Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith (20 page)

Sitting in with the Spudboys, Elliott on right. (Photograph by JJ Gonson.)

He joined up with Red Vines in fall of 1989, playing jangly rock, a kind of country punk. They gigged at Blue Gallery and Satyricon, Teddy Miller
on drums, Rob McNaulty of Saint’s Pilgrims singing. Rehearsals were held in a warehouse around NW Davis Street. You could not smoke—the place was a fire trap—so everyone chewed tobacco. Largely because of his drinking and the depression it softened, Peterson, as he says, “shit the nest in that band.” “I made it stop being fun. I just had this overweening anxiety for the bass to be loud enough.” There was ongoing internal confusion, Peterson feels, looking back. In his view, playing in a band equaled being in a family. The prospect of playing for more than one band at a time, the sort of thing lots of players managed, was unthinkable. “I felt like every band I was in had to crystallize my identity totally. I felt like ‘This is the place I’ll be safe and where I’ll be valued.’ ” A brief flirtation with Sprinkler followed—Peterson says he suggested the name—but he wound up in M99, a band Elliott knew and saw, as did everyone. They were a punk version of a bar band. The idea, then, for Brandt, was to “play every weekend and drink a lot.” Heidi Hellbender sang, with James Mahone from Gresham on drums—“he could make rock tunes feel like swing.” M99 brought out a seven-inch through Tim/Kerr records. “Seizure” was side A, “Black Eye” side B. Peterson played only on “Black Eye,” for a reason he was growing sadly accustomed to. There was a blow-out in Vancouver. Brandt made the innocent mistake of talking to an interviewer; guitarist Rob Landoll objected, and there was an altercation, with pushing and shoving. Peterson is six foot two, an imposingly fit man. When he lost it, people paid attention; they also feared getting beat up. So M99 was over for Brandt. (They later brought out two albums,
Too Cool for Satan
and
Medicine
.)

The day Brandt met Elliott he told him, bluntly and in clear attunement to his history of conflict: “You don’t want me in your band. It just gets fucked up. Everyone hates me and I get kicked out.” But Elliott answered, “That won’t happen this time.” And with that simple rejoinder, the “star search” was over. Elliott and Neil would sing and write songs, Lash would drum, and Brandt would handle the bass.

The name? Heatmiser, yet another single-word slap in the face, this one with a twist. Fictional demon Heat Miser had appeared in Rankin/Bass’s stop-motion animated Christmas special
The Year Without a Santa Claus
(1974). He’s described as a vaguely ogre-like being, a blustery, quicktempered hothead; his head’s exactly that—hot—orange/red hair aflame,
with a bulbous red nose in the center of his fat, angry face. He eats fire; he “never wants to know a day that’s under sixty degrees”; everything he touches melts in his clutches. “He’s Mr. Green Christmas, he’s Mr. Sun,” goes the song. No friend of Santa’s, no friend of snow, no friend of cozy yuletide spirit. But a decent band name all the same, one part meaningful, one part random.

Songwriting was never an issue, Elliott’s fecundity already semi-legendary. Like Chicago’s Urge Overkill, Heatmiser was a two-pronged singer/songwriter set up. Neil and Elliott lived together in southwest, and “they’d sit around a lot and play guitar together and arrange together.” The basic ideas were individual inventions, “but stylistically they’d blend together.”
¹⁰
Early on, rehearsal space was an issue. But Brandt knew Jason Mitchell, whom he introduced to Elliott. Mitchell was living with Moira Doogan, Trailer Queen’s drummer. Before they took it over, the house—at 210 NE Morris—was rented by Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna and various members of Calamity Jane (directly across the street there were occasional gang-related shootings, eventually prompting Mitchell to move). Heatmiser first practiced and rehearsed in this home’s basement, meeting once or twice per week. Slowly Mitchell and Elliott got close. They “palled around,” went to shows, dive bars like the Space Room (“in orbit since 1959”), Club 21 on Sandy Boulevard, My Father’s Place, and Patty’s Retreat on SW Stark, a “mix of bad drag queens, rock ‘n’ roll kids, transients.” Mitchell’s tacit, unofficial job was “shoulder to cry on.” “I was sort of the band’s psychiatrist,” he says. They didn’t always go to one another with their problems; they went, instead, to him. Mitchell and Gust also bonded—“Neil was actually my closest friend during most of these years.” The two eventually wound up living together. Neil, says Mitchell, was “hilarious, fun, very driven, talented.”

It was, at first, a democratic process. Neil and Elliott brought songs to the band, and ideas got floated, arrangements tweaked. “It was very collaborative,” Peterson says. “More or less built that way. One guy came with a tune, partly finished or not at all, guitar parts working together in complex ways, but not busy. It was like, ‘This is what I’m working on, what do you think?’ ” Somehow, astonishingly to Peterson, “the tunes came together fast.” Most were 4/4. Peterson wrote a little too. One of his tunes, “Glamourine,”
a “bass line with lyrics,” was recorded but never put out. Elliott, Brandt says, “didn’t want to sing lyrics other people had written.” “Just a Little Prick” was another Peterson song, on which his E-string was tuned to D. That song eventually appeared, as did Elliott’s “Mightier Than You,” on Heatmiser’s first cassette—in a sense, their first album—which they titled simply
The Music of Heatmiser
. “Elliott hated “Mightier Than You,” Pete Krebs recalls. “It was catchy and bouncy and all, but he thought the lyrics were really dumb.”

