Back in the days before YouTube, videos went viral by hand—people dubbed and traded VHS tapes, and if you wanted to see weird junk videos you had to know somebody. In the late 90s my best suppliers were three guys who lived together in an apartment, where I would hang out and let them screen whatever bizarre tapes they wanted. One day they showed me something called The Junior Christian Science Bible Lesson Program. It was a cable-access show hosted by a vaguely middle-aged-looking guy with a menagerie of ventriloquist’s dolls, including a nightmarish teddy bear and a kid with dark skin and kinky hair named Chip the Black Boy, which would’ve seemed amazingly racist if the host weren’t black. (Instead it was just weird.) The man, who I’d later learn is named David Liebe Hart (he also has a number of aliases), made the dolls deliver his sermons on the Bible and the existence of sentient extraterrestrial life, or else had them sing hymns in his quavering baritone, accompanied by a Casio synthesizer. It was utterly bizarre, but it also had the spark of wild originality that distinguishes great outsider art.
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In subsequent tapes—mailed by Hart himself after one of my guys sent him a fan letter—a long-haired electric guitarist with a hint of a smirk began to appear, suggesting that Hart had acquired a quasi-ironic cult following in LA, where he produced JCSBLP. This was more or less confirmed in 2007 when Hart began turning up in episodes of Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! alongside other recognizable figures from the Hollywood fringe, including JCSBLP regular James Quall.
Eccentric Chicago-born singer-songwriter Willis Earl Beal—recently relocated to New York City—has told me that he admires outsiders such as Johnston and Jandek, and that he hopes his career will have a similar arc. I asked him what the appeal was. “What I liked about them isn’t so much that they were labeled outsider musicians, but that they were out there doing it anyway whether they were going to be discovered or not,” he said. “It didn’t factor into the equation for them. To me outsider artists represent the ideal person, where they just make art a part of living life. It isn’t something you raise up and worship. . . . It makes more sense than the music industry.”
