Elliott Smith and the Big Nothing (4 page)

“We were probably in the seventh or eighth grade because [Steve] had gotten the Gibson SG at that point. He knew every guitar part to ‘Stairway,’ right down to the solo. He was almost fanatical about playing these songs, even at fourteen years old. He was a really fucking good musician and he had a great ear. Out of all of us he was the first to learn a specific song. ‘Stairway’ or Rush, he was the first to play it.”

In Merritt’s and Pickering’s recollections, Bunny Welch, who worked as a teacher, was a supportive mother and an aid to her son’s progress in music. “I thought he got along with her really well,” says Pickering. “She was really nice to us. You have three or four thirteen-year-old boys running through your house cranking up amps and she was remarkably tolerant.”

“When they moved to a different house,” says Merritt, Bunny “moved a piano to his bedroom.”

That house was on a larger piece of property on the border of Duncanville and the adjacent suburb of Cedar Hill. Smith didn’t live there very long: The move took place when he was in junior high, and one semester into high school Smith went to live with
his father and his stepmother, Marta Greenwald, a social worker, in Portland. In later interviews, Smith would cite family problems in Dallas as the reason he moved, but he was oblique about his reasons when he spoke to friends at the time.

“He caught me by surprise,” says Pickering. “He didn’t dwell on it for months ahead, he didn’t have conversations where he said, ‘I gotta get out of this town.’ Just in the winter of ’83 I remember him saying, ‘So after Christmas I’m moving to Portland.’ I just remember being shocked because I do not remember him indicating in any way that he was desperate to move and had to get out. I couldn’t conceive of picking up and moving to a new town where none of your friends lived. I asked him why and he said, ‘Well, I want to go up and live in Portland with my dad.’”

“It was pretty obvious that he and his step dad didn’t get along,” Pickering says. “I just attributed that, at the time, to that natural inherent resentment a lot of kids have toward their stepparents. The ‘you’re not my dad’ thing. Charlie did come off as an authority figure. Charlie would be like, ‘No you can’t go out and play this weekend, you have to stay and mow the yard.’ I remember it being a bone of contention more than it should be, and Steve just being ‘grrr’ about it. I think about that time I remember Steve becoming an anti-authoritarian. That was probably how a lot of kids felt about their stepparents. . . . I remember a couple of conversations where he specifically was angry at Charlie but it was nothing at the time I construed as exceptional.” Any issues between them seemed like “natural teenage resentment. . . . I don’t remember Steve ever saying, ‘I can’t stand him, because he’s not my dad.’”

But Smith was clear on the point that leaving Dallas for Portland left him, in his own words, “really worried about my mom.” He would talk about his troubled relationship with Charlie to friends into the last years of his life. David McConnell, who knew Smith during a troubled time in his adulthood, recalls Smith’s complaints. “He had a lot of animosity toward his stepdad. I
think he felt pretty hurt by him. The way he described it, he wasn’t a very good dad.”

Smith’s mother and stepfather would be recurring figures in the songs Smith would go on to write. His most direct treatment of his life in Duncanville, and perhaps his most blatantly autobiographical work, is “Some Song,” performed live at his earliest solo acoustic performances and released on a compilation by one of his record labels, Olympia, Washington’s Kill Rock Stars, in 1997. One of the lines drops an important place name: “You went down to look at old Dallas town/where you must be sick just to hang around.”

The place where Duncanville kids looking for an urban education would have likely gone in the early ’80s is Deep Ellum. Now it’s equal parts hipsters, tourists, and frat boys at night, but at the time it was a place where it could be dangerous to hang out. There were skinheads back then, and the neighborhood still retained the aroma of the wrong side of the tracks, which it had been until recently. It was and continues to be a place highly familiar to any Dallas police officer. If young Steve Smith met up with punk rock before he moved to Portland, Deep Ellum is likely where it happened. In many ways, it would have been the part of Dallas best able to prepare Smith for the bohemian music scene Portland had to offer. It had an active street life, dimly lit rock clubs, and a hint of danger.

He also may have discovered edgier music at Bill’s Records. Dallas is not a city of many independent-minded record stores, but one opened when Smith was twelve, shortly before he left the city for good. Bill’s Records is still owned by Bill Wisener after twenty-two years of operation. Located in northern Dallas, across town from Duncanville, it was a place a boy could find some sign of musical life beyond the arena rock that dominated the ’80s.

Pickering says that everyone from Duncanville referred to where they lived as “Dallas,” even though kids from Duncanville almost never actually had the opportunity to hang out anywhere in Dallas proper. So when Smith refers to “Dallas town” in “Some Song,” he’s probably talking about the town where he grew up rather than referring to the city as distinct from his suburban neighborhood. The subject of the song is a kid’s internal suffering and his tormented relationship to peers and family. The whole story, the whole plaint, is framed by a skeptical comment about the person relating it.

