Elliott Smith and the Big Nothing (15 page)

Smith discovers a cassette containing Hank Williams Jr.'s "All My Rowdy Friends Have Settled Down,"
Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1997. Credit: Bill Santen

Smith with Glenn Kotche and Amity, 1997. Credit: Bill Santen

Amity dyes Smith's hair in a hotel room on tour, 1997. Credit: Bill Santen

Smith plays Boise, 1997. Credit: Bill Santen

Smith rests, on tour with Santen, 1997. Credit: Bill Santen

Smith plays craps with Janet Weiss on tour in Washington, DC. Credit: Ramona Clifton

The tack piano at McConnell's house with Elliott Smith's bandage taped to the side (Smith sustained the injury repairing the piano), 2004. Credit: David McConnell

The basement on the hill, David McConnell's studio, 2004. Credit: David McConnell

Elliott Smith's favored guitar during the sessions at McConnell's studio and a couch he slept on, 2004. Credit: David McConnell

Dion and Smith had already had a short moment of bonding backstage. Whether Dion remembered it is anyone’s guess, but Smith did. “After the Oscars,” says Swanson, “we talked about Celine Dion, and I was like, ‘So how was that?’ He was like, ‘Oh, she’s so nice.’ She came down to his dressing room or something, and said, ‘Hey, good luck, this is probably going to be hard for you, it sounds like you haven’t dealt with a large crowd like this, good luck.’ And after this we’d constantly be running into people coming up and talking to him, people who didn’t know him, and saying ‘Oh, how’s it goin’, saw you on the Oscars, so, how was that?’ And [they’d] make some derogatory Celine Dion comment, and every time they’d do it, I’d be like ‘gasp,’ and this look of rage in his eyes would come up and he’d be like, ‘You know, she’s a really nice person.’ And they’d always recoil and be like, ‘Oh, no, I’m sure she’s really nice.’ It was this whole idea that someone would judge someone they didn’t know, even though of course he could judge people he didn’t know. I thought that was a cute thing about him; he was defending Celine Dion all the time.”

Celebrities didn’t become a major presence in Smith’s life, despite the fortunes awaiting the stars of
Good Will Hunting
. Smith was still nervous around major musicians. “There was a show he played in New York and Grandaddy was opening, and David Bowie showed up,” Clifton remembers. “It got to be sort of ridiculous. He didn’t actually come into the dressing room, and he may have been there because he was really interested in Grandaddy too, but I remember people coming in and saying, ‘Elliott, you gotta come out,’ and going out into the hallway. Bowie’s a little man, but he’s got that voice, and Elliott was just really modest, pleased but a little overwhelmed maybe. If he had the time to go into a corner booth and just talk, he was interested. He would be concerned about how is your life going, and your work. The most time I ever spent with him was during those first four and five years . . . during the last four years he didn’t have the time anymore, but then it was more insulated. There were always people around him who would always protect
him a little bit, and I would always be like, ‘He knows me, I’ve been around for a long time, I’m not just somebody trying to get a piece of him.’ But they didn’t know. It was harder to spend any kind of time.”

Speaking to
Under the Radar
years later, Smith would say, “After
Either/Or
, the Oscar stuff happened and that kind of derailed my train. Although it took a lot for it to fully derail.” So what happened?

The lead-up to the Oscars may have constricted the recording schedule of
XO
, but there was a sudden, major upswing in popularity that was evident when Smith was on tour. “He played downstairs at the Middle East, and suddenly the place was really packed and everybody was yelling for ‘Miss Misery,’” remembers Ramona Clifton. “He was like, ‘Oh okay,’ but the crowd sort of expanded. Within the indie scene people loved him, but then he had gathered enough people who were watching the Oscars. Suddenly he was doing all these interviews and his name was everywhere. I think he was really happy—I think he wanted people to hear his stuff, but not necessarily in that way. The
Good Will Hunting
thing happened really fast—it wasn’t his album, it was a soundtrack, and it wasn’t his own baby. He tried as best as he could to deal with the attention; he always looked a little bit lost with it but he never complained about it. I think he had a hard time sometimes dealing with the bigger crowds, more college kids, more people yelling.”

“Miss Misery,” the song that defined Smith in the eyes of Oscars viewers and headline writers, wasn’t a fair representation of Smith’s work if you thought it was all about depression, but it was if you considered it to be all about ambivalence. The chorus hook, “Do you miss me, Miss Misery, in the way that you say that you do?” puts in sharp relief both the narrator’s emotional dependency on the woman of the title and the knowledge that she’s probably not healthy for him. In her absence, the narrator looks to alcohol as a substitute: “I’ll make it through the day/with some help from Johnny Walker Red” are the first lines. Later on he
talks about how succumbing to “oblivion” is “easy to do,” a statement that applies equally well to love and narcotics.