Elliott Smith and the Big Nothing (11 page)

In this time, the mid-’90s, one of the better periods in Smith’s life, it was hard to worry about him while his career was so clearly picking up steam. Lou Barlow was one of indie rock’s most popular artists, and he first saw Smith play on a Kill Rock Stars tour on his birthday, July 17, in 1996. “He was playing to a pretty large room, kind of sparsely attended, and the seats were maybe half full,” recalls Ramona Clifton, a friend of Barlow’s. “There were maybe fifty people there or something. We started playing and Lou and I couldn’t move. We were rooted to the spot. I remember Lou saying after a song or two, ‘Fuck. He’s really good.’”

Soon, Smith was on the road with Sebadoh, a band with one of the biggest draws in indie rock and fans disposed to like Smith’s contemplative, lyrics-centered guitar music. After the July 17 show, says Clifton, “Elliott was just walking around and I went and introduced myself and talked for a minute and said, ‘I’m here with Lou Barlow but he’s too embarrassed to come over with me.’ He wouldn’t do it. But Elliott was like, ‘Whoa, no way.’ I was like, ‘Do you want to meet him?’ He was like, ‘Yeah, of course.’ And then they started talking and it was really easy and they got along—it was sort of mutual appreciation, and I think Lou invited him to open for them.”

That night the three of them went out to a bar together, and Clifton remembers Smith being smitten with Joanna Bolme. When Pete Krebs and Smith started working together, Krebs was dating Smith’s future girlfriend, Joanna Bolme. Throughout Smith’s long, slow drift away from his old Northwestern indie gang, Bolme remained a constant in his life. She spent some of the mid-’90s working at the Portland club La Luna, where Smith and other Heatmiser members were often found playing pool. Eventually, she began to work as an engineer at Larry Crane’s Jackpot! recording studio, and later joined The Minders as a bassist. Since 2001, she’s been the bassist for ex-Pavement frontman Stephen Malkmus’s Portland-based band The Jicks.

Bolme and Smith moved in together during his later years in Portland, and at one point the couple actually went so far as to move to France together, a failed experiment. Swanson remembers there being no pressing reason for the move: “I remember him and Joanna just being like they wanted to live in France. I think you hear that a lot when people are younger, ‘I just want to get out of the U.S., I just don’t like it here, and it’s not my thing,’ and I think they were both really enamored of Paris, and gave it a shot. It didn’t work out very well.” The couple soon moved back to Portland.

Smith and Clifton played pool, she remembers, “and we started talking and he sort of had a heart-to-heart with me about his girlfriend at the time, and how much he cared about her but he didn’t believe—he was afraid she wouldn’t stay with him. He was really anxious about that but really sweet about it. He just talked about her to me. I guess he just thought he was kind of a pain in the ass and that she would get fed up with him. It was more general angst. He was missing her, and he was getting uncertain about what was going to happen.”

Smith’s attitude toward his songwriting was a blend of ambition and self-criticism. He played an opening of Swanson’s in San Francisco in 1997, and they didn’t tell anybody ahead of time. They talked about how they were both looking to achieve a blend of sadness and optimism in their art. But when Swanson invited him, he spent a day and a half apologizing for wanting to do it, saying he didn’t want to ruin his show and talking about how he couldn’t sing.

The last album by Heatmiser sounds less like Heatmiser than like a new indie rock band influenced by Elliott Smith. Smith’s solo career had taken off to the point that Smith himself was singing less in the loud, Fugazi-like style he’d adopted for
Dead Air
. Instead, he was singing the same way he did on his solo albums. Also, there was a crucial line-up change: Brandt, who Smith later called the “most punk” of all the Heatmiser boys, was replaced by Sam Coomes, a veteran from San Francisco band The Donner Party.

The Donner Party was named after an 1846 pioneer expedition from Illinois to California that became trapped in an unusually brutal winter in the Sierra Nevada mountain range and resorted to cannibalism. The band, which formed in 1983 and recorded two albums between 1987 and 1989, has since gained some small recognition from the indie rock world for Coomes’s goofy pop-folk-punk songwriting. The Donner Party rocked hard and then soft, often with a macabre sense of humor. Although The Donner Party was hardly considered a great band, Coomes’s mischievous songwriting would play a major part in the bands he joined after moving to Portland.

