(I should start by saying that I started this project a few days before Daniel passed away, so the timing is pretty heartbreaking. Hopefully this will contribute to his immortality just a little bit. He deserves to be remembered. Anyway…)

I’m not gonna hold you hostage and drone on for thousands of words before I get to the point like some kind of recipe blog, so first thing’s first: here’s the tab archive.

This is not a complete Daniel Johnston tab archive. This is a document of all the tabs that were posted on the now defunct hihowareyou.com message boards, specifically in the “Official Chord/Tab Request Thread.” Other Daniel tabs can be found on various tab sites across the internet, primarily at rejectedunknown.com.

Okay, so that’s really specific. And it raises the question: why post an archive of such a relatively small collection of songs (only 92) from Daniel’s catalog, which consists of hundreds of songs? It’s because of someone I only know as “zack26.”

I don’t know who zack26 is. I’ve never met him. I don’t know what he looks like, where he lives or how to contact him. I don’t know if he’s alive. All I know is that he was the most important resource for performance-minded Daniel Johnston fans on the entire internet for about 5 years.

Here’s the timeline: in March of 2006, someone by the screen name of Marquis of Sadness started the “Official Chord/Tab Request Thread” on the hihowareyou board. The first reply, that same day, is from zack26 – who provides chords for two of Daniel’s songs, requested by Marquis of Sadness. He posts again. And again, and again. Always fulfilling another fan’s request.

This continues for years, until sometime in 2011, near as I can figure. Not only is zack26 responding to song requests with detailed guitar tabs, he is also figuring out piano parts. He’s posting tabs for songs where Daniel’s tape speed is off – posting not only tabs that sound correct to the ear (transposed up for faster tape speeds), but also tabbing the song in what is probably the original, lower, key. He’s listening to songs like Sorry Entertainer, a song that was written and recorded on a guitar that was literally out of tune, and figuring out the pitch of each individual de-tuned string so he could write a tab.

It was like having your own personal genie. Make a wish, and it came true.

If you’ve ever been an amateur musician and just wanted to jam out to your favorite artist’s songs, you know how frustrating it can be trying to find tabs online. Especially if the artist is a little obscure. Sure you’ll find some. But there’s that b-side or demo that you love, and there’s just nothing out there to tell you how to play it (and your ear isn’t trained enough to figure it out for yourself).

So you can understand what an incredible resource zack26 was. He’s probably the only reason I was able to start a Daniel Johnston cover band (self plug). Most of the tabs we used for that band came from the board. But the board was not the easiest to navigate; there were some 15 pages in that thread, and the tabs were buried among hundreds of comments from users. On two occasions, someone posted an index of all the songs in the thread and what page they were on, but that still meant that if you wanted to find a specific song, you had to know what page the index was on (or click through every page looking for your song).

It felt like a waste of zack26’s contribution for his work to be buried under so many layers of internet. For years, I’ve been meaning to copy/paste his tabs and present them in an easily navigable format. I even started this project years ago on a now-defunct site called tabwiki, but I crapped out after maybe a day of effort. I always figured there was no rush, the board would be there, in its confusing format, one way or another. But now it’s gone. The main site is there, but about a week ago when I started thinking about rebooting this project, my heart sank when I clicked on the forum link. I panicked harder when I tried pulling it up on the wayback machine and saw that not a single snapshot contained the board.

The only reason I was able to retrieve these tabs is because of our Google overlords. I stumbled upon just the right search term and managed to find the holy grail on the fourth page of results: something called a “print page” – a text version of the entire thread. <—— That’s it, right there. That’s the document in it’s pure, unaltered form. I’m not sure when the board actually went down, but if this is accurate, the final post came in August of 2012, a little more than a year after zack26’s last post, a tab for I Lose. As of now, the board is 404’d.

And now, Daniel has died. We were lucky enough to exist at the same time as him. I’m lucky enough to have seen him perform three times. Incredibly lucky. To be in the same room as this weird kid who spoke directly to my soul while I rode three buses to a job at the mall, listening to him on my Rio mp3 player while walking a mile home in the rain after the last bus stopped running. I still listen to Daniel regularly and still have large gaps in my familiarity with his catalog, but there is a specific time and a specific few albums of his that are tattooed into my consciousness and now I am rambling.

Daniel Johnston is important, and I hope my timing in launching this archive is not in poor taste. Now that he’s gone I think it’s more important than ever to sustain his legacy via things like this. The hihowareyou message board vanished. This blog will probably vanish one day. Rejectedunknown could vanish, too. You should copy and paste all of these tabs. You should duplicate this web site. You should print the whole thing out at Kinkos. Let’s keep Daniel’s torch burning as long as we can.

Zack26 has done the bulk of the work here (excluding Daniel, of course), so if any of you know who he is or how to contact him, please let me know so I can thank him properly. Only four or five of the tabs in this archive are NOT by zack26. For clarity, I have included the screen name of the tabber in parentheses next to the song title in each post. Two of them are from me (hemightbetimmy)!

I’ve also included fragments of forum posts that add context to certain tabs. For example, in the tab for Etiquette, Jeff Tartakov (Daniel’s former manager) chimes in with some info about the guitarist on the song, Bill Anderson. Bill then chimes in with an anecdote about recording the song with Daniel. Little organic moments like that are what made the board special, and I’ve tried to preserve them here.

Also, check out the sheet music version of Walking The Cow (near the bottom of the page), notated by breadbox, based on zack26’s piano tab. There’s some truly remarkable stuff here.

I guess that’s all I have to say. Daniel is important to me. The message board was important to me. Zack26 was important to a lot of fans. I hope my copy/pasty contribution is worthwhile in some way. I hope Daniel is at peace.

He killed the monster.