Elliott Smith and the Big Nothing (23 page)

But no matter how much affection he had for the hillside basement, and no matter how productive he was there, Smith stuck to the plan of building his own studio.

“Elliott decided to buy all of his gear—he had cool old gear and we bought all of it. And we bought separate pieces that we were looking for, specific things, you know, stuff like The Beatles used, bought him a new board, a cool old Trident board, which are rare. One of them was in Trident Studios where The Beatles recorded a couple tracks on the later albums; when they didn’t want to be at Abbey Road they’d go to Trident, they did a few songs over there. He wanted that board because he knew there were only thirteen made and The Beatles had worked on it.

“So anyway, we did some work there, just trying to get the studio set up, and we quickly learned that all the gear was so old . . . the board was so messed up that it had to be rebuilt, basically, by a technician. Well, months and months passed of technicians coming in and trying to work on the board, and some of them were dishonest, and these techs were messing up stuff more than fixing them, which was very frustrating for him.”

Smith would try being his own tech sometimes, and while he would later tell
Under the Radar
proudly that he had fixed his mixing board by having a “soldering party” inside it, the combination of drugs and faulty equipment slowed the creation of the album to a crawl as Smith began to engage in the obsessive manual labor typical of somebody who’s been taking too many drugs and getting too little sleep. The freedom and wildness that Smith had hoped to attain by taking whatever substances he wanted and being as particular and dictatorial about his sound as he wanted had turned into a trap. It was the kind of trap he’d described in “Between the Bars” and in “Angeles,” the kind that uses license and comfort as bait to imprison you.

During this tortured recording period, Marc Swanson and Lenny Waronker wound up discussing Smith at a chance meeting at Diner, a Williamsburg restaurant so centrally located with regard to the New York art scene that a gallery in Sweden once constructed a replica of it, flying out creative-looking Williamsburg residents as part of the package. Slender waiters with dyed floppy hair write the names of the specials in pencil on the paper tablecloths. Waronker remarked that Smith was probably capable of doing a lot of his own recording. Swanson was feeling the distance drug addiction creates between old friends, “waiting for [Elliott] to come back. . . . [Lenny] said to me, ‘I think he needed less production,’” says Swanson, “which I don’t think anybody else was telling Elliott. I had just assumed he wanted to produce himself and they wouldn’t let him.”

Back in California, Smith’s self-recording was going slowly. “I think he would kind of be . . . just tweaking on stuff, not in the way of speed tweaking, he would be like trying to fix his guitar amp, and he might be on a drug run staying up,” says McConnell, “maybe doing coke or whatever he’d have to do to keep him up, and the prescription medicine he was taking would keep him up too. But he’d be up and just kind of like, ‘just trying to fold my cables.’ He would have bought a new piece of gear that he’d got real cheap off eBay, and sit there trying to fix it, and he didn’t really know what he was doing. He’d have a concept of how it worked, but he wouldn’t really know, he’d be bitching about it, like, ‘God damn it. I can’t get that fucking thing to work, aggh.’ He’d get real frustrated, pulling on his hair and stuff.

“But it also reminded me very much of Thomas Edison or something in his lab, not sleeping. Yeah, a lot of it was drug-induced, but there were also periods when he wasn’t on drugs, when he’d be totally . . . It’s kind of interesting—one point I’d like to make regarding this—he’d be sober sometimes, and sometimes he’d be pretty drugged out, and what was interesting to me was that, when he was sober I was always expecting him to be like a different person . . . see things different. His body language and
his talking were very clear and very present like a sober person is. But his ideas and the things he was saying, and his concepts, were all the same as when he was fucked up. Which was fascinating to me, because I know when I’m fucked up I’m saying things and thinking things differently from when I’m sober, but for him it was, even though he was acting sober when he was sober, the words were the same, and his ideas were exactly the same. When he was sober, he wouldn’t tweak as much. But he’d still have the same opinion, of music, of life, of people.”

