A Side Trip to East Liverpool, Ohio

Only Orvilles in the Building

Note: Several of us are going through old photos to add to this blog post. It’s a big job, so bear with us. I’ll add them as we find them. That’s Brett with the guitar. The only person I recognize is Doug Smith on the far right.

We’re going to take a side trip to East Liverpool, Ohio. Six hours east from Kalamazoo. If you take 23 south from Ann Arbor you don’t have to spend so much time on the turnpike.

Once you pass Toledo, everyone calls it soda instead of pop. When you hit Youngstown, it’s hard not to stop at The House of China in Boardman Mall. That place can make you fill your car with take out and that’s after you’ve had their sit down meal. So, instead, you wave as we drive by because we just want to get there.

My dad grew up across the street from the U of M stadium in Ann Arbor. After he met Brett, his only words were, Ohio? Really? You couldn’t find anybody else? Sorry, dad, he was just too cute to pass up.

If you stand in Brett Hartenbach’s mom’s front yard and look down river you can see Chester, West Virginia, where Daniel Johnston lived. If you look up river you can see Pennsylvania. Picksburgh is too far away to see. There’s not one square inch of flat land in this area. You’re either going up hill or you’re going down hill. There are no other choices. But looking across the river at night, you can see the lights of people’s homes through the trees on the steep hillside and it’s really quite beautiful.

Brett used to kid his mom because she never wanted to go out. She didn’t drive. She can’t come with us because she’s on house patrol, he would say. But there was one time that she and her neighbor Alma, yes, that Alma, went to an anti-nuclear rally. They took their check books in case they got arrested. As the story goes, everyone held hands in a big circle as a show of solidarity. And who do you think Arden stood next to and held hands with…Martin f*cking Sheen!

This was what it was like to hang out with Brett and his family. They somehow attracted famous people, out of nowhere. I could make a list, Joe Strummer, T-bone Burnett, Steven Tyler and Joe Perry (that was a two-fer), Run-D.M.C. Need I go on. His step-dad was friends with Lou Holtz. His brother, Mark, had roomed with Mark Murphy of the Packers in college, his mom dated some famous athlete back in the late forties.

There was a photo of Brett with Steve Forbert on our entertainment console, next to a framed baseball card of Roberto Clemente. Neither were to be touched, by anyone. After I dusted, he would check them both for any possible issues.

Brett and Dan Johnston met when they were going to Kent State. Brett said he wasn’t really sure how they met. It was like, all of a sudden, Dan was just there. Brett had played one of his tapes for me, “Hi, How are you?” They had recorded it at Dan’s house over in Chester on a portable cassette player. THAT is why the sound quality is so bad. But they sounded like real songs that had character and interest.

I met Dan when Brett took me to East Liverpool to meet his family for the first time. his brother had just had a baby girl and we were going specifically to meet her. Arden lived in a big old house with a big old living room. There were two couches. One afternoon, several of us were piled on one talking when we heard the back door open. Brett told me it was Dan and to be calm because he was jittery like a scared cat. And someone else said, yeah he might dive under the couch if things get too loud. And someone else said, then we’d have to decide whether to leave him there or get him out. Yeah. Yeah. Not good, they whispered.

Dan and his notebooks took a seat on the other couch. He talked about some things he had been writing and that he’d been making some new drawings. One of the first things Brett and I did when we got to East Liverpool was drive all over town so he could show me all Dan’s graffiti. And there was a lot of it. All over the place. After listening to this conversation, I became curious to see what he had been up to, in his notebooks. After all, I kept notebooks. Many of them.

As I got up and went over and sat down next to Dan, a heard a collective gasp come from the other couch. As I looked at his notebooks, I heard winces and quiet sounds of distress coming from them. But he and I hit it off right away. He even handed me his pen and let me draw something on one of the pages. Brett would tell me later that nobody was allowed to even touch Dan’s notebooks, let alone draw in them. I felt honored that he let me do those things.

But the truth is, Dan and I had some things in common. We were both the black sheep of our families. We both grew up in a stressful home environment. Neither one of us had much guidance because nobody could figure us out. When you meet another person like that, I feel all your dysfunctional parts recognize each other. And it immediately feels comfortable. He could never remember my name if I wasn’t right there. You had to say, you know, Brett’s girlfriend from Michigan. And he would say, oh yeah that’s right.

About a year later, we were headed to East Liverpool again and Brett tells me that Dan is moving to Austin. Holy crap, he’s afraid of his own shadow, how’s he going to survive by himself in Austin…is what I thought to myself. I worried about him and his decision. I did. And then the next efing thing we hear is that he’s on some MTV thing.

So we look for it and watch it and could not believe what we were seeing. When I first watched Dan being interviewed on TV, I just shook my head. He didn’t have a cache of musical influences or a stock pile of cassette tapes he listened to daily. They were asking him questions outside of his wheelhouse and completely missing who he was as a person.

Dan continued to make more homemade tapes and his audience grew. The next thing that blows our mind is that Target has used his song “Speeding Motorcycle” in one of their ads. From then on, he really didn’t have to work another day in his life. Then came more ads, Mountain Dew, Axe and Apple. Curt Cobain became his biggest fan. And a cover by Tom Waits for crying out loud. What the hell was happening? And they’re still using his music. The latest I know of is that Only Murders in the Building (no relation, titles are not copyrightable) used ‘Don’t be Scared’ as the outro on season one, episode one.

Brett started backing Dan on stage. They played festivals and toured Germany. By this time we had gone our separate ways and he had married someone else. Do not feel sorry for me. I will solemnly tell you that I am the one who left him. We had lived together for twelve years and when I say that Brett was my gift so that I could be on a better path in life, I mean every word. But what he wanted lied in one direction and what I wanted lied in another. It was not a decision I made lightly. I didn’t date for an entire year because, even though we were broken up, I felt like I was cheating on him.

Dan would soon become ill with mental issues. I still hold it against the magazine that shall remain nameless for publishing his commitment papers. He will always first be a person to me. A person who struggled. If you look up his compilations and don’t like them, that’s OK. I rarely listen to his stuff. A little bit of it goes a long way for me.

Brett and I didn’t argue much, we had a pact against it. But one thing we seriously disagreed about was what musicians, especially famous ones, owe their audience. He felt John Lennon owed his fans a continuous string of albums after the Beatles and I felt he didn’t owe anyone shit. Dan was known to say something like “You don’t know what I go through to bring you a song.” One of my young neighbors excitedly asked me if Dan’s persona was all an act and I calmly said, “No. It’s not an act.” I could tell that answer was difficult for them.

I guess we’re all just doing the best we can. There are people who have done with their life what I wish I could have done with mine. But the powers that be immediately remind me that it wasn’t my path to follow. That my path is this other one, the one under my feet.

It’s funny the gifts that we’re given. Mine is my organizational skills, my knack for musical arrangement and parallel parking. Seriously, I can parallel park a sardine into a can. Even though Brett has passed away, it’s his hand I sometimes feel at my back, nudging me in a new and scary direction. He tells me to just be myself. He knows not what he asks. No, actually, he does.