Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith (14 page)

“Any Kind of Mudhen,” spelled out in lower-case on the cassette sleeve, and including thanks to, among others, Karl Marx, Ronald Reagan, and GOD, was the band’s first complete effort, recorded from June 26 to July 18 in 1985, when Elliott was fifteen years old.
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Duckler plays double bass, Elliott guitar and piano, and Hornick piano, electronic keyboard, and synthesizer. There are thirteen distinct songs, for a total of no less than fifty-five minutes of music.
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Some are political (Reagan-era diatribes), some are jokes, some are romantic (and achingly adolescent) meditations centering on lost relationships and questions of identity. In most cases—and this was the norm for the time—lyrics were written not by Elliott, but by Duckler. For now, in these very early stages of song making, Elliott remained, as Duckler saw it, “fiercely dismissive” of the words he managed to string together. Nothing was close to good enough. Nothing ever sounded, to him, acceptably original. He detested cliché, and the effort to get beyond it wore him out. His feeling was that Duckler, however, possessed a gift, a natural talent, so it was a relief to focus only on putting his words to music. Just four songs on the cassette are Elliott’s through and through: “The Machine,” “Joy to the World,” “Reeba” (spelled out “pbida,” Russian for “fish”), and “To Build a Home,” although Elliott is usually credited for the music. In one funky, James Brown–ish tune Duckler imagines America afloat in the sea, “ignoring all morals or reality.” Reagan puts quarters in the CIA machine; even John Lennon is conveniently forgotten, his name replaced with “a date.” A joke song—Duckler’s “It Was a Sunny Day”—begins side two, introduced by synthesized harpsichord. There’s talking and laughing in the background. At one point someone says, “Stop the tape.” A deep baritone voice—Duckler’s—altered to sound even deeper, describes a sunny day on which a couple walks down the street, “her hair like the frog on an all beef patty.” He looks at her, she looks at him—“boy, did we look good.” The speaker declares, “We don’t have to be any kind of mudhens.” He reaches into his pocket and pulls out some meatloaf, then shoves the girl’s face into it. The deliberately goofy song ends prettily, with Elliott singing harmonies over a funky bass line. “Joy to the World,” one of Elliott’s contributions, begins acoustically as “The Machine” trails off, with no actual separation between
the two tunes. Descending notes from the yuletide staple shift to minor tones as Elliott asks what will come “when the lights go down on everyone.” Along his street he gets wind of a party going on. At some point it will blow them all away, he says, but “if we try we can get this wheel turning.” In the party people’s eyes he sees a light burning. There’s hope there, even if the Lord does not come, in contrast to the Christmas song; things can somehow turn around, through learning, not by trying to measure up, make the grade, or jump to the sound of the whistle blowing. The song subtly calls for independence, nonconformity, rising above a mob mentality. It recalls “Outward Bound,” which decried the business life and “running under the gun,” and found meaning in nature and writing down sounds.

Violin (played by Sara Harris) introduces the last song on the cassette, Elliott’s “To Build a Home.” It’s just piano and Elliott singing in clear, authentic tones that don’t sound at all unlike any of his later solo records. The lyrics, Elliott’s, seem to reference the plight of Native Americans—another political sentiment. They move out to nowhere and live off the land, build a home without government aid, in the place where the buffalo roam, devoid, interestingly, of people. But America catches up with them, and they pack up again, heading someplace new. Isn’t it sad, Elliott writes, “to find out what is and what should never be are the very same thing.”

In all, the songs are guitar and piano driven—as usual—with numerous experimental Elliott-supplied transitions of the sort he liked to put together, creating songs within songs, as Lash described, each section its own discrete world. One thinks of John Lennon, who often did the same with his “bits,” in mash-ups like “Happiness is a Warm Gun” from the
White Album
. It’s hard to call any of the tunes catchy or hooky, but there’s an ambitiousness and a scope suggesting utter seriousness of purpose. The blend of piano and guitar—how one gives way to the other, how they overlap smoothly—points most directly to Jackson Browne, especially the
Late for the Sky
album Elliott so admired. The lyrics are dense and clever, and at times sweetly sincere, but they don’t always pop; they lack the specificity and originality of Elliott’s mature work, but then that’s hardly shocking—they were written at age fifteen. In poetical terms, they’d be labeled “juvenilia.” There are also occasions on which words don’t fit easily into the musical line; the singer, sometimes Elliott, sometimes Duckler, rushes to get them
out in time, unloading hefty mouthfuls of verbiage. It’s clear, as well, that Elliott’s working out his vocal style. Later with Heatmiser he would channel Joe Strummer or Elvis Costello, affecting a breathy bark. Here he’s withheld, more natural. Often there’s that hint of an English accent, a residue of listening to Lennon and the Beatles.

