Elliott Smith and the Big Nothing (16 page)

To E. V. Day, Smith’s new life was more destructive than any of the secrets he kept bottled up had ever been. Recognition helped decimate his support system, and Smith found himself unable to scrap together a new one as sturdy as the old. “I think it was the new life,” she says when asked if sadness about the past was festering and making Smith more self-destructive than he had been. “Because if you listen to the earlier albums it’s all the same depth and sadness and composite characters who sound like his lovers but it’s really his stepfather and twisted into these love songs, essentially. But it’s composite stuff that I think he was always singing about. Even in Heatmiser he was singing about those relationships. I don’t think they were the new relationships that were necessarily worse. It was the whole structure. He used to have friends, real friends. He was surrounded by some of the greatest, loving people: like Quasi, those people were really great friends of his. And Neil, and Swannie [Swanson]. He had smart, talented, no-bullshit friends who didn’t do drugs. I think he missed it and I think he sabotaged it, and that was kind of one way to have control over his situation.”

In a mostly unpublished May 1998 interview with Laura Vogel (a few of Smith’s sentences were published in
Elle
), whose zine he’d contributed to at Hampshire, Smith expounded at length on his new prospects. For all the reports that came later that Smith was a private person, the interview shows Smith not particularly concerned with his nascent renown.

“It’s a happy accident,” he told Vogel. Fame, he went on, “makes some things harder, but doesn’t really come close to making it not worth it. It distracts your attention all of the time. It’s easier to play music if you don’t constantly think about how you’re perceived by people. If things go well and you get a bunch of attention for a while and [people] are asking you questions all the time, it redirects your attention to how they perceive you. . . . It’s not a bad thing.”

Vogel followed up by asking him if he ever wanted to “move to the mountains and just say fuck it.”

“Not the mountains, but yeah,” he allowed. “No, I’m pretty committed to this . . . powering through any obstacle, and it’s not really an obstacle.”

Vogel asked him about groupies, mentioning the ubiquity of “thrift-store PhD’s” at his show at Tramps in Manhattan, “including moony-looking girls in vintage glasses frames.”

“I don’t know, usually after I play, I run off,” replied Smith. “I don’t think I really come across as a good groupie prospect. It’s not like I’m going to be . . . ”

Vogel: “Bringing them back to the tour bus for some blow?”

Smith: “Right. You know, having all of my security guys spec out all of the ‘hot babes’ from the audience. . . . Though, on this last tour I was kind of blown away by the occasional totally blunt proposition . . . and I get so into the mode of ‘Oh, thanks, thanks a lot,’ and someone would come up with this totally blunt proposition and I’d be like, ‘Thanks, thanks.’ It freaks me out, I so don’t feel like that kind of guy. . . . Apparently you don’t have to be handsome . . . or tall.”

This had been going on before the Oscars. Not long after the release of
Either/Or
, receiving lines for Smith had been rife with aspiring groupies. One of them burst into tears in front of Santen when she saw Bolme at Smith’s side.

Smith also discussed, with unusual candor, the way his family looked on his musical career. “Is your family proud of and happy for you?” Vogel asked Smith. “Yes, very proud,” he said.

“Were they always supportive of your career or did they want you to become an accountant?” she pressed.

“One side of my family was not especially supportive before,” replied Smith. “But now it’s looking more and more like a good idea to them.”

Which side, of course, Smith didn’t say. But considered alongside another comment he made in one of the many interviews he did in the wake of Oscar night ’98, it shows the extent to which
the Oscars were an emotional boon for Smith in some ways: He said he appreciated that the ceremony gave his mother a success story she could tell her friends.

But at the same time another strain in Smith’s life was starting to emerge: the increasing isolation that comes with fame and a successful performing career. Vogel asked Smith if the first person he wanted to talk to when something really good happened was Joanna. “Well, it was really funny,” he said. “When I first found out that I was nominated I had to call up somebody, but I couldn’t think of anybody, and it was really depressing . . . ’cause I kind of had lost track of a lot of my friends, ’cause I’m gone so much. So I called Joanna and she wasn’t home, so then my list of people to call got really short.”

