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True Love Will Find You: My Afternoon in Daniel Johnston’s Dining Room

Johnston’s instrumental arrangements and shrill vocal style satisfied a primitive urge in me.

Devil Town

I’m not sure who had the idea to start with the phone book. At one point in time, that would have been the obvious thing to do. But we were born in the nineties. We remember the phone book, sure, but we might be the last generation who does. The White Pages became a sacred text that afternoon as we sat in the contradictory cold of a midsummer Texas truck stop, wondering if it was going to be this easy to pull off.

Like most teenagers who know about Daniel Johnston, we learned about his life through the 2005 documentary, The Devil and Daniel Johnston. In the glow of a suburban Missouri basement sleepover, we watched as Daniel grew up: from weirdo high school art stud to indie-folk darling of Austin, Texas; from inept McDonald’s hamburger-flipper to underground icon.

We learned that he used only a cheap boombox to make his recordings, a device that captured the low hum of his electric chord organ at the same level as his voice, lending his songs a signature lo-fi undercurrent. We watched his love for high school crush Laurie Allen grow into an obsession. We knew she would never return his affections. We journeyed through numerous mental health episodes, like when he hit his manager in the head with a lead pipe, or when he threw the keys of his father’s private airplane out the window mid-flight. We sat in awe as, all the while, the innocent genius continued to produce album after album, drawing after drawing. His artistic output grew until it became an inadvertent shrine to brutal artistic honesty—the type of honesty you could only achieve if you truly didn’t know any better.

Because of the documentary, we also knew he lived in the house next door to his parents in a small Texas town called Waller. We knew that because of his mental illnesses, everything went through them. We also knew that, though he was a legend to us, he was stuck somewhere between fame and obscurity—the type of celebrity that maybe, just maybe, would give a sliver of a weekday afternoon to four dehydrated and exhausted young admirers, a week into their first real tour as a real punk band, learning that it was easier than it seemed to just make the things they wanted to happen, happen.

Walking the Cow

The air conditioning was okay, but we’d grown fond of the heat—bare backs pressed against soggy nylon van-seat upholstery. We embraced inconvenience because it gave us a greater sense of purpose. We weren’t out there to be comfortable. We certainly weren’t out to spend money on anything personally gratifying, like Freon. Music was always first, but freedom was a close second. Freedom from convenience, from materialism, from anything we couldn’t make for ourselves.

By seventeen years old, I’d lost interest in most kinds of pleasure, and put most of my energy into defying the types of pleasure that normal people seemed to need in order to be happy. This included, among other things: van A/C, showering, sleeping on mattresses, sleeping inside, and shoes without holes.

We kept our cell phones, though. Mostly so we could get ahold of our moms if we needed to, or the promoter of the next show, if we were running late. There might have been a payphone at the truck stop, but our cell phones came in handy when we opened the phone book to “Johnston” and found a list of ten or so numbers. We decided to try one at a time, and put Josh in charge. He was our vocalist, the most practiced in navigating conversations with strangers. On speakerphone, Josh dialed seven or eight wrong numbers. Each time, he said “Hi, is Daniel there?” and when they said “Wrong number” he apologized and moved to the next.

On the last try—Johnston, William—a female voice said, “This is his sister speaking.”

“Actually,” Josh started in. “I’m calling because I’m in a traveling rock and roll band—” He simplified our situation without admitting that we were four kids playing to roughly nine people a night: independent band, all really big fans of Daniel’s, passing through Waller with a full day off between Houston and Austin, and if at all possible, would love the chance to meet him.

Josh must have been charming because Marjory Johnston passed the phone to Bill Johnston, who said he’d talk it over with Daniel and Daniel’s mom—we should call back tomorrow at noon to see about setting up a time to meet. He took our names.

We slept in the van that night—the big red monster we called Nixon, or Tricky Dick: perhaps an unconscious nod to its sometimes sly and devious mannerisms, but we never put that much thought into it. Dick had been around for three decades; we’d had him for three months. Early on, somebody spray-painted him red for Kansas City Chiefs games. He had a topper, so you could stand up inside, or stack drum cases vertically to maximize space for speaker cabinets and sleeping bags. The middle row of seats had been taken out, which meant more room for gear, but less room for people. Most of the time, “sleeping in the van” meant two people still had to sleep outside.

