Dueling with the Demons

The documentary The Devil and Daniel Johnston reveals the ghost of a musical genius, in a life-long battle with his monsters.
by Steven Chen

You are 29 years old with no money, no girlfriend, and no home to call your own, but things could be worse. You could be 14,000 feet high in a plane with no power, tucked into a nosedive. You could have done this to yourself-thrown the keys out the window and pointed the aircraft straight down. You could be a manic depressed musical genius, beloved by your fans, misunderstood by everyone else. You could be a ghost. You could be all of these things. You could be Daniel Johnston.

As the legend goes, the notoriously off-kilter singer-songwriter had just wowed audiences at 1990’s South By Southwest Music Festival in Austin by summoning, as he’s known to do, a gut-level longing deep in himself and the thousands who would honor him with a standing ovation. His slipshod guitar, childlike devotion and secret melodies had earned him a pedestal in the Austin indie scene and beyond-but he wasn’t well. On the flight home, Johnston yanked the key from the ignition of the small, private plane piloted by his father, Bill, and promptly tossed it into oblivion. There was a struggle, and eventually the elder Johnston-an experienced WWII flying ace-was able to ditch the plane into a cluster of trees, miraculously saving both their lives. The plane was not so fortunate.

It’s an unsettling scene told by a tearful Bill Johnston from the critically acclaimed new documentary by Jeff Feuerzeig, The Devil and Daniel Johnston, which took home best directing honors for documentary at Sundance last year. Before beginning work on the film, Feuerzeig surmised that the crash was a deliberate attempt on the part of Johnston to immortalize himself. “I figured Daniel, knowing his obsession with fame, would want to, after his most heroic comeback show, go out on a high and crash the plane on purpose. It’s Buddy Holly, the Day the Music Died,” he says. The theory was reasonable enough, except for the fact that Johnston comes off as anything but, and that premeditation seems to always take a backseat to the devil wherever he’s concerned. Feuerzeig uses that word in the title of the film as a metaphor for the manic depression that has dogged the artist all his life; but for the deeply religious Johnston, it’s nothing so clinical. “He thought he was Casper the Friendly Ghost,” Feuerzeig soon discovered. “He saw himself as a Christian warrior, and he wasn’t trying to kill his dad. He was trying to save his dad from the devil, Satan.”

It was during a one-hour radio broadcast from a West Virginia mental hospital (one of several that Johnston visited) that the possibility of a Daniel Johnston film first struck Feuerzeig. He was listening to New York’s WFMU when they ceded the air to Johnston via phone. Feuerzeig knew he was gifted musically, if a bit off his rocker, but the show was something else: an elaborate, imaginatively staged comedy routine, complete with skits, voices, and singing. It was sharp, and more surprisingly, it was funny. Jump ahead 10 years to 2000, when Feuerzeig found out the reclusive Johnston had at last reemerged for a tour. He quickly got to work.

The idea was to create a portrait of an artist-a portrait of “madness and creativity”-that stood apart from the ‘rock documentary’ genre, in that here was something grander and deserving of more serious examination. Feuerzeig had done the rock doc thing years earlier with 1993’s Half Japanese: The Band That Would Be King. Not only that, but he deemed anything smacking of Behind the Music’s formulaic celebrity commentary shtick contemptible and out of the question. His reasoning: “I’m not gonna like somebody because Bono tells me to like them,” he says. “As a matter of fact, that makes me not like them. I think people should be able to make up their own minds, and I think that they should confront the music and art of Daniel Johnston directly, just like I did.” He aimed for Devil to be about Johnston, the person, told by the subject, his family and close friends-those who truly cared for him. He set out for the sleepy town of Waller, Texas-land of fast food and God-where Johnston lives today under the care of his parents.

The first problem turned out to be Johnston himself, who proved incapable of narrating his own story. Now 45 (though he looks closer to 55) and much heavier, he spends each day in a loop, drinking slushies, buying comics and Beatles albums, and rehearsing occasionally with his new band, Danny and the Nightmares. Then he stays up all night listening to Beatles bootlegs, surrounded by illustrations of his favorite characters: King Kong, Marilyn Monroe, Frankenstein, and of course, Casper the Friendly Ghost, about whom he’s written a song (featured famously in the Larry Clark film, Kids). The next day, the cycle repeats itself. It reminds Feuerzeig of Bill Murray’s character in Groundhog Day, except in this case, Johnston seems oblivious. When he talks, he’s like an old vet telling war stories, and aside from one line in the movie, Feuerzeig was unable to salvage any of his interviews with Johnston.

“I shot hours and hours and days of Daniel Johnston contemporary interviews that I’ve thrown in the garbage. I gave [him] the chance to host his own film. He couldn’t do it. He’s not well. He’s heavily medicated and those interviews are horrible,” explains Feuerzeig. “Daniel is not really the best person, now, to be able to tell his own story. He doesn’t even remember half of it.” The character of Casper is significant, Feuerzeig believes, because he sees Johnston as a ghost of his former self. The film even opens with him introducing himself as “the ghost of Daniel Johnston.”

