Elliott Smith and the Big Nothing (21 page)

“The idea was to slowly degrade the sound. But in a way that we liked, in a way that was unique. We didn’t want to degrade it and have it be like, ‘Oh yeah, it sounds like every other lo-fi band.’ Instead we wanted it to have a lo-fi sound that was something that somebody couldn’t duplicate right off the bat. So we spent a lot of time doing that, which is also why the record took a lot of time that first year. It was just because of a lot of meticulous deconstruction of the songs. The song might start off [with him] playing acoustic guitar and singing, and sure enough it sounded like a pretty standard song. By the time we got the rest of the instruments on there, it’s like a whole different song, a whole different world, in a very extreme range. It was deconstruction of the song. We would always use the less obvious approach. If it was like, ‘Oh, for this next guitar track we should use this mic on that amp,’ instead we’d go, ‘Okay, if that’s what it should be let’s not do that. Let’s do this other mic, this other guitar.’

“He would say things like, ‘Whatever happens to me, don’t let anybody clean this up. Don’t let them put it through Pro Tools. Make sure it’s released like this.’ In fact, we did a lot of mixes together, and he would say, ‘If anything happens to me, make sure these are the mixes that end up on the album. Don’t let anybody else remix them.’ He would even threaten to erase the masters, so that they had to use those mixes. And I stopped him. There was a number of times he tried to erase the master tapes, because he liked the mixes that we had and he knew that if the label got a hold of it they would try to clean it up. And so I would stop him from erasing the masters.” Of course, whether DreamWorks would have actually remixed them is anybody’s guess.

To McConnell it didn’t seem like DreamWorks was hostile to what Smith was doing, only surprised. “We had meetings with Lenny Waronker and Luke Wood where we’d play them some of the songs. [Waronker] looked really tripped out by it. . . . I think he was probably thinking, ‘Oh my god, this is most crazy drug album I’ve heard in fifteen years.’ It was kind of like that. I think he felt almost like he was going back to the ’60s listening to this album. . . . Lenny seemed very supportive of Elliott. He seemed concerned, he also seemed afraid of Elliott too, kind of scared of him, intimidated by him. . . . It wasn’t like he was saying, ‘This is unreleasable.’ It was more like he was saying, ‘This is really fucking trippy.’”

Smith’s complaints about DreamWorks were of the kind very commonly voiced by artists about their labels, but they were adamant. “He wasn’t happy with DreamWorks at any time that I knew him,” says McConnell. “The whole time he was very unhappy with DreamWorks. He felt like they had let him down, they hadn’t promoted him correctly, they had spent all this money in the wrong way. They had spent a fortune on promoting his records, but it wasn’t, to him, how that money should be spent.

“He also felt that creatively they didn’t know what the fuck they were talking about. He was going to do the next record on his own with whoever he wants, and not make it polished, you know? That’s basically when he took this record into his own hands, and decided he was going to fight to get off Dream-Works, and a lot of the time he would just sit there and obsess about it, just talk about—‘Oh, those fuckers . . . ’—you know, there was a lot of that. Just basically, he would talk about people as if they were going to fuck him over, a lot of animosity toward DreamWorks.”

When I mentioned to McConnell that Marc Swanson says Waronker felt Smith was capable of doing a lot of his own production, he said, “That’s cool of Lenny to have said that. I wish Elliott could have heard that. Because he felt that way.”

It becomes clear from McConnell’s stories that during this period Smith was just as fastidious about protecting the independence of his music as he was about protecting the independence of his brain. The annoyance he expressed when Swanson suggested a rigorous dose of therapy was a lot like the suspicion he expressed of anyone’s efforts to fiddle with his new music. In both cases, his fear was of becoming normal, of some form of propriety impinging on his freedom to create and think whatever he wanted.

Even so, he knew he had a problem on his hands. He tried to get rid of it and he tried to hide it. “He was very into quitting drugs,” says McConnell. “I don’t think he liked being on drugs, and I don’t think he liked people knowing he was on drugs, necessarily. He was always lying to people about it. It was almost humorous to me. It was almost kind of a joke, ‘Yeah, I know. I’ve been straight for two weeks. I’m doing great.’ And then after he’d say something like that to his manager or whoever, he’d come inside and smoke some heroin and some crack. It was kind of a joke after a while—‘Oh yeah, guess who’s sober?’”

