Daniel Johnston

Johnston Frog Mural Saved Rock landmark a popular greeting on Austin's Strip

For a decade, Daniel Johnston's Jeremiah the Frog mural has been an iconic piece of cultural identity for both Austin, Texas' oft-traversed Strip, as well as in the subgenre of alternative rock, where its artist (also a singer-songwriter) achieved cult notoriety. The mural, which offers a pleasant "Hi, How Are You" to passersby, received an eleventh-hour reprieve yesterday when new ownership of the building on which it was painted (on the corner of 21st Street and Guadalupe) decided not to demolish the wall and replace it with windows.

After protesters launched a Save the Frog campaign, John Oudt, the Austin franchise partner for Baja Fresh Mexican Grill, a California-based restaurant chain, decided to pick up the tab to preserve the mural, an Austin landmark despite its lack of official designation. "John's a Texan and understands that this community wants to save the frog," Baja Fresh CEO Greg Dollarhyde said. "He's incurring this expense because it's so important to the people of Austin."

Though Johnston now lives outside the city, Austin was long his home base. A self-professed "unfamous celebrity," Johnston flirted with stardom in the early Nineties when he appeared on MTV's The Cutting Edge. But his influence extends well beyond the fifteen minutes of fame that show offered. The homemade tapes he made in the Eighties are the stuff of legend. Recorded in the most rudimentary fashion, they feature hastily recorded songs that tended to focus on Johnson's obsessions and observations -- namely love, unattainable girls and the mental illness that has plagued him for years.

Those early recordings, distributed via dubbed cassettes (often to pretty patrons at the McDonalds where he once worked), also boasted his immediately recognizable artwork, a collection of flying eyeballs, large-breasted women, humanoid ducks and -- on the cover of one of his best-known albums, 1983's Hi, How Are You? -- Jeremiah the Frog, a google-eyed amphibian bearing the title's glad tidings.

Jeremiah had his own fifteen minutes when he became a cult T-shirt decoration; Kurt Cobain was the most prominent Johnston fan to don "Hi, How Are You" duds, wearing the shirt to the 1992 MTV Video Music Awards. And years ago, when vertical surfaces in Austin were peppered with varied graffiti and murals, Johnston painted Jeremiah on a wall on the outside of Sound Exchange, a well-regarded record store across the Strip from the University of Texas. A decade later, the frog mural was one of the last vestiges of the city prior to the dotcom boom (and subsequent bust), but with Sound Exchange (which received several offers to whitewash Jeremiah) shuttering last year, the mural's bodyguard was gone.

But with Oudt's decision to preserve it, the mural will now be worked into the design of the Baja Fresh building. According to local news reports, the altered plans will cost Oudt upwards of $50,000 and will push the restaurant's opening date from February to April.