Elliott Smith and the Big Nothing (3 page)

“He dressed like most average guys in junior high—conservative,” writes Doyle, who grew up entirely in Duncanville, in an email. “He was on the football team. Average hairstyle. There were only a handful of kids who were considered punk rockers or stylish dressers.”

The enduring friends Smith met at Byrd were Mark Merritt, Steve Pickering, and Kevin Denbow. They were the kids he played music with, the closest thing he’d ever have to a band in Texas. It started in sixth grade, when Mark Merritt and Steve Smith struck up a conversation in the lunch line. “We sat down and there was this shoot-the-shit discussion about guitar and music,” says Merritt. “We discovered we both played a little bit and after that both of us started hanging out.”

Soon, they convened to play guitar on a regular basis. “He’d been playing long enough to know the same amount of chords I did,” says Merritt, who’d started playing at eight and whose father had been giving him informal lessons for a couple of years. “The only [guitar] I had at that point was my dad’s Gibson classical,
and eventually Gary [Smith] got him a Martin Sigma acoustic guitar, and acoustic pickups and a Peavey Backstage amplifier.” Sigma is a cheaper division of Martin, the premiere brand in acoustic folk guitars. A Peavey Backstage is a small, modestly priced amp, and pickups are the devices that electrify an acoustic guitar in order to generate volume and texture. “I showed up at his house one time, and he was like, ‘Look what my dad got me.’ That would have to be not too long after we first met, I would have to say ’81, in sixth grade. That was the guitar I remember him owning; from time to time he would borrow one of mine.” If Smith owned a guitar before the gift from Gary, Merritt doesn’t remember it. Smith’s equipment wasn’t top of the line, but it was better than Merritt’s.

“Shortly after we met was when he had his guitar and his Peavey amp,” remembers Merritt, “and I got hold of this piece-of-shit electric guitar and spent ten dollars of my allowance on an amp. I would bring over this shit guitar and this shit amp, and we were thirteen years old, and we put my cheap-ass little amp on top of his Peavey and we thought we had our first stack. It was pretty cool. My amp was made out of plastic, but we thought it was so cool to stack one on top of the other—it was like two feet tall and it gained a little more prominence if you put it on a chair in the acoustics of the garage—and play our little tunes. We just thought it was such hot shit.”

There were no originals at this point, only exercises and covers. “Both of us being young and somewhat naïve to the whole process, we were still kind of teaching ourselves how to play—we started experimenting with finger styles and we were fooling around with open chord tunings, like experimenting with how high you could tune a high E string before it snapped. We would try Pink Floyd tunes, and Beatles tunes, and finger-picking and open chords. We would teach ourselves everything from ‘Amazing Grace’ to ‘Puff the Magic Dragon.’”

The same school year Smith befriended Merritt, he found another musician and comic in Steve Pickering. “We met in English
class in sixth grade,” says Pickering. “I sat behind him and we were both trying to be the funny guy in class. The teacher would call on him and hand the paper back to him and he’d say something funny and it was my challenge to say something funny back. In sixth grade, humor was mostly insult humor.

“I just wound up at his house on a Saturday. I was riding around that neighborhood on my bicycle, and I asked another kid riding his bicycle where his house was and knocked on the door,” Pickering recalls. By seventh grade, Pickering, who like Smith played clarinet in the school’s band (Merritt was a trombonist), had joined Merritt and Smith as a pianist, although by Pickering’s reckoning Smith played piano better than he did despite Pickering’s five years of lessons. What impressed Pickering most was the day Smith sat at the piano in the Welch living room and picked out a Dan Fogelberg song he’d heard on the radio.

Their social lives were not entirely limited to playing music indoors. It’s a wholesome, unadventurous existence Pickering remembers sharing with Smith in Duncanville: “Everybody had a basketball hoop in their driveway; it was your dad’s obligation to install a hoop. We would ride our bikes around the neighborhood, ride to the library, ride to the 7-Eleven to play video games. The 7-Eleven had Ms. Pac-Man. I remember he was a lot better at basketball than I was, but he wasn’t a vicious competitor. He’d win about 75 percent of the time. I was friends with another guy in the clarinet section, and the three of us would tear around the neighborhood on our bikes. Occasionally we would go up to the bowling alley.”

