Dead Dog’s Eyeball

K. McCarty – Dead Dog’s Eyeball (Songs of Daniel Johnston) (1994, Bar/None Records). Photograph by Paul McDermott

I’m on a bit of a Daniel Johnston kick. Last week Joyful Noise/Shimmy Disc announced Daniel Johnston in the 20th Century:

“the first comprehensive collection of Daniel Johnston’s influential and revered 20th century discography, available for the very first time in 24bit lossless audio. Featuring Johnston’s first 14 seminal releases stretching from 1980 to 1998, each recording has been remastered from the original source tapes by Kramer (Shimmy-Disc founder and longtime collaborator of Daniel Johnston).”

I picked up all 14 albums on Shimmy Disc’s initial 48-hour “pay as you want” deal. I know some of these albums but it’s been a revelation wading into the complete collection.

I’m not sure when I first heard the name Daniel Johnston. Like many it might have been seeing the late Kurt Cobain sporting his Hi How Are You t-shirt in photographs. I do remember when I first heard Johnston’s music. Sometime in the early 90s I asked an old friend - Shane Fitzsimons - if he had any music by Johnston and he gave me a lend of a tape. Anyone who remembers Shane won’t be surprised to read that he had an original of Johnston’s early self-released cassettes. I can’t remember which album it was but it got me interested. A year or two later another old friend - Boa Morte’s Bill Twomey - was going to the US and asked me if I wanted any albums that I couldn’t get in Cork. I asked Bill to try and get me a Daniel Johnston album. Bill returned from Stateside with a CD copy of Yip / Jump Music.

Yip / Jump Music (1989, Homestead Records), Fear Yourself (2003, Sketchbook Records) and Lost and Found (2006, Sketchbook Records). Fear Yourself was produced by Sparklehorse’s Mark Linkous and Lost and Found was produced by Glass Eye’s Brian Beattie. Photograph by Paul McDermott.

Over the years there have been hundreds of cover versions of Johnston’s songs. Some of my favourites include: Yo La Tengo’s take on ‘Speeding Motorcycle’ from 1990’s Fakebook, Sonic Boom’s Spectrum released ‘True Love Will Find You In The End’ as a single in 1992 and more recently Beach House covered ‘Some Things Last A Long Time’ from their second album, 2008’s Devotion.

In 2004 Sparklehorse’s Mark Linkous curated the fantastic The Late Great Daniel Johnston: Discovered Covered. Volume 1 of that 2 Volume collection features Beck, Eels, Teenage Fanclub, Mercury Rev, Vic Chesnutt, Tom Waits and a host of other artists covering songs by Johnston. Volume 2 features Johnston’s original recordings of the same songs. It’s a beautiful collection that along with Jeff Feuerzeig’s 2005 documentary The Devil and Daniel Johnston brought the songs of Johnston and his story to a wider audience.

Is And Always Was (2009, Feraltone Records) and Beam Me Up!! (Daniel Johnston and Beam) (2010, Hazelwood Vinyl Plastics). Is And Always Was was produced by Jason Falkner. Photograph by Paul McDermott.

But for me, my goto album when it comes to Daniel Johnston has always been Kathy McCarty’s Dead Dog’s Eyeball (Songs of Daniel Johnston). This album came out in 1994 on the New Jersey label Bar/None Records. It remains, not just my favourite collection of Johnston songs, but one of my all time favourite albums. When asked earlier this year to be a guest on Keeping Track, Dave Hackett’s UCC98.3FM radio show, I had to pick out a few tunes. It was tough trying to narrow down my final list of songs but I knew from the moment I was asked on the show that Kathy McCarty’s version of Johnston’s ‘Walking the Cow’ would make my list.

In the mid-90s I worked for Frontline Promotions, a gig promotions company in Cork, run by Philip O’Connell and Ally Ó Riada. Ally’s older brother Peadar had released albums on Bar/None Records and the label’s Tom Prendergast posted over a parcel of CDs to Frontline from Hoboken, NJ.

I knew Bar/None, I had two of their albums in my collection: They Might Be Giant’s self-titled debut and Bill Drummond’s The Man. It was news to me that Prendergast, a Limerick man, had set up the label in the mid-80s with business partner Glenn Morrow.

