The Devil and Daniel Johnston

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,

to tell you about my condition,

and the other world.

Ladies and gentlemen.

The best singer/songwriter alive today,

Daniel Johnston.

We love you, Daniel!

He was different.

I noticed that from the start that Dan was different.

I had him on a crib in our little bedroom

and I would go in and talk to him, change his diaper,

and I would squeal at him and he would squeal back at me.

That's a small baby communicating, I thought.

Being, uh, six years younger than his four brothers and sisters,

he was pampered by them.

And, uh, they nursed him along.

But we didn't notice at that time

that there was any special talents involved or anything.

When he went to school, they tested the kids,

and Dan was put in the highest group of the highest class.

His teacher was really mad at him and it's understandable

because Dan doesn't follow directions.

You know, when he was in junior high,

he suddenly lost all his wonderful confidence,

and I guess it was the beginning of his illness.

He and his brother decided to make their own movie.

And it was a collaborative effort between the two brothers working together.

And Dan had to change clothes and pretend to be his mother.

Because his mother and I weren't in the movie actually.

Tell about it, Mabel.

Dan is the director and the actor

portraying himself in parts

and his horrible mother in other parts.

I think he was having fun teasing me.

What do you think, Bill?

Yeah, he--he was doin' it for humor.

You are real lazy. Wake up.

Dan's hard to deal with sometimes.

He thought, "I'm artistic. I shouldn't have to do those things."

Time to get up and get ready for school.

Get up in there, breakfast is ready.

He wanted to be comic all the time. He just couldn't get over it.

Okay.

They were having too good a time.

I don't think his relationship with me was typical.

Do you suppose he really pictured me that way?

This is ridiculous, what they're showing.

I think it's popcorn and green Kool-Aid.

He was a trial.

I was sort of the star art guy at the high school.

Oak Glen High School.

And I started hearing rumors of this new art guy, the new art star.

You know, the--the new kid in town,

I had to find out who this was.

A friend of mine told me, "There's this kid, Dan Johnston,

"he can really draw, he's a musician or something."

So he kind of had one up on me, he was a musician.

The guy is a natural, an absolute natural.

He never even had to learn to draw.

He just got better from great.

You know, I had to hang out with this guy.

I had to be around this art.

So we just started hanging out and doing art together, actually.

The eyeball thing was sort of like his intro calling card.

Did it touch you emotionally?

It was his mysterious entry.

It's definitely different.

I'm speechless.

Everybody was, "Who's the eyeball guy?"

You know, he was painting these eyeballs everywhere.

He would actually draw on walls all over the high school.

I thought Dan's was very imaginative.

Daniel, he just exudes art.

He--He can't stop making art.

He never sits and thinks, what am I gonna do?

He just grabs something.

He wasn't buyin' them for comic books,

he was buying them for the artwork that was involved on the comics.

And some of the artists were his incentive

to try to be an artist himself.

They were an inspiration to him.

Now talk about the cinema of Daniel Johnston, then.

He doesn't have influences.

He doesn't sit down and consciously watch Chaplin

and then learn, or this is my Keaton period.

It's not like that. He doesn't even know who these guys are.

You know, he gets a Super 8 and he makes a movie.

Dan took himself seriously.

He, for some reason, thought he was going to be

an artist because probably of the attention he got.

The family room would sometimes be almost full of kids

and one of them told me that he's gonna be famous someday.

And I thought, that silly stuff, you know?

He lived in the basement of his parents' house.

They got this perfectly normal ranch house out in the country

behind New Cumberland.

He's got this amazing lab,

like this amazing factory downstairs.

He's turned a garage and two sort of utility rooms

into a bedroom and an art factory,

and he's just got everywhere, magazines, tapes.

In fact, he's recreated it in Waller, where he lives today.

It's a duplicate of the same room.

They're sort of like this

Christian fundamentalist Glass Family.

They're creative, they're intellectual,

but there's this, like, West Virginia, kind of right-wing Christian thing.

Daniel wasn't havin' any of it.

Spiritually he was separated from them,

socially, every other way he was gone from them.

But at the same time he was of them,

in the sense that he had certain material to draw from.

Bill and I both thought he was

doing too much concentrating on the art

and the music and he wasn't

having a well rounded life.

She would constantly try to get him, "Go to church and save yourself,"

and he just would have none of it.

He'd go to church, even, but he wouldn't participate.

He'd go to church so he could stare at the girls,

try to find a girlfriend.

Literally, all he cared about was making art and being John Lennon,

and his parents' rules were in the way of that.

All he wanted them to do was just

keep the lights on, keep the power on so he could draw.

Dan was getting to be a problem.

And he wanted to do everything

but he didn't want to do any of his chores,

like help mow the lawn, or wash the car,

or any of those things that I thought he was lackin' in training,

and I had to settle that.

Every bit of the-- of the supposed persecution

that Daniel portrays in early music was there,

but, um, but I'm not saying it was without provocation.

He did it. He brought it on himself.

He--He would cause it

to tape record, to film.

Many, many times, Mabel would open the basement stairs door

and she used to call him an unprofitable servant.

"You're an unprofitable servant of the Lord.

"You need to leave the house and get a job."

He turned it, he used to call himself an unserviceable prophet.

I really didn't like it when he put...

He taped me giving him what for.

I didn't think he would do that.

She would really harangue him and, uh, and he--he, um...

It was hard on him. It was.

But he's this sort of like,

coal burning in the basement, you know,

and it's heating up the whole house,

and they're just going insane from it.

So the whole place is just going wild

because he's just such a problem.

When the problem became apparent