Yet, he cautions against those who peg Johnston as an idiot savant or outsider artist. A fan boy with a vast, encyclopedic knowledge of music and a former art school kid, Johnston, he says, is always “the smartest person in the room” and “the ultimate insider.” In watching the film, there’s no question that he plotted consciously and constantly to become a famous artist and wrote tremendously sophisticated material on the piano and guitar, effortlessly creating his own signature sound, to be imitated by countless others. He fed songs to tapes very much in the moment and left the results as they were, hiss and all. In fact, lo-fi loyalists may have to admit that it was Johnston who invented it all.

His early basement tapes recorded in 1983-Yip/Jump Music and Hi, How Are You?-sound as if they might’ve been plucked from the indie/alternative explosion of the early ’90s, when authenticity was gold. Beautiful and shaky, they sound exactly as they were-imagined and committed to tape in the heat of the moment. According to Feuerzeig, a typical songwriting session might begin outside, with Johnston humming a melody. He would then come inside, lay down a verse on the piano, and then go back outside to the repeat the process until a song was complete.

“Then, if you’re lucky, one dry run of the song. It’s done, and then he’s onto the next song,” Feuerzeig says. “I’ve heard all the outtakes-we’re talking thousands of songs-and I’ve understood how his process is. And I’ve seen the notebooks. It goes right down, verse for verse, line for line. He doesn’t edit and change lines. I’ve seen this, okay? That’s how I know he’s a genius, whether you like the music or not. Pages and pages, stacks of notebooks, and they go down, And very rarely do you see a little cross-out of a line or a word.”

When the ’90s did roll around, Johnston gained national attention as bands like Sonic Youth and Pearl Jam began to talk about him. His songs appeared in My So Called Life and Larry Clark’s Kids, and for a period Kurt Cobain wore nothing but a Daniel Johnston “Hi, How Are You?” T-shirt. To date, his songs have been covered by no less than David Bowie, Tom Waits, Beck, Wilco, and more than a hundred other bands and musicians.

Johnston was also incessantly self-promoting. While working at McDonald’s in Austin during the early ’80s, he built buzz by employing the ingenious tactic of dropping his cassettes into the to-go bags of pretty girls and hip musicians. And when MTV’s new music show, Cutting Edge, rolled into town, Johnston was there to talk his way onto national television.

In his lyrics he’s eloquent and thoughtful, even as words gush out of him unedited, which makes whatever goes on in his mind even more intriguing and unfathomable. His music is touching and his sentiments-in song anyway-are lucid. In “The Story of an Artist,” he sums it up for you: “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/Everyone and friends and family/Saying, ‘Hey get a job/Why do you only do that only/Why are you so odd/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.’”

In his film, Feuerzeig paints a Southern landscape of passing time and mental health, stretching from the slow drag of 1960s West Virginia, to the inner sanctum of the Johnston family, to the tirelessly churning basement that housed an adolescent, unruly Johnston. He goes further still into Johnston’s uncontainable mind, spilling back out onto paper, into the Austin music scene, various hospitals, New York, and everywhere else. (For some of these journeys, Johnston collaborated with Feuerzeig, helping to art-direct the film’s recreations.) Everywhere he went, Johnston left behind him a wake of desperation and admiration, both of which got more severe as time went on. His family bore the worst of it, as the film shows in close-ups and long interviews with weary but loving parents, Bill and Mabel. Meanwhile, Johnston’s best friend David Thornberry is one of a handful who provide the other perspective: the rising art star with creativity gushing from his pores like a sickness. It’s clear early on that his genius and madness spew from the same place.

A lot of this story sounds almost made up to create a kind of lore. Daniel Johnston purposely crashed a plane into a tree. He ran away from home to work at a carnival. He frightened an elderly woman into jumping out of her window. He beat his manager over the head with a lead pipe. He got arrested for drawing thousands of Jesus fish inside the Statue of Liberty.

Fortunately, Johnston obsessively documented his life, not only in song and illustration, but with brilliant eight-millimeter home movies and hundreds of audiocassettes, providing an orgy of material-a wet dream for any documentarian. Despite another bit of Johnston lore involving a manic phase in the ’80s, during which he burned and destroyed master tapes and art, Feuerzeig was able to accumulate a treasure trove of this recorded material from family and friends, which he uses to mesmerizing effect in The Devil and Daniel Johnston. They include audio tapes of Johnston’s mother lecturing him as a teenager, cassette letters he’d sent to friends, phone conversations, and a lifetime of private moments collected over the years in the form of monologues and songs filling stacks and stacks of 90-minute tapes. The tape recording of the Statue of Liberty arrest is an especially precious tidbit.

Considering the mountain of transcriptions Feuerzeig needed to scale, you can understand how the project took four and a half years to complete. When he finally began laying out the film, he found the audio so compelling that he first assembled an all-audio radio play before putting together the visuals to accompany it. Sound alone provided the foundation of the film, from which everything else followed. “Audio, in many ways, is much more important than a picture in telling a story,” he stresses. “And if the audio tape is rolling during a manic phase or when you’re being arrested or when you’re having a telephone conversation, or your most intimate thoughts into your diary are going down, then, guess what? That’s about as close to the truth as you’re ever gonna get.”