The mid-90s was an interesting time for Bar/None - they had expanded their own domestic release schedule and had also signed a licencing deal with Setanta Records, enusuring that records such as Edwyn Collins’ Gorgeous George and The Harvest Ministers’ A Feeling Mission got US releases. They also released the Tindersticks’ debut album in the States.

In the parcel Prendergast had sent to Frontline was Amidst These Hills by Peadar Ó Riada and a load of other gems including: Pomegranate by Poi Dog Pondering, Change My Life by Nikki Sudden’s Epic Soundtracks and Can You Fly by Freedy Johnston. Prendergast had included two compilations by the Mexican pianist, composer and big-band leader Juan García Esquivel: Space-Age Bachelor Pad Music and Music From A Sparkling Planet. These were revelatory albums for me and helped me understand the retro/futurist sounds of Stereolab and The High Llamas.

Esquivel – Music From A Sparkling Planet (1995, Bar/None Records). Compilation produced/Liner Notes by Irwin Chusid. Photograph by Paul McDermott.

Prendergast had also included two CDs by Kathy McCarty: Dead Dog’s Eyeball (Songs of Daniel Johnston) and the Sorry Entertainer EP. We divvied up the haul: I nabbed the Esquival comps and the McCarty CDs.

Kathy McCarty by Daniel Johnston (taken from the back sleeve of Dead Dog’s Eyeball).

The name “Kathy McCarty” seemed familiar to me, I remembered where I had seen it. She had acted in Richard Linklater’s 1990 debut film Slacker. I loved Slacker and while in the US in 1992 I had purchased the movie tie-in book. It has Linklater’s script, his making of notes and reminiscences on how he put the project together. As if I needed more reasons to buy this beautiful book - it also has an introduction by Douglas Coupland and by 1992 I was mildly obsessed with Coupland’s Generation X and Shampoo Planet. The book features side panels with short bios of all of the movie’s cast. There was Kathy McCarty!

Slacker by Richard Linklater (introduction by Douglas Coupland) (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992. Softcover. First edition). Photographs by Paul McDermott.

McCarty plays Delia, the Old Anarchist’s Daughter and features in one of my favourite scenes from the movie.

Delia and her elderly father return home only to find their house being robbed. Hilariously, Delia offers the Burglar a coffee, and then the Old Anarchist and the Burglar go for a walk around Austin. The Old Anarchist looks at the capital building and says:

“I’ve always dreamed of pulling a “Guy Fawkes” on the Texas Legislature - just blow the damn thing sky high.”

Looking towards the UT Austin Tower in the distance the Old Anarchist says:

“But now Charles Whitman, there was a man. Twenty-three years this summer. This town has always had its share of crazies… I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else”

Back in 1992 this sequence meant nothing to me. Years later I realised that the Old Anarchist was referring to Charles Whitman, the Texas Tower Sniper.

Dead Dog’s Eyeball features 19 cover versions of Johnston songs and Sorry Entertainer features the title track, a Glass Eye song and five other Johnston covers. The sleevenotes to Dead Dog’s Eyeball were written by music critic Gina Arnold. McCarty had fronted Austin band Glass Eye in the mid to late 80s. Arnold writes:

“Kathy first met Daniel when he came up to her at a Glass Eye show and gave her a tape of his songs, entitled Hi How Are You… A few weeks later, he again approached Kathy at a Glass Eye gig, wanting to hear her reaction to his tape. ‘He was so eager and innocent,’ recalls Kathy, ‘and I felt guilty that I hadn’t listened to it, that I lied. I said it was great and he could open for us. And then I actually did listen to it to see what I had gotten into to, and I was blown away. I just knew he was a genius.’”

Arnold continues:

“On Dead Dog’s Eyeball, Kathy has done more than merely guard Daniel’s fragile music from extinction; she has actually reinvented it. Somehow, she has created a completely new setting for his instinctively pure songs without impinging on their heartbreaking naiveté.”

Dead Dog’s Eyeball (Songs of Daniel Johnston) (1994, Bar/None Records) and Sorry Entertainer (1995, Bar/None Records). Photograph by Paul McDermott

In 1989 Bar/None released a sampler - Time For a Change. McCarty contributed a cover version of Johnston’s song ‘Living Life’. Johnston was a huge fan of Glass Eye and had once listed Bent By Nature (the band’s second album released in 1988 on Bar/None) in his Top 10 along with nine Beatles albums.