The Brandt compositions were anomalies. Really the band was Elliott’s and Neil’s; they were the dominant voices. They churned out the raw material—the subjects, the tone, the group aesthetic. And as always, from Texas, to Lincoln, seemingly from infancy, Elliott wrote “a ton of songs,” Gust recalled. “He was so prolific, effortless. His process was advancing much quicker than any songwriter around him.”
¹¹
As Mitchell saw it, Elliott’s moods had “the most profound impact on the band by far.” We “followed his lead,” Gust adds. “He was a great craftsman. I was learning how to write songs from him.” And it was rarely easy, Neil’s process a lot less effortless. According to Mitchell, “he was working really hard to keep up, to contribute 50 percent of the songwriting, to maintain an equilibrium in the band.” There was no feeling of tension, nor resentment, nor competition—since the Texas days, no one felt equipped to compete with Elliott musically. It was more about balance and equity. Plus from its inception the band was a joint effort, with Lash and Peterson, although very gifted musically and trained at Berklee and Oberlin, playing essentially subsidiary roles. Peterson, by nature, was pricklier about it. He didn’t automatically defer. “They always had ideas for bass lines,” he says, “but I wasn’t going to listen necessarily. I had my own ideas too.” Still, even to Peterson, it was clear that Elliott’s “writing process was exploding. He was phenomenally creative.”

The Morris Street practices ended when Elliott and Neil found a larger house on SE 16th, just south of Division, where they lived with two female roommates and met as a band in the basement. At this critical juncture a new force entered the equation, a small, beneficent tornado from the East Coast named JJ Gonson. In no time, Gonson would transform the future of Heatmiser, and more important, Elliott’s own life and music. Just
as Pete Krebs and Elliott shared aspects of life history that served to strengthen their bond, that wordlessly drew them closer together, so did Elliott and JJ. The day after Gonson graduated from high school, she found herself locked up. “I was a junkie, a garbage head,” she says, heroin the one drug she managed somehow to avoid, although it always loomed tantalizingly. She lived with prostitutes—“I was on the edge but I did not whore”—and sold acid to skinheads, a batch of which accidentally ran through the washer. Skinheads were looking for her; they weren’t happy about the buy. Her mother flew her to Eden Prairie, Minnesota, for a seven-week treatment program. On the plane the first thing Gonson did was order a drink; her mother canceled it. “I got clean,” she says. “I was actually eighteen so I could have legally signed myself out but I knew I was in trouble and I couldn’t stop. I believed I had a disease. Addiction came easily.” In the lockup she learned to blow smoke rings. She also got turned on to the Replacements and punk outfits like Big Black from Chicago.

Inpatient time over, Gonson took a degree from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, that turned out to be useless. Her plan was to teach darkroom photography in either elementary or high school classrooms, but a recent measure annihilated art in public education. “They took their red marker and basically crossed it out,” she recalls. But a better fate came calling. Gonson had latched on emotionally and personally to a number of Sub Pop bands whom she photographed for fanzines like
Rip
,
Cream
,
Spin
,
XXX
, and
Suburban Noise
. She even shot Nirvana when they played shows for “crowds” of 15 or so at MIT frat parties. Band members took to sleeping on her floor when they came through town; she cooked their meals, made sure they were taken care of. Her life was spent in clubs, shooting away, a kind of punk Weegee. Inevitably, at one point she joined a band herself, called Feeding Frenzy. Still, Gonson felt at loose ends, unsure where the ideal future lay. “I went walkabout a little bit,” she says. “I ended up driving across the country,” with no special destination in mind. Back in Boston she’d met quite a few Northwest bands, and in one of life’s random good luck/bad luck throwdowns her car conveniently gave out in Portland, where she stayed with the Hellcows and landed a job at La Patisserie, the same place Jason Mitchell worked as a waiter. Mitchell quickly became her closest friend—as he seemed to do with everyone he came in contact
with—and he introduced Gonson to Neil and Elliott “almost immediately.” Heatmiser was not playing live yet; they were honing their craft, recording sporadically in the fashion Elliott and Tony Lash had by now perfected.

Even before heading west Gonson had done some band managing, mostly by necessity. She’d dated Sluggo, one of the members of Hullabaloo, and because the band was “clueless” when it came to bookings and other necessary evils such as putting together press releases, Gonson assumed that role for them, even going out on tour and working as a merch girl (selling T-shirts, etc.). “I’ve always been somebody who decides they want to do something then learns how,” says Gonson. (There had even been, earlier, a stint as a self-taught electrician for a circus.) By trial and error, then, she learned band management, gradually accumulating a notebook “full of names of pretty much all the important promoters in the country.” Firsthand, she also got intimately acquainted with venues. She knew which were solid, and which sucked.

So when Jason Mitchell took Gonson to see Heatmiser, at what was one of their virginal performances at the X-Ray between 2nd and 3rd and Burnside downtown (it’s no longer there), she was no average spectator. She’d been around the block more than once. She knew music, she knew bands, and she knew what it meant to sell and promote. “Heatmiser wasn’t like anything else,” Gonson recalls thinking. “It was so much better. Just mesmerizing, phenomenal music. So organic. They were just channeling these songs. I know when I hear good music. I realized it when I first heard Elliott’s voice.” In a shot by Gonson of a slightly later X-Ray show, from May 1992, Elliott wears a Red Sox baseball cap, hoop earrings in both ears, and a cartoon T-shirt. Peterson stands to his right in a Madonna T-shirt and thick, black-rimmed “geek” glasses, cigarette eternally listing from his lips, as slender, blond Neil Gust sings. Behind them, seemingly tossed against brick walls, hang assorted velvet paintings of dogs and celebrities (e.g., Hulk Hogan) positioned at haphazard angles. Swofford’s response to the music was just like JJ’s. For him the sound was “raw, aggressive, and crushing.” Later, when he came to know the band members personally, he was struck by something else just as unusual: “Heatmiser had manners. They understood a little about tact. They could be adult men. They were real people, not dumb kids. Properly reared. A smart band, smart individuals.”