Elliott Smith and the Big Nothing (12 page)

One moment in the aftermath of his own death that Smith would have liked was Beck’s performance of “Ballad of Big Nothing” at an Elliott Smith memorial concert at the Henry Fonda Theater in Los Angeles. Beck’s singing is louder than the voice Smith typically used in solo acoustic performances, and the chorus takes on the feeling of an anthem. “You can do what you want to, whatever you want to” sounds like it could be the rallying cry for hedonist teenagers throwing off the shackles of a restrictive
upbringing. But the guitar chords undermine any such notion immediately, and the lyrics to the verse, “up all night and down every day,” illustrate the problems inherent in the belief that you’re free to live your life as you see fit without considering others’ feelings. It’s an anti-anthem, or an ironic anthem, but it’s not incompatible with a morally rigorous mode of self-evaluation.

Smith had a novelist’s tendency to find the ambiguities in anything. It’s for that reason that he could say with fairness that the sad singer-songwriter description didn’t do him justice. There’s nothing wrong with being a sad singer-songwriter, but Smith’s gift as a lyricist was to capture the details of a predicament, and sadness was one color in his palette. “I’m a color reporter,” he sang in “Bled White,” and that’s exactly right. There are many songwriters who can write sad songs—for instance, the ones who beat him at the Oscars with “My Heart Will Go On.” There aren’t many who can describe the specifics of a condition without contorting the music to fit ungainly lines. Smith was great at doing just that.

Smith moved to New York City on May 27, 1997. Even acquaintances of his assume to this day that he lived in the East Village, because he liked to go to Max Fish and Luna Lounge, two bars that face each other on Ludlow Street in that part of town. It’s easy to imagine him taking his place among the thousands of young people slouching in wool caps with tattoos protruding from under rolled-up sweatshirt sleeves. But he moved to Jersey City, which, despite its name and Garden State location, is essentially a New York suburb across the Hudson River from Wall Street.

Dorien Garry was on the cusp of turning twenty-one when Smith told her he was planning on moving to town. She knew Smith had broken up with Joanna Bolme, and that he’d decided to ditch Portland. Because Heatmiser had broken up at the same
time, he was reeling from two blows. Dorien asked him if he had a place to stay and he said he didn’t know what he was going to do, so she offered him a couch to crash on and joked that he should try to make it in time for her upcoming birthday. Soon after, she got a message on her machine: “My flight gets in at six that day. I’ll see you at the party.”

The party was at Max Fish, and Garry stood up to announce the new guest: “This is Elliott! He just moved here!” Overnight, Smith had a new base. It may not have quite been home, but it was more of a safe haven to him than just about anywhere he’d stay from then until the last year of his life.

In those days, Garry and her two roommates were always on tour with bands or putting up musicians who needed a place to crash, so it was no trouble putting up Smith. It was Smith who had trouble with the arrangement, as comfortable as he was in the Jersey City house. “About three weeks or maybe a month into it he started to speak about feeling guilty about it and in our way, which he totally wasn’t. Nobody really had a problem with it and everybody was just like, ‘Do what you got to do.’ He was also starting to make some money for the first time in his life and he was kind of like, ‘I should just get my own place.’” But New York City became more and more expensive as the dot-com boom got under way and Smith wasn’t sure what he was willing to spend or where he wanted to live. After all, he was a touring musician; he wasn’t home very often. Around the middle of the summer of 1997, his friends set up a new arrangement. “Ellen Stewart was his booking agent. She had friends with an apartment in Brooklyn—Shauna and Pierre—so she hooked them up with Elliott, and he sort of begrudgingly moved his stuff in there,” Garry recalls.

Smith lived in two different apartments with the couple, but was never fully comfortable in either. “He loved Shauna and Pierre but there was something wrong with every apartment . . . that he lived in with them. . . . in one of them, he was convinced that the floorboards were going to fall through and he was going to wind up like Tom Hanks in
The Money Pit
. . . . The other
one was in a very violent neighborhood at the time and he just couldn’t deal with it and even though it’s not hip and cool to live in New Jersey, my neighborhood was very quiet and safe and he had friends there, too, and there were a whole bunch of us who lived in the neighborhood at the time and there was a bar there he really liked to go to and it was more that there was always those times when it was like. ‘I’ll just go to your house and hang out and go home in the morning,’” Garry says.

New York City was a good place for Smith in other ways. “I think just like anything else with him he was trying to find the place to go that was just like okay. I think he liked the anonymity, that people left him alone here,” says Swanson. “He never expressed that, but I think it was a nice combination here where people definitely respected him and knew who he was, and when he played a show here a lot of people would come. His biggest fan base was definitely in New York. When we all left Hampshire we all had this kind of ‘meet ya in New York’ sort of thing. I don’t remember if Elliott was specifically part of that, but I think that whole Hampshire crew, everyone thought eventually if we could do well with what we’re doing we’d end up in New York. He came for the things people always come here for, and I think he was excited to live in a place that was just big. I think he loved it because he could lose himself here pretty easily.”

But Smith’s life in New York City never went exactly as planned. If things had worked out differently he might have shared a loft with Swanson, which might have been a more comforting place to live. “He was in Portland and I was in San Francisco. We were both kind of nervous about moving here and we thought we’d get an apartment together,” says Swanson. “He was in better shape than I was financially, so he could help with that and we thought that was a good situation. But then I went to Sweden, he moved here, and he got an apartment with Shauna and Pierre. They moved from that apartment to a bigger apartment. I moved in [to Pierre’s old apartment on Bergen Street] with the idea that we would live there a little while and then find another
apartment separately. So basically it turned out the idea was we’d all find a place that was big enough or he and I would find a place separately and we kind of nominally looked at a couple of loft spaces. But then he got nominated for the Academy Award and had to go, so we never really lived together.”