If there’s an overriding theme in mudhen, it’s self-definition and relationship failure, sometimes in combination. Other guys get in the way of connections. Love is given then thrown away. Forever “is a temporary instability and never is a permanent possibility.”

When not holed up with four-tracks painstakingly crafting these complicated compositions, the three friends simply did a lot of goofing off. They were high schoolers, after all, and they shared—obviously delightfully—a taut, abjectly sarcastic sense of the world. This was another form of art they worked at perfecting, and every drawn-out joke came with a hidden, inside back story. Hours were spent listening to music and discussing, usually playfully, what they heard—sounds and lyrics. As Duckler puts it, we “were all (in very different ways) very nerdy. Jason and I, for instance, actually got in trouble for using complete sentences when we worked at Baskin-Robbins.”
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Elliott (and Duckler) passed time reading Freud’s lectures—as well as existentialists, Dostoevski, and volumes on renaissance painters or the history of weapons—and Elliott “was so surprised,” Duckler says, “when I got him Gifford and Seidman’s book on
Ulysses
for his birthday that he started to read it right there on the spot.”
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Most weekend nights featured rolling aimlessly in Hornick’s car, because “either we had no real life and had no place to go or because we couldn’t really think of anything that would be as enjoyable (or both).” They’d finally settle on some destination—“two for one dozen donuts or something absurd”—while playing, in the car, one complete album after another. R.E.M.’s
Murmur
was out, and at the time no one had heard of the band. “We still felt,” Duckler jokes, “that Michael Stipe’s lyrics could actually mean something someday.” Conversations about the music were of a particular sort, specific to their way of talking generally, about anything. “There was no academic minutiae that bores me to tears,” explains Duckler, “but there wasn’t a lot of vague ‘that’s awesome’s.’ ” Nor was there any tally aimed at identifying “who was great and who sucked.” “Jason was a great mimic and Elliott would give kind of an
emotional rendering of what was literally being played and I would throw in a metaphor (on the band Yes, ‘It’s like they’re fishing for whales instead of salmon with these lyrics here’).” It was all playful, all slapstick, and the true goal was just to make the other person crack up.

Sometimes mild disagreements emerged, never lasting or significant, yet there was little of the typical “one-upmanship” one meets with in movie versions of male bonding. Being exceptionally smart and inventive, the boys turned every drive around into a night at the improv. “Elliott would hunch over and make his arms into claws and try to grab one of us as we tried to flee from his clutches. I made a scary devil face,” says Duckler, “that Elliott would try to get me to do and Jason would plead for me to stop doing it. And Jason would run like a Tauntaun, one of the creatures from the planet Hoth.” To Duckler, Hornick’s Tauntaun captured the humor’s flavor perfectly—“stunning, crazy, but also based on astute observation.” Other evenings they might arrive at 7-Eleven, feeling “terribly awkward” around other people. While waiting in line Hornick mumbled, sotto voce, “Bats. Them iz some crazy-ass blind motherfuckers.” Then they’d suddenly stand erect to make it as hard as possible not to laugh.

