Elliott Smith and the Big Nothing (26 page)

Smith told Morgan he wanted the studio to be a place where “good bands” who were “nice people” could come to record for free or at least for cheap. Blake Sennett, a member of the LA rock band Rilo Kiley, was one of those musicians. He was embarking on his first album for his new band, The Elected. In addition to providing his own songs and bands, Sennett provided his own producer: Mike Mogis, the man behind the sound of Saddle Creek Records. Rilo Kiley was on Saddle Creek and benefited from the signature clarity that Mogis bestowed on records by their label-mates The Faint, Cursive, and Bright Eyes. The completion of New Monkey as a functioning studio may well have rested largely on Mogis’s shoulders.

There was a violent disruption amidst what looked like gradual progress. On November 25, 2002, Smith and Chiba went to see Beck and The Flaming Lips play at the Universal Amphitheatre, in Universal City, just north of Hollywood. According to
Under the Radar,
security “assaulted and arrested Smith without probable cause.” The officer who arrested Smith injured Smith’s back, the magazine says, and as a result Smith was forced to start taking pain pills, which worried him and Chiba because of his history of addiction. The officer’s report described Smith interfering with the arrest of a violent concertgoer.

McConnell remembers the event like this: Smith saw a cop dealing with some kids outside the Amphitheatre in what he
thought was an abusive manner, and after Smith and the officer exchanged words, they started to wrestle. “Elliott put up a great, great fight. This guy was twice his size, you know, this cop. He was really giving him a run for his money. Finally the cop sprayed him with pepper spray and took him down, and they cuffed him.” Elliott was still kicking and shouting, McConnell remembers, as they pulled him into a car. “That was the last time I saw him in person. [After that] there were messages, like, ‘Hey, I want to finish the album.’”

According to court records from the Beverly Hills County Clerk’s office, which handles Universal City cases, Smith, Chiba, and the concertgoer were arrested that night by the LA Sheriff’s Department. Each was charged with unlawfully obstructing a peace officer. Smith didn’t attend the arraignment on January 27, 2003; a lawyer, Ed Rucker, represented him. Rucker again represented an absent Smith and filed a not-guilty plea on his behalf at a court date on March 4, 2003, in Beverly Hills. After representing Smith at a series of court dates throughout the spring, Rucker was granted disclosure of peace officer personnel records. In the end, Smith came into court on July 3, 2003. He pled no contest to disturbing the peace, as opposed to the original charge of unlawfully obstructing a peace officer. He was asked to perform eighty hours of community service and pay a fine of $150, showing proof of his completed service by January 5, 2004. He remained on his own recognizance—that is, out of jail—throughout the trial process documented in the clerk’s records. It looks like an unremarkable plea bargain. Chiba was also represented by a private attorney, and the charge against her was dismissed. The concertgoer, who used a public defender, made the same no-contest plea as Smith to the disturbing-the-peace charge. A probation and sentencing hearing for Smith was set for July 6, 2004. How Smith’s sentence might have differed from the service and fine described in the record is unclear.

Meanwhile, rumors swirled around LA that the cops had roughed up teenagers unnecessarily and asked Smith to get out of the way, then arrested him when he refused. On April 26, 2003, six months before Smith’s death,
www.sweetadeline.net
posted news messages that Smith had cancelled shows because he had “suffered a severe injury in November which has progressively gotten worse.” He’d gone on with shows “despite chronic pain and subsequent treatment issues,” the site explained. “He recently had an adverse reaction to new medication prescribed to him and he is now undergoing different treatment for this injury. At this time he is hesitant to reschedule or schedule any shows until he feels confident that the treatment is healing him and that it will enable him to play shows.” He was back to playing shows again by May 3, when he played Austin’s Steamboat at a benefit for Gwyn Allen Owens, a local musician and schoolteacher.

The Web site and
Under the Radar
both provided contact information for Rucker and asked witnesses to come forth. That seems like the gesture of folks confident of his innocence.

Smith probably pled no contest because he didn’t want to risk going to jail. The incident haunted him in early 2003, even when he was far away from LA in New York for some of the handful of shows he played there in the last year of his life. “When I saw him when he was here for that Jon Spencer [Blues Explosion] show,” says Clifton. It was right at the time he didn’t know what was going to happen and I think that day or the next day his lawyer had to go into court and represent him, so it was really on his mind, and he was very, very worried about what would happen. But he said they were outside and saw a kid being belligerent or something and saw the cops pushing him around and really attacking this kid when he didn’t deserve it, and kind of brutalizing him. And he said that he stood there and purposely watched to witness it, because they wanted to witness it and they planned to report it. The cops noticed that he was doing it and were like, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ and when he responded they somehow pulled him into it. He said [he and Chiba] ended up getting pepper-sprayed and arrested that night. But when he was talking about it he didn’t know what was going to happen and he was
very frightened and he was very worried he was going into jail. And he was saying he didn’t think he could stand it there, and he was really scared about what could happen to him then, and what he might have to do to protect himself while he was in jail. He was really worried about that. Because he knew that he’s not a typical guy to end up in jail and he was worried about the sort of people he’d encounter there, and I think he’d become kind of paranoid about what might happen and was thinking about really awful stuff happening to him if he was put in jail, and he couldn’t stand it. So at the time he was saying if he could get through that and win this case then he hoped to leave LA. He was really pissed off at LA at that point. He felt that the cops were criminals and it was an inhumane kind of place. He was really ranting, he was really upset about it, and [Chiba] was trying to reassure him but she was also really scared because she was involved too.”

