Elliott Smith and the Big Nothing (2 page)

“We bonded talking about being an artist, talking about the loneliness, the solitude, talking about who has control, and why it’s important to make work. We talked with wonder and conflict about what we do. He had the ability to be very funny, but he also had the sadness, and his ironies made him a dynamic person. He always wanted to be truthful and real; he wasn’t a phony. He was a very pure artist. And when you live with that kind of purity, it’s really hard to deal with the rest of the world. Because you’re not playing on the same field. . . . It’s sort of about acknowledging that you’re so lonely in this individuality that in a way there is no payoff. You’re just trying to do more of what you do and stay alive.”

This is the story of an artist who just wanted to do what he did and stay alive, and there’s nothing simple about that. First he did a lot of good work, and suffered, and survived. Then he was rewarded for his work, and he numbed himself, worked less, and did not survive. This book will provide clues to how it happened. Smith threw himself into the labor of self-expression to the point that he came to need it. Maybe this book will illuminate for a seventeen-year-old taking guitar lessons what it means to live that way.

S
TEVEN PAUL SMITH was born at 12:59 a.m. on August 6, 1969, at Clarkson Hospital in Omaha. The hospital is about fifteen blocks west of the Mutual of Omaha building and one block east of Saddle Creek Road, which arcs through the prosperous neighborhood that spawned the founders of the indie rock label Saddle Creek Records.

Steven Smith’s parents, a twenty-four-year-old medical student named Gary Mac Smith and his twenty-five-year-old wife, Bunny Smith, née Bunny Kay Berryman, lived nearby on 41st Street, according to his birth certificate. The apartment complex still stands, and if it stood in a place with greater extremes of wealth and poverty than those of the tidy neighborhood surrounding the Nebraska Medical Center campus, it would flirt with squalor. But in its current context, with students carrying their backpacks home from class and nearby vegetarian dining, the building looks merely humble and uncomfortable, like a cut-rate roadside motel. It’s shaped like a
C
, with a tiny courtyard of grass bisected by a cement path filling in the middle. The apartments are small, conjoined brick bungalows. It’s hard to imagine they allow an optimum level of privacy. They certainly wouldn’t allow a young couple
with a newborn optimum space. But it was a one-minute walk from where Gary took classes. The hospital where baby Steven was born was essentially part of the campus.

This must have been a trying time for the Smiths, he a native Nebraskan, she a Texan. They would part ways soon after the baby arrived, and Bunny would move with her son back to the state where she was born. The couple had married in Dallas in 1966, when Gary was already living in the little apartment on 41st Street. When Steven was one-and-a-half, in 1970, Bunny filed for divorce and was granted custody of their only child, while Gary, who had just earned his MD from the University of Nebraska College of Medicine, was granted visitation rights and asked to pay child support. He would go on to become a psychiatrist in Portland, Oregon, where he lives today.

Portland would be the place Steven Smith went when his family life in Texas didn’t work out, and where he became a professional musician. But Texas was a well from which Smith drew material, the place where he experienced life outside the liberal cities and college towns where he spent the rest of his days. He had a tattoo in the shape of the state on his arm, and while he might have scoffed at that tattoo’s significance, he pondered the Texan side of his family and his Texan childhood until the last.

Bunny’s family had roots in Texas. She was born in Beaumont near the Gulf coast to a family of musicians eluded by commercial success—everybody played something and everybody had a day job. Smith told
Under the Radar
magazine that his maternal grandfather installed signs for a living. Bunny’s parents still live close enough to Dallas to attend local Elliott Smith tributes; they showed up at one hosted by a local record store.

To see the environment that molded Smith’s childhood one must travel nearly 600 miles south of Omaha to the metroplex of Dallas–Fort Worth. It’s a sprawling fusion of two Southern business cities that has come to resemble urban Southern California with its sailor knots of freeways and armies of strip malls and chain restaurants. The western-wear boot and hat shops don’t become
a feature of the landscape until you leave city limits, but it’s still Texas—there are preachers all over the radio, and folks in the area hear more country music than anything else. There’s the drawl and the Southern courtesy in everyday talk at shops and bars, along with traffic jams that are Angeleno in their scale and bitterness. Texas-sized American flags are visible from the freeway that snakes through the city center.

It’s March 2004, a rainy day in Dallas, and heading south from downtown, first on the 35 and then on the 67, the drive to Duncanville takes about twenty minutes. A beige wooden sign welcomes me to town, and shortly thereafter I pass churches representing a full range of protestant denominations. The first church-ordained message that confronts me is spelled out on the marquee sign for a branch of the Church of Christ: “READ THE BIBLE IT WILL SCARE THE HELL OUT OF YOU.”

This is where Smith spent his boyhood, in Duncanville, De Soto, and Cedar Hill, adjacent towns off the 67 freeway south of downtown Dallas. These are streets full of ranch houses and malls, streets that occasionally erupt in an explosion of passion for either Christianity or football. By the side of Camp Wisdom Road, one of the main thoroughfares, there’s a new megachurch roughly the size of an airport terminal. Churches abound, and they occupy relatively new buildings, as do local residences. Away from the larger streets is straight-up blue-collar and middle-class suburbia: one-story houses packed tight into envelopes of green. Some of the houses and lawns are spic-and-span, but some clapboards sport patches of rotten wood and some lawns patches of weeds, like soft spots on an apple. It’s spring and there are purple blossoms everywhere.

