Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith (31 page)

From Virgin, Heatmiser cashed a decent advance to help with the making of the next record. A decision was made to buy equipment and rent a separate space in which to record, a smallish home set back from the street on 19th and SE Ankeny that Gonson initially had scoped out. Sound insulation was pressed up, rooms were blocked out. In all “it seemed at the time to be a pretty elaborate setup for a temporary studio,” Jason Mitchell says. It was here, in this nondescript little two-story house, with ample
parking in front, that Heatmiser produced
Mic City Sons
(“Mic” pronounced “Mike”). This would also turn out to be the location for the long-postponed demise of the band.

The situation was “fucked up” to begin with, according to Gonson, who was now watching things unfold from afar. The songs Elliott made with Uppinghouse had been culled for 1995’s self-titled album,
Elliott Smith
, released by Olympia’s Kill Rock Stars. The cover, a picture put together by Gonson, featured two blobby figures falling between bluish buildings, a fitting image, it seems, for a record Elliott later called his darkest by far. Despite his long relationship with Cavity Search, the label Swofford and Cooper had so lovingly constructed, the move to Kill Rock Stars was surprisingly amiable and smooth. As Swofford charitably explained, “It was totally natural that Elliott went to Kill Rock Stars. They had a lot more resources. It was like, ‘Elliott, we get it.’ Besides, were we in a position to put out his second, third album? That’s arguable. We were just fine. It made sense and there were no hard feelings.” In terms of their origins, Cavity Search and Kill Rock Stars popped out of the same chaotic murk of tenacity combined with happenstance. Slim Moon was the latter’s founder. He’d moved to Olympia in 1986 as a high schooler, then quickly discovered KUPS, University of Puget Sound’s radio station featuring songs by the Butthole Surfers and other underground punk outfits. At the time punk was new to Moon. But he started looking for discs, eventually buying a Beat Happening seven-inch put out by K Records. Moon was a spoken-word poet who read over the radio, but he formed bands too—one called Eights and Aces, another (with Donna Dresch) called Nisqually Delta Podunk Nightmare, who shared a bill with Cobain’s early Skid Row. Moon’s first notion for the Kill Rock Stars label was admirably outrageous—he would devote himself to recording only spoken word, releasing poetry on seven-inch vinyl. In fact he did this several times, carving out a very unusual niche. The label’s first release he called “Wordcore: Vol. 1”; it included one of his works, along with “Rockstar,” a poem by Kathleen Hanna. She would soon form the band Bikini Kill. Hanna’s seven-minute recitation concludes with a woman on her knees “wiping up a boyfriend’s vomit after telling him she was raped by her brother”: “You sit down to write a song about it,” she says. “Fuckin’ rock star.”
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Soon such outré poetry gave way to music. With the
help of K Records’s Calvin Johnson, Moon pieced together a compilation from the International Pop Underground Convention, with songs by the Melvins, Nirvana, and Bikini Kill, among others.

With his punk bona fides obvious, his lyricism—to Cooper and Swofford—Dylanesque, a sort of poetry all its own (with a no-look assist from Garrick Duckler), Elliott easily fit Moon’s mind-set. But when the self-titled record appeared, Uppinghouse was stunned. It came as a total surprise, a sort of
Roman Candle
redux. From her perspective Elliott had only been laying down tracks; as far as she knew, it was just more note-taking of the sort Gonson had described, an attempt to catch works in progress on the fly. A record had never been discussed or proposed. But plan or no plan, when the record materialized—with “Needle in the Hay,” “Christian Brothers,” “Southern Belle,” “The White Lady Loves You More”—it was instantly heralded. Critics saw in it a blueprint for all Elliott’s later success; it was “his first major artistic statement,” deeper, stronger, more complex and more fully realized than
Roman Candle
had managed to be. “Tragically beautiful,” they called it. A “masterpiece of minimal folk-pop.” These accolades Elliott stiff-armed per usual. “I don’t know what to say about that,” he replied. “I kind of don’t think about attention a whole lot. I don’t really deal with it. It exists more in other people’s minds. It’s surprising, but that’s kind of the extent of my feelings about it. Surprising and temporary.”
²⁹
He was in the same difficult corner. Here he sat, a promising auteur, on the verge of bigger and better things, but at the same time he’d just inked an important contract with Virgin to make a record with a band he no longer wanted to be a part of.