In the meantime, Smith was still moving in a more experimental, instrumental direction with his music than he’d ever gone before. “When I talked to him in February, he was pretty foggy—it was hard to kind of get to stuff,” says Swanson. “But he told me about these soundscapes he was making that sounded pretty great. It’s that kind of stuff we talked about that seemed so esoteric, but I remember in that conversation it kind of brought focus: There it was,
he
was there. I was talking about doing this project, this installation, and I was trying to build it up and almost understand and then break it down again and build it up again, and he said, ‘That’s one of the things I’m trying to do with these soundscapes.’ I think Elliott was always trying to do a lot of things with his music, and it often would be like, ‘That’s great, that’s what I’m trying to do.’ A lot of times I’d be really struggling with something and there wasn’t a lot of people I could talk about it with and I would talk about it with him and he would get it exactly. And that was really important.”

Ramona Clifton remembers a Smith from that time who seemed both to be surviving and still not fully restored. Smith performed at Maxwell’s and at the botched Field Day festival, which
was supposed to take place in a field in Long Island but had to switch to Giants Stadium at the last minute because of local resistance. “I didn’t talk to him that day because it was a big-stadium crappy show. I saw him at Northsix, the last show, I think—he did four or five shows in the course of five or six days—and I saw him then. At the Maxwell’s show we talked some, we went downstairs, and he told me he was doing pretty good, he said he was clean. He was drinking a lot; he was not his perky self. He was still very sweet. Kim Deal was around that night. He had some really good friends there, and then the last night I saw him was the Northsix show. I think that was all in June. He looked really exhausted, and I felt kind of bad. Jen helped get me into that show, and afterwards I said hello to him and there was a bunch of people and I think there was some good old friends he was talking with and he just looked so exhausted, he just looked totally wiped out. That was the last night, and he had spent the whole time in New York playing shows and seeing so many people, and he was just full, it was like, ‘I can’t talk to a single ’nother person, I’m going back inside, good bye.’ I was always sad that that was that. It was kind of a bad note to end on; nothing bad happened, but he just looked so exhausted, and I don’t really know how he was doing. When I said, ‘Hey, how you doing?’ He said, ‘Oh, pretty good. Not on narcotics.’ But he didn’t see the same. There was kind of a distance. Sort of a spark missing or something.”

Smith’s earlier New York visit had left Dorien Garry irritated with the Blues Explosion and their coterie. Smith’s health was so fragile, it seemed wrong that the band should party around him as if they didn’t know his history. And their two days of shows turned into an ongoing party, with the Explosion’s posse swelling to include Russell Simmons, she remembers. “I hung out with Elliott after the shows but I didn’t like what was going on. When he lived in New York he didn’t really hang out so much with the New York rocker people. He actually kind of made fun of them when he’d see them at Max Fish and stuff, and then somewhere down the line they became embracing of him, and he of them. But
he didn’t really seem like himself and he didn’t seem like he was necessarily sober. I’m sure that the Blues Explosion people knew more than anybody that he was not always okay. And I sort of think you have a responsibility, morally, toward somebody if you do really care about them. When Elliott came to town it wasn’t my idea to go to a bar, it was like, ‘Let’s go to a movie or go get some food or go get some tea or something, I don’t want to sit in a bar and sit with you and be an enabler,’ for lack of a better stupid term for it. Everybody was going out to the bar after the show and buying drinks and shot after shot and it was like, ‘Fuck them for thinking this was a good idea, you’re supposed to be getting your shit together. You’ve been trying to get your shit together and everybody knows you’ve been down some rough roads, and fuck the people who live some stupid rock and roll party lifestyle and think that it’s okay.’ I know that’s maybe just what their lives are like but if you really care about somebody then you sort of leave your own shit behind for a couple of days when they’re here and have some real fun with them instead of doing shots of whiskey in some shitty bar in the East Village.”

But when Smith came to New York that June—the last time he would ever play New York—for Garry it was a quiet, pleasant occasion and he and Garry mostly goofed around, barely drinking at all. He was still intent on moving back to New York, as he’d been consistently the whole last year of his life. “I was like, ‘Do you want to live in Manhattan?’ And he was like, ‘I don’t know.’ I was like, ‘Do you want to live in Brooklyn?’ And he was like, ‘Oh, I don’t know . . . maybe I’ll move to Jersey City.’” He and Garry were cracking jokes again—“I was like, ‘In that case I’m moving to LA.’”

Morgan kept in touch with Smith via Jennifer Chiba, and he recalls talking to her on the phone shortly before Smith’s death. “Aside from the police incident it’d be, ‘Oh yeah, the studio’s finally in order.’ Or right before last October: ‘Elliott is so healthy, Elliott is doing so great, he’s getting done and he’s so healthy.’ It leapt out of Jen’s voice. So aside from that police incident, it was
always like, songs are getting done, studio’s in better order, Elliott’s healthy, great stuff.

“Two weeks before it happened, that’s when she was like, ‘Elliott’s doing great, he’s so happy. We just went and saw Supergrass and that’s Elliott’s favorite band. We loved them, we left before Radiohead.’ I was like, ‘You left before Radiohead?’ . . . Anyway, it sounded like he was really sticking to rehabilitating himself, just being good to himself. I was so happy he was . . . restored to form. . . . That’s why I felt so fine about leaving. I didn’t check in that often anymore, and I heard that just two weeks before from Jen: ‘Yeah, Elliott’s great, his new record’s done,’ and for me as a fan it was like, ‘Oh my god.’”

Chiba had a band, Happy Ending, that had been readying its first release. Smith had invited himself to help produce it, remembers Morgan. “I don’t know if he was actually doing it, but was talking like, ‘C’mon, let me mix your record.’”

Happy Ending was a distinctly un–Elliott Smith kind of production. Rene Risque, a satirical rock act who shared a bill with Happy Ending at the Derby in Los Angeles, remembers “that Elliott Smith was at the show we played with them, and that they were all squeezed into what appeared to be tiny vinyl go-go dresses.”