Five years Smith’s senior, Coomes was born in Sherman, Texas, and moved to California as a child. He moved to Portland from San Francisco and there formed the band Motorgoat with Janet Weiss and Brad Pedinov “circa 1990.” Motorgoat released two cassettes and a single on 7-inch vinyl, and after Pedinov left, Coomes and Weiss stuck together and dubbed the stripped-down outfit Quasi. They would become Smith’s touring band in the late ’90s.

It’s hard to distinguish Coomes’s effect on Heatmiser’s music from the effects of the band’s having been given a large sum of money by Virgin Records, which it used to buy its own equipment and record an album in Heatmiser House. But what is certain is that the punk element of Heatmiser—in the loud, fast, distortion-soaked sense of the term—went into remission under the new circumstances. Melodies established themselves through clarity rather than pounding insistence and volume. Instead of power chords, the guitarists used finger-picking and slide techniques, and the beat deviated from the medium-fast tempo that set the tone on
Dead Air
. Most importantly, both Smith and Gust seem to have
taken a hint from the success of Smith’s solo records. Instead of repeating the effortful shouting that Smith tried to make his own on
Dead Air
, he sings like the Elliott Smith audiences know from his solo albums.

With the infusion of money from Virgin came the assistance of the two producers who would stay with Smith for his next three albums: Rob Schnapf and Tom Rothrock. Schnapf and Rothrock were young up-and-comers at that point, and the production of the record reflects the quiet “production” of Smith’s self-titled album.

“We did it at the Heatmiser House,” Schnapf says of
Mic City Sons
. “They had rented this house and filled it with equipment and started the record on their own. And I think they couldn’t come to terms with one another and they needed outside help. So we recorded it up there and we mixed it at the shop. When we came in [the songs were] in varying degrees of [completion], some were pretty far along, some were barely along, some we started from scratch. It was a collaborative effort, as always. We recorded in the bottom floor of the house. The living room was where they had made the control room, and then the dining room was where the drums were cut, and the kitchen was where a lot of guitars and vocals were done, so the dining room was more dead-sounding and the living room was more live-sounding. We were separated by this 8-inch wall.”

Schnapf says part of his function during the recording was to mediate between Smith’s and Lash’s the differing visions for the album. It had always been an unusual trait of Heatmiser’s that the drummer exercised the most control over the band’s recorded sound. Heatmiser’s mixes had heretofore emphasized the band’s beat and capacity to rock more than making the melodies clear. With the melody half of the band suddenly flexing its muscles, there was bound to be some new disagreement. “Elliott and Tony had a difference of values,” says Schnapf. “I don’t know this to be factual but I sort of gleaned from the situation [that] Tony had been doing it, and those records had sounded a certain way, and [then] Elliott started spreading his wings. There just wasn’t room for the two of them. [Elliott] started getting an artistic vision himself, and they were just too close to one another and they needed a third party to say ‘here.’” Schnapf may not be certain that that assessment was “factual,” but Smith sounded pretty sure of himself when asked about Heatmiser’s transformation by
Under the Radar
: “Me and Neil kind of took over.”

One of the goals with
Mic City Sons
was to achieve a more old-fashioned sound than would had been put down on any previous Heatmiser release. “With their equipment and the way we went about it we tried to make it a more analog recording, even though their equipment was digital,” says Schnapf. A less punk, more ethereal feel was also abetted by Coomes’s facility with slide guitar: “The harder [slide] stuff would be Sam, where finesse was required.”

The irony of Heatmiser was that as soon as the band started to produce something like the music closest to Smith’s soul, it collapsed. The bandmates wanted to go in separate directions, and there was no longer a workable compromise. Smith later referred to the band as a “disaster” of sorts.