It didn’t make any sense, but for the time being Elliott soldiered on and did what he could to abide by conflicting commitments. He took the path of least resistance, in other words. For the solo work he enlisted the services of manager Margaret Mittleman who, from Long Island originally, got her start in the business working at a record store and record distributor. Her first big break occurred in 1992, when she stumbled upon Beck playing solo at the Sunset Junction street fair in Silver Lake. With her was her husband, Rob Schnapf, a partner in Bong Load Records. “We were walking around,” she says, “and we saw Beck playing acoustic guitar and singing under this little tent, right on the street. I just got drawn in; he had a unique sound and look, and his lyrics were hilarious. After the show, I
talked to him for a while, and gave him my card.”
³⁰
Later the two had a lengthy phone conversation that led to a publishing deal. The big draw was the brilliantly effete nerd rap “Loser,” a surreal loop of poststructural self-mockery suggesting “I’m a loser baby, so why don’t you kill me?” The tune was released by Bong Load as a twelve-inch single, and it took off, leading to Geffen’s
Mellow Gold
album. Mittleman would later sign Built to Spill, the Posies, Lutefisk, Mary Lou Lord (who released several EPs on Kill Rock Stars), The Folk Implosion featuring Lou Barlow, and Neutral Milk Hotel. Her reputation revolved around discovering cutting-edge bands in early stages. She found them, then she helped them develop. It was Slim Moon who first turned Mittleman on to Elliott, suggesting she check him out at L.A.’s Jabberjaw, where he was slated to play as part of a poetry/spoken-word tour. “It felt like the hottest night ever,” Mittleman recalls. The cafe’s air-conditioning was out, and Elliott performed on a patio in the back. “I just couldn’t believe it,” says Mittleman. “
Roman Candle
was already out, and he—and I just was blown away.”
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She bought one of his CDs. The two met the next day. “I just offered my services, basically. He didn’t want to do a publishing deal. That was the big thing. He wasn’t interested. So I just said, you know, that I didn’t care about that. [So] we just developed this relationship,” one that slowly became “more and more official.”

For Elliott this new development meant going out on the road—a train tour from city to city, followed by a car tour—in support of
Roman Candle
and
Elliott Smith
. Mittleman says “nobody showed up, just the few diehards … That was very discouraging and disappointing for him, but it was the first time he really did something on his own.” He split his time working on
Mic City Sons
and touring on his own behalf, the solo bookings competing with efforts to keep Heatmiser viable. It didn’t seem particularly doable, but the minor momentum was there to be seized on. Besides, “there’s a part of me,” Elliott said, “that wants to go as far as I fucking can with [the solo work].” And although for a while he felt as if it were essential to never get anywhere in a commercial sense in order to feel like what he was doing was worth anything—the whole, “if you make it, you must be a mediocrity” sentiment—he bought in. He got over his self-defeating misgivings. For one tour he went out with headliner Mary Lou Lord, who’d just signed an impressive publishing deal. She’d told Elliott he was the next Kurt Cobain, a
compliment with terrifying implications; she also “unsuccessfully pursued a romance with him.”
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For another, a one-month jaunt through Georgia, Texas, and California, then back to Portland, Pete Krebs backed him up, pursuing his own solo work, just like Elliott was, after the demise of Hazel (In 1997, Elliott would arrange and produce Krebs’s solo album
Western Electric
.) Mittleman had put the two together with a “big black guy” who drove, but was also apparently there to keep Elliott on track, Krebs believed. The money was negligible. Looking out for his own best interests, Krebs said he needed to make a hundred dollars per show. Elliott wasn’t so sure, but in the end they came to an agreement, and as Krebs recalled, “it was more than what Elliott was making,” a fact that took him by surprise. In the south somewhere near Athens a young girl approached Elliott and Krebs in a bar. She’d been at the show and wanted to say how much she liked it. They struck up a conversation during which she confided she was on the brink of joining the Army. “We spent hours,” Krebs says, “trying to talk her out of it. Going over all the possible scenarios.” For much of the time Elliott was wrapped up in fear about the prospect of entering Texas, as if simply being within the boundaries of the state was grounds for panic. He was freaked out. Texas meant bad times, and no matter how hard he tried, whether he burned his haunter up in songs like “Roman Candle” or drank him out of his system, the bogeyman flailed, a ghost on the prowl, if not physically present then projected out.

