Elliott Smith and the Big Nothing (19 page)

“There’d be fans coming to the after-party and maybe the bouncer would close the door and then [Elliott would] feel really bad for that person who was some groupie who couldn’t come to the after-party, who he’s never met before,” says Day. And he’d be like, ‘I feel so bad, that’s so uncool,’ and it’d be like, ‘Elliott, you have friends here, so what? It’s just part of the deal. The whole world can’t be at your after-party, and you don’t want them here either. It’d just drive you crazy after a while. Your friends are here, so you gotta close the door.’ He would just deflect from things that were really important to him [and focus on] anonymous people, and that’s when I just knew, ‘This is not making any sense.’

“And we were just like, ‘fuck you,’ because sometimes you’d go the shows to remind him there were people who really cared about him because you knew he was bad, and you’d make an effort to go because, sure you liked the show, but you made an effort and you knew his circumstances were a lot more limited, and he’d pull shit like that. He wasn’t rock-starry about it, he was just kind of like, ‘Oh, I feel so bad.’ I mean that was just queer. It’s like no one thinks you’re a hero because of that. I think there is this dichotomy between him thinking that he’s pathetic and him thinking that he should be taking care of the world in some way or taking care of everyone else’s feelings. And ‘everyone else’ became not his friends, or people he doesn’t know. But I think this happens with a lot of famous people, and I think it’s this weird celebrity dysfunction.”

For Smith’s old friends, the consensus was that New York or Portland would have been a better place for him than LA. Part of it was the severity of the crack and heroin use that he’d eventually fall into there, and part of it was that he kept talking about how he’d like to move. “He always talked about coming back [to New York],” says Swanson. “Always talked about it. The last time I saw him here it was like they were looking for a [recording] studio, he was looking for an apartment. It was like he was never officially living in LA. He liked to make people happier, so I wouldn’t be surprised if every day here he told everybody he was moving back here and every day there he told people he was never going to leave. But I do know he was always here and was enamored of it here and made friends here, and things got isolated in LA and he always talked about wanting to be here. The general consensus of the whole crowd was that it would be better if he moved here.”

But the influence of old friends on Smith was waning. “I think he was conscious that it was happening, but I think that’s where he started to lose it,” says Day. He couldn’t understand why there had to be any hierarchical relationship between him and anyone else, most of all his old friends—he couldn’t accept that he was a rock star now and they weren’t. “He would fixate on something they had done that was wrong”—the intervention—“and he thought that was just wrong and mean . . . and it just didn’t make sense.”

Smith recorded
Figure 8
with Tom Rothrock and Rob Schnapf in LA, much the way they’d recorded
XO
, only with a field trip to Abbey Road Studios in London, where he fooled around on the piano on which “Penny Lane” was supposed to have been composed. The album’s sound was grander, at once smoother and more rock, than anything Smith had put out before—and also less personal. There was still Smith’s gimlet-eyed approach to the human psyche, with “Everything Means Nothing to Me” the darkest point in the album for its title alone. But the personal content of the lyrics, if there is some, is far more vague than on his previous records.

Take “Pretty Mary K,” the album’s thirteenth track. The lyrics describe a wounded soldier in an infirmary calling out for the title character. “I walk round the dock and talk to St. James,” Smith sings, a reference to the blues standard “St. James Infirmary.” That’s a modified version of a lyric in a song also called “Pretty Mary K,” recorded years earlier but never released. Where the new “Pretty Mary K” is sad but not intensely dark, the old one is one of the most personal laments in the Smith canon.

