Elliott Smith and the Big Nothing (8 page)

In 1994, Smith and Krebs put out a split 45-inch on the tiny local label Slo-Mo. Krebs’s contribution was the song “Shytown.” Smith’s was “No Confidence Man.” It was recorded in one day, Krebs remembers, at a house then shared by Janet Weiss and Sam Coomes. “Our friend Moira [Doogan] . . . was like, ‘Hey, I’m starting this little label, do you want to do a 45?’” says Krebs. “And so we went to Sam and Janet’s house when they were still together, over there off of Hawthorne on 37th—Janet still owns that house—and there’s a little setup and we just did it in an afternoon. Elliott did all the engineering and I found all the weird noises. We both had these tunes and there’s a bunch of forks and knives and spoons hanging from a fishing line. It was an actual instrument they had in their recording [studio] . . . and I was just like, ‘We should put that on there.’ And Elliott had these dumb masks: a bear mask and a weird bat mask. There’s black-and-white shots of us with guitars wearing these masks. We took the pictures outside of Janet’s basement. We laughed a lot—we both
have the same sense of humor—it was just kind of this dumb sense of humor. He had that old Domino guitar.”

Smith’s social life at the time was fairly typical for a Portland musician. In addition to doing construction with Krebs, he also worked as a painter with Ralf Youtz, drummer for both the original, temporary line-up of Built to Spill and the short-lived Doug Martsch–Calvin Johnson collaboration The Halo Benders. Todd Patrick—the Portland promoter whose club, 17 Nautical Miles, expired with a party in which a guest punched a hole through the wall into the Hallmark store next door—remembers Smith showing up for karaoke night at the Galaxy Lounge and hanging out at The Lutz.

But his social reputation was unusual in two regards. “He was regarded as an eccentric guy, a very standoffish person, just painfully shy,” Patrick says. “But he also wore his emotions on his sleeve. . . . Because . . . he would successfully communicate his feelings and stuff like that, people would get to know him, they’d know how he was feeling. He was a shy human being who was also capable of being very nice and very moral and not cold and not a dick. . . . People kind of felt sorry for him, they kind of looked after him—unlike some other famous people in a small town like Portland. You get a little famous in Portland or any town of that size and anyone who’s not famous is going to be resentful. They’re going to say that your fame is undeserved and that you’re a snob now and this and that. Other people who have achieved a similar level of fame—various things were said about all those other people, but not Elliott Smith. Maybe it’s just because his whole painfully shy reputation covered any snottiness he may have betrayed towards people and no one ever took it personally when he’d snub them. But I think he was generally a decent guy who tried to be nice to everybody. Except for the fact that [people] thought he was really fucked up. People thought he was personally weird. Although I would say that among the people that knew him a little better than the average fan, there was a sense that he wasn’t as fucked up as he was made out to be.”

During this period, Smith got the second of his two tattoos, the one of Ferdinand the Bull on display in the cover photograph of
Either/Or
. The character was invented by author Munro Leaf for a 1936 children’s book,
The Story of Ferdinand
, featuring the illustrations of Robert Lawson. Lawson’s cover image of a bull sniffing a flower was copied for Smith’s tattoo. In the story, Ferdinand was a strong bull with a peaceful disposition. Picked by a fluke to enter the ring with a matador, he refuses to fight. Instead of going on to fame and fortune, he decides to return to his old pasture where he loves to smell the flowers. Smith told an interviewer that he got the tattoo both because he wanted an image of a bull on his arm and because he felt some kind of solidarity with Ferdinand the Bull, a character who was regarded as a failure because he was unwilling to do the things expected of his kind. Smith said that he, like Ferdinand, wanted to work “outside the system.”

“When I first met him I didn’t get it,” says E. V. Day, “and then I totally got it. It’s like . . . he’s this big bull who doesn’t want to fight and would rather sit down and smell the flowers and wishes he wasn’t this big bull. He’s small but he’s so big in his art and in his music. His music is orchestral and so this little man, this little beautiful man made this huge romantic music, and so his bigness, I think, is about the talent inside of him, the vision inside of him. I think he realized he was a big person in a lot of ways: his morals, his ideals, and a lot of things he could never live up to, the expectations he could never live up to inside of himself. I think it’s funny to think of him as this large bull too. That’s maybe the third element, which is the humor, which is survival. We’d talk about humor as survival from emotional agony, conflict, stuff like that.”

That’s not the kind of thing Smith was talking about when he actually had the tattoo punched into his arm. “I was around for Ferdinand,” JJ Gonson writes in an e-mail. “He’d already got Texas. Ferdinand was done by the wife of a tattoo artist friend of ours. . . . They had a new shop; she was learning and it was one of her first jobs and took a very long time. I never quite understood why he did it. He had this truly perverse fascination with bullfighting, which he had actually never seen, and probably would have been put off by had he [seen it]. It was completely out of character for him. Somehow he had missed the point of the children’s story, which I’m not even sure he had ever read and which is about pacifism. Ironically, that would have reflected his actual character (I remember conversations about passive resistance) more accurately.”

