Elliott Smith and the Big Nothing (17 page)

Smith didn’t drink to the point where it sabotaged his success. It was just a retreat from the exacting convictions he lived with, a way of forcing himself to be easier on himself. “I think his convictions were about being essentially a good person, about being fair—he was super moral,” says Day. “He was so sensitive about is everyone else okay?’ These are the things that preoccupied his mind, and if he was before maybe able to take care of those things, there was an overcompensation, mentally anyway, of taking care of others, protecting others, making sure everything’s fair and no one gets hurt, and I think a lot of that comes from a place where you have been in a situation and you have witnessed abuse. But then there’s this narcissistic thing where you feel responsible for it all. It’s like a twisted psychology where he felt at this place and time that he was responsible for other people’s pain. And that’s the last thing in the world he would want, and I think it got worse and worse and worse, and he felt he was losing his agency and his ability. He just had this dialogue going on in his head nonstop, and the only way to stop it was to drink more and drink more and drink more and drink more. [Sometimes] he’d be drinking all day and then [there was] the show, and then he’d be drinking. It’s amazing that he lived as long as he did, based on his body filtering so much beer. And he was so tiny. Not an inch to pinch.

“I think he had huge secrets that he would never reveal entirely, and [they’d] come out in little spurts in his music and show there was something there. I think he was probably so frightened that he was going to have to confront those issues, which were stuff that happened earlier. So he didn’t see it as, ‘Stop drinking.’ I think he saw it as, ‘If I stop drinking I’m going to fall apart’ and
confront the interior world where he had these deep, dark, black secrets.”

To judge from his songs and discussions with friends, those secrets might have been his frustratingly vague memories of his childhood abuse and his inability to come to a resolution about how to relate to his family because of their vagueness.
XO
seems to arrive at its emotional climax three quarters of the way through “Waltz No. 2 (XO),” on the “XO, mom” line. It means both “I love you” and “goodbye.” And that’s the way the song sounds, like a love song and a farewell. The refrain of the coda, maybe Smith’s most famous line, is “I’m never going to know you now/but I’m going to love you anyhow.” It’s the way everybody feels during the termination of a short-lived relationship, but it also fits with Smith’s apparent confusion over how to look back on his Texas upbringing—the love is there, and so is the confusion.

Smith wrote a lot of the
XO
lyrics at a bar in Park Slope called O’Connor’s, where he befriended a bartender named Spike Priggen. The man’s name does not misrepresent the establishment. Priggen, whose real first name is Michael, no longer works at O’Connors. The owner of the bar, Pat O’Connor, said to be the third generation of his family to run the establishment, remembers Smith sitting in the second booth from the door, kitty-corner against the wall, and looking out at the room. Smith didn’t say much, but O’Connor would look up occasionally and find the young man looking right at him.

At night these days, O’Connor’s is the kind of Brooklyn bar that attracts young people, struggling in picturesque fashion, from Dumba and Williamsburg. But in the afternoon it’s still the O’Connor’s where Smith could be found in the late ’90s, one customer told me. He described it as a collection of regulars back then. From the outside, O’Connor’s is inconspicuous. The paint has faded on the sign in front, and the storefront has a couple small windows with neon beer signs. Inside, the bar is spacious, with a pool table in the back and a long bar that runs the length of the room. There’s a Budweiser sign featuring a map of Ireland beneath the moose head, and pictures from a fishing trip Pat O’-Connor took with a regular customer are framed on the wall above the booths, near an “Irish Need Not Apply” sign. When I was there on a Wednesday afternoon in early 2004, a few months after Smith’s death, a regular came in with a baby in a stroller and bought everyone in the house a round. He’d won O’Connor’s annual chili contest, in which regulars eat each other’s chili recipes. The maker of the winning recipe gets a free drink and everybody gets a free glass of Chilean wine. On this particular Wednesday, there was a chart on the wall documenting the votes accorded each chili entry. A jukebox full of garage rock and punk was the only sign of the bar’s nocturnal transformation into a place young people hang out. In the afternoon, Pat plays Frank Sinatra and Betty Carter.

Priggen, another bartender explains, was the new bartender during Smith’s stay in New York, and he led the way in O’Connor’s transformation from old-school neighborhood bar to an institution that serves local regulars by day and a younger crowd at night. He introduced the jukebox full of garage rock and provoked the first trickle of youthful customers. Smith preferred the old O’Connor’s.

