Elliott Smith and the Big Nothing (10 page)

Dallas and heroin were two of the most prominent ogres in Smith’s songs, and both his incomplete memory of his own boyhood and his educated guesses about the inner life of a heroin addict were to some extent products of his imagination. They inspired great songs and tortured him personally; he was deeply
sensitive to images stuck in his head that posed no concrete threat to his well-being. What haunted Smith were dangerous corners of his mind, corners that he peeked into when he wrote his songs but that were better left alone if he had any intention of living a happy life. Smith preferred to think about them and explore them in art rather than think of them as baggage to get rid of.

Krebs thinks that as much as Smith might have thought about doing heroin, he never saw heroin as an end, a route to death. He saw it as a dramatic episode in his life. “The thing about Elliott in his drug use is that I felt like it was somehow in his plan to get strung out, to get really far out there. I always felt like the whole heroin thing, he nodded to it, no pun intended. He had it in his mind that that was going to be part of the picture.”

It also helped get him attention both on a personal level, drawing concern from friends, and in the public sphere, creating a recognizable public image of Smith as somebody who wrote about drug addiction. “He was getting some mileage out of people freaking out when he would talk about it, so he liked that. I really feel like the plan was, ‘I’m going to get really fucked up and come back from that.’ I never thought that he would intentionally kill himself or OD intentionally; if he died it would be an accidental OD. He had plenty of opportunities to kill himself when he got really depressed; I always just felt like he would have done it. I heard he tried a couple of times and they were half-hearted attempts and something happened. With the heroin thing I just thought that that was part of the plan, I thought he was going to do his thing and then he was going to come back. That was the big picture, and he would overcome his demons or have some depth of experience he could draw from artistically or somehow satisfy some romantic vision he wanted to be like. But I don’t think his romantic vision was finally tragic. I think he liked being a tragic character but he wanted to be around to see the results of that characterization.”

Marc Swanson thinks the Smith songs that dealt with drugs were generally a blend of autobiographical and non-autobiographical material. Literal, simple interpretations were rarely the best ones. “I think in a way a lot of times Elliott’s songs were about bigger things, more than people realize, but they also could help to be self-portraits in a way because I think most good artists are taking themselves and their interaction with the world and reinterpreting through the light of what they make. I think you would get a lot of different answers from people about what different songs are about, because often if you got deep into a certain subject he might say, ‘Well that’s what that song was about.’ And I don’t know if it was ultimately
just
about that. There was always this running thing of which girlfriend it [a song] was about, depending on when he wrote the song, whether he was going out with JJ or Joanna. I think there are some autobiographical items in them all the time. But I would never take ‘St. Ides Heaven,’ [to be] about walking around high on speed or something.” (The chorus of “St. Ides Heavan” begins, “High on amphetamines/The Moon is a light bulb breaking.”) “Who knows, maybe, but I wouldn’t assume that it happened a couple nights before.”

Heroin wouldn’t become an issue for Smith until Los Angeles—alcohol was his first problem substance. He was a good social drinker—he liked to have deep conversations in bars. “A lot of what me and Elliott did is sit in bars until four in the morning or however late they were open,” says Swanson, “and just talk.”

On tour in the mid-’90s, Santen remembers Smith as more focused geek than rampaging musician. After he hooked up with Mittleman, he traveled to shows in the backseat of a Lincoln Continental or the Taurus. “He was so together. When we were [on tour] he bought a tape machine and he read that manual diagram by diagram just studying that thing,” says Santen. “He was so disciplined, recording and reading. It was pretty inspiring.”

As if challenging himself to increasing heights of nerdiness, Smith alternated between recording-equipment manuals and science fiction. “He was pretty hard to travel with,” says Santen.
“To begin with, the tour manager didn’t stop; he’d drive four or five hours without stopping. The first thing [Elliott] did on tour was buy
2001: A Space Odyssey
, so most of the time driving he would just read and I’d be crawling out of my skin.” Smith brought exactly one tape with him on tour, and listened to it over and over again: a Velvet Underground album. “It was one of those reissues, with two versions of ‘Mr. Rain.’ It starts with ‘We’re Going to Have a Real Good Time Together’ [
Another View
(Verve, 1986)].”

But it wasn’t that Smith was anti-social. He was by all accounts a funny guy who cared deeply about how people perceived him and even had ambition and a sense of direction. “He’d kind of wake up at night,” says Santen. “I asked him a lot of questions. I knew he knew where he was going. It was fun asking him stuff about life and his experiences playing music and places he’d been. He had the outlook, ‘You know what, just do what you’re doing, don’t send music off to record labels, don’t do any of that crap.’ He taught me how to be simple about things. The way that he recorded is the way I record now. Simple as can be.”

