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Chronicle
. He
once found Daniel standing knee-deep in a river on the University of Austin campus, preaching loudly into the night about Satan.
    ‘We spend our lives with the notion of the crazy artist,’ Louis Black said, ‘Van Gogh cutting off his ear, and we really loved the crazy people because they were our people.
They didn’t have any commercial sense. And yet here was a real sick person. And we were, “What are we going to do?” So we did the most pedestrian thing possible. We committed him.
I’ve always had contempt for those people who didn’t understand genius. And here I am, saying, “Please put him in this hospital.” Because we didn’t know what to
do.’
    The Devil and Daniel Johnston
is a tribute not only to Johnston and his music, but to his friends and especially his parents, Mabel and Bill, who have spent a lifetime doing their best in
the midst of unbearable stress.
    Then there was Don Van Vliet, Captain Beefheart, who ruled over his band with a tyrannical fury. For his album
Trout Mask Replica
he rented a house in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, and
forced his musicians to eat only a cup of soya beans a day. For eight months they weren’t allowed to leave the house at all, except for once a week when one of them was permitted to briefly
go and get groceries. He would psychologically break his drummer and bass player down by yelling repeatedly in their faces, ‘You hate your mother!’ for thirty-hour stretches.
    Peter, Lenny and I rented a disused railway station for a while just outside the Alton Towers theme park, near Stoke, so we could write. It was there Peter told me a haunting story about a band
called The Shaggs. It was a story he only half-remembered from something he’d read years before, but it was so strange I felt compelled to fly to The Shaggs’ home town, Fremont, New
Hampshire, to try and meet them.
    ***
    Nowadays Dot Wiggin is a cleaner in her local church. You wouldn’t know from meeting her or her sister Betty that they once recorded about the strangest record ever
made.
     

    Betty Wiggin, Jon Ronson, Dot Wiggin.
     
    Fremont looked as gentle and as unassuming as they did. The main display in the Historical Museum commemorated how Fremont was the first place in the world where a B52 bomber had crashed but
nobody was killed. ‘B52 bombers had crashed elsewhere,’ Matthew Thomas, the town historian, told me when I’d visited the museum the night before, ‘but people had died. In
Fremont, nobody died. That’s what made Fremont pretty unique with that episode.’
    I took a walk with Dot and Betty to their house. Or the place where it used to be before the new owners burnt it to the ground so they could build a new house further up the land. The grass had
never grown back so you could still see the outline – the ghost of a house. It was there they told me their story.
    When Dot and Betty were children there was no music in their lives. No music and no friends outside the family. Their father Austin wouldn’t allow it. ‘We couldn’t go to dances
or anything,’ Dot told me. ‘We just stayed home. He didn’t want us to have a social life. He was afraid we’d get too involved on the outside.’
    ‘Which we would have,’ Betty said.
    Given his devout bearing, the announcement he made over dinner one night sometime during the mid-1960s came very much out of the blue. He told his daughters that he’d just returned from
his mother’s house where she’d read his palm and divined from it that the sisters were going to be in one of the most successful girl groups in America. He was therefore taking them out
of school so they could practise. Relentlessly. From morning until night. Until they were ready.
    ‘We practised during the day when he worked,’ Dot told me, ‘and then when he came home from work we practised. We practised until he liked it. If he didn’t like it we
practised over and over. Usually on Saturdays too.’
    ‘Did he ever ask you