Daniel Johnston talks about Captain America, WWII, and his new iPhone game
"I don’t know where I’m at most of the time, because we go too many places"
Still from "The Devil and Daniel Johnston"
There’s a vulnerability to Daniel Johnston that makes him endearing, a fragility that makes his heartsick ballads about frogs, vampires, and ghosts impossible not to love. For the past three decades, that vulnerability has been the hallmark of his music, which is why pairing him with producer Jason Falkner for the upcoming Is And Always Was is sort of a gamble: By taking away the barebones, bedroom-recording structure of his songs and turning them into fully realized studio productions, Johnston risks losing everything that makes him special. But fortunately, Johnston’s songs have always hidden rock symphonies within their creaky minimalism; fleshing them out only serves to further reveal the pop savant behind the melodrama—like de rigueur discussion of Johsnton’s bipolar disorder and frequent self-sabotage, uneasily chronicled in the 2005 documentary The Devil And Daniel Johnston. In advance of a performance on Wednesday Oct. 14 at the Highline Ballroom, The A.V. Club spoke to Johnston—who recently performed at the Austin City Limits festival—about outdoor concerts, his obsessions with World War II-era Germany and Captain America, the recently announced movie based on his life, and Hi, How Are You?, the new iPhone game based on Johnston’s art and music.
AVC: Do you enjoy playing big festivals?
DJ: Oh yeah, it’s a lot of fun. I’ve played some bigger festivals. I played an MTV festival one time.
AVC: And you’re going on tour soon?
DJ: Yeah, we’re gonna go on the road. I don’t know exactly where it is we’re going. It’s hard to keep track of where I’m at. Like we were out in Cali, and I said, “Gee, it’s great to be back here in Austin!” [Laughs.] I don’t know where I’m at most of the time, because we go too many places.
AVC: Do you have any favorite places to play?
DJ: Yeah, Germany. I like playing in Germany.
AVC: Why Germany?
DJ: Because I’m a big fan of World War II. To be there, historically, to see everything like that, it’s pretty all right, you know. We found one museum about how, since the [Berlin] Wall had gone up, you know, people were trying to sneak through and stuff, but there’s probably other museums there that we couldn’t find. I’m sure there is. Next time we go, I’m going to try to find a World War II museum. I collect tanks and models and stuff, and I’ve got mostly Germany models and tanks.
AVC: How did you get into that?
DJ: Well, my first comic book hero is Captain America, and of course, he was the living legend of World War II. He’d always be fighting the Germans and everything, so that’s sort of how it got started for me. When my mom would go to the grocery, she’d give me a dollar for helping out, and then I started buying some comic books. And about the third week or so, I walked up to the comic book stand, and there was Captain America, and it just looked like some kind of prize. Like the Ten Commandments. [Laughs.] I just went crazy for Captain America. I would buy only Captain America comics, and then, when I was looking at the first one, I recognized the name. It said “Jack Kirby.” I used to say, “Jack Kraby.” I didn’t know how to pronounce it, you know. I started collecting Kirby until there was nothing else but Kirby on my mind.
AVC: What’s it like having your own iPhone game?
DJ: I don’t know. It’s some kind of game that you can hold in your hand. I don’t think it’s a television game. I don’t know how it works. The frog goes across the road or something. [Laughs.] Almost gets hit by a truck, you know.
AVC: Do you know what’s happening with the movie based on your life?
DJ: It’s been going on for about a year now, so I was trying to write down some things that had happened to me and stuff like that. The kid that’s playing my part is a lot of fun. And he’s a real virtuoso on the piano.
AVC: What were your first impressions of Is And Always Was?
DJ: It’s very Beatles-ish, because the producer is really into The Beatles.
AVC: Aren’t you as well?
DJ: I sure am. A lot of the material to me sounded like The White Album, Abbey Road. That’s what I was fantasizing about, you know? So it’s really cool the way it sounds. I’m happy with it. I guess my dad has released it on our own label, and now we have another record coming out soon, too, called The Death Of Satan, recorded with Danny And The Nightmares. I’ve been playing with them about eight years now. They live just down the road from me, and we have been getting together and playing every so often. We had a whole album to do, so we were glad about that.
AVC: Are your newest albums recorded digitally, or did you stick to analog tape?
DJ: I don’t know how they did it.
AVC: Do you have any thoughts on the “digital revolution” in music?
DJ: Well, what is it? What’s it mean?
AVC: When you were starting out, you used to make a brand new tape every time you wanted to give it to someone.
DJ: Uh-huh. Yeah.
AVC: But now you can just make one recording and an infinite number of copies—and you don’t even need to have a physical copy.
DJ: Yeah, that’s great. I never understood what it meant about that!
AVC: Why do you think people get such pleasure out of hearing you sing about your real-life experiences with sadness and madness?
DJ: I like to think that there’s a sense of humor enough that, if they get to liking the tape or an album, they might want to listen to it more than just once, you know? There’s a little bit of a sense of humor every now and then. [Laughs.]
