Daniel Johnston, still truckin’

After ‘Keep Austin Weird,' Daniel Johnston's ‘Hi, How Are You?' is probably the second most common touristy T-shirt slogan in town.  Accompanied by a strange looking, bug-eyed frog, the crude drawing and chipper greeting is best known to Austinites as the mural on the corner of 21st and Guadalupe Street. Though they may drive past it regularly, many residents do not know what it is, why it is there, or who the heck Daniel Johnston is.

Raised in West Virginia, Johnston made Austin his home in the early eighties after dropping out of college and working briefly for a touring carnival.  Austin's music scene has always provided refuge for unconventional artists and off beat creative types and Johnston, undoubtedly, falls into both categories. 
Before computers enabled easy home recording, putting your own music on tape meant dealing with audio hiss and sub-par sound quality. Johnston has been making tapes since he was a teenager, but it was not until he reached Austin that those tapes found an enthusiastic audience.
The, now sought-after, tapes recorded by Johnston at home with just a cheap boom-box, were distributed hand to hand by the artist himself. Though the inferior fidelity and silly cover art discouraged all but the most intrepid listeners, those that went home and listened to Johnston's albums were amazed to find beautifully original pop songs played with painful earnestness on an old chord organ.

After appearing on a 1985 MTV special on the Austin scene, Johnston's cult appeal was elevated to the national level. That weird frog (whose name is actually Jeremiah the Innocent) became his own celebrity when Kurt Cobain (Nirvana), an avowed fan of Johnston's, wore a ‘Hi, How Are You?' T-shirt at the 1992 MTV Music Awards. 
Despite the interest Johnston and his music received from the media, his star never took off the way fans had predicted, due to Johnston's erratic behavior and his struggles with mental illness.

His struggles were chronicled in depth in the award winning documentary The Devil and Daniel Johnston (2005). Thanks to the film's success, interest in Johnston's work has piqued, yet again. 
Johnston performed at this year's Austin City Limits Festival, and he released the slickly produced "Is And Always Was." A far cry from the rough edges of Johnston's early masterpieces "Songs of Pain" and "Hi, How Are You?," "Is And Always Was" shows an artist growing old and working with new palettes. 
Iconic cover art aside, "Hi, How Are You?" is a great starting point for anyone looking to understand more about Austin's music history and the legacy that is Daniel Johnston. 
Lo-fi before it was cool, "Hi, How Are You?" is an odd, uneven, and bizarrely captivating album and an important landmark from the days when it was not such a struggle to keep Austin weird.