Elliott Smith and the Big Nothing (18 page)

Smith’s lyrics run back and forth between emotional extremes on their own. When you add even modest vocal histrionics, you fracture the complicated melody and take those extremes over the top into melodrama. Most important, you destroy the balance between sadness and resilience that is Smith’s trademark. If you sing the words to “Miss Misery” like you are in the midst of the romantic turmoil he describes in that song, you cut out one of the most distinctive and least appreciated parts of Smith: the quality of “oh well, so what if I suffer?” To stray too far from the deadpan is to risk becoming a sad singer-songwriter convinced of the awesome scale of his own problems—precisely what Smith said he wasn’t. At the same time, Smith isn’t so modest with his vocal abilities that he sounds like he can’t sing. He consistently treads a path between murmur and belt. Fall into the former and you’ve got a song that sounds sullen and depressing, one of Smith’s least favorite adjectives to have applied to his work. Rise to the latter and you become a whiner. The occasional tremble is about all you can afford. When Smith does indulge in embellishments, he deploys them with economy. The drawn-out “s” at the end of “You should be proud I’m getting good mark
s
,” in “Needle in the Hay” is barely noticeable, but once noticed it nails home the point of the tune, which Smith once described as a “fuck-you song.” It’s the only place in the entire song Smith deviates from the simplest possible delivery of the words, and it drives home the song’s meaning more effectively than a moan. In fact, for all the talk
about Smith’s songs being sad, it’s impossible to imagine him moaning at all. His songs are largely sad, but they’re also stoical.

Mike Doughty and Smith hung out in LA when Doughty was recording what would be the last Soul Coughing album,
El Oso
, and Smith was recording parts of “Miss Misery” for the
Good Will Hunting
soundtrack. Best known for Soul Coughing’s early effort
Ruby Vroom
and single “Super Bon Bon,” Doughty is an unusually analytical conversationalist for a musician. “We were staying at the Magic Castle Hotel,” he says, “which is like a completely weird place to be staying.” The Magic Castle is a private establishment where magicians perform for each other, and the Magic Castle Hotel capitalizes on its proximity to the club. “It’s basically a cheap hotel, and we were making a record with Chad Blake at the Sound Factory . . . the last record,
El Oso
. [Smith] came over, and we got stoned, and I don’t really remember what we talked about. And then the next day he came into the studio. . . . I remember he’s like, ‘Yeah, I’m doing songs for this Gus Van Sant movie.’ And I’m, ‘Oh, Gus Van Sant, that’s great.’ It’s kind of funny to think we identified it as a Gus Van Sant movie. I was like, ‘Really, what’s that like?’ ‘I don’t know, it’s kind of weird, there’s this guy doing arrangements.’” That guy was Danny Elfman, the famous Hollywood soundtrack composer who was doing the incidental music for the
Good Will Hunting
. The arrangements would have been for the orchestral version of “Between the Bars” that appeared on the soundtrack CD. “I think he was staying at the Mondrian. He seemed relatively blasé about it.”

It was during that stoned conversation and the brief recording session that followed that Doughty learned what he decided was a keystone of Smith’s ability as a songwriter. “He talked about writing. He would sit at the Sky Bar at the Mondrian writing songs. He wrote songs divorced from the melody.”

What was so revealing about Smith’s songwriting, to Doughty, was that Smith could write lyrics for one tune, decide they didn’t work, adjust them, and graft them onto a completely different song. At Sky Bar, which commands palpitation-inducing nighttime views of LA’s incandescent grid, or at O’Connor’s—he appears to have been happy to work at whichever bar was nearby—he worked like a poet, able to keep rhythms and melodies in his head. The evidence was the combination of words and music that Doughty heard him sing the one time they got into the studio together during that trip.

“He sang a version of ‘Bottle Up and Explode!’: ‘The record that played over and over/There’s a kid on the story below.’ I think he used that lyric for a different song somewhere down the line.”

Doughty’s right: “There’s a kid on the story below” wound up as “There’s a kid a floor below me” not on “Bottle Up and Explode!” but on
XO
’s first track, “Sweet Adeline.”