Did Smith worry about being a failure in the early days? “I think,” says Swanson, “in a way he was always afraid of that.” But in 1996 he pieced together the album that would eliminate any possibility of a return to obscurity.
Either/Or
is in some sense the last of Smith’s early Portland solo albums, characterized by stripped-down production with Smith’s acoustic guitar and vocals at the center. But it’s also the first of the latter-day Smith albums in that its most remarkable moments—the moments that made Smith’s career, and arguably made
Either/Or
his best album—were recorded with state-of-the-art equipment at The Shop, Rob Schnapf and Tom Rothrock’s state-of-the-art studio in Humboldt County, California. The instrumentation on “Between the Bars,” “Angeles,” and “Say Yes” might have been the same as on “Southern Belle” and “Christian Brothers” off the self-titled album, but the sound was far more delicately produced.

For one thing, there was The Shop itself, a hundred-year-old riverside barn with plenty of windows in the heart of California marijuana country, surrounded by redwoods. The facilities were luxurious. “We had a control room and we had three other spaces,” says Schnapf. “We had this old console from Wally Heider Studio 4—it was the board from [Gram Parsons’s]
GP
and
Grievous Angel
, and a diverse bunch of Tom Waits records—it was just a classic old board. . . . It was really good for vocals. Tom found it in the
Recycler,
it was in some guy’s storage. It was the very one, the board in Wally’s Studio 4.”

The
Either/Or
recordings were done at The Shop in two different sessions, recalls Schnapf, both between one week and ten days long. The three songs originally recorded in The Shop—“Angeles,” “Between the Bars,” and “Say Yes”—were each essentially one take of Smith’s singing and playing acoustic guitar at the same time, superimposed on another take of Smith’s singing and playing. It’s a surprisingly difficult thing to record well. “He played acoustic, sang, doubled it, another take,” says Schapf. “It was really incredible. Once we got the take we would double it, and he would listen. He’s doing both [takes] singularly really well and then matching them. He was out there playing acoustic guitar and singing for a while until we got a good phase relationship. He didn’t seem really super loud—very controlled.” In other words, the shimmering quality of the guitar sound on
Either/Or
tracks produced in The Shop—the reason it’s difficult to tell if there are two guitars in play or one—is that Smith would turn in two nighidentical live performances, note for note, voice and guitar, with the tiny differences that inevitably creep in creating a sense of depth and something similar to a subtle echo. Applying a reverb track to the sound wouldn’t have produced anything nearly so delicate. The three songs were the greatest realization up to that point of Smith’s potential as a musician and an innovator, and they helped make his reputation.

The only adornment to the guitar and vocals on the three songs was a keyboard track on “Angeles”—Schnapf thinks it was
a Hammond B–3 organ—that Smith had put down in a mostly fruitless studio session in Hoboken, New Jersey. In addition to the three songs they recorded, Schnapf and Rothrock mixed most of the record.

“Between the Bars” on
Either/Or
is one of Smith’s clearest statements of contempt for the Byronic approach to life’s responsibilities taken by many rock musicians, including, on occasion, himself. The pun in the title of the song ties alcohol to prison, but the body of the song goes a step further to suggest that drunkenness is self-deceit is prison is love. “I’ll kiss you again, between the bars” paints a picture of lovers on a crawl and of a jail scene. But the line leaves mysterious who is locked up and who is on the outside. Is it the narrator or his “baby” who’s trapped? The first line of the second chorus could either be addressed to someone looking through the window of a cell or someone stumbling around with a bottle in a paper bag: “Drink up baby, stare at the stars.” The lyrics emphasize how the comforts of love and the bottle are derived from their ability to blind the imbiber to the ambitions and other people that might trouble him. “People you’ve been before that you don’t want around anymore/they push and shove but won’t bend to your will/I’ll keep them still”—that’s the promise of Romeo and of Jim Beam. Smith is talking about the romance of slackness, of failure: “The potential you’ll be/that you’ll never see/the promises you’ll only make.” The narrator could easily be the bottle itself talking to its victim. To take the metaphor to its logical conclusion, the narrator could be understood as the devil, or temptation itself.