Elliott Smith and the Big Nothing (6 page)

The
Frog Book
, the freshman photo book for Smith’s class at Hampshire, provides ample evidence of the contrast between Smith and Gust at the time. Smith’s hair is a wilder, shaggier version of the coif sported by Sean Penn’s Jeff Spicoli character in
Fast Times at Ridgemont High
. Dyed a lighter color but with the brown roots heavily grown out, Smith’s bangs obscure his eyes almost completely; he looks like an amiable sheep dog. Gust, by contrast, looks like he could play the head of the poetry club on
Beverly Hills, 90210
. His long hair is swept back from his forehead into a graceful, leonine mane; his face is perfectly sculpted and his expression is gentle and proud. If anyone in the’87 Hampshire College
Frog Book
looks ready to become the next Michael Stipe, it’s him.

After freshman year, Smith left the dorms and started to live in houses off-campus with friends. “We had three people in my apartment and three people in theirs, three men and three women,” says Germann, whose apartment was in a house on North Street in Northampton, a block from the house Smith and Gust lived in on Cherry Street. “And it ended up being very split: Neil and Mandy and I were all gay; Amy, Mary Jane, and Elliott were straight. So there was this sort of awareness. And it was as we were coming out. I was out, and Mandy was slowly coming out, and Neil was slowly coming out. It was very PC, very Northampton, very Hampshire College. It was this awareness of who you are as a gay person or a straight person and a man or a woman. And that was a lot of what we talked about—his [Elliott’s] identity as a straight white man. And he sort of had an issue with that, with falling into that category of straight white man, and not wanting to be part of that category. I think that’s sort of why he studied what he studied. Elliott talking about being a fireman—he wanted to go beyond being a straight white guy, he wanted to help people, he wanted to save people, to transcend that label.”

But he still dated women. Smith and Wight broke up soon after their arrival at Hampshire, but Smith briefly dated Mandy Daramin, Germann recalls, before briefly getting back together with Wight early in their senior year. Most of his social life revolved around the Mod 51 group, but Wight made an appearance on their radar when she showed up as Elliott’s girlfriend at their Thanksgiving dinner in 1990—the last Thanksgiving of college.

Germann’s memory matches Smith’s own assessment of his refusal or inability to detach himself emotionally from the fashionable theories of the time. “It was such a time of identity politics. It was so prevalent and what we were studying was just so about that. I think that he sort of went back to how he was raised, and thought about the men in his life, and then sort of thought about where did he follow in their footsteps and where did he go off, and took what he was learning and reacted and very seriously internalized and thought about it. We’d talk about how he needed to go beyond that identity and where could he go from there. It’s not like, ‘[If] you were a gay white man that’d be great.’ It’s not like you want to go through life thinking in those terms. You just want to trek on through. Mandy as well talked about that, and Amy, our other roommate, would talk about the fact that they don’t wake up every day thinking about how they’re women—you don’t have to think about it. But Elliott thought about it; he thought about everything. Everything was a very internal struggle, in terms of that.”

Smith’s collegiate brow-furrowing might seem like an irrelevant set piece in the story, except that one of Smith’s distinctions as a lyricist, in his early days, was his Puritanism. And Smith knew the theory he studied in college was a kind of Puritanism, or as he later put it in interviews, somehow “right-wing.” The characters in Elliott Smith songs are constantly doing harm to other people not out of malice but out of selfishness and licentiousness. The outlook Smith adopted at Hampshire, in which the path of righteousness was narrowed to a tiny range of options and career
choices, was an extreme he soon shied away from. But it was also the opposite of an attitude he inveighs against over and over again on his albums, most explicitly in “Ballad of the Big Nothing”: “You can do what you want to, whatever you want to” is the refrain of that song, and it’s meant as an ironic retort to those very sentiments.

Smith said in a 2003 interview that he didn’t feel especially comfortable hanging out with other straight men while in college: “I was around twenty or nineteen and a lot of straight guys were . . . you know, just having kinds of conversations that I couldn’t relate to. You know, just like very high school.”