For a few days during this time when he was heavily addicted, according to Dorien Garry, Smith spent time with Fugazi’s Ian MacKaye in Washington, DC, talking about his problems. He hoped MacKaye, famous in the punk rock world for espousing sobriety, might show him a way out of his dependencies.

Smith also tried to solve the problem through unconventional treatments. Los Angeles, of course, is to alternative therapy what Florence is to Renaissance art. Smith had a man he called his “brain boss,” McConnell says, showing me a note Smith left on a piece of tape that once labeled the different tracks on a mixing board. The note says “psych appt. 2 pm” and indicates that whatever Smith was working on was still unfinished. McConnell also showed me a prescription pill bottle for Steven Paul Smith, left over from Smith’s stay at the house. The prescription is for Klonopin, an anti-anxiety medication known for its potential to create dependency. Smith at one point posed for a photograph, McConnell says, next to a pyramid of his prescription medicine bottles. McConnell remembers there being about ten different prescriptions. Smith also received visits from a man affiliated with the Malibu-based Telesis Foundation, says McConnell. Telesis uses some of the same 12-step meetings Smith seemed to reject in Arizona.

“I just knew he really had absolutely the ability to kill himself. From college I think it was really bad,” E. V. Day told me in an interview. But the moment I came to grips with what Smith was going through during the last few years of his life came when Mc-Connell showed me two pieces of black construction paper filled with dense, neat handwriting in silver marker. The rows are even and the entire space of both pages is filled. This, McConnell explains, was a document Smith made of one of his dreams during that time. He suggested to McConnell that he frame it in order to preserve it.

The two-page note begins with Smith musing over if he were able to physically assault himself, he would choose to do it; segues into a vow to stop buying cocaine; and eventually finds Smith reaching the conclusion that he must choose between drugs and relationships. Then Smith writes, “Must separate drug use from escaping my past and/or stupid ‘I don’t remember what happened.’” It’s hard to be sure what Smith is referring to by “stupid ‘I don’t remember what happened,’” but since he’s on the subject of “escaping” his “past,” it seems possible Smith was bringing up his uncertainty about whether or not he was sexually abused as a boy. Smith’s preoccupation with what he couldn’t remember had to stop being a reason to take narcotics. He had to find a more lasting way of putting his past behind him. The note concludes with a reflection that maybe the reason Smith is on anti-schizophrenia medication is because of how conflicted he feels, which is followed by a remembrance of a dream in which a huge ship was stretched and split apart, apparently a reflection of his own divided state of mind, topped off with an image of Smith digging at his own brain with a fork.

The fact that the note veers far from standard personal-essay structure shouldn’t in and of itself be seen as a sign that Smith was in a troubled state when he wrote it; when asked in an interview magazine if he’d ever write a novel, Smith said no, and explained that the kind of writing that came naturally to him was the kind of free-associative liner notes one finds on Dylan albums. The silver-on-black note at McConnell’s house is squarely in that tradition.

That said, it’s a rueful, vaguely suicidal series of reflections. Smith copiously reminded his listeners in interviews that his songs weren’t diary entries; here we have what
is
essentially a diary entry, and it’s grimmer than the grimmest of his songs. The vision of the ship stretched to the breaking point mirrors the vision of a Smith divided between an old self and a new one the former threatening violence to the latter. What this section of the note has in common with the first part is its implication that the past must be confronted. Otherwise, it will creep up to kill him from behind. The whole note is roundly anti-drug, in its way, from the vow not to buy coke to the observation that there must be a reckoning between narcotics and love.

At this time, Smith was striking out at himself, albeit in a quieter fashion than the above ruminations might suggest. Mc-Connell kept finding Smith had drugged himself into oblivion in places that were easy to find, “with the intention of killing himself. Which I didn’t know until much later. He would be like, ‘Dude you know the other day when you found me on the floor asleep for twenty-six hours? Well, I took twelve Klonopin and I drank a bottle of scotch.’ I’d be like, ‘Fuck, Elliott, why didn’t you tell me?’ ‘Well, I just couldn’t stand it.’ So he tried to kill himself a number of times here, but he was always in a place where I would find him and wake him up and be like, ‘Hey dude, what’s going on?’” McConnell says Smith would inform him of his suicidal intent “after the fact.”

