Daniel Johnston

Daniel Johnston made his first albums on a $59 boombox.

He was born in 1961. In Austin in 1984 he cleared tables at McDonald’s and gave customers his tapes, copying each one himself. After MTV’s The Cutting Edge filmed him in 1985, labels called him at work. Atlantic released Fun in 1994. He lived with bipolar disorder, and died in September 2019, aged 58.