Pierre Kraitsowitz, who with his wife Shauna Slevin was Smith’s roommate in Brooklyn, comes here often. He has stubble and a shaved head—the hair on his dome is almost as short as the hair on his chin—and he’s part of a group of men who work in Red Hook on the sets for off-Broadway shows. One of his more prominent memories is of Smith composing orchestral arrangements. This was a new thing for Smith. Even on the more elaborately arranged songs Smith had done in Portland—“Miss Misery” and “Cupid’s Trick”—there are no string sections. It’s the Brooklyn-era Smith who wrote the plunging violin parts that punctuate the end of
XO.

For the strings on “Waltz No. 2 (XO),” Smith came up with a rough idea of the notes he wanted each instrument to play, but he consulted with a pro for help in finalizing the arrangements. “He
had a rough idea, piano-wise,” of where the notes fell, says Schnapf. “He would show the guy and then they would just go back and forth with one another. He could read but we were doing a lot of stuff and it was a lot of work.”

If moving toward strings signaled a new direction for Smith—more money to make albums, two new producers, no time constraints from being in Heatmiser—it was part and parcel of a return to being the multi-instrumentalist he’d been in his junior-high “band.” Piano showed up more and more on his songs. On
Either/ Or
, there are keyboards on three tracks (“Pictures of Me,” “Punch and Judy,” and “Angeles”). On
XO
, keyboards play a central role in about three-quarters of the songs.

XO
was recorded chiefly at Sunset Sound, on Sunset Boulevard. There, Studio One was the incubator for Janis Joplin’s
Pearl
,
The Doors
, and
The Who By Numbers
. Studio Two was used in The Rolling Stones’
Exile on Main Street
, as well as
Led Zeppelin II
and
Led Zeppelin IV
, and Studio Four was used for Beck’s
Odelay
(the last track of which, “Ramshackle,” was produced by Schnapf and Rothrock), Tom Petty’s
Full Moon Fever
, and numerous Prince albums. Smith didn’t sit down and decide to make a louder, more elaborately orchestrated album than he had made before, but there was an understanding that that was the direction his music was taking, says Schnapf.

“The first three records kept developing more and more. And
Either/Or
could have gone more in that direction but he wasn’t ready yet. And so then
Either/Or
is sort of the bridge between the first two records and
XO
as far as the development in arrangements. It just seemed like that’s how we’re going. I think it was unspoken.
Either/Or
could have been done that way, and we didn’t go there. And now he’s ready, so we do it.”

In stark contrast to the recording of Smith’s last album, which would take place a few years later, much of
XO
was recorded with military efficiency. “‘Waltz No. 2’ is the first song we recorded,” says Schnapf. “And we started off with nothing in the morning, and we left with that at night. Maybe it was a day and
a half. I remember saying to Elliott, ‘Wow, we just won.’ We kept plugging away and it kept blossoming. I mean, we started with drums and we kept going until it was that, and then weeks later we added strings. That’s how a bunch of [the album] was.”

Beyond the standard array of melody instruments in the singer-songwriter’s palette, Smith was growing up to be a one-man band. Of all the encomiums to Smith’s musicianship, few of them mention the gift that belies the folkie label he always shunned: He provided, among other things, his own rhythm.

“I am a huge fan of Elliott’s drumming,” e-mails Glenn Kotche, the most recent drummer for Wilco, the Chicago-based avant-country-rock band that attained its greatest heights of renown with its 2001 album
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
. “His drumming was perfect on [his] songs. This makes sense since he wrote them and knew exactly what to do to support the songs and add to it instead of distracting from it. He played drums like a musician, putting the song first, and not like a drummer. His big-picture approach to drumming was a big lesson to me that affected the way I view drumming. He was extremely talented in so many ways that I think his drumming always got overlooked.”

The attention Smith received in the wake of his Oscar nomination meant working on
XO
around press interviews, but according to Schnapf neither time nor money restraints posed a serious problem for Smith and his frugal collaborators. “We weren’t worried, but we were not being wasteful in any way. We were just trying to make a good record—we were still conservative, not blowing money left and right. We weren’t using the most expensive rooms. We were eating burritos for lunch and beer for dinner.” In its professionalism, the album was different from anything Smith had done before; his approach was exactly what any label would want from a stripped-down indie artist making his first major-label album: speed, economy, a willingness to polish and expand his sound and catchy melodies. Even though
XO
didn’t come anywhere close to going gold, its creation was so
smooth and the critical response so positive that it’s not surprising DreamWorks was happy with its relationship with Smith.

