Daniel Johnston
A singer-songwriter and visual artist who recorded on a $59 boombox, handed out cassettes in Austin, and whose "True Love Will Find You in the End" closes the 1984 tape Retired Boxer.
Boombox, Austin and the tapes
Daniel Dale Johnston was born on January 22, 1961 in Sacramento, California, and grew up in New Cumberland, West Virginia. In the late 1970s he began recording songs, voice with piano and chord organ, on a $59 Sanyo mono boombox. He attended Kent State's East Liverpool art program and recorded Songs of Pain and More Songs of Pain before making Yip/Jump Music and Hi, How Are You in 1983 in a family garage and in San Marcos, Texas. In April 1984 he moved to Austin with a carnival, worked a corn dog stand and then McDonald's, and handed out tapes. Retired Boxer, recorded in Austin in December 1984, was the first album he made there.
MTV's The Cutting Edge featured him in 1985 in a piece on Austin's new sincerity scene. 1990 (1990), his first professional recording, was made with Mark Kramer at Noise New York, and It's Spooky (1989) with Jad Fair. In 1993 Kurt Cobain was photographed in a Hi, How Are You frog T-shirt and listed Yip/Jump Music among his favorite albums, and a frog mural was painted on the wall of Sound Exchange in Austin that year. He signed to Atlantic in February 1994 after turning down an Elektra offer; Fun, produced by Paul Leary, came out in September 1994, and Atlantic dropped him in June 1996.
Tributes and the last years
Kathy McCarty's Dead Dog's Eyeball (1994) covered 19 of his songs, and The Late Great Daniel Johnston: Discovered Covered (2004) gathered covers by Tom Waits, Beck, TV on the Radio, Eels, Bright Eyes, Death Cab for Cutie and the Flaming Lips. The documentary The Devil and Daniel Johnston, directed by Jeff Feuerzeig, premiered at Sundance in January 2005 and won its documentary directing award; it was released in the US on March 31, 2006. Later records include Is and Always Was (October 6, 2009), Beam Me Up! (2010) and Space Ducks (2012), an album and a comic. Matt Groening chose him to play ATP at Minehead in May 2010. A final tour of twelve concerts in fall 2017 had him backed at each by bands influenced by him, among them the Districts, Modern Baseball, Beirut and Built to Spill; Chicago 2017, recorded at the Vic with Jeff Tweedy, was released in 2020.
He died on or about September 11, 2019, aged 58, in Waller, Texas. The Hi, How Are You Project is a nonprofit inspired by his Austin mural. His frog mural stands as a wall after the building was razed in April 2023.
Albums
- Retired Boxer 1984 · Self-released
His seventh self-released cassette: nine songs on a consumer tape player, closing with a guitar song.
Songs
- True Love Will Find You in the End Retired Boxer · 1984
A two-minute song on acoustic guitar that closes Retired Boxer and has been covered by Wilco, Beck and Spiritualized.
Sources
- Daniel Johnston, Wikipedia
- Retired Boxer, Wikipedia
- The Devil and Daniel Johnston, Wikipedia
- Hi, How Are You Project, Hi, How Are You Project