And Santen found Smith to be an excellent confidante, even though their relationship never approached the kind of closeness Smith seemed to experience with close friends like Sean Croghan or Neil Gust. “Whenever we’d do something in Portland that wasn’t music, I’d just call him and we’d meet at Dots. That was right across the street from me. I don’t know if I’d ever had another guy like that. It wasn’t like we were best friends by any means. He was just an acquaintance I could call up and be like, ‘Let’s get a beer.’ I can’t imagine doing that now with anybody. And it’s weird because we weren’t really that good of friends.”

Dots Café, on Southeast Clinton Street, is a quintessential Portland establishment, from its vaguely retro-’50s name to its abundance of beer and pool tables and its dim lighting. It’s a place where you could order a vegan sandwich with a can of beer and then play several rounds of pool with a cigarette trapped between your teeth. Entrees didn’t cost more than six bucks. The place embodied some of the qualities that distinguished Portland in the ’90s from other “left coast” cities like San Francisco. On one hand it had vegan options, an album by X on the stereo, and cave-dark pseudo-Victorian wallpaper; on the other it had cheese fries and smoking and Budweiser in a can, a location-specific fusion of cosmopolitan and blue-collar aesthetics.

As much as this seems to mirror the music Smith made in Portland, with its blend of comforting, folky guitar and punk rock darkness and minimalism, Smith seemed to have his sights set on a different part of the world. “He talked about New York like it was Oz. When he found out I’d never been there, that was all he talked about,” says Santen. “He talked about how much I’d love it and all the great things you could do there. I don’t think he cared much about Portland. . . . One of the things he told me is that he hated Portland because everybody played music and everybody did the same thing. He wanted to move to New York City so he could meet people who made movies and were artists and did different stuff.”

As Smith started to yearn for life beyond Portland’s music scene, the music world was starting to turn away from the Northwest in general. The early ’90s, in the United States, had been a time when Northwestern grunge established itself as a force on the album charts along with the pop R&B ballads of Whitney Houston and the ascending genre of hip-hop, still only a decade old in the consciousness of most Americans. The press of the time was full of the concurrent rise of “rap and grunge,” but the latter grew stale while the former—focused in New York and Los Angeles—took over. By 1996 hip-hop was achieving an unprecedented degree of acceptance in the upper-middle-brow kingdom of
The New Yorker
and the
New York Times
, largely as a result of The Fugees’ breakthrough album
The Score
. It was a turning point not just for hip-hop but for rock as well. Accustomed to being the only acceptable pop-music option among the smarter-than-average set, rock lost ground to hip-hop among Americans with brainy inclinations. Groups like The Roots were claiming
college students and artistic teenagers who would have formerly gravitated toward alternative rock. In cities like New York and London, began to look as if rock were on the way out. Despite the commercial success of Oasis and some of their Britpop brethren, hip-hop and techno dominated among young people who considered themselves connoisseurs of music. As
The New Yorker
put it in a 1996 profile of the doomed child alt-rock star Ben Kweller, “alternative” now meant mainstream. And by the logic alt-rock had itself installed in the psyches of teenagers on both sides of the Atlantic, that meant it was hopelessly out of style.

But Portland was sealed off, somewhat, from these trends, which were financially catastrophic to anybody who hoped to make a living with an acoustic guitar. While Portland had something of a rave scene, hip-hop groups remained barely visible even as hip-hop came to dominate radio and album charts elsewhere in the western world. For one thing, Portland was a predominantly white city, and the prospect of Oregonian rappers retained, in America’s pre-Eminem innocence, an aura of absurdity. When hip-hop bigwigs like Jeru the Damaja came through Portland, they sometimes found themselves disappointed by the mellowness and passivity of the crowds. It was not a dancing town, outside of a small swing-dance scene. In Seattle, there were optimistic mutterings that a local hip-hop scene was poised for greatness, but never in Portland. And while Portland did have dance clubs, its ethos of non-stylishness and informality—call it the raincoat aesthetic—made the city barren ground for the seeds of a real techno movement. The Portland rave scene, though represented in a few serious record stores for DJs, worshipped Detroit house and never came into a sound of its own.

As all these movements slid past Portland, the local indie rock scene clung stubbornly to its position of prominence. The Northwest had already lost its claim to being world headquarters for rock ‘n’ roll, but it remained rock ‘n’ roll territory. At shows by techno acts of the moment like Spring Heel Jack, attendance was mediocre, while at shows for veteran acts like The Scofflaws there’d still be enough (fully grown) skinheads in attendance for there to be large, regular brawls on the floor.