One morning in Northwest Arkansas, after spending the night in a Walmart parking lot, I was awoken to a cadence of “Y’all all right?”—echoing as if in a dream. Realizing I wasn’t dreaming, I opened my eyes just wide enough to see a man with a Walmart vest and a clipboard standing over me, repeating the same phrase over and over. I pretended to sleep, thinking eventually Josh would perk up and deal with it. Eventually, I sat up. The man looked at me funny and changed his tune: “We got to move some mulch over here.” He gestured to a trailer filled with bags of mulch, waiting to take our place. “Y’all all right?” he said one more time, just to be sure.

“Yeah,” I said. “We just got in really late.” We rolled up our sleeping bags and left without another word.

Man Obsessed

Bill figured it would be all right if we stopped by. But we couldn’t be late. He was very clear about this. Two o’clock on the dot.

Waller, Texas is a town of about two thousand people. One of them is Daniel Johnston, who has written a remarkably high percentage of my favorite songs. There’s not much to separate Waller from the hundreds of other towns sprinkled along southern state highways. It sits between Houston and Austin, if you take the long way on US-290. The landscape is fuzzy and gray—an old blurred photograph tucked between two crisp images.

The Johnstons live a little bit outside of town. We followed the GPS over some train tracks and came upon two modest homes sitting side by side. One of them was the address we’d plugged into the GPS; the other, we guessed, must be Daniel’s.

When I first heard Daniel’s music, the most interesting thing to me wasn’t his mental illness. It wasn’t his surreal and honest lyrics. The thing that compelled me most was that he couldn’t really play any instruments—or at least he maintained the illusion that he couldn’t play. From the clanking, fractured chord changes of his Magnus chord organ to the half-muted, bent-out-of-tune strains of his guitar playing, his instrumental arrangements, together with his carefree and shrill vocal style, satisfied a primitive urge in me—a hunger formerly fed with Black Flag and Sonic Youth. At seventeen, I was more bored than I’d ever be again, and the thing that I was most bored of was being good at something.

Everyone around me was obsessed with being good at things. I guess it’s what we naturally aspire to. But like most young punks, I thought it was all bullshit. A lot of my friends were getting really good at playing guitar, but something about that annoyed me. I wanted to go backward to something I didn’t understand. I wanted to relearn music, relearn everything, and Daniel guided my reeducation. He showed me that you truly didn’t have to give a fuck. And while his manic depression and schizophrenia may have aided his recklessness, the product moved on its own. His songs transcended technique, transcended skill. I had always known there was more to it than just practicing and getting good, and Daniel was my proof.

Walking into the Johnston home was like walking onto a movie set. In some ways, I guess that’s exactly what it was. Several interviews featured in The Devil and Daniel Johnston were filmed right there, at the dining room table, where I sat, waiting for Daniel to come over from next door.

Despite Bill’s warnings, we were late. Maybe five minutes. Late enough that Daniel got impatient and retreated to his own house. His mother had to convince him to come back. We apologized.

While we waited, Bill gave us the ground rules, the most memorable of which was to not a) give him any money, or b) let him give you any money (or anything else, for that matter). He could be very convincing—manipulative, even—and though he might have good intentions, we were forbidden to make any exchanges. I laughed anxiously as Bill explained the rules. They sounded like a joke.

After a few minutes of embarrassing uncertainty, worried we’d blown it, Daniel came crashing through the backdoor, and plodded through the kitchen and into view. He looked exactly as he had in the documentary, the pictures on his website, and the many YouTube videos I’d watched over and over. I don’t know why I expected something different. I’ve seen famous people up-close before, and they have a way of shifting out of the image of reference trapped in your mind. Once I met Frances McDormand in an airport. I couldn’t even tell if it was her at first. She was with her kid. She wore mom sandals.

But Daniel was exactly what I imagined. His hair was frazzled, his eyes bulged, and a light-brown stain spanned several inches across his plain gray T-shirt, as if he had just spilled some diet soda before coming back over to meet us.