A quarter of Duncanville’s 36,000 residents are black, a fifth Hispanic—substantially larger proportions of both minority groups than in the United States population at large. The local
used-CD shop has a lone copy of Smith’s fourth solo album,
XO
, but it has a whole section devoted to local hip-hop. It’s the kind of suburban landscape often portrayed as housing unbroken fields of white families, but a lot of the people walking around local malls aren’t white. Duncanville is also diverse economically, in a more obvious way than one might expect: In a mall parking lot, a homeless-looking guy approaches me to beg through the open window of my car.

Drive west on Camp Wisdom past the megachurch and a series of strip malls, and eventually you will see a football stadium towering on your left. It’s about the size of the football stadium owned by almost any amply endowed small Northeastern liberal arts college. A sign affixed to it consists of a circular drawing of a raging panther’s head and red letters reading “Panther Stadium.” This is a facility of Duncanville High School, and from even a slight distance it dwarfs the flat but expansive school complex. Aside from the larger churches, it’s the most imposing structure for miles, and the sign’s fang-filled maw seems as heartfelt a declaration of collective identity as the industrial-sized cross that bisects the front of the new megachurch. It’s a martial exhortation, and so is the slogan that appears occasionally on signs by the road: “Duncanville: City of Champions.”

In 1973, a month before Steven Smith turned four, Bunny Smith became Bunny Welch when she married Charles Hughes Welch, Jr., a native of Longview, Texas. The marriage was presided over by an elder of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. That sect, which shortened its name to Community of Christ in 2001, is the second-largest denomination of the Latter-day Saint movement founded by Joseph Smith in the nineteenth century, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints being the largest at 11 million strong (according to its own estimate). Community of Christ members read the Book of Mormon along with
the Bible but don’t generally call themselves Mormons because of the term’s association with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and because they believe the term was not originally associated with the church. Community of Christ claims about 250,000 members, and its headquarters are in Missouri, not Utah. The elder’s ministration of Bunny’s second marriage suggests that she and Charles Welch were Reorganized Church followers at the time. But Steve Pickering and Mark Merritt, friends of Steven Smith’s from junior high, distinctly remember Steven, Bunny, and Charlie attending a local Methodist church—it was Merritt’s church and the Welches started attending it when Smith was in junior high.

The differences between the Mormon church and Community of Christ date back to the death of Joseph Smith, when one contingent, led by Brigham Young, settled around Utah’s Salt Lake, and another, the Reorganized Church, named Joseph Smith’s son Joseph Smith III its new ordained leader and remained in the Midwest. Community of Christ’s world headquarters are in Independence, Missouri, the place Joseph Smith proclaimed was the center of Zion, God’s idyllic kingdom on earth. For over a hundred years the church was run by Joseph Smith’s patrilineal descendents. The Reorganized Church never accepted the nineteenth-century century Utah Mormon practice of polygamy, and it came to reject secret temple rites and the baptism of the dead, two of the Mormons’ most distinctive and controversial practices. In the mid-’80s, the Reorganized Church authorized ordination of women as elders, which the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints still does not do. The church’s decision to change its name a few years ago is generally thought to reflect a desire among prominent members to no longer define itself in relation to the Mormon church and to move closer to mainstream Protestantism. Community of Christ’s official literature, as one might expect, is less conservative than that of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It allows that “there is no official church creed that must be followed by all members.” The church also supports the
organization Call for Renewal, which is run by an evangelical Christian whose stances are left of center on poverty and environmental issues. Relatively liberal as it may be, Community of Christ is clear on the subject of judgment: “Our eternal destiny is determined by God according to divine wisdom and love and according to our response to God’s call to us. God’s judgment is just and is based on the kind of people we have become in relation to the potential of our lives.”

The threat of divine judgment never completely left Smith alone in adulthood, as he explained to
Spin
: “Mainly church just made me really scared of hell. It still just scares the shit out of me. If you grew up being threatened with that, it’s really hard to be like, ‘Oh, it probably doesn’t exist.’ Even if everyone you meet tells you there’s no place like that . . . I would have to go to hell on a technicality—because there’s some things you’re not supposed to do that I can’t seem not to do.”

One of his friends from adulthood, Marc Swanson, remembers the same concerns. “He wasn’t religious, I don’t think, but he believed in an afterlife. I know he was scared of going to hell and he was pretty serious about that.” On the other hand, Swanson remembers that Smith “didn’t like many organized things, or hierarchical things,” so he’d have probably chafed against a traditional religious practice.

The house the Welch/Smith family gave as its official residence at the time of Bunny’s second marriage sits on Duncanville’s East Center Street, a quiet, curving street that could belong to any American suburb; it could have produced Dennis the Menace as easily as it did Elliott Smith. Brick, with a small cement porch sporting white columns a much larger version of which you might expect to see on a Southern plantation house, its side door opens onto a medium-sized, fenced-in backyard. There’s nothing at all unusual or fancy about it, but it looks like a much more comfortable place to raise a child than the apartment Gary and Bunny lived in when Smith was born. It’s also not far from Lakeside Park, the neighborhood where Smith lived during junior high. If
there were moves between the time the Welches moved to town and Smith’s beginning junior high, the family landed close to where they started.

Donna Barton, whose Duncanville family was friendly with Smith’s family and (at least, in Barton’s recollection) used Charles Welch as their insurance agent, remembers Steve, as he was then known, as a shy boy. Three years her senior, he stood by and watched quietly during an Easter-egg hunt, too cool to participate.

Smith won a local competition for a piano composition in elementary school—likely Central Elementary on East Freeman Street—but life as a rock musician started in sixth grade at Duncanville’s William H. Byrd Junior High (now William H. Byrd Middle School) on Wheatland Road. Steve played clarinet in the school band with Julie Doyle, who is now a member of the Dallas indie rock ensemble The Polyphonic Spree, known for their exuberant live show and uniform of white robes.