardom and subsequent fall from grace—through his own tape recordings and homemade movies. The black-and-white end credits reveal an even more chilling image: present-day Johnston—overweight and graying—floating about his home in a Casper the Friendly Ghost costume.

Encapsulated by these ideas and images of death, the documentary presents Johnston as a living ghost, whose revered childlike innocence, creativity and vulnerability, the hallmark of his art and music, has become tainted with time and deteriorated through mental illness and drug abuse, blurring the lines between brilliance and dementia.

That sentiment is also reflected on the cover of the subject’s The Late Great Daniel Johnston: Discovered Covered, a two-disc set released in 2004 where Johnson’s original work is reincarnated by artists like Beck, Tom Waits, Bright Eyes and Death Cab for Cutie. There Johnston stands before his own freshly covered grave. The tombstone is inscribed “Sorry Entertainer.” The lyrics for that particular song make for an appropriate eulogy: “Drove those demons out of my head / With an organ and a pencil full of lead.”

Currently collapsed into a worn recliner in his living room in Waller, Texas, far removed from external pressures, Johnston’s hands tremble as he takes another drag of his cigarette, a side effect of a new medication he’s trying to treat his long-standing bipolar disorder. As ash drops onto his gray T-shirt, it’s evident his mind is elsewhere. A bowl of half-sucked grape lollipops rests beside a growing pile of cigarette butts.

Do you remember all of the songs you’ve ever written? Johnston’s eyes search the walls for something to distract his focus. “Sure. Sure,” he says, without thinking.

All of them? He directs his attention toward a stack of paintings leaning against the wall. The first portrait is an updated version of his infamous frog illustration, asking, “Hi, how are you now?” Johnston finally responds, “Well, I’ve got tapes of them.”

Soon after, he leads the way to his parent’s home next door and into their two-car garage, which is cluttered with pop culture artifacts, recalling the claustrophobic cover to 1993’s Artistic Vice. The room is actually a replication of Johnston’s old studio at his former residence in West Virginia. It feels like a movie set, every comic book and toy an essential prop, further adding to Johnston’s mystique.

The artist plays his part well, turning to face the camera before pounding a few chords with one hand on his old piano, which is badly out of tune. Then he sits down at his desk, lights another cigarette, and glances one last time at the camera.

Daniel Johnston may now be a mere shadow of his former self, but Feuerzeig’s documentary has ironically given his career a second life. Kramer, the infamous Butthole Surfer who produced Johnston’s 1990, which featured members of Sonic Youth, recently released I Killed the Monster on his Second Shimmy label. The 21-band tribute album features modern indie giants like Sufjan Stevens and Daniel Smith songs, mirroring Johnston’s earlier embrace by artists like Yo La Tengo, Kurt Cobain and the Dead Milkman.

Last year, his family-run label Eternal Yip Eye Music released Welcome to My World: The Music of Daniel Johnston, a greatest hits collection, and reissued Yip/Jump Music: Summer of 1983, while Bar/None Records re-released Kathy McCarthy’s revelatory tribute, Dead Dog’s Eyeball: Songs of Daniel Johnston in 2005. And, more than two decades after originally being featured on MTV’s “Cutting Edge,” the station broadcasted the songwriter live during his last tour in Canada. “I played two new songs,” Johnston beams during a recent phone conversation. “It was a lot of fun.”

The recent re-releases serve as a perfect time capsule for Johnston’s early career: his lo-fi acoustic and organ-based recordings retain their oddly intriguing intimacy as he squeals his tales of good and evil, his unrequited love for Laurie—his high school sweetheart who married an undertaker—and his admiration of The Beatles.

Johnston’s artwork, meanwhile, is more popular than ever, and has been displayed at both the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Clementine Gallery in New York, as well as countless other galleries around the world. Following the success of Infernal Bridegroom Productions’ 2006 rock opera, Speeding Motorcycle, loosely based on Johnston’s life and lyrics, Daniel’s brother and co-manager Dick says there’s now talk of a possible biopic in the future.