Elliott Smith and the Big Nothing (27 page)

Sean Worrell, the head of Organart, an English indie label that purported to be working with Happy Ending on their release, later told
The Guardian
that Smith’s involvement in the record was creating problems because of his tendency to mix and remix until he was perfectly satisfied, and that a member of the band had stolen the tape reels from Smith. After Smith’s death, he said, the record was shelved. He added that the band’s Web site had to be taken down because of death threats directed at Chiba.

Two weeks before October 21, Sam Coomes and Janet Weiss toured through Los Angeles as Quasi, accompanied by Marc Swanson. Swanson got Smith’s number from Ashley Welch, but never found the time to call him. He never managed to make contact with Smith again.

Garry visited Smith and Chiba three times in LA between the Northsix show and Smith’s death on October 21, and found a Smith looking toward the future—and making room for domesticity. Smith wanted to start a family and Chiba did too, Garry recalls. “They definitely wanted to have children. It was something they both talked to me about. In my first year of knowing him, we had this really funny conversation about having kids, because I took care of kids off and on, and he was like, ‘If I have a kid it’ll be the most important thing ever, and I want to have a kid but it’ll be the thing that makes me want to kick my ass into shape more than anything else, ever.’ And it was like, ‘Well, yeah, you don’t have a choice, because when you have a kid it’s yours forever,’ and I remember we both laughed and were like, ‘We can’t have kids.’ He wanted to have kids and that was something they were both trying to do. I think that was what a lot of the cleaning up and trying to be healthy was about and I know the last time he spoke to me about just quitting smoking it was kind of like, ‘I’d rather have a baby knowing that I wasn’t smoking while I was having a baby.’ That was a big one.”

In business matters, Smith was returning to the ethic of early ’90ss indie rock. He wanted a label like Dischord or Kill Rock Stars or K to release his record. “He was getting really interested in the mentality and punk and indie and DIY ethics of ten years ago,” says Garry. “He wanted to be on a label he could call up and be like, ‘hey,’ instead of, ‘I’ll have my manager call this person in this department and see what’s going on in my life.’ He was becoming really super-obsessed with Built to Spill and Fugazi again, and I know he admired Ian [MacKaye, of Fugazi] and Doug [Martsch, of Built to Spill] like crazy. It was like, ‘Wow, this is just so ten years ago. But fucking go for it man.’ Those guys know how to do it and they’re honest and they’re sincere and they’re successful in their own hearts. He wanted that thing that guys like that had, which is, ‘I’m just going to do this my way and I’m going to do it for me.’” It was a return to the puritanical Smith. The independent-minded, anti-commercial, mildly ascetic code of behavior that Martsch and MacKaye represented was the kind of thing Smith needed—the strict feminist philosophy he’d adopted at Hampshire was also an ethical code. His flight into fame and real money had been accompanied by desperate and self-destructive behavior. The change of attitude didn’t save Smith, but he spent his last days in some degree of contentment.

According to the coroner’s report, this is what happened on the day of Smith’s death: In response to a 911 call placed by Chiba at 12:18 p.m. on October 21, 2003, an ambulance came and found Smith, still alive, lying on the floor with two stab wounds in the chest from a kitchen knife. They took him to the hospital at the University of Southern California, a short drive to the south, near downtown LA, where he died an hour later, despite a successful emergency surgery in which some of the perforations in his heart were mended. The investigation that followed ruled the death an apparent suicide. But the autopsy report left room for the possibility of homicide for three reasons: the absence of hesitation wounds on Smith’s body (stabbing suicides typically hurt themselves non-fatally before they deliver the serious wounds, out of uncertainty); the fact that Smith was stabbed through his clothing, also out of keeping with the typical details of a suicide by stabbing; and what the report describes as Chiba’s initial refusal to speak to the police. The report mentions no evidence of breaking and entering or participation of a third party. It describes Chiba’s testimony that she was in the bathroom at the time of the stabbing and emerged only after hearing a scream to find Smith walking with a knife protruding from his chest. Speaking to the
Los Angeles Times
after Smith’s death, Chiba said that during the days leading up to October 21 Smith’s general happiness was undercut by “traumatic memories from childhood” as well as “biochemical imbalances . . . due to the gradual discontinuation of psychotropic medications.” Her story matches Garry’s recollection of Smith’s comments about cleaning himself of all dependencies, great and small. Garry remembers Smith and Chiba getting into health food and taking pains to be clean, in the ordinary sense of the word, by taking baths. It’s sad to think of the simplicity of the life Smith envisioned for himself after
From a Basement on the Hill
: raising kids somewhere in the New York area, just another liberal creative professional in his thirties, coming back from tour to push a stroller alongside the organic-baby-food shelf at Whole Foods.