So if getting Johnston to narrate was an impossibility, then Feuerzeig managed to drape the guy’s internal monologue throughout the movie. “It’s sort of like Terrence Malick’s great film, Badlands, where there’s that Sissy Spacek internal monologue-I love that-or what Paul Schrader and Scorsese did in Taxi Driver. I love the use of internal monologue in cinema, and I always wanted to do that. Daniel gave me that opportunity to do that in this film, and I had never seen that in a documentary before.”

In the case of Laurie Allen-Johnston’s lifelong muse-Feuerzeig opted for restraint, choosing to preserve her as a memory frozen in Johnston’s mind. He offers no image other than Johnston’s own, filmed ages ago on super eight. For Johnston’s fans, Allen is the ultimate curiosity, the girl that inspired hundreds of songs. He met her when he was young, in art school, and gave himself to her instantly. At one point, he got her to say “I love you, Danny” on tape. Never mind that she was already taken. That she was taken by an undertaker (whom she’d later marry) was more fodder for Johnston, to later become yet another, perfect, poetic piece of lore spurring songs about loss and funeral homes.

“Laurie’s the Mona Lisa,” says Feuerzeig matter-of-factly. “When we see in that film that Laurie’s blowing those kisses and being so flirtatious, you realize that Daniel was a goner. Any girl that would do that to you, forget about it. You’re over. You’re done. Game, set, and match. You’re in love, and he was in love.” Note: wait for the DVD to watch the long-overdue reunion between Johnston and Allen, who has since divorced the undertaker. Feuerzeig notes that “Daniel proposed marriage no less than three times.”

These days, Johnston’s fans across the globe (he has growing followings in Scandinavia, Germany, Japan, and the U.K.) are a devout bunch not unlike Beach Boys fans at a Brian Wilson performance of Pet Sounds or Smile. Audiences understand that they’re in the presence of the real deal-a true singer-songwriter, nothing short of a Bob Dylan or Elvis Costello.

“They hang on every word and every spittle-laden lisp,” says Feuerzeig. “There’s nothing perfect about the show. It’s like a high wire act without a net. And you don’t know if he’s gonna fall or not. And some of those songs, and his art, they just sort of hold together and hang on for dear life, and that edge of fragility is what makes him unique and different and special from other people’s art and music.”

There’s something of that frailty in his personal life as well. Feuerzeig likens it to the documentary Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser, in which Monk relies on women in the jazz scene to adopt and take care of him. “Sometimes our mad geniuses can’t take care of themselves,” Feuerzeig explains, and so Johnston continues to live with his parents in Waller. Invariably, after each screening of Devil, one or two people with manic depression in their own families will approach Feuerzeig and thank him for portraying the plight of Bill and Mabel Johnston. For regular fans, it’s easy to marvel at Johnston’s wild stories from an enjoyable distance, but those who have dealt with manic depression bring to the film another kind of appreciation, for his parents who have amazingly kept it all together. They thank the director for presenting the experience truthfully and for not judging it.

There are also the roles of Johnston’s father and his brother Dick in managing his art career, as well as his ex-manager and friend Jeff Tartakov, who acts as a gatekeeper outside of the family for hundreds of other illustrations. Over the past few years, Johnston has begun to be recognized by the art world and has watched prices for his artwork climb steadily higher (if he’s watching at all). At the moment, the Clementine Gallery in New York is offering the first-ever retrospective of his work, reaching back over the past 30 years to showcase his drawings of Captain America, Casper the Friendly Ghost, frogs, torsos, and other beloved characters. Meanwhile, the Whitney Museum of American Art has included him in its 2006 Biennial.

“Now, The New York Times and everybody has to reevaluate Daniel Johnston,” Feuerzeig says, “because it was only a year and a half ago that he was in the Times, and he was the poster child for outsider art and outsider music. Well now [the Times] has to change their tune, and I love that. And the film definitely tells you that Daniel Johnston is a fine artist. And now his art is being shown in galleries all over the world.”

Similarly, one thing Feuerzeig set out to do with this film was to elevate Johnston and to surround him with a powerful narrative that would encircle audiences as completely as any fictional film. The advantage with documentary is its ability to capitalize on the nuances and minutiae of events simply because they’re true. Little moments become big moments, and with the right story, so many things bring you to the edge of your seat.

One of Feuerzeig’s favorite instances in the film is when a young Johnston returns home from work at Six Flags Astroworld in Houston, turns on the tape recorder, and says very quietly, “Just got home from Astroworld. Mom sent me a package today.” It’s clearly unimportant and beyond inconsequential. Still, “everyone in the audience leans forward because they want to hear what he’s whispering.” LAA

“The Devil and Daniel Johnston” enters select theaters on Friday, March 31st.