“That first one he’d be like, ‘Hey, don’t tell anybody—if you do, it’s going to get worse, I will for sure kill myself.’ But I would take it up with his girlfriend, and be like, ‘Hey, Elliott tried to do this, would you please take the appropriate measures to remedy this situation?’ I couldn’t call the police.”

But Valerie, like just about everybody who knew Smith, found Smith difficult to control. “Valerie’s reaction was basically, ‘I don’t know what to do,’” says McConnell. “God, she was so up and down. One minute she’d be real smiley and happy and passive—‘ Oh, that’s just Elliott’—the next minute she’d be in tears—‘I don’t know what to do about him, he’s going to end up killing himself and there’s nothing I can do.’ He later told me, ‘Hey, I tried to kill myself at your house at least ten times and it didn’t work.’ His statement about drugs was that he was invincible when it came to drugs, that he couldn’t OD. And he might have been right.”

It was hard to figure out how to react to Smith’s drug problems at this time. On the one hand, he didn’t like it when somebody intervened, as DreamWorks and Mittleman did. McConnell remembers Smith saying of Mittleman, “She tried to clean me up. Tried to get me on the bandwagon.” To which Smith’s response, Mc-Connell says, “was basically like, ‘Fuck that, I’m an artist.’ I don’t know, obviously Margaret would know more about it. But he definitely was resentful. She was on his shit list, let me put it that way, whereas maybe Rob [Schnapf] wasn’t really on his shit list.” The difference between declining to continue a professional relationship (as he did with Schnapf) and ending a professional relationship on a note of rancor seemed to depend on whether there had been some kind of attempt to get Smith off drugs. At the same time, McConnell, who showed Smith more deference in this area, couldn’t get Smith to finish his album in anything like a timely fashion, let alone take care of himself.

And Smith’s eating problems during the recording of the record were almost as bad as his drug problems. McConnell got the sense that crack was one reason Smith didn’t eat right, but not
the whole reason. “I think it was partially just him, he just didn’t feel good when he ate. He just didn’t like the way food made him feel. You know when you eat and feel tired? He hated that feeling. And what he would do was he would eat ice cream late at night, he loved ice cream. We would go to the grocery store and buy two hundred, three hundred dollars’ worth of ice cream, stick it in the freezer, and it’d be every kind of ice cream you can imagine. But he wouldn’t eat real food. He’d eat nutritional bars now and then.

“One day I forced him to go with me to a restaurant, because he didn’t like going to a restaurant. So I took him down to a sushi restaurant, one of my favorite ones, down the street. I took him in there, but not against his will. He sat in the car. I said, ‘I’m going to go in and eat, you don’t have to go with me, but you know where to find me, I’ll be in there eating if you want to come in.’ And he said, ‘No, I’m not ready to eat food, I’m not going in your restaurant. No way.’ So I said, ‘All right, well I’ll be back.’

“So I had him in my car and I knew that he either had to sit in the car and wait for me or he’d have to come in. So I went in and I ate. Then after fifteen minutes he caved and he came in and sat down next to me and he had a bowl of soup. That was like—his girlfriend and everybody was shocked—‘Oh my god, you got him to eat.’ It was one of those things, you know? I kind of planned it, planned it all out, that he would, because I knew he’d eventually come in, and just out of curiosity he’d want to see what was going on. So he did. He had a bowl of miso soup, he ate about half of it. And he was like, ‘Mmm, that’s actually pretty good. Not bad!’”

Basement on the Hill
had become an exercise in self-deprivation, a search for rock bottom. This becomes plain when you listen to the music. McConnell played me three tracks from
Basement on the Hill;
they all court chaos without abandoning prettiness. “Shooting Star” in particular is orchestrated to sound like something falling apart. The verse-chorus-verse structure is framed by guitar solos that compete for attention in the rough mix, and at the end the song gives itself over to them, with the
drums leaving behind their regular snare on the two and four to join in the clamor.