The only sounds on the old “Pretty Mary K” are acoustic guitar, Smith’s voice, double-tracked, and an organ or accordion sounding out single notes that follow the chord progression. It’s an unrequited-love song: The narrator talks about Pretty Mary K as a woman in some inaccessible place, “with another man.” In another verse, she appears “with some little boy in blue/who can’t stay away from you.” It’s a dilemma that comes up in a million songs, but Smith’s version carries personal weight because his mother’s name was Bunny Kay, and the tune ends with the narrator’s vow to drown or at least somehow negate himself: “Going to walk out on the water/fill my mouth up full of sand,” Smith sings. The narrator believes that he’ll be with Mary K soon, “as soon as I pay.” In the last refrain of the song, he vows to walk, Jesus-like, upon the water, to Mary. The reference points are Christianity, suicide, and Oedipus—not an old blues song. It’s more powerful than the new “Pretty Mary K” because it more closely resembles the feeling of extraordinary intimacy Smith was able to achieve writing songs he didn’t think would be released on
Roman Candle
. Most of
Figure 8
—as lovely as songs like “Junk Bond Trader” might be, and as much as Smith pushed the envelope with loud rock guitar solos and ever more orchestral production—doesn’t have the same sense of secrecy his fans so adored on his other albums.

Smith toured behind
Figure 8
nearly nonstop for about a year. Myles Kennedy, Jr., a tour manager Smith met through Lou Bar-low, was with him the whole time, and estimates he spent about twelve days at home the entire time. Still, Smith seemed his playful, musically expert self. It was, as Ramona Clifton remembers it, “the best sort of times. When he’d be warming up beforehand, he’d get out a little Casio he’d play. He could play Sabbath or he could bust out that music-box dancer and then switch to Mötley Crüe. He could pull anything out of a hat; you could say any Beatles song or any Kinks song.”

Kennedy remembers another pre-show ritual: “It was a stupid little thing he taught me: When you’ve got a song stuck in your head, you just stand there going ‘by
Men
non!’ And every once in a while you’d see him go ‘by
Men
non!’ to clear his head.”

“[We were in New York] and my friend Myles was tour-managing and Elliott was staying with friends in the city and he was staying in a real nice hotel suite, the Roger Smith Hotel,” says Clifton. It’s like an art hotel where they put modern art every where and really nice suites, and he had this beautiful corner suite, and he wanted to stay with friends in the city, so he let Myles and I crash in his super-nice suite. That’s how generous he was. I was living in Boston at the time, and he knew we would be crammed into some other room.”

Touring was wearing on Smith, but he had become afraid of stopping. In 2000, “He wouldn’t stop touring,” says Day. “He’d say, ‘I don’t know what else to do . . . if I’m not touring I’m not making money, and so I have to tour, but I don’t want to tour, and if I don’t tour I’m scared because I don’t know what I’m going to do.’ Because he’d alienated everybody. I think he was scared that he didn’t have a life anymore.”

Kennedy remembers a mix of good times and trepidation on that epic ride with Smith. Over the course of at least two separate U.S. tours, all the major festivals in Europe, a sixteen-date
Rolling Stone
–sponsored run with Grandaddy, and a tour of Japan, they spent a lot of time hanging out in the back lounge of the bus, shooting the shit with a guitar tech. The band was Sam Coomes on bass, drummer Scott McPherson, who’d just left the California alt-rock band Sense Field, and two keyboardists: first Aaron Embry, an LA studio musician, and, after Embry bailed, tired of playing somebody else’s stuff on the road, Shon Sullivan of the LA indie band Goldenboy. For the last shows, in Japan, Smith played solo and acoustic. For one leg of the tour, the opening band was the Portland retro-’60s rock band The Minders, with bassist Joanna Bolme. Smith and Bolme “were not a couple at that point,” says Kennedy, “but they put that whole thing together.” On another leg of the tour, Kennedy remembers, the opening band was the LA country-rock ensemble Whiskey Biscuit.

The
Rolling Stone
–sponsored leg, the
Rolling Stone Live
tour, gave Smith a palpable sense of how many new fans he’d acquired. Ten to fifteen minutes after every gig, starting in the fall and stretching into the winter of 2000, he was required to do a meet-and-greet with fans and corporate sponsors, with Kennedy
standing by to guard him from the mob of curious and friendly people that threatened to crush him, or at least annihilate any concept of his personal space as they clamored to hug him and shake his hand and ask him to sign things. “It was everything from meeting people from Phillips Magnavox and from
Rolling Stone
to contest winners,” says Kennedy. “I don’t think he was somebody that enjoyed being fawned over and his fans were fairly rabid. His fans were one extreme to another, it’d be a sixteen-year-old girl or some corporate executive, so you never really knew what you were up against.”