When Cavity Search quietly released
Roman Candle
in 1994, the reception was mixed, unusually so for an album nobody had heard of. “With Elliott you think about him being universally liked in a certain world,” says Swanson, “but I tried to cram that record down people’s throats when
Roman Candle
came out, and so many people were like, ‘Whatever, it sounds like Simon and Garfunkel, not my thing, really boring, all the songs sound the same. . . .’ I could never get anybody to listen to it, and then I figured out this really funny recipe: The time to get someone was to get them as soon as they broke up with someone. . . . I’d be like, ‘You should listen to this,’ and it’d be the same person I’d given it to six months earlier who said it was boring and sounded like Simon and Garfunkel, and they would come back to me, like, ‘Your friend’s amazing.’”

JJ Gonson had opened a Pandora’s box by playing Elliott’s self-recorded tape for her friends at Cavity Search. The Northwest got its first taste of how distinctive Smith’s work could be when it was deeply personal and unaccompanied by a punk rock band. Still, nobody had any idea how good a guitar player and poet he was. That discovery would provoke the decline and fall of Elliott Smith, indie rock musician with a miserable day job, and the rise of Elliott Smith, big genius.

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Calamity Jane opened for Nirvana in a stadium in Buenos Aires. They were booed offstage.

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The first song on Heatmiser’s 1994 EP
Yellow No. 5.

B
ILL SANTEN GRADUATED high school a year early in Lexington, Kentucky. He was a thin, deer-eyed kid, classically good looking. He could play guitar and he surprised people who knew his proper Southern family with his determination to be a musician. Before he could drink, he headed to LA and then to Portland, and began to play acoustic guitar in bars.

About a year later, he was a heroin addict standing in front of a house Elliott Smith shared with Sean Croghan of Crackerbash in northeast Portland, asking if he might borrow a hundred dollars. He’d called first, but Smith wasn’t exactly in the mode for entertaining company. “Elliott came out in his flannels,” Santen recalls. Smith took his friend upstairs and gave him what amounted to a career-counseling session. “Elliott mudded and drywalled his own walls,” says Santen, and he showed Santen how to do it, talking as he worked. When they walked out together, Smith gave Santen a wad of bills amounting to one hundred dollars.

Later, when they were touring together in 1997, Santen put one hundred dollars on the table of a room they shared. “[Elliott] said, ‘I knew what you were probably going to spend this on, but it was time somebody took a chance on you.’” Looking back on his Portland days, Santen, who now lives in Kentucky and no longer has a drug problem, says Smith’s kindness helped straighten him out.

The loan wasn’t the first act of generosity Smith had bestowed upon Santen. The two met sharing an acoustic solo bill at the Egyptian Room on Division and Southeast 37th. Now one of Portland’s most popular lesbian discos, back then “it was pretty much a strip bar,” says Santen. “We were doing it once a week and looking for different people to come play.” Santen wrote Smith a letter saying he liked playing with him. A couple weeks later, “he called up out of the blue and said he was going up to Seattle with Mary Lou Lord,” and invited Santen to share the bill at RKCNDY (pronounced “Rock Candy”), “a pretty stupid LA-style club by the Space Needle. . . . Everyone was coming for Mary Lou; nobody knew who he was.”

Mary Lou Lord was by that time on Kill Rock Stars, the Olympia, Washington, label then synonymous with the feminist punk “riot grrrl” movement. The label’s main attraction was the three-quarters-female Bikini Kill, a loud, anthemic, political band with song titles like “Reject All American” and “Distinct Complicity.” But Lord, a native of Salem, Massachusetts, came from an entirely different underground: the T subway system in Boston. Having acquired a local reputation as a busker with an acoustic guitar, she stumbled across fame in the punk rock universe by falling into a romantic relationship with Kurt Cobain shortly before he settled down with Courtney Love, when Nirvana played Boston in the early ’90s. Lord had cut an EP for Kill Rock Stars featuring seven folk ballads and one rock song, “Lights Are Changing.” “Lights Are Changing” was a departure from her busker mode—it contained drums, bass, and electric guitar—and it was a split from the regnant indie rock sound of the day in that it was unabashedly a ’60s song. The melody and the chiming guitars recalled The Byrds and early electric Bob Dylan, as did the lyrics, which were not as concerned with social controversies as with old-fashioned relationship themes.