“A lot of the songwriters I know sort of work in parallel tracks,” Doughty says. “They have a music thing going on and a lyric going on and they try to match them up. He had a really great system: He would write lyrics in a certain meter. Like, nine out of ten writers, if you co-write with them or produce them and you say, ‘Can we change the lyric on this verse,’ they can’t do it to save their lives. It’s like, no that’s the lyric, tried to change it, can’t change it. Or they’ll change little bits about it. But to wholesale pop off one lyric and pop on another is indicative of a really extraordinary level of skill and facility. To be able to have that ego-less moment where you can really say, ‘I’m getting rid of it.’ And the thing I most remember about it is him saying, ‘I went to the Sky Bar and I sat down and I wrote songs.’ ‘You mean you just wrote the words and then the melody later?’ ‘Yeah.’ And you got to respect a guy whose idea of a good night out is to sit in a bar and write.”

The extent of Smith’s drinking was in evidence to Doughty at this time. “We gave him a beer, and I got the impression he
needed
a beer. I got the impression, it was like ‘Thank you, I need this beer.’ Which is a little different from, ‘Oh, it’s the end of the day, I think I’ll have a beer.’

This was a crucial juncture in Smith’s career. In the course of a couple years his label had switched from Kill Rock Stars to Virgin to DreamWorks. “I remember talking to him about ‘Angeles,’ and him saying, ‘Yeah, that song is kind of about the music industry,’” says Doughty. “And I said, ‘Yeah, I know.’ He’s like, ‘You know?’ And I sad, ‘Yeah,’ and I quoted back a lyric to him: ‘Someone’s always coming around here trailing some new kill/said I seen your picture on a hundred dollar bill.’ And it’s called ‘Angeles.’”

For all the ambivalence about the music business evident in “Angeles,” Smith didn’t come off as an indie rocker cautiously dipping a toe in the world of pop. “There was some song by Chicago that he was obsessed with,” says Doughty. “And it had some kind of horn-driven early stuff and some kind of ’80s [stuff]. But he was like obsessed with it. It was like a ballad, some semi-obscure [thing]. I don’t know, man, those were like harsh, harsh times in terms of a very steep division between cool and uncool. I actually think that probably the best song of the decade is a Back-street Boys song: “I Want It That Way.” The best song. Written by a Swedish guy who didn’t speak English, which kind of brings some unintentional humor to it. I think if it was like The Shams or something people would find it charming and quirky, but since it’s a mega-hit people don’t look at it that way. . . . The discussion about the Chicago song was interesting because he was really interested in the fact that it was considered so corny. He thought it was really great the way they did it. But there was no way you could really come out and say, ‘Hey, I think this song by Chicago is really fantastic.’”

In Doughty’s perception of Smith at that time, he stood in sharp contrast both in his attitude and in his music to the quintessential ’90s music god, Kurt Cobain: “Kurt Cobain was essentially getting up on stage and people applauded the beautiful guy. And he did some brilliant work, but it wasn’t like a fundamental
difference between him and somebody that—I don’t want to glibly say he was just like David Cassidy or something like that, but it was kind of like that. Certainly when he got famous there were all kinds of people just going there because he was this beautiful compelling guy. And Elliott was not that guy. And people loved him for his music. Also, I don’t think he felt sorry for himself; I think Kurt Cobain felt really sorry for himself. The thing I most remember about [Elliott] is him saying, ‘I went to the Sky Bar and I sat down and I wrote songs.’”

There were two Elliott Smiths around this time, just as there had been in Portland: One was exceptionally talented, hardworking, and funny, writing around the clock, knocking out great and complicated albums with business-like efficiency; the other seemed to harbor a need to hurt himself. In September 1998, Bill Santen and Glenn Kotche went with Smith to a Mekons show in Manhattan and went drinking with him afterwards.

“It was a perfect night,” says Santen. “[Elliott] shows up and everything’s great and we go down to Max Fish.” Max Fish was at its apex of popularity amongst arty folk in the ’90s, and the neon image of a giant cigarette above its door remains a glowing time-capsule reminder of New York nightlife in the pre-Bloomberg days, when the city had no important rock scene to speak of and few good small venues in which to see bands—other than The Cooler in the meatpacking district—but people were at least allowed to smoke in bars.

