Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith (17 page)

Once Gust and Elliott stumbled upon a sort of natural echo chamber in a dorm stairwell, of all places. Experimentally, they blasted what they were recording through speakers. In the space the sound ricocheted, and they would re-record the echo through mics set up at different levels. “We got this amazing stereo reverb,” Gust recalls. But it was an “obnoxious thing to do,” loud and irritating, even by capacious Hampshire standards. In response three of what must have been a rather scant number of “jocks” at the school stole the mics, which Elliott and Gust later recovered, to great relief—given that they were rented—in some remote closet.

In no time the two friends did what so many at Hampshire also took a stab at. They formed an acoustic duo, called, with Dada-esque panache, Swimming Jesus (apparently the savior had yet to perfect walking on water). They covered Tom Waits, Elvis Costello, the Beatles, and threw in whatever originals they managed to assemble, some written by Gust, some by Elliott. There was a different outfit too, featuring Gust, Elliott, a friend named Dylan, and two others. But most promisingly of all, during breaks from school over holidays and summers when Elliott returned to Portland, the old Stranger Than Fiction reassembled, this time with the fresh moniker Harum Scarum. They even performed. The venue was Satyricon, their name was on the marquee, Tony Lash recalls, and they appeared on the night of a mysterious explosion at Sav-Mor grocery, that ultra-famous event in the history of Portland rock. Yet per usual, performing was not atop the list of priorities. Again the intent was to record, Elliott’s abiding monomania. This time they assembled in the studio of Chicago transplant Neil Karras at a place called The Palace at NW 12th and Glisan. All serious or semiserious bands of the time hung out there or rented practice space in variously sized cubbies, from virtual closets to twelve-by-ten-foot “living
rooms.” In essence the building amounted to a partitioned warehouse with fifty units total and very little insulation between walls. To effect some sort of organization for what was in fact abject chaos, the heavy-metal outfits got sent to the basement, where they plugged power strips into antique outlets on the ceiling, the rooms illuminated by a single hanging bulb. From there it was all feedback and barre chords and anguished screechy solos; you heard yourself by playing louder and more uninterruptedly than the band next door. Pond rehearsed there—initially calling themselves Moodpaint—as did Beauty Stab (later The Dandy Warhols) and Tony Lash’s other band Nero’s Rome.

The place was run by icon Bill Fisher, whose presence was fierce and unforgettable. Red haired, flip-flop-wearing, sprouting huge mutton-chop sideburns, he stood about six foot three and weighed somewhere in the neighborhood of two hundred fifty pounds. Karras says he “considered himself an alpha male” and never let you forget that fact. He was endlessly in your face, his legs “whiter than plain yogurt,” an enormous joint rolling around his overactive mouth.
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It was from Fisher that Karras rented his recording space, which came to be called, a little vaingloriously, Palace Recording. Karras paid him five hundred dollars per month, then tried recouping that sum with bookings. It was never easy. But he had a solid setup, plus an eight-track and sixteen-track. Fisher made of the location a gestalt of musical entrepreneurship. He had a booking agency, a music store inside; he even put out a magazine called
The Insider
. For a glorious span of years he managed a living off the aspirants circulating enthusiastically, as did Karras, barely.

Lash made the connection with Karras, who knew him from Nero’s Rome.
Trick of Paris Season
(1989) was the cassette that came of the week-long session, the one featuring a crazed-looking man shoving his head into another man’s pried-apart mouth, which he spreads with both hands on the black-and-white cover.
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In all there were ten songs on two sides, most melodic rock numbers with Elliott on guitar, tearing off his occasional trademark Van Halen-ish solos. Karras recalls being impressed with his playing, which was obviously accomplished. All the songs were sung by Elliott, with, this time, Elvis Costello/Joe Strummer bark and bite. Garrick Duckler appears as “himself,” with Hornick on bass and Lash on drums. All
songwriting is credited to Duckler and Elliott, with the exception of “Small Talk”—with its “monster voice” narration—which is credited to the band as a whole. The sound is a bit Cheap Trick, in Karras’s estimation, and compared to earlier Stranger Than Fiction efforts, especially the first two, it is simpler, more direct, and lacking in long-drawn-out digressions and abrupt changes of time and mood. What is maybe most notable about
Trick of the Paris Season
is that it includes two songs—“Catholic” and “Key Biscayne”—that Elliott resurrected later, with rewritten lyrics. So again, he did not always abandon these early efforts, set them aside as markedly inferior; they were part of his stock. He reused them when so inclined, if something about them struck him as worthy. Then he remade them to suit current preoccupations. “Catholic” became
XO’s
“Everybody Cares, Everybody Understands,” Elliott’s attack on “synthetic sympathies.” “Key Biscayne” became one of his two “Mr. Goodmorning” songs, with its repeated line, taken from the original, “don’t sleep, don’t go to sleep, don’t go to sleep tonight.” The re-recording features a deft, arresting acoustic guitar intro, immediately engaging, one of Elliott’s most charmingly upbeat, toe-tapping melodies.