There are other feasible reasons Smith might have killed himself besides traumatic memories, if his death was indeed a suicide. “I think he had such conviction about quality and music and art, and I feel he gave up what his gift was,” speculates E. V. Day. “And I think he emotionally couldn’t face that he was losing it—he couldn’t deal with it—and I think he just decided to drown himself. And so the thing is, unfortunately, I always expected he would overdose on something and be kind of passive like that. So the fact that he stabbed himself—it’s like he got the final word. He got to say, ‘No, I mean it. I am choosing to do this. I really mean it. I really feel this much. I am so broken-hearted in this life, I am so broken hearted.’ It’s like the artist who’s just too sensitive. And that sensitivity can be heroic the way that vulnerability can be strength. He decided to go out like that to prove it. He wore his heart on his sleeve. He’s so sensitive no one understands.”

Robin Peringer, who befriended Smith in the summer of ‘94 and started to recognize his greatness watching him compose “Some Song” on tour, became Smith’s drummer at shows during the last year of his life. Now he’s Chiba’s roomate. He remembers hanging out with Smith either one or two days before he died, talking on his porch. Smith talked about marrying Chiba and having children, and expressed a desire to move somewhere less expensive than Los Angeles, where he could buy a nice house. Peringer reminded him this would be expensive. “Why does everything have to be about money?” Smith lamented—they weren’t playing as many west coast shows as they would have liked, Peringer says, because club owners were concerned about Smith’s history with performances. But Smith, while concerned about what he might have done to his brain with drugs, was still upbeat about releasing a double album’s worth of songs, says Peringer, possibly putting out a single album, touring for six months, and then putting out another. He had enough material, Peringer estimates. A couple songs Peringer remembers Smith recording in this last phase of his life were called “Suicide Machine” and “Abused”—those titles aren’t listed on the album coming out this fall.

There was a memorial service in Portland, and a tribute concert featuring Beck, Bright Eyes, and Beth Orton at the Henry Fonda Theater in Los Angeles.

Smith’s friends have continued to hang out together since his death. Garry had Chiba over for Thanksgiving in Jersey City, continuing a tradition she’d started with Smith seven years before of celebrating the holiday with friends instead of going home to their families. The first Thanksgiving dinner they’d shared, Smith had invited his half-sister Ashley to eat with them and Garry had been touched at how affectionate an older brother he’d been. She upheld the tradition through the years at her place.

“He and Jennifer had been talking about coming out. I’d been in LA about a month before he died and it was like, ‘Okay, see you at Thanksgiving.’” Chiba and some of Smith’s New York friends came over and Garry found it made her feel better.

There’s something deeply Elliott Smith about Thanksgiving with friends. If we assume Smith committed suicide, then the story of Smith’s life reveals someone who needed camaraderie, and who lost his way, never to recover his old self, when the artificial warmth of narcotics replaced real friendship. If we assume Smith was murdered, the story, oddly, changes only a little—it would be the story of someone who lost his old friends, picked up bad habits and fell in with the wrong company. Either way, Smith ultimately looks like a brilliant man in dire need of guidance. He needed guidance to pursue his calling, he needed guidance to let the public see his best work, and he needed guidance to survive. Unsure of how to come to terms with a childhood that remained painful and mysterious to him, he needed friends even more than most people do.

*
Smith’s bass player on tour.

Even toward the very end, Smith held on to his nervousness about snatching attention from anyone. “His last idea, which is sad,” says Swanson, came in 2003: Smith suggested that at a show of Swanson’s in 2003, he could “play music from behind a curtain in the gallery, so that no one would know that he was [Elliott Smith]. It was kind of this nonsensical attempt to be like, ‘I want to play your show but I don’t want to take away from’. . . It’s really sweet when I think about it now, but at the time I was like, ‘You’re going to play behind a curtain?’ and he was like, ‘Yeah, I think that’s a good idea.’”

That reminds me so much of the guy I saw on stage in Portland in 1999 that it breaks my heart. He played as if he
was
behind a curtain, and each member of the audience seemed to indulge the illusion that she was the only soul behind it with him. The picture of Smith behind a curtain also reminds me of the Smith that recorded
Roman Candle
in a Portland basement, alone with his art and with no public to embrace him and tell him what a genius he was.