Smith began to drink beer and Jameson—a combination that was usually a portent of bad things to come. “He gets in line for the pool table,” remembers Santen, “and we go to another bar and come back . . . This guy was kind of being a jerk, running the [pool] table, and Elliott played this guy and was up in this guy’s face. I thought they were kidding around because I’d never seen him do stuff like that before. I guess Elliott hit him, and the guy was a foot taller than him, and I don’t think he ever hit Elliott. Elliott knocked him down, and Glenn was holding on to this guy to keep him from jumping on Elliott, and Elliott rushes him and hits
him again. This guy was a frat boy, and Elliott had fallen on a bottle, and he was bleeding. We wrapped a sweatshirt around him and ran around the back of the bar so people wouldn’t kill him. There was a chain-link fence, and we were trying to get out. Security came around, and Elliott had started the fight, but they let Elliott stay—they knew who he was. He was a mess. We put him in a cab and took him home. Next thing he was crying on the way home. That was the last time we really talked that much. After that he kind of laughed about it, but he never talked about it.”

I
N THE LAST days of the ’90s, Smith was as famous as he’d ever be. He still liked to visit Portland and show up at parties, and one night he ran into Pete Krebs. “I saw him one time after that. He showed up at a show that I played at the Laurelthirst
*
and it was like a Tuesday night. Nobody was there and we got to play like three or four or five games of pool in peace, and nobody came and talked to us. It was just like old times again. We would just hang out and just crack dumb jokes. We didn’t talk about music or anything—we just made all the dumb jokes we used to make. Then he was like, ‘Hey, you want to go get a drink, you want to go to Club 21?’ We went there and it was just like, girls just sitting down wanting to hang out. That was really the last time we hung out, whenever that was, and after that there were just stories about Elliott in New York getting into fights, and all this crazy shit and ‘Elliott, he’s really not doing very well.’ For a long time, Elliott was just out of my orbit.”

When Krebs caught a glimpse of what had happened with Smith’s ballooning name recognition, he decided it was something Smith would have hated. “I was just surfing the Web one day and I went on this Web site, a fan-club site where people had posted recent photos of Elliott playing live, and I was looking at the pictures. He looked like a different person. He looked like an old man; it was just shocking. I thought, ‘I don’t want to see this,’ and then I clicked the wrong button and it was fan art, just weird obsessive pictures of Elliott people had drawn. Elliott would have appreciated that, but he would have hated that. He just would have been embarrassed by that. It just got sort of weird, so any time I saw old friends—Sam, Janet, Sean, Joanna, Neil—I’d always ask them, ‘You talk to Elliott lately?’ ‘No, I haven’t heard from him for a while.’ I talked to Sam [when] they were on the road, and he said [Smith] was walking around with a plastic bag with five thousand dollars’ worth of portable recording gear in a box, and he couldn’t get it together enough to even play demos of his new stuff. He couldn’t figure out how to make the machine work because he was so fucked up on pills or whatever. So it just got to be too much to take.”

Smith’s high profile was painful for Smith and his friends, but it was good for indie rock—the key word being
rock
. For a while, the new-new thing in music, from Tortoise to Pavement to Moby to Cat Power, was anti-rock: It was either electronica-or experimental music–influenced, or dissonant or loose or just weird. It was not a coincidence that after Smith became one of indie rock’s best-selling artists and got swept up in a major-label hand-off, bands started to be rock bands again. Sixties-loving bands like Belle and Sebastian and Neutral Milk Hotel became increasingly popular during the late ’90s, as did Rhino Records’
Nuggets
box set of ’60s psychedelia. Where minimalism had once been the defining characteristic of American indie, it was being displaced by intricate, retro rock music. Phil Spector–esque violin arrangements, Keith Richards–style guitar solos, and Rolling Stones haircuts were tearing across indie land like the first blush of vintage glasses frames.