The first words are “It’s a junkie dream, makes you so uptight/Yeah it’s Halloween, tonight and every night.” The portrayal of this character grows even more critical a couple lines later: “You’re a symphony, man, with one fucking note.” The song then goes on to tell the story of this single-note character, to describe his “junkie dream.” As it turns out, Halloween every night means a constant return to childhood, and that recurring vision is described in detail. In the chorus, the song slips into the perspective of the person having the “junkie dream”: “Help me kill my time/ ’cause I’ll never be fine.”

This ambiguous figure—the troubled complainant deserving of both scolding and understanding—populates a good half of the songs Elliott Smith wrote. And ambiguity characterizes his attitude toward where he grew up and toward himself. He didn’t show much affection for Texas when he got older, but he knew he couldn’t leave it behind completely.

In the Kill Rock Stars version of “Some Song,” Smith sings, “How they beat you up week after week/and when you grow up you’re going to be a freak.” The “they” could be most easily understood as other kids in school. But in live versions of that song—and there are at least two recorded instances of this—he sang, “Charlie beat you up week after week.” Of course, Smith took pains to explain that his songs shouldn’t be interpreted as diary entries, and “Some Song” shouldn’t be understood as a factual report. When
Spin
asked Smith if his stepfather “had a violent side,” he wouldn’t answer on the record. “He’s had a tough time in his life and has moved forward in a lot of ways. We didn’t get along when I was a kid,” Smith allowed, adding that he didn’t
want to “dredge that all up” with Charlie, whom he never mentioned by name.

Steven was already able to write songs in Texas. “He was always dabbling in something,” says Merritt, “even if it was just little instrumental numbers he would write up. The first time I remember witnessing him try to write a song was when he and I went to South Padre Island way down in south Texas on a family vacation, right next to the border with Mexico. We went there the summer before he left to go to Portland. It was a weird set of circumstances: My family was planning on going to South Padre Island for a week, and they said, ‘Hey, it’d be cool to bring Steve. Have a buddy, bring the guitars.’ We went down there and did the beach thing. We came back after that, and then a week later I went to the same place with his family, and once again we took the guitars and spent another week. And it was during the second vacation, with his family, when he said, ‘Hey, let’s write a song,’ and we tried it. He was really kind of getting into it. We were fishing around for chord schemes. We sat down with the full intent of writing a song. I remember him being real intent about it, really fascinated by the process of how to write a song, and by that time he had delved into a wide range of tastes, and during that time we were talking about lyrics such as Pink Floyd’s. That’s when he really started paying attention to lyrics: Were they writing about something that they knew, or were they writing some cheesy-ass love songs for kicks? He’d write some ideas down and scratch that out and say, ‘That doesn’t make sense.’ But he kept at it—and he was fourteen.

“He definitely took the reins of the songwriting session. I was there to help discover chord structures and I was there to play what he told me to play. I remember being like, ‘I have no idea what I’m doing, but he does.’”

When Smith moved to his father’s house the following winter he didn’t cut himself off from his old life. He came back to Texas for prolonged visits a number of times. “After Steve moved to Portland,” says Pickering, “I came up and visited him twice—in March ’84 over spring break, and then again in summer of ’86. Bunny and Charlie continued to live in Duncanville for the next couple years. In the summer of ’84, Bunny had visitation. In the summer of ’85 [Steve] came back into town as well.”

The move from Dallas to Portland was a huge shift in terrain. Steven was suddenly living with a different family in a city that would earn the nickname Little Beirut for its anti-war demonstrations, a small metropolis teeming with independent-minded rock bands, clubs, record stores, and book stores.

“My dad lived up there,” he later said of the move in
Under the Radar
. “I saw him every year for like a week or two. So I knew who he was. It wasn’t really like I moved out into nowhere, but it was a difficult move. It took some getting used to. I didn’t sleep at all for about the first six months I lived there. At that time the situation at my mother’s home was very fresh in my mind. I was very worried about my mother. But everything turned out okay.”

Housing records in Portland show that Gary Smith and Marta Greenwald, who lived with their daughter, Rachel Smith, owned a three-story colonial house with a big yard near Division Street and Hawthorne Boulevard in southeast Portland. A wide gable protrudes from the top story and there is a deep, wraparound porch. Across the street is an Episcopal church with a large circular glass window that is black from the outside and looks as if it could have inspired the reference to “the cathedral with the glass stained black” in Smith’s “Speed Trials.” There are industrial-sized roses blooming beside some of the houses on the block. Condor Avenue, the street that would provide the name for Smith’s first great song, was a bus ride away in southwest Portland.