The list of friends shrank while the legions of fans grew into an army of hundreds of thousands of literate young people. On Oscar night, Smith might not have cared, but he became a symbol of something pure and rock ‘n’ roll and pensive. He became something kids could associate themselves with, a quiet guy with a guitar floating in a sea of glitter. For the kids who came to his shows, who drew fan art and posted his image on the Web, he was a lighthouse in a big nothing now, the glittery monstrosity of the dance-floor music and frat metal claiming the charts. You didn’t have to be an aggressive punk rocker to identify with Elliott Smith—you just had to be someone who saw herself as more thoughtful and honest and less smitten by the trappings of fame and riches than the rest of the world. Smith probably never would have wanted to represent anything in particular, much less to take sides in any dichotomy between thoughtful rock and glitzy pop, but he became a convenient rallying point for teenagers and twenty-somethings who carved out identities as Elliott Smith fans.

*
A club in Portland.

A
S BILL SANTEN recalls, the pivotal moment when he lost touch with Smith was not when Smith moved from Portland to New York City but when Smith started to be surrounded by handlers. It was also the moment he saw the first of Smith’s fourth album, his first for DreamWorks.

“He got a road manager, and he got his people. It wasn’t where we could all hang out in his dressing room, where they’d have good food and good drinks, and it got so they’d shut the door. I was just kind of messing around. I didn’t realize he had all these people guarding him. I knew he had this new record, it was
XO,
and I snagged it, and later that night I realized it was the only copy. It was the artwork copy the company had sent him to proof. I had to walk back to his hotel room and say, ‘Sorry man.’ He laughed about it.”

A necessary evil that comes with even a small degree of fame is the process of protecting oneself from the intrusions of an overly curious public, and Smith had a small collection of people who did that for him. In addition to Mittleman’s careful tending of his career, and Schnapf and Rothrock tending to his records, he had Felice Ecker, the head and co-founder of Girlie Action Media and Marketing, working as his publicist. But during the time he had this small professional group of advisors he also managed to
arrange things so that he often traveled with friends. On the
XO
tour, the opening acts were Neil Gust’s post-Heatmiser outfit No. 2 and Sean Croghan’s band Jr. High. Marc Swanson was the tour photographer. And Janet Weiss was often around because her new band, Sleater-Kinney, was on a tour schedule that often paralleled Smith’s. And while some artists crumble under the car time, sleeplessness, and heavy drinking that generally accompany the touring life, Smith had a professed fondness for being on tour and thrived under the nomadic conditions. “When we were on the
XO
tour, everyone was getting drunk every night, things were getting really rowdy at the time,” says Swanson. “It was staying up all night, playing every night, and in between I would just see him switching back and forth between reading this book on quantum physics and [a book on] I think it was World War I, or, I think, a history book that was six inches thick. I could barely read
Us
magazine, and he had this endless capacity.” As much as any non-commercially-minded musician can have a comfortable career in the music business, Smith had one from when he signed to Dream-Works to when he stopped touring for
Figure 8
in 2001.

The most serious source of Smith’s isolation from his friends was a difference of opinion over how his struggles with self-destructive behavior ought to be handled. There was no ignoring that difference after a series of events that unfolded only a month after Smith moved to New York City, and it wound up thoroughly discussed in the CD Santen innocently swiped that day.

Dorien Garry had worked for Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore, the married couple at the center of Sonic Youth, taking care of their new baby Coco. Through Gordon and Moore she caught wind of a concert taking place in Raleigh: an anniversary party for Tannis Root, the company that made Sonic Youth’s t-shirts, with performances by Mudhoney and Redd Kross as well as Sonic Youth. “Elliott was kind of in a funk, just sitting around and playing music but not much else, and it was like ‘Come on, we’re all going to drive down to Raleigh,’” says Garry. “And I really
figured out that something was wrong when he got on the turnpike and we stopped at a restaurant and he was like, ‘Is there any place to get alcohol here?’ And it’s like, ‘On the New Jersey Turnpike? No, you’re lucky if you can get a decent cup of coffee. No. Not at all. Come on, you can make a ten-hour drive without a drink.’ He just wanted to be anywhere but in his own skin at that time.”

On the first night of the two-night celebration, they were giving a friend a ride home from the party, and Smith had been drinking. In the North Carolina countryside, they stopped to let Garry’s friend out of the car.