Smith was able to conceive of songs almost entirely in the studio. “‘Tomorrow Tomorrow’—that one kind of came out nowhere,” says Schnapf. “He had that guitar part. The way I remember it I gave him the high-strung guitar—you take a twelve-string guitar”—the jangly specialty guitar favored by The Byrds’ Roger McGuinn, in which each string found on a normal guitar is augmented by a thinner string next to it, tuned an octave above it—“and you only put on the high [thin] strings. And you tune it the same way and all the notes are really close together now. So that whole thing is on the high-strung.” Much of the rest was created through a trial-and-error process of coming up with vocal harmonies around the melody. Schnapf, Rothrock, and Smith would “send out the probe, as we would say,” says Schnapf. “Explore.”

“‘Independence Day’ we had recorded after the record was already finished, because DreamWorks needed b-sides, so we did that song and ‘Happiness.’ And those weren’t b-sides—we said, ‘Independence Day’ is going on the record, and ‘Happiness’ we’re saving for the next record.” Their wishes were granted—“Independence Day” did go on
XO
, and “Happiness” became the first single on
Figure 8
. “They were both written as we finished the record, I guess in April, and early in June that happened. And we were only in the studio for three days, and we did three songs, ‘Independence Day,’ ‘Happiness,’ and an instrumental that was a b-side.”

“Happiness” was distinguished in part by a drum loop Rothrock came up with—a muffled sound that was akin to a floor tom mic’d and run through a distortion pedal. It was supposed to be a click track, Schnapf remembers, a sound for Smith to keep time by while recording other instruments. But it sounded good so they kept it in the whole song.

“I Didn’t Understand” underwent a swift transformation into an a capella number because of a casual remark Schnapf made
that Smith took seriously. “I had been listening to a lot of Beach Boys at the time, so I knew he could do it. I was like, ‘What if we did this?’ ‘Okay.’ ‘Jesus Christ!’” First they recorded one version that was more “liturgical,” in Schnapf’s phrase, and then they decided to redo it. Smith built up the harmonies mostly by himself. It turned out to be one of the boldest displays of Smith’s formidable abilities as a singer, something he’s rarely remembered for. Smith could croon; with the help of modern recording technology, he could be a one-man boy band.

Of course, most Elliott Smith songs are harder to sing well than they initially appear. While it’s not fair to evaluate performers at a one-off tribute revue with the same critical standards you apply to a performer who’s had time to master his material over a long time, the New York City Elliott Smith tribute concert in early 2004 was an educational experience. It showed, above all else, how difficult an Elliott Smith song is to perform.

Everyone recognizes that Smith’s guitar work was intricate, but there’s a particular range of expression in Smith’s vocals that must be maintained if the music is to carry anything like the emotional weight it bears in Smith’s own performances. In the course of the evening at the tribute—which drew so many fans that portions of the audience had to huddle together near the stage like commuters on the morning train, prompting the club to ask all customers who hadn’t come expressly for the tribute to leave—it became clear that an Elliott Smith song should not, generally speaking, be delivered like a Jeff Buckley song or even a Nirvana song. Smith once said that the reason he was a pop musician rather than a folk singer was because his songs didn’t have specific morals or messages. But another important respect in which Smith veers closer to ’60s London than ’60s Boston Commons is his deadpan delivery. While it’s not without accents and trembling, Smith’s singing is almost never an interpretation of the song, but the only correct execution of it. He sounds like he’s singing not from his stomach but from his head, and he almost never allows himself the full force of his vocal chords. Were it not
for the occasional exception that proves the rule, it would be easy to believe that Smith simply couldn’t sing very loud, or high. But in a live performance of The Beatles’ “I’m So Tired,” at the moment where the narrator hits an emotional rock bottom and the melody hits its highest note—“I wonder should I call you, but I
know
what you would do”—Smith opened the flood gates. The note is rich and high and displays the kind of capacity other singers would be tempted to showcase at every opportunity. But a night of listening to other singers try Smith’s songs shows why he kept it on a leash.