At last Heatmiser’s
Mic City Sons
dropped improbably in mid-October 1996, a full year and a half after Elliott’s self-titled record. It was nothing like
Dead Air
. Nor was it anything like
Cop and Speeder
. It represented, by leaps and bounds, the best the band could do, or at least the best the band had done to date. Full-blooded, melodic, catchy, hook-infused, it could have pointed in a new direction, one that might very well have added up to something big. But in fact it was, as everyone knew, a last gasp. There was not going to be anything else. As new bassist Sam Coomes told
Magnet Magazine
, “It was a miracle that record made it out into the world. Everyone should just be happy it got that far.”
³³
The fact of its tortuous emergence was not lost on Virgin, who had in effect signed a band fated to go nowhere. They knew about the deepening conflicts—everyone did—so in a move
reflecting the likely absence of any future for the group, they brought the CD out through a subsidiary, Caroline Records. They even passed on a vinyl version. That did eventually appear, but with a Cavity Search imprint. One of the few people not a fan of
Mic City
was Denny Swofford. To him
Dead Air
was the zenith—an obviously contrary judgment. “I’d rather see Heatmiser live any day during the
Dead Air
period,” he laughed, “than Elliott alone singing while sitting on a chair.”
Mic City
, he added, “is an Elliott Smith album that happened to have a band called Heatmiser playing on it.” An acid sentiment, to be sure, but one with a hefty portion of truth. For really the first time, and more glaringly than ever, the Elliott songs leap out sideways. They could just as easily have been included on his self-titled solo album, or saved for future records. Immediately recognizable as paradigmatic Elliott tunes—for instance, the spectacular “Plainclothes Man”—when they appear in the song list their incongruity is plain. They diminish everything alongside them. They advertise Elliott’s difference, his gift. He did not and could not fit anymore.

Reviews took note of these disparities, sometimes explicitly underscoring the quality difference between the Smith and Gust songs in a way that probably came as no surprise to Neil but still must have stung. The record was described as “decidedly more pop,” Elliott’s lead song “Get Lucky”—which Tony Lash dismissed for its clichéd Foreigner bombast—as “swaggering.”
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The verdict seemed to be that these were refreshingly diverse and invigorating tracks and that the record ironically “marked Elliott Smith’s maturation into the role of the band’s visionary” at the moment when there soon would be no band. As Allmusic.com retrospectively put it, “it’s unfortunate that this indie-rock supergroup decided to split up just when they had reached such a creative peak.” But the reality was, it was Elliott’s peak, and Neil was not peaking along with him.

The softest, most affecting, and by far most Elliott-esque track, strangely “hidden” and not listed at all on the record, is “Half Right,” with its mournfully transporting acoustic intro joined by Lash’s brushed drumming. It’s a song Elliott would keep playing solo, clearly a better fit with the tunes he’d make solo than with Heatmiser. Characteristically ambient on the surface—who is this “you” who shouldn’t be “doctoring” herself?—it’s another song bent on unpacking the Gonson breakup. When he pictures her new boyfriend, he doesn’t match up. He imagines someone more like him, someone who “looks like what I look like.” In alternate versions he asks instead “What’s he look like? What’s he look like?” In still other alternate versions, those performed live in 1994 at Umbra Penumbra in Portland, he indulges in various bitter predictions: “He’s just half-ass, and he won’t last.” One particular line seems to come out of nowhere. Elliott twice sings nonsensically, “Don’t you say hi.” The true reference is a real event. At the time Gonson cooked at Dot’s, a place everyone gathered across from the Clinton Street Theater with its regular midnight showings of the
Rocky Horror Picture Show
. By this time the relationship was over. The kitchen looked out through a window up front, so that when people passed by on the sidewalk, on their way down the street, Gonson could see them and vice versa. One day out of the corner of her eye she caught Elliott strolling past. Hurt that he didn’t at least wave or stop in for a short hello, she rushed out after him, catching him at the intersection, where she blurted out, “Don’t you say hi!?” That Elliott wedged this fragment of obvious autobiography into the song makes it a private communication, and not an especially friendly one. He goes on to picture Gonson’s dream lover bursting her at the seams. When he calls her up on the phone, he sings, “it’s just like being alone.”