By this point, Smith was only occasionally able to successfully commit some music to tape. “This happens to a lot of people when they record. Almost everyone I’ve ever worked with can get caught in this rut, but for him it really spiraled out of control,” says McConnell. “You get a lot of work done, so that you feel like you’ve got it under control, but then maybe you take some time off from it, and it’s just really difficult to get back to work, to get back into the flow of finishing the album, and there would be like weeks going by where he would kind of be in the studio without getting a whole lot done. It’d be weird because he’d call me over there, and I’d get over there, and two days would go by, without any music getting done, and I’d be like, ‘Look Elliott, I’m going home, call me when you’re ready to work, when you’re ready to get some shit down.’ I wouldn’t hear from him for like a week, and then like a week later he still doesn’t have any work done. Sometimes I’d kind of force him to work, I’d call him up and I’d be like, ‘Dude, we’re starting tomorrow at one o’clock. Be there. This is what we’re going to do, we’re going to lay down guitars first and then start on vocals.’ And then I’d get two or three good days out of him, when I’d force him to work. But left to his own devices he didn’t get a lot done, especially when he was in his own studio, because I think he felt like he wasn’t having to pay by the hour. He’d just kind of cruise along.”

Smith was working on an album that deftly used a grain of chaos to create an original feel, but far too much chaos had worked its way into his life. The studio in Van Nuys was a mess
of non-functional equipment; his bank account was draining; and his live shows, a surefire way to replenish funds and maintain his reputation, were falling apart. The Sunset Junction experience wasn’t an isolated incident.

On May 2, 2002, Smith shared a bill with Wilco at the Rivera Theatre in Chicago, Wilco’s hometown. By this time the American indie crowd had heard the stories of Smith’s shambolic Sunset Junction performance, and the Rivera show confirmed their worst suspicions. Smith explained at the show that he’d fallen asleep on his arm on a plane and couldn’t feel his fingers; it’s hard to imagine the flawlessly tight musician Smith had been in 1998 offering that kind of excuse. “I felt like I’d walked into my house to find Robert Downey, Jr., sleeping on my chaise lounge,” wrote the indie rock Web site
Glorious Noise
of Smith’s performance that night. Andrew Morgan, then an unknown young musician living in Chicago, with no connection to Smith, remembers the show as “sad and brutal to watch.” After Smith’s death, the site
Pop Matters
published the saddest recollection of that night: “He didn’t even seem to know where he was: ‘I love Portland,’ he announced, apropos of nothing.”

Morgan would get to know Smith soon afterwards, when he was in the middle of giving up the punishing lifestyle he’d stumbled into while recording
Basement on the Hill
. In August 2002, Smith checked into the Neurotransmitter Restoration Center in Beverly Hills, an addiction-treatment clinic run on principles developed by Dr. William Hitt. This was the second of Smith’s two stays there, Smith told Morgan. Smith described his treatment to
Under the Radar
as being hooked up to an IV that delivered saline solution and amino acids, which, he said, “kick all the shit out of your nerve receptors. The different proteins in the amino acids eventually sort of rebuild the damaged neuro-receptors.” He talked about the center like a convert: “I was coming off of a lot of psych meds and other things. I was even on an antipsychotic, although I’m not psychotic. It was really difficult, but also something to get the word out about because it doesn’t cost as much as
it does to keep someone in a twenty-eight-day rehab. It’s usually a ten-day process, but for me it took a lot longer. I think most people just go there for a week. . . . But nobody seems to know about it. There’s been like 15,000 people treated with it, and its success rate is 80 percent versus 10 percent for the normal twenty-eight-day twelve-step.”

Smith’s description matches official Neurotransmitter Restoration Center language. The center’s Web site credits the NRC with treating thousands of people, and in a short documentary a man who’s supposed to be Dr. Hitt portrays his technique this way: “Within a few days, three or four days, we’ll have the craving for drugs James [the client depicted in the film] has used totally obliterated. We feel our success rate is probably close to 80 percent. The treatment feels almost like the substances they’re using.” The film shows a client being hooked up to an IV in non-descript chambers that will look familiar to anyone who’s been in a typical family doctor’s office. It also shows Hitt preparing medicine for eventual use on a client. Different amino acids, he explains, are effective for curing addiction to different substances, so each client gets a different cocktail, depending on her or his type of abuse.

The clinic Smith appreciated so much was run by a man who’d been found in a Houston court to have misled his patients, in violation with state and federal laws. Court papers show that Dr. William Hitt, credited with developing the process the Neurotransmitter Restoration Center uses to treat addiction, lied in Texas about being a doctor.