Germann’s breakdown of Smith’s circle of friends at Hampshire backs up that recollection to some extent. After the Mod 51 clique left the mods, Smith was one of the few straight guys in his social group, along with Constantine Roumel, who Smith later hung out with in New York City. His name seems a likely inspiration for the Constantina character who lives in a place that sounds like the downtown Manhattan neighborhood of Alphabet City (then a decrepit place where people bought heroin) in the song “Alphabet Town” off Smith’s self-titled album.

The traces of depression in Smith’s life at this point, as far as Germann noticed, went only a shade beyond the standard emotional moodiness common to college students. “He had stomach problems. And there would be an entire day when he would be in bed, and not come out. He would have some moments when he was melancholy and everybody would be hanging out and he’d just decide, ‘All right, I’m done with this,’ and go read or play guitar or something like that. He would spend a lot of time in his room in the summer I lived with him, and there’d be times he’d just go and play music by himself for hours and then he’d come out and be totally fine and the life of the party.”

E. V. Day, the sculptor, who had a class with Smith at Hampshire but did not become a close friend until ten years later, had only the vaguest impressions of Smith as someone who might have depressive tendencies. “It wasn’t just like, ‘This is a depressed person who’s not cool to hang around with.’ It wasn’t that, it was a certain ‘zing’ you get from somebody.”

Smith was not, despite his eventual acquisition of admiring female fans through his music, a magnet for Hampshire College women, says Germann. “No, he had the long hair hanging in his face. He seemed very quiet. Once you got to know him he was really very charming and funny, but I think that for the most part he was a long-haired guy that hung out with this group of people he lived with. Neil at that time was the charmer. [He had the] chiseled face. He was the one people would look at, particularly if they were performing.”

Smith’s brand of humor wasn’t generally loud or broad, but it showed itself more than just occasionally. Germann recalls a running joke wherein Smith attempted to spend an entire day speaking in clichés. He lasted about an hour. Even with Smith’s capacity for humor, Day found him intimidating. “He had a small physique with a very tough-looking face, but he just sort of exuded this sort of unease that—he reminded me of Pig Pen. You know, he had the aura cloud of mud and dirt around him—it’s like that it was almost comical, but he wasn’t messier than anyone else per se.” It was more like a thunder cloud than the Peanuts character’s grime cloud, she recalls. She was afraid of the vibes she got from him. “He wasn’t that clean but he wasn’t dirty, he was grungy—but he really had it, unlike anyone else, and he was sort of petite, and exuded this thing, and he was very soft-spoken, but it was almost like there was a sort of a thunder cloud over him all the time. I was sort of intimidated and afraid of him, I was afraid to talk to him or be alone with him. It wasn’t fear for my life or anything, it was just a kind of energy.”

Much of Smith’s public persona was already in place: the slightly foreboding presence matched with a gentle disposition, humor, and self-deprecation. He was already the Elliott Smith his fans would recognize.

During the later years at Hampshire, Smith lived mostly in a house on Cherry Street, several blocks from downtown Northampton. The neighborhood looks as if it could be in one of the subtly bohemian areas in Cambridge or Jamaica Plain: In old wooden houses, imperfectly maintained, groups of young people and families live side by side, sometimes under the same roof. The Bridge Street graveyard sits a stone’s throw away. This was the home base for Smith and his friends.

Besides Gust, the closest friend Smith met at Hampshire was Marc Swanson, though the two didn’t become close until after graduation.

Swanson grew up in Merrimack, New Hampshire, a small town gradually being enveloped by suburbia, the son of a highschool teacher. Born within a week of each other, Swanson and Smith spent their childhoods in similar circumstances, living in areas where middle-class suburbia ran headlong into working-class rural culture, although background wasn’t at the root of their bond. As Swanson puts it, “We didn’t really talk about that, [but] it seemed like all our close friends were pretty much from the same socioeconomic situation. It seemed Neil and Joanna [Bolme, Smith’s future girlfriend] and me, all the friends from Hampshire, I think we all grew up in pretty quasi-suburban places and were probably for all intents and purposes lower middle class, but not where we grew up. I had free lunches at school because we had no money, but we had a house. We didn’t live in a trailer and we didn’t live in a really shitty house and we didn’t live in an apartment, and I never considered myself poor.”