The story goes that impressed with the results of ‘Living Life’ Bar/None pestered McCarty to record an album of Johnston songs. According to a Bar/None press release:

“Along with longtime Glass Eye collaborator Brian Beattie, K. McCarty went through the hundreds of songs in the Johnston catalog. While staying true to the original inspiration of Daniel Johnston’s low-fi basement recordings, the pair built a remarkable album of elaborate productions that bring a technicolor brilliance to Daniel’s songs. Each song receives a special treatment that finds the album running the gamut from Beatle’s psychedelia, to lounge standards, to Broadway Show tunes, to Beefheart skronk. There are even a couple of numbers that sound suspiciously like Glass Eye.”

In 2022 McCarty told The Seattle Star how Dead Dog’s Eyeball came about:

“My mother and a few other important people in my life could not stand to listen to Daniel’s music and could not hear what I heard in it at all. Because of the extraordinarily “Lo-Fi” nature of the recordings.

You must remember—no one was recording that way in the eighties. It was unheard of. Even “naive” artists like Jonathan Richman were recording in actual recording studios with decent equipment. Nobody was “releasing” shitty sounding cassette tapes recorded in their bedroom on an (often broken) jam box.

In addition, Daniel had just been committed to the mental hospital in Austin and it seemed he would never get better or be well-known outside of the Austin music scene. He was taken by his family back to West Virginia and committed to an infamous mental hospital there, Weston.

I felt that I had some idea of what Daniel had wanted his songs to sound like, had he had access to the musicians and studio and producer that I had access to (Brian Beattie of Glass Eye) and had he the sanity to undergo the usual recording process. I thought I could record a selection of Daniel’s songs in a way that would make them “hearable” to people like my mom. You know, normal people. People who expect music to sound pretty and radio-friendly and reasonably accessible.

If Daniel was going to vanish into the mental health nightmare that is typical in the United States, I wanted his songs to be heard at the very least before he disappeared.”

I got to see Daniel Johnston play live in Dublin on 03 April, 2007. For the Vicar Street gig Johnston was accompanied by The Beam Orchestra. The studio album

Beam Me Up!! (Daniel Johnston and Beam) was released in 2010 and gives a good impression of that 2007 gig.

Before the gig Vicar Street’s overflow bar (previously known as The Shelter) was set up as a gallery to display Art Prints of Johnston’s drawings. I purchased a signed print, I can’t remember what I paid for it, it wasn’t that much, the framing definitely cost more. It hangs in the good room. Whenever I look at it I remember the parcel of CDs from Prendergast.

Daniel Johnston framed Art Print:
“Polka-dotted underwear guy with duck and guitar”

Daniel Johnston sadly passed away of a suspected heart attack on 11 September, 2019 . He was 58.

In the early 00s Tom Prendergast sold his share of Bar/None Records to his business partner Glenn Morrow and moved back to Ireland. He presents The Last Bus Home every Sunday at 10.30pm on Limerick Community Radio 99.9FM. It’s always great checking out his playlist for each episode when it lands in my inbox, he’s got a fantastic taste in music.

Kathy McCarty - Another Day in the Sun (2005, Rexy Rex Records). Photograph by Paul McDermott.

In 2005 Kathy McCarty released her first solo album Another Day in the Sun on her own imprint Rexy Rex Records. Around the time of its release, she kindly sent me a copy so that I could play a few songs on Songs To Learn And Sing, my Dublin City FM show. On the album McCarthy once more collaborates with her old Glass Eye bandmate Brian Beattie. It’s a great album and one I return to again and again.

The rights to the Dead Dog’s Eyeball recordings eventually reverted to McCarty from Bar/None. Following a successful Kickstarter campaign McCarty released a double vinyl remastered reissue of the album in 2022. For this edition of Dead Dog’s Eyeball the extra Johnston songs from the Sorry Entertainer EP have been added to the original album and the tracklisting has been re-sequenced. Dead Dog’s Eyeball (Songs of Daniel Johnston) is available from Rexy Rex Records.

Praise for Dead Dog’s Eyeball:

“This is the album that made it impossible for anyone to dismiss Daniel Johnston as just another outsider artist.”
Greg Beets/The Austin Chronicle (April, 2005)

“A really great album and a total crowd-pleaser, you can gift that record to just about anyone and they’ll fall in love with it.”
Michael Azerrad (December, 2019)

Kathy McCarty and Daniel Johnston in Waller, TX, 1994. Photograph by Brian Beattie, taken from KCRW.