As Smith’s solo efforts got more and more serious and elaborate, indie rock turned further away from the kind of music he made. When
Roman Candle
was released in 1994, Liz Phair had just a year earlier been a hot new thing for her minimal ennui opus
Exile in Guyville
, and footage from Nirvana’s
MTV Unplugged
concert was played regularly in the wake of Kurt Cobain’s suicide. Both Phair and the acoustic version of Nirvana shared Smith’s personal tone and stripped-down approach to rock and folk. But when Smith got famous in 1997 and 1998, he was an anomaly, a holdout for guitar rock when nobody cool was playing a guitar. What was cool was every variety of “post-rock”: fusions of electronic music and hip-hop, like Massive Attack, or intricately layered groove music like Stereolab or Tortoise.

The increasingly isolationist climate of mid-to-late-’90s indie rock would nurture Smith’s solo career even as that very career became one of the influences that lead indie rock bands out of seclusion, back into the embrace of major record labels and back into public scrutiny.

*
Possum Dixon was an LA indie band that tasted the beginnings of national attention in the mid-’90s with their album
Star Maps
and then returned to obscurity.

W
HILE HEATMISER HAD represented a collaboration of apparently equal partners as far back as
Dead Air
, the band’s sound had been such that Gust’s songs, not Smith’s, were the standout tracks. The strongest tune on
Dead Air
is Gust’s “Can’t Be Touched,” with its swaying rhythm and power chords, the melody carried along by the iron tone of Gust’s singing. On
Mic City Sons
, the best tracks are mostly Smith’s. Gust still weighs in with impressive songs (“Low-Flying Jets” and “Rest My Head Against the Wall”) but the highlights are Smith’s “Plainclothes Man” and “Get Lucky.”

“Plainclothes Man” was more like the Elliott Smith solo work to come than any of the songs on his self-titled album. On
Mic City Sons
, Smith, Schnapf, and Rothrock figured out a way to wed the intimacy of Smith’s solo work to bigger production, and Smith would follow that path on a few songs on
Either/Or
but especially when he was reunited with Schnapf and Rothrock on
XO
. “Plainclothes Man” looks in retrospect like the blueprint for the last two Smith albums: the familiar double-tracked vocals over acoustic guitar and then, gradually, the intrusion of electric guitar, drums, and keyboard. “Get Lucky,” the album’s first track, wouldn’t be out of place on
Figure 8
. The guitar has classic rock swagger, but the vocals still have the soft, breathy tone of
Roman Candle
.

The Smith songs are still dramatically different from the Gust songs on
Mic City Sons
, but the production had changed to bring out some of the best traits in Smith’s songwriting and singing. Smith had become the most famous member of the band, because his self-titled album was garnering a reputation. Dorien Garry remembers that in 1995, Smith became a client of Girlie Action, then a tiny, brand-new PR firm with a handful of employees. Garry had recently been hired as a junior publicist there and her job included handling minor press for Smith—zines of the day like
Ben Is Dead
—while the agency’s co-founder, Felice Ecker, handled the larger media outlets.

On the other hand, Heatmiser seemed bound for its own fame and glory. The band had signed a deal with Virgin Records for
Mic City Sons
to be released on its alt-rock division, Caroline. It was a deal with a couple distinctive features: One, according to Smith, was that the label retained the rights to release any solo albums by any member of the group if the band split. The other was that it provided the band with enough money and freedom to stock up on studio equipment and record the album in a house (Heatmiser House) by themselves. The result was that Smith came to disagree with Lash about how they should produce parts of the album, producers Rob Schnapf and Tom Rothrock were brought in to help them find their way, and the band decided to break up—but Virgin retained the right to release future Elliott Smith records.

For now Smith was touring nationally with the self-titled album and then
Either/Or
, his second and last Kill Rock Stars album, sometimes accompanied by Mittleman. He was a musician’s musician, on the radars of only the most serious of connoisseurs. In the winter after the 1995 release of
Elliott Smith
, he shared a bill with another obscure figure at the Manhattan club Fez: Stephin Merritt, playing with his band The Magnetic Fields.