“It was pitch black and we were in a little cul de sac, and [Smith] just got out and started running,” Garry remembers. The first to go after him was Tim Foljhan, a sometimes back-up musician for Cat Power who made his own music with the band Two Dollar Guitar. He and Smith had hit it off, and by the time Garry got to the spot in the darkness where they’d disappeared they were both off a cliff—Smith had run over the edge and Foljhan had followed him. “[Smith] landed on a tree and the branch went into his back,” says Garry. “He wouldn’t go to the hospital and we took him back to the hotel, and it was like, ‘What the fuck is going on?’ I felt responsible. It was my friend that I bring on this, everybody’s fun happy road trip.

“At the show the next day he kind of said sorry he put everybody through that and bandaged up his back—the last thing he really wanted to do was to make a spectacle of himself and have everybody freaking out.”

Garry wasn’t sure what to do about what she’d seen. “He went on tour a few weeks after that and he called constantly and he called all through the night. I don’t think I slept for six months straight all through that time. Because I was working at Girlie Action and getting up and going to work but also getting a phone call at three in the morning when he’d be having to leave a bar—this is before cell phones, so it’s from a pay phone, crying.”

She was coming in to work feeling like the living dead. But she believed Smith when he said he hadn’t been trying to kill himself. “He just wanted to run from himself, and there was a very dark end of the road there that he didn’t see, and so he fell off of it.” But she was worried that Smith was going to get hurt. She had a choice between two risky courses of action: She could let people know things were getting bad and risk Smith’s getting mad and cutting of their friendship, or she could keep the problem a secret and maybe lose him completely. In the end, it looked like it would be hard to maintain secrecy anyhow: “I didn’t go home and share that information willingly with people, and it wasn’t ever my place to tell other people what he was doing or what had happened. But
he
did that all the time. He had a humongous scar on his back from landing on a tree and he showed people and he told them what happened. And there were e-mails and phone calls that I got and I knew that he wasn’t happy, and Sam and Janet were probably having a fuck of a time dealing with it [on tour].”

Garry told Mittleman and Felice Ecker, her boss at Girlie Action and Smith’s national publicist, that things were “getting heavy,” and soon there was an intervention where some of Smith’s work advisers and friends got together and asked him to go into a treatment center. It took place in Chicago, while Smith was on tour there. Garry decided to go because Neil Gust and Joanna Bolme were going and, like them, she wanted Smith to know she’d be there for him no matter how he chose to respond.

In Chicago, the group confronted Smith and told him they wanted him to check into a rehab in Arizona. Smith cut a deal: “He was on tour with Quasi when that all went down,” says Garry, “and the way that things worked out among the generals in charge and him was he had, I guess, five or six more shows that brought him back to New York. From New York on, the rest of the tour would be cancelled, but he would go to Arizona after that and he would stay out there.”

The task of flying with Smith to rehab fell to Bolme. After the last shows on that tour, says Garry, “she came to New York and they left from there. They stayed with me and then they left and went out to Arizona the next day after the show at the Knitting Factory.”

Bolme stuck around for a few days to make sure Smith stayed in treatment, and then she went home. But Smith didn’t last very long at the clinic; he just hated the recovery culture there. “He had to go to some group-therapy thing,” says Garry, “and he walked into the group and the group greeted him by making this big huge wave and going ‘howdy!’ And he was kind of like, ‘Fuck this. Don’t say ‘howdy’ to me like that.’”

On a Saturday afternoon soon after, Garry was hanging out with a friend up from DC, Allison Wolfe from the riot grrrl band Bratmobile. “I guess it was about four days after the Knitting Factory show, maybe a little bit more, and we had gone down to the beach in the afternoon and we came back and we were going to go meet Janet for a drink. We came back to my house and I put the key in the lock and the door was open and we came home to Elliott sitting on the couch and it was like, ‘What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be in Arizona.’ And he was kind of like, ‘It wasn’t for me, it wasn’t the place for me.’

“Here we are with plans to go to a bar and go meet Janet, and he’s like, ‘Well, I’m coming too.’ We were going to the bar that he went to all the time. It was like, ‘Well Janet’s going to love this one, you know?’ And I only say that because of the hell that she had to go through leading up to it.”