The clinic’s Web site broadcast impressively ambitious descriptions of his credentials. The rap sheet on Dr. Hitt would be an inspiration to any screenwriter looking to deliver the next
Chinatown.
The Center’s Web site states, “Dr. Hitt has been honored with numerous awards as a scientist and physician, including the Van Leeuwenhoek Award of France for excellence in microscopy and the Ely Lily Award for his discovery of a new system of microplasma.” There may be an Ely Lily Award, but Eli Lilly and Company, the multinational pharmaceutical corporation that introduced Prozac, bestows no such honor. There may be a Van Leeuwenhoek Award of France, but the Leeuwenhoek Medal, bestowed by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, is one of the highest honors in microbiology. Dating back to 1877, it is given to a scientist once every ten years, and the winners include Louis Pasteur. They don’t include Hitt.

It was in 1987 that a Houston judge shut down three clinics operated by Hitt and forbade them to treat allergies and AIDS symptoms by injecting patients with urine, according to court records; the assistant attorney general said she sought the injunction because she felt the treatment was dangerous. The court ruled that Hitt misrepresented the effectiveness of the treatment and misrepresented his own qualifications. Hitt was not a medical doctor or a PhD, and he claimed both titles. He was found to have violated Texas laws a handful of ways. Among them was “selling, or offering for sale, a ‘new drug’ as defined by the Texas Food and Drug Act and by the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (Title 21 U.S.C. 301 et seq.) without having applied to or acquired approval from the Federal Food and Drug Administration.” Another was “engaging in false advertising by making false and misleading representations as to the safety and effectiveness of the treatment offered.” The most pertinent to Smith’s situation: “representing that Mr. Hitt is professionally qualified to diagnose and treat human patients when he is not” and “failing to disclose that claims made concerning the treatment were false, unsubstantiated, and undocumented, with the intent to induce consumers to enter into a transaction into which they would not have entered had the information been disclosed.”

In Texas, the court enjoined Hitt and the companies affiliated with him, Allergy Control Group and Vita Scale, from (among other things) “representing expressly or impliedly that Defendant Hitt is a doctor, that he holds a PhD or any other graduate or post-graduate degree which he does not hold or that said degree is from a particular institution when such is not the case, that he is
a licensed physician or that he is qualified or certified to treat any illness or disease.” The state hit him up for twenty thousand dollars, eighteen thousand of which covered its legal fees.

Presumably the reason no article about Smith contains this information is because Smith was unaware of Hitt’s background, at least for a while, and didn’t feel the need to go public with it if he ever found out. He tried Hitt’s treatment after a few attempts to get clean through other rehabs. As
Under the Radar
put it, after noting that the center wasn’t FDA-approved, Smith apparently gave the place a whirl as a last resort and felt it helped him in ways that other places didn’t.

Given Hitt’s legal history, it’s unclear what kind of treatment Smith actually received. If he got an IV drip that he thought helped purge his addictions, what exactly was in that IV? Given that the Texas judgment was quite clear on the point that Hitt misled his patients about the content of his treatments, and that Hitt’s signature is on the judgment testifying to his own acceptance of the judgment, it’s hard to feel confident that the drip going into Smith really contained the custom blend of amino acids it was supposed to. Smith told
Under the Radar
that he required a much longer stretch of treatment than most people who went to the clinic, that he received an unusually large amount of it.

The clinics shuttered by the State of Texas purported to treat AIDS with filtered urine, which has nothing to do with what the Neurotransmitter Restoration Center purports to do: help addicts. But treating addicts was one of the numerous functions of a Hitt clinic in Tijuana that was searched by local health authorities before the eyes of an NPR reporter in 2001 and that closed that year after the inspectors discovered code violations. According to NPR, the inspectors found mucus samples and “tubs of unknown medicine.” They also said that Hitt wasn’t licensed to practice experimental therapies. As of this writing, there was still a Web site online for a William Hitt Center in Tijuana, with links to a hotel that advertises itself as housing many patients of the center. The place where Hitt’s clinic used to sit in a Beverly Hills office building is now empty, but the Neurotransmitter Restoration Center’s name is still on the directory in the lobby. It’s in one of the most expensive areas for commercial real estate in Los Angeles.