Swanson grew up in an environment that was fiercely libertarian. New Hampshire has a “hands off” approach to taxes and to zoning and hunting regulations. If you want to start a farm there that mostly sells used cars, Swanson explained to me, New Hampshire doesn’t mind. Today he’s an artist in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, making sculptures and installations that are often reminiscent of the customs of his home state. He had a gallery show in 2003 titled “Live Free or Die,” and he’s perhaps best known for his sequined antlers. When I met him at his apartment, there was an employee named Devotion (Swanson called him “D”) sitting on his living-room floor applying silvery material to what looked like a plastic horse’s head.
Vice
magazine called Swanson “simultaneously Ted Nugent and Liberace.”

After dropping out of the Art Institute of Boston (he finished art school later), Swanson hung out in Boston with some of the tougher elements of the punk rock crowd, but found himself gravitating toward Hampshire College, a two-hour drive to the west. He was gay and artistic, and in ’80s Boston he didn’t find as much overlap between punks and artists and gays as he would have liked. “In the age I grew up in, in the punk rock world being an artist meant you were a pretentious academic. And you were in with the man. I was embarrassed to tell people when I was in Boston that I wanted to be an artist. I basically hung out there with skinheads and whatever, whatever was going on. The art-school kids, they were artfags, they had this whole other thing. They were in this institution to become institutionalized.” (It’s clear from the way he says this that his perspective has shifted since then.) But at Hampshire he discovered kids who liked punk rock and art and critical theory and weren’t afraid to talk to about it. First he befriended Gust. “I didn’t really know Elliott that well at Hampshire; he was really introverted and quiet there. And I think honestly he kind of made me nervous. He was part of our group of people but it was a pretty big group of people. He was very serious, and it was alternative school and everyone kind of had their own thing, but it seemed like Elliott had more things to be dealing with. There we didn’t really talk about a whole lot of stuff, like I probably made him nervous and he made me nervous. Me and Neil bonded cause we were both gay guys so that was our thing.”

At a party at Swanson’s house, one of the last the group that came together at Hampshire would celebrate before dispersing to faraway cities, Gust finally came out to Smith. “It was this big, sort of momentous thing,” Swanson remembers. “Neil and Elliott were gone forever. All of us were there—Mandy, Carl, all hanging out. They disappeared for a while and came back teary-eyed.” Gust and Smith would be friends, on and off, for longer than Smith dated any of his girlfriends.

The friendships that would stay with Smith for a decade and a half had been put into place. His career started after college, in Portland, where he would meet two long-term girlfriends, JJ Gonson and Joanna Bolme, and acquire the advisers that are the mainstays of a professional musician’s existence. But he discovered his milieu, his corner of bohemia, at Hampshire. It was a group of liberal, to some extent college-educated, young people, who by and large liked punk rock, grew up in modest homes, and didn’t shy away from academic ways of thinking. As bands, relationships, living situations, and problems emerged and fell by the wayside, this group would remain a constant in Smith’s life.

W
HEN YOU STEP off a plane in Portland during the winter, you feel as if your nose has been pressed into a wet towel. This is the signature smell of the city, a mustiness attributed to continuous rainfall and an outlying formation of paper mills. Between September and May, there is usually either a whisper of perspiration in the air or a blinding downpour. Portlanders don’t carry umbrellas; they pack raincoats. If you were young and in a band in Portland in the 1990s, you were likely wearing high-water jeans and a hoodie beneath your raincoat, topping the ensemble with a mesh trucker hat. (This look was discovered by New York fashion designers around seven years after its appearance in Portland.)

The Lutz was to musical Portland in the mid-’90s what Odeon was to literary Manhattan in the 1980s, and the discrepancies between the two are instructive. The Lutz runs on cheap beer, and while it might be acceptable to drink hard liquor there, it’s not the kind of place you order a glass of wine. It has a television that’s usually tuned to
The Simpsons,
minimal natural light, neon beer signs in the windows, and blood-red pleather booths. Unlike other Portland hangouts, like Montage and Satyricon, there’s nothing in the décor to betray the eccentricity of its clientele to the outside world. The jukebox plays Ween albums—“Baby Bitch” is a popular selection—but also plenty of heavy metal. There’s nothing to distinguish The Lutz from the hundreds of blue-collar bars like it all over the city—until you notice the hoodies and high-waters.