Not long after Smith moved to LA in 2000, during the time he was recording
Figure 8
, Marc Swanson came and stayed with him for a week. As usual, the two of them had a good time, although Swanson recalls that Smith was watching a lot of run-of-the-mill TV, and that he was between girlfriends, “which was unusual for him.” They played the kind of mind games familiar to any friend of Smith: “I remember we did this little game where we would write down—he liked to do this and I was doing it with him too—we’d watch TV for kind of hours on end, and then write down what people said, try to take something out of context that would change the meaning of that thing. We were watching
Cinderella
and the woman said to Cinderella, ‘Life is like your pipe; you never know where you put it,’ and I wound up using that for a piece later. . . . Even when he was watching TV, he was always doing something.” Moreover, “he was recording
Figure 8
. The whole
XO
tour was bigger than anything else, it had sold a lot of records, and DreamWorks was excited. I don’t think they were pressuring him to do that much more than that. I think he was in a really good spot. That was the first DreamWorks record. He’d gotten bought out from his contract like he wanted to, and I think Lenny Waronker was a good guy, and [Smith] told me that. He was in LA, as far as he always said temporarily, and had a nice place.” But at one point during Swanson’s stay the conversation turned distinctly grim.

“He wasn’t doing any drugs at all, I think I would have been able to tell. He was drinking, but not even that much. I was going out every night to visit friends and he wasn’t; he was at home working on stuff. He was recording every day and would come home and play stuff. But at that time we went out to lunch, and I was like, ‘So really, how are things going?’ And he was like, ‘Not so good. . . . I don’t know what I can do. I don’t know what to do. It’s not going well. What do you think I should do?’ And we’re like a week apart in age, and we seemed to be on the same kind of things with dealing with things artistically a lot of the times. I think it’s one of the reasons we’re close. And I had started to go to some therapy stuff and deal with stuff, and I just said flat out, ‘I think you need to go to therapy, and I think you need to either go someplace where you’re monitored all the time or you need to go pretty intensively, a lot.’ And he totally lost his temper, and was like, ‘You know, I can’t believe you of all people are saying that, and you know how I feel about that.’ I didn’t really know that much how he felt about it. He really didn’t like people telling him what to do in a certain way. Anyway, then his idea was that he should go jogging, so after that we went to the mall and bought him shoes and we went jogging instead. He knew he had to deal with some stuff, but at that time he thought getting exercise was going to help. I don’t really know why.”

Smith’s resistance to therapy went beyond his ability to outsmart therapists and therefore sabotage the process—he was openly against the
idea
of going into therapy at this time of his life, and was looking for a physical alternative. This tendency would eventually put him in a situation potentially dangerous to his health. And this time it wouldn’t be because of a self-destructive urge but a frustrated desire to rid himself of demons without approaching the problem from a psychological, intellectual, or religious perspective.

Eventually, Smith’s nascent feeling of shame about his success started to rob him of his warmth; he just didn’t get along with his friends anymore. He slipped further and further into an identity he hadn’t wanted, a new self he would later write about wanting to destroy. E. V. Day remembers that Smith “just got so negative.” He felt he had to avoid his friends because being around them became too emotionally complicated for him.

“He could not function—he just became more and more of an invalid, which I think is also pretty normal when you’re being taken care of like a rock star. He never wanted to be treated like a rock star, he never wanted to be bigger than anybody else. And yet, because he couldn’t deal with it, he ended up being just coddled, and that’s the label’s interest, is to take care of this person, get them to do the records. So I don’t blame them, per se, for anything. I think it’s circumstantial.”

Smith had moved to Los Angeles gradually, and without any pronounced intention of doing so. His series of LA-based activities—the recording of
XO
and the original material for the
Good Will Hunting
soundtrack, the performance at the Academy Awards, the mixing of
XO
, the recording of
Figure 8
—basically constituted a move. “When the Academy Award thing happened, everything blew up: DreamWorks buying his contract, and
Good Will Hunting
was a huge movie, and all of a sudden he was pretty much in LA a lot of the time from then on,” says Swanson. “They got him an apartment before that. . . . But that whole time he wasn’t living anywhere, he was touring and recording, and flying around. In my mind that’s when he went to LA because he wasn’t near anyone for an extended period of time. He wrote
XO
[in New York] but he left right after that. . . . And then it was like, ‘Well, there’s the apartment, and there’s the car.’”

