Netflix’s Tiger King is full of baffling story lines, looney large-cat lovers, and Coen brothers–esque criminal acts that landed Joe Exotic, the character at the show’s center, a 22-year prison sentence for a harebrained murder-for-hire plot and several wildlife violations. But beneath the unhinged egos and sincerely disturbing treatment of cats is a minor mystery that nagged at us: Who actually recorded the country songs “performed” by Joe throughout the docuseries? And what kind of work went into Exotic’s absurd, homemade, obviously lip-synced music videos—further evidence of Joe’s blissful detachment from planet Earth?
After some light internet research, Vanity Fair concluded that the mystery musicians responsible for Joe’s tracks are Vince Johnson and vocalist Danny Clinton, both of whom are listed in Tiger King’s credits. But Joe guarded this “secret” fiercely.
“It was absolutely ridiculous,” producer Rick Kirkham told Vanity Fair of Joe’s music ruse. Kirkham spent years living on Joe’s now-shuttered zoo, filming footage for a prospective reality show. “One time,” he said, “Joe got a little bit drunk and high, and we actually coaxed him into singing part of one of the songs. He couldn’t even hold a tune. It was just so ludicrous. It was a big joke within the crew and staff that it wasn’t him [singing in the videos]—but he was damned insistent to anyone and everyone, including us and my studio crew, that that was him.”
Unbeknownst to Kirkham and the staff, Joe had tracked down Johnson and Clinton and convinced them to produce customized cat songs for free. The musicians had a proven record personalizing lyrics to clients’ needs—Johnson said that a song they wrote about Meineke’s poor service, commissioned by an unhappy customer, was what won over Joe—but had not yet broken through any major market as recording artists. Joe contacted Johnson, explained that he was a large-cat owner operating a private zoo in Oklahoma, and said he needed music for a reality show that was the subject of a bidding war between Animal Planet, Discovery, and National Geographic. Johnson agreed to work pro bono in exchange for the potential exposure his music could get on cable TV.
The first song Johnson and Clinton recorded was “I Saw a Tiger”—an ode to Joe’s life passion. The creative process for that song, and the tunes that followed, was simple: Joe would give Johnson a subject (Joe’s late brother, or “the nut in Ohio who was a friend of Joe’s who let his big cats loose,” or a bikers club), and the duo would turn around a track within two weeks.
“I had no idea he was going to Milli Vanilli the songs,” Johnson wrote Vanity Fair in an email. “It was a couple of months and two or three songs [into the collaboration] when I was on YouTube one night and just happened to look up Joe Exotic. And there he was, lip-syncing and acting like the ghost of Elvis [in these music videos]. I called him up, I was hot…And he bamboozled me about his reality show—that it was coming soon and he would make everything right as rain. I just wanted the proper credit.”
Johnson and Clinton went along with the ruse for awhile—thinking their music might finally make it to air—until it was clear that there would never be a real Joe Exotic reality show, beyond the low-fi content Joe was producing for his YouTube channel.
“When it finally ended, I told him they could have filmed Gone With the Wind for all I cared—let alone a crummy reality show starring a jerk-off con man kook,” Johnson said.
Mateusz Gugałka, who produced some of Joe’s music videos, told Vanity Fair that Joe went to extraordinary lengths to insist that he was writing and recording his own country music. One tactic involved telling staffers on a Monday that he spent the weekend in Dallas recording a new song—a brazen lie, considering Joe had interacted with said staffers the whole weekend in Oklahoma.
“We knew he didn’t go record a song, but you didn’t question Joe. You just roll with it.” said Gugałka, who began working for Joe at age 22 after moving to the U.S. from Poland. “He would not give us any notice about shooting music videos. He would just wake up one morning sometimes…and say, ‘We’re going to shoot a music video today, because I had a dream, pretty much, of how I want it to look.’ Then he would show up dressed like a priest.”
There actually was a glint of logic—Joe Exotic logic—to the priest getup.
“I think he was trying to start his own church at the zoo,” claimed Gugałka, who now produces commercials for NBC’s Oklahoma City affiliate. “I don’t know if he was doing this for tax reasons, or he just wanted to get people married. There were times where he wanted to start his own church.”
The filming process for the videos was pretty bare-bones—though Joe managed to rustle up occasional shimmers of production value. (A pretty spot-on Carole Baskin look-alike features in “Here Kitty Kitty.”) The music video for “Guardians of Children”—about the “bikers who protect abused children in our country”—features a group of children clapping, “Kumbaya”-like, between a shot of Joe lip-syncing on a highway overpass, his bare tattooed torso visible under a leather jacket, and Joe in a priest uniform, handlebar mustache, and baseball hat, serenading a newborn at night. The video for the piano-heavy “My First Love” features Joe in the dark, sitting at what could be a piano or table saw—everything from Joe’s forearm down is out of frame—staring into a glowing candle and what look to be pink roses added in post.
“Sometimes I had two cameras pointed at him—we’d just record two different angles maybe 50 different times, then pick the take where his mouth lined up with the music actually,” said Gugałka.
“I’m a musician myself, and I was just flabbergasted by the sheer fakeness of his presentation,” said Romeo Dupuy, a producer who impulsively moved to Oklahoma to work with Joe after he saw a Craigslist posting following a breakup with his girlfriend. “He couldn’t even play the guitar. So we would pose him. When we shot him playing these songs, he would be behind grass to cover up his hands. Then he’d lip-sync.”
But there’s something about Joe that is strangely magnetic. Even if he is a con man, those he conned can’t argue that Joe’s got a kind of gonzo charisma.
Writing to Vanity Fair years after their ill-fated collaboration, Johnson reflected on it: “We all get what’s coming to us in the end, be it good or bad. Joe, all in all, was likable. Most people just bore the hell out of me. They have the personality of a lobster. He’s a seedy shyster, but he’s got personality.”
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