The Smith I want most to memorialize is the one who played Pete Krebs a tape he’d made in his bedroom on a scaffold in a Portland construction site. It was a Smith who could do heavy physical labor and endure work he hated and finish a collection of astonishing songs with one piece of recording equipment, then play them live before a tiny crowd. Or the Smith that cleared out a portion of the cluttered basement below JJ Gonson’s house on Southeast Taylor Street to work over his songs without any intention of releasing them to the public.

By accident, that Smith was eroded, by the coddling and isolation that become a financial necessity in the music business and then, suddenly, by serious drug habits. But while it lasted, that version of Smith epitomized a work ethic, a code not unlike a religion, a relentless self-criticism, a need to get something done, that I perceived in some of the friends of his I interviewed. It would be stupid and elitist to expect every musician to think this way, but it’s a good thing a few of them do. I believe some of that discipline might have come back to Smith toward the end, as his studio finally came together and albums started to slide out of it.

Dear friends of Smith’s who might have been his staunchest defenders are absent from this book because they don’t generally talk to the press about him and they wouldn’t make an exception for me. This isn’t surprising, because while as a college kid I moped around Portland talking about how influential they were, I never met Portlanders Neil Gust, Joanna Bolme, Janet Weiss, and Sam Coomes. They’re the collaborators who knew Smith most intimately for the longest amount of time, and I hope someday they talk to someone in depth about Smith’s life. The same applies to Smith’s family. If one of those four musicians or any member of Smith’s clan decides to talk one day, I bet it’ll change the way people look at his story. That would be a palliative to much of the posthumous press about Smith, in which reporters were obliged to use quotes from people who barely knew him and people who wouldn’t give their names.

Because I can’t talk to Smith’s family, I don’t know how they handled the curatorial task of figuring out what music should wind up on
From a Basement on the Hill
and tying up whatever loose ends Smith might have left. This book should find its way into the hands of its first readers at the same time as Smith’s posthumous album, released by the indie label ANTI-Records, which has put out CDs by Nick Cave and Tom Waits. At the end of this project, the words that ring loudest in my ears belong to David McConnell, who admired Smith’s father, Gary, but worried about the task that confronted Smith’s loved ones: “Gary and I, I think, saw eye to eye about what should be released. I think what I really appreciate about Gary is that he is—he has enough insight to understand that what Elliott did when he was on drugs was very artistic and very much—it is really strong, artistic music. I think partially because Gary is familiar with the music of the ’60s, and he’s also just a very smart guy.” The risk, McConnnell felt, was that other family members working on the record might want Smith “to be represented in the best light.” He compares the task to Van Gogh’s family trying to finish a painting: “‘Oh, let’s make this sky look a little more real. That flower’s a little too big, let’s clean that flower up a little,’ you know what I mean?” It is a remarkable situation: Smith wrote his share of family songs, and then the people he wrote about were forced to try and be objective about his work.

The track list for the record includes both songs Smith worked on with McConnell and at least one song, “Memory Lane,” that Andrew Morgan remembers Smith developing in the second half of 2002, as well as one that sounds like the kind of soundscape Swanson and McConnell talked about with Smith. As of my writing this, the list goes “Coast to Coast,” “Let’s Get Lost,” “Pretty (Ugly Before),” “Don’t Go Down,” “Strung Out Again,” “Fond Farewell,” “King’s Crossing,” “Ostriches and Chirping,” “Twilight,” “A Passing Feeling,” “Last Hour,” “Shooting Star,” “Memory Lane,” “Little One,” “A Distorted Reality is Now a Necessity to be Free.” The song McConnell recalls Smith saying he wanted to lead the album at the time they were working together, “Shooting Star,” comes near the end.

I wouldn’t fault Smith’s family for any decisions they make in finishing the album. Smith recorded different versions of many songs, and it would be a weird, necessarily speculative task trying to reconstruct his intentions. There’s no way the album that’s released this fall, mixed by Rob Schnapf and Joanna Bolme, could ever be exactly the one Smith intended to produce. That said, I hope
From a Basement on the Hill
was mixed and cut in the spirit in which Smith approached
Roman Candle
in the basement in Portland. I want listening to the last Elliott Smith album to be as voyeuristic an experience as listening to the first. I want to feel that shock of recognition that comes with listening to a really good Elliott Smith song for the first time.