One of the musicians who came to that gig was Mike Doughty, the singer of Soul Coughing, a band that had just hit its stride as a breakout act from an avant-garde Manhattan rock
scene centered around the Knitting Factory in Tribeca. After two albums on indie label Slash Records, they put out their first Warner Brothers release,
Irresistible Bliss
, in 1996, and their last,
El Oso
, in 1998, before calling it quits in 2000, around the same time Smith moved to LA. In their major-label days, they cut a couple songs that received some national airplay, such as “Super Bon Bon.” The mix of genres—funk, hip-hop, jazz, no-wave—had nothing in common with Smith’s music, but the two singers shared an attentiveness to words and a loathing of cliché. Doughty was developing a solo acoustic act (his manager termed it “Sebadoughty,” for its resemblance to Lou Barlow’s indie rock band Sebadoh) that came to resemble Smith’s music far more than anything he’d done with his band.

It was the first of many times Doughty went to an Elliott Smith show. “[Smith and The Magnetic Fields] were both not particularly notable to anybody at the time, but my A&R guy took me and he totally snobbed out on me for my never having heard of either one of them,” he says. “It had to have been early in the week, not very crowded, and clearly with an incompetent sound guy because both acts spent the evening scowling at the guy. . . . Stephin Merritt was so in angry-Stephin-Merritt mode, about the sound guy, about the subway that rumbles past that venue, about the shittiness of the crowd, he was just basically glaring. Whereas Elliott was just looking woeful, he was openly looking like Charles Bronson out at the sound guy. . . . And it was incredible. I went and got the records of both acts, and it was
Elliott Smith
, and after that I went to every gig Elliott did in New York. If I was in New York and he was in New York, I was there.”

Doughty’s A&R man at Slash Records, Randy Kay, took him to hang out with Smith and Mittleman after one show. “I guess after the fifth or sixth time I saw him, we met him after the show at the camp theme bar next door to Brownie’s, and we hung out, and we talked about drummers, and the old Sam Cooke records and the drum sounds on them and how basic they were. . . . I said, ‘Well, have you thought about making a record with Mitchell Froom? [And he said], ‘No, I haven’t heard of him.’ . . . ‘Oh, he’s really great, and blah blah blah,’ and Margaret Mittleman was just freaking out. When I said ‘Mitchell Froom,’ she was just completely aghast at the idea. She just totally got her back up, it was like super visible.” Froom is a frequently unconventional producer whose credits include Suzanne Vega and Los Lobos as well as weirder projects like Cibo Matto and the soundtrack for the cult movie
Café Flesh
. Of course, Smith ultimately picked Mittleman’s husband, Rob Schnapf, and his partner, Tom Rothrock, as his producers. “I remember him speaking almost apologetically about having someone from BMG hanging out, as was the custom of the time,” says Doughty, referring to the indie-cred issues of the mid-’90s that dogged musicians who in other periods might not have cared at all.

Mittleman proved highly effective at negotiating contracts and making Smith money, and her skills were in dire need—Smith wanted to get out of a record deal. (It was unclear why Smith didn’t want to stay on Virgin after the break-up of Heatmiser, but he didn’t.) “There wasn’t a bidding war,” he told the English zine
Comes with a Smile
. “I didn’t want there to be one. They get really ugly and people’s feelings get hurt. No, I was in a band that broke up and we were on Virgin and they had a claim to me after that. So DreamWorks bought me out of that. I couldn’t stay on the label I was on either way.”

Smith’s “couldn’t” might be understood to mean “couldn’t” in an emotional sense, except that it’s hard to imagine Kill Rock Stars could come up with the cash to buy Smith out of a deal with a major label like Virgin. Andy Factor, Heatmiser’s A&R man, gave Smith no reason to complain, by both Smith’s account and Santen’s: Smith described Factor as a “friend” in an interview, and Santen’s account indicates he wasn’t just looking for brownie points: “His A&R guy at Virgin [Factor] was wild about him, he loved Elliott Smith.”

Swanson confirms Smith’s desire to leave the label: “I remember he talked quite a bit about how he didn’t want to be on Virgin,
how he wanted to switch. I think after that he started to feel really uncomfortable about complaining about his situation at all to anyone—maybe he could to another musician on his level but not to a friend who was a struggling artist.”

Santen recalls Smith’s story of what exactly went down when Heatmiser announced their break-up to Andy Factor: “Him and Tony [Lash], they weren’t getting along, [Elliott] didn’t like the way the record sounded, and the A&R [guy] came into town to say, ‘Let’s hear the record.’ And they sat down and had a meeting with him [and said], ‘We broke up.’ And he said, ‘Okay, Plan B.’ Just skipped a step. [Smith’s] point of view was, ‘Fuck these guys, they want my soul,’ but the other point of view is that there wasn’t anyone else interested at the time and they fucking loved him, and I think he decided he didn’t want anybody who had anything to do with [Heatmiser].