Duckler remembers one episode at earnestly alt Reed College (where he later went to school). The occasion was an experimental jazz band performance of some esoteric variety, as deliberately recondite as possible. One terribly sincere guy played a hammer and whisk, another struck a fire extinguisher with a shot glass. Every ounce of irony was “sucked out of the room”; it was “a moment of great solemnity as if we were at the funeral of melody or something,” nobody speaking, everybody hanging on each note. “Elliott and I could not handle it. We literally ran outside bursting out over the gravity of everyone’s expressions. My girlfriend at the time came running after us, saying, ‘I can’t take you guys anywhere. You’re like little boys.’ ”
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As for deeper, less comical affinities, Duckler and Elliott shared interests in psychology, a certain slant on internal life. These attitudes were, in Duckler’s estimation, “the basis of our friendship, and after … working on all these songs together and doing all the things we did, there was a long time when neither one of us really trusted anyone else with this type of communication. Among everything else, Elliott was an intuitive person and
he was (until the fame machine got him) able to hold the complexities of other people with insight and compassion … I wouldn’t say we were innocent and everything was great but we certainly weren’t burdened by anyone else’s opinion … The three of us were intensely critical people but not particularly judgmental people. We were slightly depressed people who enjoyed each other and appreciated anything that made us feel genuinely astonished.” And when they needed it, they created their own astonishment. High school at Lincoln was, in short, a genuinely fruitful time, marked by more or less nonstop artistry, generativity, and galloping inventiveness. As Elliott told Duckler many years later, “Those were the most creative years of [my] life.” The Stranger Than Fiction cassettes on their own go a long way toward proving the sentiment. They set a bar that, with every next effort, got higher and higher.

“Mudhen” was followed by “Still Waters More or Less,” recorded from November 1985 to March 1986, at The Hedhoues (presumably a friend’s house) and Woofbark Sound (according to liner notes), near 140th and SE Holgate. The drum machine—given the name Ed Luther Kassier before—was replaced by Tony Lash, and the difference is striking. The songs, with lyrics by Duckler again, but also by Glynnis Fawkes and Susan Pagani, and in three instances by Elliott, take on added gravity and resonance.
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They sound, in other words, more like real songs; the album improves measurably on its more erratic predecessor. There is pith and polish to spare. When Elliott sent him the tape, Pickle’s first thought was: “A lot of these songs sound like they were written by the smartest kids in class—for each other.” It’s true, there’s a conversation going on, with “Strawberry Fields”–like allusions Duckler and Elliott understood, if naive listeners didn’t. And these
were
the smartest kids in class—no one failed to recognize that—grafting their thoughts on politics, relationships, and family life onto increasingly complicated musical arrangements, some lasting ten minutes, most made up of the same discontinuous sections that somehow, in the best of cases, managed to cohere.

The cassette is a smorgasbord of sound once more showcasing Elliott’s astonishing range. There’s boogie-woogie, psychedelia, ragtime, straight blues, lengthy ornate piano intros and interludes (beautifully played), endless electric guitar stingers and leads. In their strange, defiant heterogeneity,
these songs—except in small patches—are glaringly unlike the kind of tunes characterizing Elliott’s later solo work. That sort of quiet, internal, focused succinctness is mostly missing. Nor do they sound at all like Elliott’s next band, the far louder, harder Heatmiser. The influences, in fact, cover the map—a little R.E.M., a bit of Pink Floyd—Roger Waters’s
The Final Cut
—some Yes, some early Peter Gabriel Genesis, and as always, a healthy dose of Rush. There’s even some James Taylor guitar (“You Can Close Your Eyes”) and Carole King piano (“It’s Too Late”) thrown in. One song, “The Crystal Ball,” lyrics by Susan Pagani, models itself on Lennon’s “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds.” A mysterious dark-eyed girl appears and disappears, tempts and abandons. There are castles, deserts full of purple camels; kangaroos “grab your mother.” As butterflies hover and balloons fall, she’s there “by your side”—in the same second-person as “Lucy”—near “looking glass windows and marmalade shades.” Another song, “Vatican Rock,” samples “Johnny B. Goode,” with alternate politicized lyrics by Duckler; the Chuck Berry tune Elliott jammed on with his bandmates back in Texas.

This time there are three songs with lyrics and music by Elliott, and all three appear on side two. The first, which starts the second side, is “Jump Across the Mountain.” It’s an indictment of the rich, their easy, clueless hypocrisy, most likely a response to the wealth Elliott encountered for the first time at Lincoln. A marquis and his wife prepare for a “quiet wedding,” with a thousand guests. The homes are stately; ladies have a “jet-set reputation to protect” although, as Elliott points out, “we’re all animals, you know.” No one ever brings up the state of the nation; it’s a topic carefully avoided. Deserted people choke in the sand, victims of “wrong moralities.” “Look at what has happened in the streets of Cape Town,” Elliott concludes. The repeating chorus he sings softly with no irony, coming back, he says, to “claim the hand of my families.” The lilting melody and sharp finger-picking make the song the cassette’s catchiest. It sticks in the ear.