A figurine of Jeremiah the Innocent sat on the table—the disproportionately-rendered cartoon frog that has become Daniel’s greatest contribution to the visual arts. It had just recently been made into a limited-edition figurine. Colloquially known as the “Hi, How Are You Frog” because of its original role as cover art for one of Daniel’s earliest and most well-known albums (and because of the famous mural of said cover art painted by Daniel at the corner of 21st and Guadalupe in Austin), I didn’t realize the frog had a proper name until that afternoon, when I read the label on the box.

Daniel immediately tried to give it to us.

“They made my frog into a toy,” he said.

“We were just checking that out,” I said.

“It comes in different colors,” he explained. “Green, yellow . . .”

The one on the table was green.

“You guys can have that one if you want,” he went on.

I respectfully declined, which was hard because, yeah, I wanted the thing. I’m sure we all did. There was probably no way we could’ve gotten out of there with it, I guess, but it would’ve been a nice token. Instead, I get the memory of Daniel wanting to give me something that belonged to him, which isn’t nothing, I guess.

During our conversation, he continuously dropped casual references to his life that anyone who’d seen his documentary or even listened to his music would be familiar with. I couldn’t tell if he was doing this in response to our expectations for him, or if he was so fixated on certain moments that he couldn’t keep from bringing them up in conversation with strangers. He would chronologize his early career as “back when I used to work at McDonald’s,” as if songs like “McDonald’s on the Brain” didn’t exist.

Most of our conversation topics started and ended this way—Daniel bringing something up, and letting it fade into nothing. Maybe I was giving him too much credit, but I believed he always ended up where he wanted, satisfied with the meaning he had created, whether his audience understood or not.

But he kept coming back to grape slushies.

It started with, “Do you guys like slushies? From Sonic?”

To which we replied, “Yes.”

Soon, the generic slushie became a grape slushie, which became the perfect drink for a hot day like this. Then, in a move that seemed unrelated at the time, he arched his neck to see out the window and said, “Is that your van out there?”

“It is,” I said.

“That’s a nice van,” he said.

“Thanks,” we said.

“Do you boys know where Sonic is?” he asked us.

We didn’t know where Sonic was, but he assured us he could show us the way.

Bill and Mabel Johnston waited in the living room, listening to every word. I wonder how many times Bill bit his tongue, trusting us to navigate our way through the situation.

One of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do was tell one of my heroes that no, I could not take him out for a slushie. It became the thread that held the rest of our conversation together. We talked about songs and movies, but everything revolved around how cool our van was and were we thirsty? He sure was. He sure could go for a Sonic slush. Grape.

I Had Lost My Mind

Daniel told us about the projects he was working on: an album, a comic book, new Captain America drawings. He is manic depressive. There are periods when he physically can’t stop himself from creating. There are periods when he mentally can’t force himself to create.

I was diagnosed with manic depression as a kid. This is the term I remember being used. I took a lot of medication for it back then, but as I grew up, I began to doubt if I ever really had the illness to begin with, and stopped taking the medication. I still go through insanely productive artistic periods, balanced by impossibly unproductive periods. The good times often feel driven by something out of my control, perhaps an unjustified sense of self-importance. For the most part, I’m not exactly sure where I stand with it.

My relationship with the illness was part of what drew me to Daniel. As I went through my own ups and downs, confusion, and desperation, I latched onto his continued struggle. In many ways, I wanted what he had, and still do. After talking with him, though, I felt like I had dodged a bullet. The price of innocence was higher than I thought.

Things had been going well for us that summer, as a band. The people who did show up to our gigs always left confused and curious, which was the intended effect. We had a whole repertoire of gimmicks: deliberately getting into fights on stage, setting up our gear backstage where audiences would have to come find us, extending one riff for eight minutes—we were earning a reputation for our live shows, which were sloppy, unpredictable, and sometimes violent.

But even as we gained momentum, we knew we were moving toward an end. Cruising the liminal space of the summer between junior and senior year, I’m not sure I had any clue where I would go individually, but it was getting hard to imagine that I would go there with these guys. And we all knew it. It’s not just that people change; it’s that people want to change. They want to move on.