Smith’s new home was in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Park Slope. “The Slope,” as it is locally known, is famous for being a hardcore bastion of Northeastern upper-middle-class liberalism, but Smith lived on its scrappier fringes. The spine of the Slope is Seventh Avenue, which runs a few blocks from the green blanket that gives the area its name. There, the organic cup of coffee has held court for decades. But Smith lived off Fifth Avenue, near the point where the neighborhood faded into the more proletarian downtown Brooklyn and Fort Greene. Now that area has joined the rest of the neighborhood in giving itself over to track lighting, but in the late ’90s it was still mostly a neighborhood of blue-collar businesses.

The Atlantic Center Mall looms nearby, its giant “A” logo glowing red, white, and blue, and the phallic clock tower that dominates the downtown Brooklyn landscape looms behind that. But the streets off of Fifth Avenue lend themselves to nostalgia: near-identical row houses trailing off ad infinitum, fringed by ample trees.

Among the trains that run to and from Manhattan and Park Slope are the F train and the yellow line (the N and the R). Smith refers to both in “Bled White,” the song in his oeuvre that deals most directly with his life in New York City. In the first lines of the song, there’s a description of feeling out of place: “I’m a color reporter/but this city’s been bled white.”

While Smith lived in New York he seemed to Swanson to exhibit the same qualities that had set him apart in the first place. The spontaneity, the fondness for going to extremes, the generosity, the sense of fun, were all still intact. “We were just walking down the street, and [a man] just asked us for money or said he needed help. Later on I realized he didn’t look like someone who
was homeless or look like a vagrant at all. I had been in New York for a while and in San Francisco for a long time before that so admittedly I was just kind of like, ‘whatever,’ trying to get to this gay bar I used to make Elliott go to. And it was a time when I was trying to be protective of Elliott’s time, he was already doing well for himself and it was this nice little thing that we got to go out alone in Brooklyn. And this guy kind of asked us for help. It was a very strange circumstance as I remember. Elliott kind of talked to him for a second and then couldn’t really figure out what was going on but something was going on. Then we got a drink and about halfway or three-quarters or some way into the drink, the guy came into the bar and then walked back out, and I remember Elliott was like, ‘I gotta deal with this guy.’ Then he got up and was like, ‘Are you okay?’ And it was kind of amazing: He got him into this place where the guy could focus and be like, ‘I’m not okay. I don’t know where I am.’ And I think this guy obviously had some sort of problem. I don’t know if it was a schizophrenic problem and he was off medication or something, but realizing that this was a guy dressed in normal Park Slope clothes, probably forty years old, glasses, haircut, [Elliott] just zeroed in that there was something wrong. And then spent the next, probably, whatever it took, a half-hour, to call pay phones and get this guy to a hospital. Not that that’s so remarkable or anything, but I wasn’t on my way to do it.

“Sometimes it was frustrating to be his friend. This sounds terrible, but sometimes he would treat strangers with more respect than people he was sitting with or something; he had the utmost respect for people. If someone came up and said, ‘I’m a fan of yours, I just really want to talk to you,’ before they could get their first sentence out, he would immediately be like, ‘What’s your name? Where are you from? What do you do?’ And would immediately go into ‘Oh, really? You’re from Brooklyn itself? Wow, that’s so funny. I’ve never really met someone from Brooklyn. Did your grandparents come here?’ [He’d] immediately try to switch the conversation to them, which was frustrating as a person who
at that point barely got any time alone with him. You were used to getting time with him, and then all of a sudden he’s encouraging conversation with complete strangers.”

Another night, Smith practiced a form of urban camping. “I remember one night we wound up sleeping in Central Park. Me, him, and my friend Wendy, we went to this bar, to Luna Lounge, and then we went to the after-hours place, and we were kind of like, ‘What should we do?’ And we couldn’t get into the place, or, I don’t remember, we decided on the way to the place—I decided I was really missing California and kind of New Hampshire in a way, and I decided we should go to Central Park. It would be like camping, only in Central Park. And they were both like, ‘Yeah! Yeah!’ So then we went and got all these beers and got cigarettes and we went to Central Park and spent a long time trying to figure out the best place to camp. And we settled on this one place and basically passed out. And woke up the next day, so hung over, we had picked a really bad place in the middle of a bunch of paths, and he woke up in a really bad mood, I remember, but that was kind of him. He was really always game for that.”

For all the good times he had there, New York was by Smith’s own account the place he became a bad alcoholic, and moving there did constitute a move away from where his friends and family were concentrated. Being left alone meant more opportunity for rumination and also more room for erratic behavior. During this time he and Bolme got back together and broke up again at least once. Given the degree of attachment Smith showed calling Bolme on tour, this was likely a destabilizing series of events. And there were disturbing symptoms of Smith’s doldrums.

“He often walked around subway tunnels when he first was here, which is not good,” says Swanson. I remember a specific conversation where we both talked about New York, because we both liked it in the middle of the night, that this place was really great in the middle of the night, all the energy was still here but the people were mostly gone, but there were still people around. I remember times if he was working on music or something like
that, he would just leave for a couple hours and just listen to what he’d been working on. I think it was part of—I think a lot of what he liked about here is that he could walk around by himself in the middle of the night listening to his Walkman and be part of something and not be a freak. A lot of what Elliott was worried about was being a freak. . . . When he went to buy his car, he was like, ‘They’re not going to let me test-drive it, they’re going to think I’m a freak. I can’t go in there, they’re going to think I’m a freak. I can’t go to nice restaurants, they’re going to think I’m a freak.’ I think part of it was that here [in New York] he never felt like a freak.”