But Smith was not average in the way he approached music. According to Pickering, “In sixth grade it wasn’t a huge part of what we did, but it was in the summer between sixth and seventh grade that I noticed that he was musically inclined beyond other people I knew.”

Smith cast his junior-high experience in bleaker terms. He recalled a scrappy, redneck upbringing much grittier than what Merritt and Pickering remember of the childhood they shared. “I
got into a lot of fights in Dallas and was just sort of a hostile person,” he said in a 2003 interview with
Under the Radar
magazine. “I’d get into fights about once a week or two. I don’t think I ever really picked a fight, but I would totally fly off the handle if somebody said word one. You had to be like that or you’d get more shit. But I didn’t have to be as much like that as I was. I was pissed off about other things—at home—so if anybody said anything at school, I’d just [shakes his head] . . . And I didn’t even win most of the fights. I wasn’t that big, but sometimes it’s the little guys who’ve been beat on enough who figure out how to hurt somebody, even though they’re not going to win. You have to fight harder and faster.”

As far as Doyle recalls, Smith wasn’t one of the little guys who was picked on. While he grew into a diminutive, five-foot-nine man, he wasn’t small enough by junior-high standards for it to be a stand-out characteristic: “I have no memories of him being bullied,” writes Doyle. “Steve was a big guy in those days.”

Merritt and Pickering don’t remember him as particularly big or small for his size; it was only later that he would come to be smaller than most boys. Nor do they remember him getting into fights with any kind of regularity at Byrd or during his one semester at Duncanville High; the two of them remember just one bout. “I didn’t see it personally,” says Pickering. “I remember that he had to go the principal’s office, which was a big deal at the time. The kid he got in a fight with was a substantially larger kid. I wouldn’t have called him a bully, but I remember thinking, ‘Wow, I would not have fought that guy.’ He was a big stocky guy. While they were waiting to see the principal they worked out whatever difference they had.”

The differences between Smith’s memories of Duncanville and those of his Texan friends suggest that Duncanville acquired a special symbolic quality for Smith after he left for Portland. He would sing in “Southern Belle” of a “southern town/where all you can do is grit your teeth.” It was a Southern town that represented for Smith an attitude to define himself against—one of
traditional, redneck masculinity. Much of his day-to-day life there might have been standard-issue suburban leisure time, and it might have been a place where he was able to work at his music the way most kids in garage bands do. But elements of a rougher existence found their way to the forefront of Smith’s descriptions of Texas.

Smith had an older, female friend who drove a muscle car with a grim reaper painted on the hood. In Pickering’s recollection, she wasn’t so much Smith’s girlfriend as an older student at Duncanville who took the small group of freshman boys under her wing. “It was a big, fat-ass muscle car,” says Pickering. “She played clarinet and he played the clarinet. It would have been summer ’83, at marching band rehearsal,” that she and Smith met, he says. “She wasn’t a metal head. She did buy us tickets to go see The Police in the fall of ’83 at Reunion Arena. She invited Steve and he invited me. It was the
Synchronicity
tour. Steve was into it; he knew a bunch of Police songs—he knew all the words to ‘Roxanne.’ That was the first concert I can remember him deliberately going to with people of our age group. The girl with the car had to get [tickets] for us, because our parents wouldn’t let us camp out all night in front of the Ticketmaster. We were in the first balcony and it was a huge-production arena rock show.” Smith told
Under the Radar
magazine about a separate occasion when he got drunk and played pool at a neighbor’s house; neither Merritt nor Pickering remembers this.

The girl both Merritt and Pickering remember Smith getting involved with was a Byrd student named Kim. “She was in junior-high band. I considered her to be one of the more popular kids in her grade,” says Pickering. “When you’re dating a guy in junior high, you’re hanging out with his friends more than you probably want to, but she put up with us and was nice to us. I remember calling Steve once and saying, ‘There’s this new movie out called
The Outsiders
,’ and he said, ‘I already saw it with my girlfriend.’ That was probably the kind of thing they did together. He would have been in eighth grade, she would have been in seventh. That
would be the first girl I remember him being interested in for a period of time.”