The Smith–Lord alliance was revealing in a number of important ways. Smith was still the co-frontman of Heatmiser, and by accounts he gave later on, staying in the band only as a favor to Neil Gust. “Neil never asked me to do that—it was just my trip,” he would later say of his determination to stick with the project. Heatmiser was, in Smith’s words, “trying to be Fugazi.” It would be an understatement to say they were grunge as opposed to folk-rock—they were about as far from folk-rock as you could go and still have verses and choruses. For a Heatmiser member to be traveling up to Seattle to open for a neo-folkie was, if not an act of remonstration, an act of broadmindedness. For Smith to perform with a folk-rock act at RKCNDY must have seemed fey in a distinctly un-Heatmiser way.

Lord had discovered Smith because she was dating Slim Moon, the founder and owner of Kill Rock Stars. Not long after the release of
Roman Candle
on Cavity Search, she was deep in conversation backstage at a show featuring Moon and his band Witchy Poo, when Moon came and told her to come to see the guy performing. She hadn’t listened for long before she decided the “little punk kid” on stage was “the quintessential songwriter of our generation besides Kurt Cobain,” as she later put it in an interview with Harvard’s radio station.

Lord introduced herself to Smith, who already knew who she was, and invited him to tour with her. Moon signed Smith to Kill Rock Stars and put out his second, self-titled album in 1995. While it was recorded in much the same way as
Roman Candle
, at home, it was promoted heavily, with posters of Smith appearing in record-store windows all over the Northwest. By the time Santen got to know him, his solo career was well under way through a Kill Rock Stars showcase at the LA club Jabberjaw, where Smith had met his longtime manager, Margaret Mittleman, and his longtime producer, Mittleman’s husband Rob Schnapf.

Heatmiser was hardly a critically acclaimed platform from which to launch Smith’s solo work into a position of indie rock prestige, no matter how many Portland kids came to the shows. “I think most people who had good taste thought Heatmiser sucked,” says Todd Patrick. “They didn’t like them at all; they were a ‘grunge band.’ Which is funny because if you listen to
Mic
City Sons
[their last album], they were going in a completely different direction. That band was not regarded very well. I think it’s almost surprising how much he [Smith] was accepted there by artistic people who had good music taste, critical snobs like yourself and I.”

Smith’s task was to win over critical snobs as a touring musician, and in the beginning his solo tours were as uncomfortable as the next punk rocker’s. Patrick first met Smith in 1995 when Patrick was a twenty-year-old indie rock fanatic in Texas. He and his girlfriend of the time drove ten miles from their Austin home to Lubbock to see a bill in which Smith opened for The Softies, by a skateboard ramp. The two acts—The Softies being a quiet, largely acoustic indie pop duo consisting of Rose Melberg and Jen Sbragia, at that point based in Portland—were traveling with their guitars in a Geo, and as Patrick recalls things were not going smoothly. “They got kicked off their slot by Possum Dixon
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at some bar in Austin. I tried, with this guy who owned a record store, to book them at a show”—Patrick’s first effort as a promoter. “It didn’t work.”

But Patrick could offer Smith and The Softies shelter, and he found the obscure solo artist both kind and eccentric. “They stayed with us for four days, The Softies and Elliott. I got to know The Softies pretty well and I got to know what a unique guy Elliott Smith was—us and The Softies went out and bought some beer, and he spent the entire time in our apartment on our computer. We had an Internet connection, which was sort of unique. I guess he had never been on the Internet, and he spent the entire time in our apartment logging on. He didn’t leave, and he was very standoffish and he was constantly calling somebody. When he left he was really nice to us . . . he gave us copies of every record he’d made, his first single, a cassette, everything he had. . . .
It was sort of incongruous that he’d been this really weird standoffish guy the whole time but he was so sweet.”

Patrick followed Smith and The Softies to their next gig, at Rice University in Houston, and on to the one after that in Louisiana. After they parted ways, Patrick remembers, Smith left the tour early, possibly weary of life in the Geo that carried all three musicians from show to show. “The Softies told us that he had told them he was on all these amazing pain killers, opiates.” In retrospect, it was an early sign of problems to come, but it didn’t look like an overly serious one at the time. It was around this time that Smith met Dorien Garry, a doorkeeper at the club Maxwell’s in Hoboken, New Jersey. She was only eighteen, but they hit it off and he crashed at her place. She would come to be one of his good friends, and she remembers him as being admirably good-humored considering nobody had come to see him play.

In fact, Marc Swanson remembers the earliest days of Smith’s solo career as one of the best times to be Smith’s friend. “When we really started to spend time by ourselves was when he started to play by himself. He would come to San Francisco, and I’d just meet him at the club; the first couple albums it was like I’d go meet him, he’d go throw his guitar in a cab, and we’d go to my house or a bar and hang out. He didn’t know a lot of people in San Francisco, and it got to be where there was an endless stream of people waiting to talk to him. So I think of that as a really nice utopian time with him, because that was even before the old Hampshire students were showing up, or anybody was, when Elliott would come to town.”