Kennedy became, in effect, a bodyguard, something it would have been absurd to imagine Smith ever having just a few years earlier. “The only person that could come up behind Elliott was me. We tried to do the meet-and-greet at a bar, where one side was protected, and I would be behind him, so nothing weird was sneaking up to him, because some of those shows were huge. People would just rush to him. After a rock concert people don’t always have their heads on straight, and a lot of times fans don’t know the boundaries between meeting-and-greeting and smothering somebody. People would come at him from all different ways; people wanted to hug him, people would want to ask him everything from why he wrote a certain song to ‘Where’d you get that t-shirt?’ I just remember helping him, and being glad I didn’t have to go through what he was going through. I don’t think he enjoyed those meet-and-greets in any way, shape, or form, but it was part of the contract.”

On the great 2000–2001 trek, merchandise—Elliott Smith t-shirts, CDs, and the like—was handled by a Scotswoman named Valerie Deerin. In the middle of the tour, she and Smith hooked up. “On the flight to Japan, they broke up,” remembers Kennedy, “and so it was me and Valerie and Elliott, and that was kind of an awkward situation, because they broke up while we were on the plane to Japan.” By the time the trip was done and the three of them were back in the United States, Deerin and Smith were together again, and would stay together for roughly another year and a half.

Kennedy thinks that by the time the tour was through, Smith may have started to experiment with narcotics. But he simply wasn’t with Smith enough to be absolutely sure of what he was up to all the time, and he felt quite clear that whatever drug use might be going on, it was nothing Smith couldn’t control. “There was something going on, but it wasn’t like, ‘Stop the presses,’ and a lot of the times things were going on, I could have been doing changeovers. I did a lot of the backline, a lot of the tour management. There was a lot of stuff happening that I was not hip to.” What Kennedy describes sounds like the potential beginning of a problem, but not a problem in and of itself. Kennedy puts it this way: “He went to Japan,” where “whatever you’re doing you have to quit cold turkey, and he didn’t have any collapse or breakdown happen at that point, so I would say at that point he didn’t have any kind of problem.”

Kennedy’s stories from the tour are mostly funny memories: Smith and his band watching police helicopters hover over an English festival at which the singer of Slipknot was rumored to want to kill himself on stage (he didn’t do it); Smith, Deerin, and Kennedy watching a soccer riot in Tokyo so organized that it stopped and started punctually and nobody rioted beyond the proscribed area. One of the few areas that Smith seemed less than entirely comfortable was Portland. “He was nervous anytime we’d end up in Portland,” says Kennedy. “Old friends, old girlfriends. He stayed at the hotel; he laid pretty low when we were in Portland.”

At this point, when Smith wasn’t on the road he was living in a tiny complex of small houses known to residents of LA’s Silver Lake neighborhood as the Snow White cottages. There is an urban myth that Disney built the cottages, which are set back from a residential section of Griffith Park Boulevard. They are a dark place to live by Los Angeles standards. A thick canopy of
trees shades them, and they’re black and white, built low to the ground, and designed to look like places the seven dwarves would have lived—cozy and spooky at the same time.

The cottage was Smith’s first long-term residence in LA. He and the black-and-white dwarves’ hut were not a natural couple. Day, who dated Smith for a little while early in his Los Angeles years, despite the fact that the two of them weren’t living in the same city, remembers that it was “a hilarious picture, because he looked like a little grungy leprechaun, and then in that weird scale of the Tudor Disneyland landscape there was just nothing funnier. He could see the sense of humor and he would just live it with a smile. He didn’t ask for this, [his handlers] just found the house for him and he just loved that it was so embarrassing. That was sort of the cartoon quality of it, he would be that cartoon character in the way he carried himself.”