Daniel Johnston entered the wider public consciousness when Nirvana's Kurt Cobain appeared at the 1992 MTV awards wearing a Daniel Johnston T-shirt featuring a line drawing of a frog-like creature with eyeballs on stalks and the slogan 'Hi, how are you?'. It was the artwork from a demo tape Johnston had made in his bedroom as a teenager in the early 1980s.
The son of respectable, middle-class Christian parents from Texas, the precocious Daniel gets heavily into music, comic books, home movies and a girl called Laurie. These might seem like the staples of any American adolescence, but as he shoots to fame via MTV and the fledgling grunge scene, he begins to lose his grip on reality and finds himself heading for manic depression, drug use, violence, religious fanaticism and a life spent in and out of mental institutions.
Director Jeff Feuerzeig has sifted through hundreds of hours of Johnston's tapes and spliced key moments together. He breaks up Johnston's own often creepy narrative by placing interviews with Daniel's long-suffering parents, his brothers and sisters, his manager, the editor of the local paper and even the singer of the Butthole Surfers, who were playing the night Daniel first took LSD in 1986 and 'freaked out'.
Johnston's voice is thin, quavering and tuneless, and his guitar playing choppy and basic. His lyrics reflect his obsessions with cartoon characters such as Casper the Friendly Ghost and Captain America, but there are also painful love songs, inspired by Laurie, who married an undertaker. Johnston often cries and breaks down on stage - to the delight of the early 90s music scene.
Louis Black, editor of the 'Austin Chronicle', which named Johnston Best Folk Singer, says about Johnston's music: 'Sometimes it was godawful, sometimes it was unbelievably brilliant. Sometimes it wasn't there. Sometimes there was too much there.'
Incredibly, Johnston plays at CBGBs and gets a slot on an MTV show in 1985. 'It really happened, I am on MTV!' he says. But after the LSD episode at the Butthole Surfers gig in 1986 he becomes increasingly disturbed, and by the end of the year has put his manager in hospital with concussion after whacking him with a lead pipe.
Kathy McCarthy, a fellow singer who was Daniel's girlfriend for a short time, says: 'At first I thought he was almost angelic, but after one or two weeks I realised something was dreadfully wrong with him. Something that wasn't angelic and pure and naive and beautiful.'
On TV
First Shown
| Date | Time | Channel |
|---|---|---|
| Saturday 01 January 2005 | Channel 4 |
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