On a May afternoon in 2004, a teenage punk rock couple shuffles home from school carrying backpacks and skateboards. Downtown is a few minutes away by bus, and Hawthorne Boulevard, home to a lot of the record stores and coffee shops that have made southeast Portland a popular destination for recent college grads at loose ends, is a short walk away. It’s unclear how much time Smith spent there; his girlfriend from his senior year of high school, Shannon Wight, recalls that by the time she knew Smith his family lived in southwest Portland.

Pickering visited Smith in his pleasant new circumstances twice. “He obviously liked it up there. In ’86 when I visited he had friends there, and it was his town. He obviously had found a place where he had a social network. As I’ve watched and read the interviews over the years—I remember a guy who was upbeat and reasonably outgoing, smart and funny and talented; I don’t remember him being unusually sad or depressed or anything like that. Just from playing basketball or riding our bikes, listening to
Sgt. Pepper’s
or The White Album, I did not get the impression he was depressed or had more than the usual level of sadness.

“The first time I visited him in Portland was spring ’84 in March, and I don’t recall him looking significantly different at the time. . . . My next trip in the summer of ’86 I did meet a bunch of his friends. I don’t remember their names, but I did hang out with
five or six of his friends. He’d been there for three months the first time I went up. Mostly what I was impressed with is he would take the bus everywhere—if he wanted to go to downtown, if he wanted to go to Clackamas Town Center.
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I remember thinking that was amazing, because in Duncanville there was no bus. His hair might have been a little bit longer, but I still recognized him as the same guy. . . . I remember a girl he spent some time with in my visit up there”—at this point it wouldn’t have been Shannon Wight—“and it was him and her and me tagging along. I don’t remember anyone calling him Elliott until college. I called him Steve and he did not correct me on that, and everyone in July of ’86 up there called him Steve.”

The oft-repeated tale that Smith changed his name at fourteen from Steve to Elliott is false. “He was always Steve Smith,” writes Julie Doyle. “It was news to anyone he’d gone to early school with.” He was Steve Smith all through high school.

Pickering was able to track Smith’s musical progress in Portland. He was now in what was by high-school standards a real band: Stranger Than Fiction, with fellow teenagers Tony Lash, Jason Hornick, and Garrick Duckler. There were actual recordings. “I have two Stranger Than Fiction tapes—he was hanging out with those guys at the time—which I brought back to Texas and listened to excessively,” he says. “But he was still Steve at that point as far as I knew. He ran me off a dub and slapped a label on it. I remember coming back in ’86 with a really well produced Stranger Than Fiction cassette and being amazed at the sound quality of it. And I do have an earlier cassette. I think that must have been when he came back summer of ’84 or ’85. That was more with a drum machine. One of the things I remember being impressed by the most was a guy playing upright bass. The drums sounded really good. I remember him coming back in summer of ’85 or summer of ’86. Mark Merritt had come into a drum set somehow, and I remember Steve, he could play the drums. That’s when I realized this guy could play anything, it was just not difficult for him.”

Smith started some of his best work during high school in Portland. “Condor Ave.,” the second song on
Roman Candle
, Smith’s first album, “was definitely written in high school—or begun,” writes JJ Gonson, Smith’s girlfriend in the early ’90s, in an e-mail. “‘Kiwi Maddog 20/20’ was not only written, but also recorded, then. He took the old tape and reworked it, but just a little bit. The title comes from a bottle he and our housemate, Chris Herring, polished off one night.” It was “bought for the color—like antifreeze—and choked down on a dare.”

Early in his senior year at Lincoln High School in southwest Portland, Smith went to a meeting for prospective applicants to Hampshire College. At the meeting he found an acquaintance from Lincoln: Shannon Wight. They started dating, and after she got an early-decision acceptance to Hampshire, he decided to apply—he hadn’t gotten around to applying anywhere else, says Wight, and he wanted to follow her. She sensed that this might be “a terrible idea” as far as their relationship was concerned. In her Hampshire College freshman photo, Wight looks like an all-American girl, perfectly unremarkable in appearance. She has long straight brown hair, a dark sweater and no visible streak of rebelliousness.

Smith’s relationship with Wight didn’t survive long once they got to college, but it was there that he met some of the people who became central characters in the rest of his life. Hampshire was the first place where he could present himself as a person set against the upbringing he felt had been thrust upon him in Texas: a sensitive, feminist musician of philosophical bent named Elliott Smith. Steve Smith—the boy on a bike in the Dallas suburbs who wore the clothes his parents bought him and lived on classic rock—ceased to be a person you could meet and shake hands with. He became a specter haunting Elliott Smith, cropping up over and over again in song.

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A mall in southeast Portland.