When Swanson hung out with Smith during those times in San Francisco, there was a strong note of youthful earnestness in the conversations. “I remember him telling me, and we used to argue about it years after that, that he thought visual art was a better medium to—I don’t know about express yourself, but more pure, more respectful, and he said he tried to write songs like someone would paint. I would often argue with him, ‘No, no, no, music’s
way better because you have this whole other element with this other group of people and you can work with melody as well as poetry.’ [He thought] the art world was kind of safe from this sort of mass media consumption and people were more pure about what they were doing. It wasn’t that he was an elitist about it, but we would jockey back and forth over whether it was better to make visual art or better to make music—which kind of shows our age . . . to think about one creative pursuit being better than the other. Now I just think it’s kind of silly. We were twenty-four, twenty-five, maybe twenty-six.”

The sculptor E. V. Day, who befriended Smith later in New York, remembers Smith’s affection for the art world. “He loved art and had such respect for artists. And he really felt like artists were the best, like the top geniuses. Because it was pure expression—in music it’s filtered and it’s produced and it’s packaged and all these changes are made to your final product. And we would argue about all those different things.” Like Swanson, Day is successful. Some of her more famous works include exploding dresses, red tatters suggestive of flesh suspended in mid-air. She’s stretched thongs into a shape resembling fighter planes and arrayed them, dangling from the ceiling, into a fleet aimed at G-spot bull’s eyes painted on a museum’s walls.

Of all the new connections Smith was making on tour, the most important may have been Mittleman. Once they’d formed their relationship, they’d stick together as he changed record labels (from Kill Rock Stars to Virgin to DreamWorks), moved around the country (Portland to New York to Los Angeles), went from being a member of a band with a solo project on the side to a crossover success story, and weathered break-ups with Joanna Bolme and other girlfriends. Her husband, Rob Schnapf, worked on five of Smith’s albums with his partner Tom Rothrock (if you include Heatmiser’s
Mic City Sons)
. Smith would invite himself over to Mittleman and Schnapf’s house in LA, Schnapf later recalled, just to play croquet in their yard. When they parted ways in early 2001, Smith went through one of the hardest years of his life.

Mittleman came into management after a long journey through disparate sectors of the music business. Working in music publishing at the powerhouse BMG in the early ’90s, she went to the Sunset Junction street fair in Silverlake and saw a performance by a young Beck Hansen. She gave him her card, he got her a demo, and eventually she persuaded BMG to give him a publishing deal. Rob Schnapf and Tom Rothrock recorded Beck’s hit “Loser” shortly thereafter, and put it out as a 12-inch vinyl single on their label Bong Load. Mittleman had proved she could find and break talent with the best of them. Two years later, she and Schnapf first saw Smith’s Jabberjaw show, where he had the crowd move outside to watch him play because of the extraordinary heat. She was moved by how silent he rendered the crowd.

But just as Smith’s career was shaping up from a business perspective, a strange thing was happening to his reputation: His second, self-titled album, which Kill Rock Stars released in 1995, made people think he was a junkie. The first song, “Needle in the Hay,” seemed the most obvious bundle of references, including mention of “marks,” and meeting up with “the man.” Another song, “The White Lady Loves You More,” looked only slightly subtler: “Keep your things in a place meant to hide”; “Need a metal man just to pick up your feet.” Adding to the druggie ambience, the chorus of “St. Ides Heaven” featured Smith and Rebecca Gates (of the Portland band The Spinanes) singing “High on amphetamines/the moon is a light bulb breaking.” The cover of the album, a photograph by JJ Gonson that showed cut-out figures tumbling from a building like suicides, seemed like a portrait of the death-cheating soul that had written the songs. But Smith was no heroin addict.

Not long after the release of
Elliott Smith
, Santen had a candid conversation about the drug with Smith. “He had a show in Boise with The Softies. And I was back in Portland and I was a mess and nobody knew, and I was like, ‘Elliott Smith, everyone knows he’s a junkie, and I’ll offer him a ride to Boise.’ And when we were up there I told him I was a mess, and he told me he’d
never done it. I was pretty shocked by that. But not really—once you get in that kind of trouble you can tell if someone’s been through it or not.”

On another occasion, says Santen, “we were driving back from Boise and I was having a talk with him, saying, ‘I don’t want to go back to Portland, I don’t know what to do, I’m in a mess with everything.’ We were talking about how heroin had taken over the city. I was talking about swimming across the Columbia River to get some heroin, and he was like, ‘I’d swim across that river for a piece of carrot cake.’ We spent the next two hours going around looking for carrot cake, after we were having this really heavy moment in the car.”