Smith described his Duncanville self as a reluctant but rather successful jock. “I had to play sports in junior high in Texas because everybody in Texas has to,” he told
Under the Radar
. “I played football. I played defensive guard of all things. I was not any bigger and I was always very average. I was always a little on the small side in height and weight. First I was a wide receiver, which is great in junior high when nobody can throw the football. . . . You hit kind of hard for about the first ten plays, then the rest of the game you’re just kind of running out there and bumping up against the cornerback. I just became aggravated by people who were bigger than me and threatening me and saying some of the things that junior-high kids say. You know, when you’re down there like inches away from somebody’s head and some guy is going, ‘I’m going to fuck you up!’ So the play starts and I’d just sort of dart out and cut him off at the knees and that was that. They’d always put the big guys by me because I was the small guy on the defensive line, but I got my guy every time because I was smaller and quicker and I guess angrier in general or something. I just can’t believe I played so much sports. I can tell you it doesn’t build character by itself. Except maybe building the character to not play sports because you were forced to.” Pickering confirms that football didn’t seem to be important to Smith. “I recall him playing football, but I don’t remember it being something he was into.”

David McConnell, who would be Smith’s musical collaborator on his last album,
From a Basement on the Hill
, recalls that Smith told him he experienced physical abuse as a child, and that Smith said he also suspected he might have been abused sexually, but couldn’t remember any incident clearly enough to say for sure. The theme of searching in oneself for some distant memory would become a theme in Smith’s lyrics, and the abuse memories are one more instance of Smith’s recollections of boyhood being darker than Smith’s childhood friends’ impressions of him.

Smith’s stories about his musical taste during his formative years also diverge from the accounts of his friends. Smith often joked about how much he had liked Kiss and their makeup. “I saw that Kiss reference in interviews and laughed at it,” says Pickering. “I don’t remember him being into Kiss in junior high. It was classic rock—The Beatles,
Sgt. Pepper’s
and The White Album, The Who, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Rush. He came over to my house and played what sounded like a classical piece on acoustic guitar and he explained to me it was a traditional folk song that Peter, Paul & Mary had recorded. I remember in eighth or ninth grade he owned a Jackson Browne record, and his tastes started expanding somewhat. He was branching out and getting into a lot more and different stuff—by eighth and ninth grade it was The Clash and U2. I don’t know how he heard of them, but one of the songs he learned on guitar was ‘Should I Stay or Should I Go,’ which is in a pretty different musical category from The Beatles, so I think even then his tastes were expanding exponentially. He was always the one saying, ‘Hey, you should check these guys out.’ He always had a broader musical knowledge base than I did.”

Smith was inclined toward musical leadership by the time he ordained his friend Mark Merritt a bassist. “The way I got voted a bass player is he’d went out and gotten himself a Gibson SG [electric guitar] and a couple of stomp boxes [effects pedals] and he was really getting heavy into the electric world, and the discussion came up that maybe we should think about starting a band. We were like, ‘Maybe we need a bass player and a drummer and somebody who can sing.’ And he was like, ‘Somebody should start playing the bass.’ He had better gear and was better than I was, so I went out and got a bass, and he introduced me to Rush. He was like, ‘Dude, here’s something to shoot for.’ He was responsible for making me the Rush head I was as a teenager; my goal became to play every Rush tune known to man.”

It was also Smith who pushed the group into its first attempts at public performance, Merritt remembers. He was a miniature
Jimmy Page figure, calling the shots and assuming the center of attention as lead guitarist. “One time when it was Pickering, Steve, and myself, and another guy playing drums, there was a contest being held at one of the churches. Steve said, ‘We ought to do something,’ and I’m like, ‘I’m game.’ And I was wondering about song selection, because it was at a church.” Smith took the reins and chose the tunes. “We were the very last act and we played two songs: Steve played guitar and I played ‘bass’ on a crappy electric guitar, on four strings with the treble turned off.” On this particular gig, Pickering was on keyboard. “The first song was ‘Tequila.’ It was a rousing success—among our parents, at least. Everybody knew that one. And that was my first public performance in a band.” The second song, which drew a response Merritt doesn’t recall as quite so enthusiastic, was “the instrumental of a long version of ‘Stairway to Heaven.’ None of us were brave enough to actually sing.