“I remember asking him, ‘Could it be then that [Virgin] puts out your records?’” recalls Dorien Garry. But Smith remained uncomfortable with the situation, not because of anything Virgin had done wrong, but because of the way he had come to be signed to the label. “He fought really hard,” says Garry.

On the solo side, there were still modest tours with the likes of Mary Lou Lord. In the mid-’90s, Lord recalled in a Harvard radio interview, they both applied to perform at the music industry’s most important conference for indie rock bands: South by Southwest in Austin, a festival where hundreds of bands showcase themselves over the tequila-amplified buzz of journalists, radio programmers, and label executives. They were both rejected, Lord said. On tour, they were headed through Texas anyway, so they conspired to show up at the festival. It was St. Patrick’s Day, and they set up on the street with Mary Lou Lord’s amp and played in front of a Kinko’s. A few drinks later, they were dedicating Irish songs to Shane MacGowan of The Pogues, and Slim Moon and Calvin Johnson showed up. Neither Johnson’s Olympia-based K Records nor Moon’s Olympia-based Kill Rock Stars had showcases at South by Southwest, as ambitious indie labels generally do, so the site became an impromptu outsider outpost.

Years later, when things started to go seriously awry for Smith in LA, one of the things his friends from this period missed most was his playful side. “He had the best kind of sideways conspiratorial glance,” says Ramona Clifton, who got to know Smith by introducing him to Lou Barlow at a show. “He’d be talking and make a little joke, and he’d look at you like, ‘Did you catch the joke?’ And he would do this little sideways grin. He always seemed sort of slightly awkward, not a dancer type of guy, but then he would just slide across the floor, straight moonwalk. He would do it onstage every once in a while with Heatmiser.”

Even this early on, a relatively healthy time in Smith’s life when drug use and drinking didn’t get in his way and his career was ascendant, there was the apparent contradiction in his character that would stay with him: Smith and Lord had a good time on tour, even as Smith often appeared shy and closed-off to people who weren’t close to him. As Swanson puts it, “Elliott was hilarious; he was one of the funniest people I ever knew. When we hung out, most of the time we had a really good time. When I think about Elliott I think about him laughing. We would often get into these stupid characters, we’d goof around for hours on end, like he’d be the mad scientist and I or someone else would be Igor. And we’d play those characters out endlessly. And you’d tell him a joke and he’d tell the same joke over and over again and just be in stitches about it and tell it to everybody he’d be in contact with. It was definitely this running thing with him . . . saving up the new jokes you heard for Elliott, and the funniest ones, always in the typical Elliott way, were really funny without being mean to anybody.”

On the other hand, says Swanson, “There’s also the other half of that guy that was crying a lot, too. To be honest, not to say this in a mean way, but I probably shouldn’t say it: By the time we
were thinking about us living together, I didn’t know if I wanted to live with him. He was a tough person . . . to be friends with. He was very sad and had a lot of demons and problems to deal with.”

Before you got to Smith’s sadness, you had to penetrate a lot of layers—layers of sweetness and shyness if you were an acquaintance, and layers of good humor, intellect, and esprit de corps if you were a friend. His songs were personal, and they offered clues to his concerns. But they were clues, not roadmaps, and he rejected the idea that people could assume they had the roadmap to his psyche because of psychology or twelve-step-program talks or because he had a business relationship with them.

“It’s almost like the sadness came on stronger when he started to do better. This is obviously just a theory on my part too, but I was always really nervous for him because it seemed like the better he was doing, the more he had to justify to other people that he wasn’t doing well,” says Swanson. “This idea that him being successful as a musician was hurting all of his other musician friends. It started to happen more and more, where it was like, ‘One, I can’t sing; I can’t do anything. But I’m also really sad.’ In one way, if you’re sad, and then you have everything that’s supposed to make your life good and you’re still sad—is that Kurt Cobain, is that what happened to him? If you’ve got the whole world at your feet and you’re still sad, what do you strive for after that? And Elliott’s sadness was deep and very sad. You could tell. I’m not going to go into specific conversations about that stuff, but I remember understanding that the sadness was probably a kind of sadness I had never even felt before, even though I had had pretty sad times in my life. And I think, in general, just like a lot of people, Elliott, to be frank, started to drink a lot and self-medicate through a lot of these things that had happened to him in the past or whatever it was making him sad. I think it was probably things that had happened in the past, and that he needed to deal with it. But the idea of therapy or anything like that, or when people would try to do the interventions and get him help . . . I think the writing was on the wall that he needed some outside help. But I think that’s tough to do with a fiercely intelligent person.”