My tastes have evolved, but I don’t regret anything we did back then, even when stuff got a little out of hand—like the night Josh punched a guy in the front row (a common occurrence) and his tooth went through his lip (surprisingly, a one-time deal). Everything I did back then was intentional, everything had a point. When I think about the things I made back then and the things I make now, I wonder if I had a better idea of what I wanted to say before I learned how to properly say it.

These days, I can replay the sounds of Daniel busting in through the backdoor like an old cassette tape. The screen door squealing open, Daniel mumbling something unintelligible to his mother, heavy steps thudding onto tile, and finally, the screen door slamming shut behind him. A five-second composition that, aside from bits and pieces of dialogue, remains the most accessible sounds of that day.

A picture from that afternoon does exist—the five of us in the dining room, before we took off for Austin. We all look tired. A little sunburnt. In need of haircuts. And Daniel hadn’t even been out on the road.

“I used to live there,” he told us when he found out we were headed to Austin. We all laughed a little, because of course he used to live there. For a guy whose desperate ache to be famous partially led to the fame he did have, he had no concept of how much people knew about his life. In that moment, I assumed he didn’t understand the consequences of being famous—the thing he desired more than anything else, but now I see how badly I had wanted Daniel to be pure, to be innocent.

Even though I understood how much of a manipulator he could be (the evidence playing out in real time by way of the Grape Slush Situation), I never considered that his detached associations with the past could be part of a show. He was telling us exactly what we wanted to hear—McDonald’s, Austin, the frog, all of it—and I was taking all of it, because I needed him to be exactly what I thought he was.

I wonder how deliberately structured his responses were, but I have to say I’ve never met someone of (at least) moderate fame who so obviously needed something from me, too.

Maybe he just needed a ride to Sonic.

Maybe he needed me to believe he was exactly who I thought he was.

“It’s beautiful at the lake,” he said. “Make sure to have a picnic at the lake.”

We probably weren’t going to have time for a picnic at the lake.

Some Things Last a Long Time

When it was time to go, Daniel and his parents followed us outside. We passed from the comfortable shade of dark blue wallpaper back into the scorching Texas heat.

“This is a nice van,” Daniel said for the fourth or fifth time. “I like the red.”

“We call it Nixon,” I said. “Or Tricky Dick.”

Daniel laughed. He thought we were funny, something I’m still proud of. I really think he got the joke, too, even though he might’ve just laughed to be polite. Or because he still believed we could be convinced to take him out for a slushie.

“How long you guys been on the road?” he asked.

“Couple weeks,” I said, exaggerating.

In truth, we were only one week into a two-week run, but longer sounded better. More authentic.

It’s been seven years since that afternoon at the Johnston house, and looking at Daniel’s website, I’m just now coming across a drawing he did in 2002 called “Love Is Always Drinking A Slurpe.” In the image, the words are written in Daniel’s crisp all-caps handwriting above a picture of a purple human blob presenting what appears to be an eyeball-on-a-stick to a humanoid Jeremiah the Innocent with wings. There is no slurpe present in the image.

I’m not surprised this sentiment appears in Daniel’s work some seven years before he spent a whole hour trying to convince me to drive him to Sonic for a grape slushie—not surprised, but validated, like I’m forever entangled with his artistic process.

One of Daniel’s most famous songs is called “True Love Will Find You in the End.” There’s nothing incredibly deep about the lyrics—the idea is that true love is out there looking for you, and can’t find you unless you make yourself visible.

But this drawing makes me wonder: If Love Is Always Drinking A Slurpe, when is it ever going to have time to come looking for us?

Daniel pursued the slushie all the way to the end, holding out hope that someone—whether it’d be us or his parents—would change their mind. I hope he understood that it wasn’t ever up to me.

We got in the van and followed the GPS down 290 toward Austin. I sat in the passenger seat sticking my face out the open window, wondering if I was going to get the things I wanted. I had a year of high school left, but didn’t feel like I needed it. I thought maybe I’d stay on the road, after this thing ended. Even if it was just me out there—voice that couldn’t really sing, nervous fingers fumbling over the fretboard—trying to make myself visible, to show what I could do, which wasn’t much.