But no matter how traumatic the whole rehab flight might have been for Smith’s friends, Garry didn’t fault him for what happened. “I never really believed that Elliott going to rehab was going to make things better. Just because a bunch of people sit there and say you’ve got to go to this place and do it doesn’t mean you’re ready to do it or it’s the time to do it, and he didn’t do well with authority. . . . He didn’t like to be told what to do, so to be
surprised in a room with a bunch of people going ‘now’—it was just a fucking really stupid idea.”

Swanson remembers the incident as a triumph of Smith’s brains over his friends’ good intentions, a case of Smith pulling the wool over the eyes of his doctors. “He basically stood up and acted right until they let him out. He could do that, even though he was obviously suicidal at the time, obviously had all these problems. He knew what to do to get himself out of there . . . after he had probably tried to break out or something. Elliott could get away with those kinds of things.”

The incident resulted in a song on
XO
that was one of the most caustic Smith ever wrote: “Everybody Cares, Everybody Understands.” It’s in the tradition of
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
in its send-up of a mental institution’s sanctimonious airs, and it drops clues to a Southwestern location with a reference to “brilliant sun.” Schnapf remembers it coming out of nowhere in the studio, and its arrangement is simple, suggesting that it was written quickly, on impulse. It contains bleak references to police lying in wait and a form of exhaustion that makes you hold on to the banister. Its most devastating line comes near the end: “Stay the fuck away from things you know nothing about.”

That line balances out the more tender sentiment that Smith expresses in
XO
’s “Waltz #2 (XO)”: “I’m never going to know you now/but I’m going to love you anyhow.” The two remarks, seemingly expressing nearly opposite sentiments, are about the same thing: how difficult it is to understand other people, no matter how much you love them. “Stay the fuck away” is addressed to people who loved Smith and thought they knew what was good for him. “I’m never going to know you” is addressed to a mother (one of the previous lines is “XO, mom”) and it’s a confession that she will always remain partially mysterious, unknowable. Both songs can be traced back to Smith’s personal experiences, but they use those experiences to launch into a discussion of a universal condition. The two songs comprise a view of personal tragedy as something created by people’s imperfect ability to understand
each other. As if to make his theme clear, Smith ends the album with “I Didn’t Understand,” an infinitely gentle a capella number that sounds a bit like The Backstreet Boys singing a paragraph out of
Notes from Underground
. The song is about exactly what its title suggests: the narrator’s failure to comprehend somebody he loves. “I waited for a bus to separate the two of us,” Smith sings, and goes on to laugh at himself ruefully: “What a fucking joke.” For Smith, the effort to “get” somebody else is a joke, a quixotic gesture, but also a gesture of love.

At any rate, the songs were brilliant enough that Smith’s friends and associates didn’t abandon him for writing them, but he was worried they’d take offense. “He didn’t want me to hear these records and think that because I had been around and dealt with every little angle of [the intervention] he was writing these attacking songs and that they were directed at me. And I never felt they were and I didn’t care about that anyway. It’s like, ‘You’re a songwriter, you’re a poet, you write about whatever it is you want to write about and you do a fucking great job at it and don’t worry about how I feel about it, you’re not hurting me at all. I loved him and I wanted him to be happy,” Garry says.

Smith’s friends were progressive and understanding enough to be tolerant of songs in which they appeared to play a substantial part. He’d written songs about people he loved dearly, after all, including his mother. But the flap over the intervention weakened the feelings of mutual trust between Smith and some of his friends, and that was probably the last thing he wanted. “I brought it up once,” says E. V. Day, “and he was just like—part of it was the denial of being an addict, and part of it was like, ‘I don’t try to control other people’s lives.’ A group of people sort of get around you and grab you—it’s sort of terrifying and I think he felt like a caged animal or something by that. And it has to do with addiction. It was very surprising to me that he never forgave his friends for doing that. He couldn’t even understand why they had done such an evil thing. He thought it was evil they had done that. And that kind of disillusionment was really weird.”

At the same time, he was still close with some people who’d been there in Chicago. Smith told Vogel, in their May 6, 1998, chat, that he and Joanna Bolme had reunited: “I’m going out with her again, yeah, we broke up for a year and a half.”

When another interviewer asked him around this time what was important to him, he said, “My girlfriend.”