The mainstream celebrities who lived in LA didn’t hold much interest for Smith, but when he met a member of indie rock’s highest circle of elder statespeople, he was worried he’d come off as a schmoozer. His modesty was still extreme, or at least conspicuous. “I was in Los Angeles for a show and he was touring there, and I had just met Exene Cervenka the night before,” remembers E. V. Day. “I met her at a poetry reading out there. I’d seen her read and then I had to leave, and we’d just been introduced and she’s like, ‘Where are you going?’ and I’m like, ‘I’m going to go see Elliott Smith,’ and she’s like, ‘I wanted to see that show.’ And I said ‘Well, I could probably get you in for tomorrow, but it’s the acoustic set,’ and she said, ‘Oh, that’s the one I want to see,’ and she was like, ‘Oh, it’s at the Troubador; I could go over and get in if I wanted to, but I don’t want to be like that,’ so I was like, ‘Oh well, I’ll bring you over tomorrow.’ And so I went to the show and I told Elliott, ‘Do you mind if I bring Exene?’ And he couldn’t respond. He was totally freaked out. And I was like, ‘I don’t have to bring her,’ and he was like, ‘Ah.’ I was like, ‘She just wanted to see the show, and she really likes your music.’ He’s like, ‘Oh my god, I guess so.’ So then I asked him before, too. The next night I was like, ‘Are you going to freak out if I bring her back after the show?’ And he just couldn’t even really respond, and Swannie was like, ‘Whatever, of course, she wants to meet him.’ So we watched the show and it was very funny seeing it with her because it was a small space and there were all these teenage girls lined up at the front and she was making great commentary about the dewy-eyed teens who knew exactly what he was saying, could really relate. Afterwards we went [backstage] and Elliott was basically paralyzed, couldn’t move, couldn’t relax, couldn’t really talk. And so then, after the show, it’s like, ‘Time to go out, where does everybody want to go?’ So Exene’s like, ‘I know where we’re going, let’s go to this place called Stone Age 2000.’ It’s in Koreatown, and it’s in a mall. You take an outdoor escalator to get there. It’s a Korean dinner-party place. You go in and it’s these big fake boulders and mirrored columns and big seats that go around and people drink out of pewter kegs on their table and it was just a hilarious atmosphere and so the whole band came, a ton of people came, and Exene—he wouldn’t talk to her. He could not talk to her, and the other women who were playing with him were huge fans and having a great time, but he just couldn’t do it.

“I think he was just too big of a fan, and I think he felt like a sheep because he was playing and he had the show and I think he always felt conflicted in a very narcissistic way about that. So after that, Exene was like, ‘Why won’t he talk to me? I want to play with him. We should just hang out and play music together’—not professionally, she just wanted to mix and fool around, because she’s a collaborator, and loves his music, and they sing about tortured romance and love, and so she said just, ‘Tell him to call me.’ And I was like, ‘Listen, Elliott, Exene loved the show and she thinks you’re great and you’re here, she’s here, and she thinks it’d just be fun to play together or see if you can do something together,’ and he said, ‘I can’t call Exene.’ And I said, ‘Why not? She likes you, she respects your music.’ And he said, ‘But she’s Exene.’ And I was like, ‘But why can’t you call her?’ And he said, ‘Because if I call her she’ll think I want something from her.’ And I was like, ‘Do you expect her to call you, Elliott?’ And he just didn’t respond. She was approaching him and he just could not get over that. He just thought he was way too star-struck, way too big of a fan. It just didn’t feel comfortable.”

The irony of Smith’s modesty was that he was starting to become famous enough himself that he sometimes found himself torn between fans and friends. At the very least, he didn’t have much time alone with old friends anymore. “I stopped hanging out with him—I’d go to the shows, I’d see him before, and not do the whole after-thing,” says Day. “Because he was always all pulled apart. It just wasn’t any fun unless you could really hang out and talk. I think he felt kind of unworthy.”

Smith was starting to become an island unto himself, partially as a result of his humbleness and generosity. He couldn’t stand the idea that people who liked his music and wanted to hang out with him weren’t going to be able to come party after his shows. Even though, as his friends pointed out, it would have been impossible for him to let in everybody who wanted to get in, and the more strangers he felt obliged to entertain, the less attention he gave people who were really close to him.