Back at Hampshire the relationship with Gust deepened, taking on unexpected complexities, as did Elliott’s PC indoctrination as he moved to Division II and Division III requirements, the latter including a thesis. Gust and Elliott shared a close friend, a roommate, who happened to be gay and who, at some point in the process of what Gust described as a sort of “love triangle,” made it clear he had feelings for Neil that Neil did not reciprocate (Gust does not name this person). That possibility fading, Elliott and the roommate became particularly close, and as Gust says, “I sometimes thought they were friends at my expense, and as a result I would sometimes act like an asshole to Elliott.” Laughingly Gust adds: “We were like nineteen, twenty years old. We were not fully developed emotionally.”
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Whether it was this same roommate or somebody else, according to close friends of Elliott’s someone at Hampshire, a young man, confessed a serious crush on him. In response, not sure exactly how to react, and feeling genuine confusion, he spent several weeks investigating, imagining internally the possibility that
he might be, or could be, gay. In other words, he tried on a gay identity, almost to the point of attempting to talk himself into it. He thought it might be easier somehow; he wished, at least in the moment, that he might actually be gay. But in the end he found he could not do it. It wasn’t him. In any case, this may be the “love triangle” Gust had in mind, though he never does spell out details. As weeks dragged on, Elliott grew more confused with Neil’s feelings. He asked him why there were times he acted like he wasn’t his friend. He could not understand the capriciousness of Gust’s affections. Gust, for his part, “knew exactly what he was talking about … Sometimes I would be friendly with him, and sometimes I wouldn’t.” And this was not a matter that could be blithely shrugged off, since over time the two had decided to form yet another band after graduation. They first thought about moving to Chicago, but finally decided on Portland, where Tony Lash lived, and both Neil and Elliott “loved” Lash’s drumming, which reminded them of the drummer from the Pixies. So at last, at a Fourth of July party in the summer prior to senior year, Elliott opened up. He said to Gust, “If we are going to do this together I need to know … I want to talk to you about something.” As the two took a walk together Gust realized: “Okay, if we are going to live together, then I have to tell him.” It was a freighted moment. What came out, for the very first time ever, was Gust. He let Elliott know he was gay. Gust says, “I just blurted it out.” At first he couldn’t believe he’d said it. He was frozen, terrified, he found he couldn’t speak, and impulsively he started to cry.

It’s telling that Gust chose to come out to Elliott. No doubt he sensed what friends in Texas and in Portland already knew for certain: that he would not judge, that his compassion was guaranteed. Faced with any sort of vulnerability, Elliot sympathized. He knew what it felt like. At this point in his life, it was one of the things he did best. As Gust recalls, “He was completely … amazing.” The two took a short walk, sat on a curb together, and talked for hours. Elliott was “totally nonjudgmental and sympathetic,” Gust says. He was the only person who knew for another six months, “so he helped me come out.” “One of the things I loved most about Elliott was that he was a deeply compassionate person. He even took me to task when I was being judgmental with others.”
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Being in a band meant being accepted “by these cool people,” self-created indie rockers whom Gust occasionally found
“pretty gross,” but even here, in competitive context, “[Elliott] was totally unwilling to do it at the expense of someone’s feelings.” It wasn’t worth it, overriding one’s impulse to avoid belittling judgments. “He knew all that stuff instinctively,” Gust adds. “He was always like that.” It was an admirable, extraordinary posture. And although he would not always stick to it—like anyone, Elliott had his weaker moments—his commitment to making it on his terms was clear from the start.

All this was who Elliott naturally was, but it was also swirling in the thick Hampshire “anti” atmosphere. Financial aid, grants, and work-study were set up for Elliott, and he worked a number of campus jobs, at a farm, caring for sheep, and at a dog kennel—the “Livestock Guarding Dog Project”—where he helped with research on “Scandinavian attack dogs” thought to be peculiarly well-suited to protecting sheep and goats. He liked what he was studying, a hybrid concoction of philosophy and pre-law focused on “how to think” and “thinking about how you think and other people think,” a very meta sort of curriculum in which one spent a lot of time in one’s own head, reflectively introspecting about introspection, critiquing facile categorical bifurcations. In the late 1980s in academia this kind of dismantling of Kantian structures was
de rigeur
and painfully inescapable. As it did so many undergrad and graduate students, it took Elliott in a post-structuralist direction, into the clotted, sometimes annoyingly wheel-spinning fulminations of Foucault, Barthes, and most of all, Derrida, as well as their assorted epigones. Division III required a mentor, someone to supervise thesis work, and to that end Elliott made the acquaintance of one of Hampshire’s most ardent founders, Lester Mazor, who according to one of his research assistants, “did not do superficial.” When anyone complained about Hampshire’s then-hefty price tag, Mazor’s standard response was “You can drive a Chevy or you can drive a Mercedes, and we are a Mercedes.” Mazor hosted law lunches anyone might attend, for which he often brought in speakers. He was demanding, he pushed students hard, but usually in a fun, friendly fashion. Like others at Hampshire, Mazor was a student of the culture wars, an outspoken participant in the “PC” debate. A large man with strong forearms and a thick white beard—at least later in his career—Mazor looked a bit like Santa Claus (although in basketball scrimmages, he was apparently famous for his “rough” un-Santa-like play,
which earned him the nickname “Lester the molester”). He’d served as a law clerk to Warren E. Burger and taught law at University of Utah before taking a job at Hampshire at its inception, as Henry R. Luce Professor of Law. His courses included hyperspecialized offerings such as “From Potsdam to Perestroika: East Central Europe Since 1945,” as well as smaller independent study seminars, one with the acronym D.W.E.M, a.k.a. “Dead White European Male Seminar.”

Elliott’s thesis was no doubt right up Mazor’s alley. Its title was “Toward a Poststructuralist–Feminist Critique of Law,” and it zeroed in on procedural changes in the way rape cases got tried in the courts. These were the Foucauldian, Derrida days of the death of the author, according to which all interpretations were equal, every reading a “misreading,” and the self a “paper I.” Students dutifully memorized the relativistic, deconstructionist mantra, “All meaning is context-bound and context is boundless.” In Wittgensteinian fashion people spoke of the end of philosophy, or of its transformation into analyses of language games. Declarations of sincere, unironic belief came for a time to seem passé, the new goal a dismantling into a virtual meaninglessness that was celebrated as some sort of release from dogma and received wisdom. At any rate, this is the intellectual context in which Elliott would have been doing his reading, thinking, and writing. Rape and legal theory was an altogether different matter. Anti-sex feminism was in marginal vogue, leading to antipornography law creation of the sort articulated by Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin. “Pornography is the theory,” said Robin Morgan, “and rape is the practice.” In 1983, four years before Elliott started at Hampshire, Dworkin and MacKinnon drafted ordinances sidestepping obscenity law and labeling pornography a violation of women’s
civil
rights, by virtue of which pornographers might be sued for harm in civil courts. Versions of these ordinances were passed in select cities—for instance, Bellingham, Washington, in 1988—although later found to violate freedom of speech protections.

In all, adding up to an examination of undecidability and indecipherability (on the poststructuralist side) and sexist, male-dominated, patriarchal hegemony (on the feminist side), it was more than enough to keep a smart twenty-year-old’s head spinning. That it did and more to Elliott, as some of his later comments made plain. But he got it done, and he went
“straight through” the school, leaving with debt to repay. Retrospectively, he felt he hadn’t proved much. The most he showed himself and others, he said, was that he “could do something I didn’t really want to do for four years.” His studies he did find interesting, but they “had no practical application in the world.” He had a BA in philosophy and legal theory; what this allowed him to look forward to were jobs in bakeries or in the spreading of gravel. It wasn’t about the academics anyway. To him they were just that—academic. As ever, it was the music that mattered. And Hampshire supplied that, most notably in the person of Neil Gust. Now Gust and Elliott were about to do something remarkable, at first together, then later intractably separately.