Portland’s rock musicians were both overwhelmed by and resistant to the commercially successful grunge pouring out of Seattle in the early ’90s, and sought to set themselves apart from both big-time alternative rock and club music by disavowing glitz and bourgeois comfort. Somebody’s house was a legitimate place not just for an evening on the town but for a show, and most houses were rented by a rapidly shifting cast of young people. Some were ’50s split-levels, some rambling, wooden, and pre-war, with room for at least six. The residents rarely stayed the same from year to year, but the houses’ names often did. In addition to places like the Power House or the Dustbin, where bands played in the basement or the living room, there was Heatmiser House, named for Smith’s first and only serious band in Portland.

Portland streets divide the city into quadrants: northeast, southeast, northwest, and southwest.

Northwest boasts the biggest houses, the most lyrically tree-shaded lanes, and a generous cut of the designer boutiques. Northwest 23rd Street is the epicenter of local gourmet shopping, and subdivisions of homes that would not be out of place in the Hollywood Hills offer views of the district.

Southwest Portland comprises most of downtown, a small collection of modest skyscrapers that includes The Portland Building, a profoundly non-intimidating, orange-fringed example of early postmodern architecture cruelly maligned by critics and locals as “proof that Kmart has an architecture department.” Portland’s larger rock clubs, like Berbati’s Pan, are in the western portions of the city, but the scrappier eastern quarters are where local musicians live and fraternize.

Northeast Portland is home to a large fraction of the city’s non-white residents. Portland is primarily a white and white-collar town, but in “northeast,” working-class neighborhoods house mostly blacks and Hispanics, as well as a sizable Vietnamese Town. It’s a place where, for most of the ’90s, you could easily find a room for two hundred dollars a month.

Southeast Portland, a mix of working-and middle-class neighborhoods, is only marginally more expensive. Most of its bars and rock clubs are a short TriMet bus ride from Hawthorne Boulevard, which is ridden with breakfast cafés like the Cup & Saucer and shops selling used records, vintage clothing, and drug paraphernalia. In the late ’90s, it wasn’t uncommon to spot excitable indie rock kids smoking cigarettes in front of places like the Cup & Saucer, muttering to one other that Elliott Smith was sitting inside.

The visual melancholia that pervades Portland found its corresponding sound in Smith’s early recordings. With the exceptions of its parks and streaks of stylish commerce, Portland is a gray city, with a dearth of sunlight and grandiose architecture. People move there for jobs or because it’s unpretentious, uncongested, liberal, and coated in oversized evergreens and roses. It’s a short drive from the coast, Mount Hood, and towering forests—pretty but rarely striking.

Smith and Gust moved to southeast Portland shortly after their Hampshire graduation, renting a house in the rose garden–filled neighborhood of Ladd’s Addition. Smith was still writing solo songs, but now Heatmiser was a professional focus. Tony Lash, their new drummer, had been Smith’s high-school drummer in Stranger Than Fiction, and he’d developed a formidable ear for recording. They found a bass player in Brandt Peterson, who Smith later described as older, more punk, and more confrontational than the other members of the band. Things moved quickly: A little over a year after they landed in Portland, Marc Swanson recalls, they mailed him a cassette with an album’s worth of recordings.

Heatmiser had the good luck to arrive in Portland at the same time as a few similarly minded bands who would put the city on the map. One of the bands starting up was Motorgoat, a collaboration between two California transplants: bassist, keyboardist, and guitarist Sam Coomes and his wife, drummer Janet Weiss. There was also Calamity Jane, a rough all-female punk band with a bass player named Joanna Bolme; Crackerbash, a loud three-piece ensemble led by Sean Croghan; and Hazel, a loose, catchy punk band led by multi-instrumentalist Pete Krebs. Krebs had dropped out of college to start life as a musician in Portland after a bout of protracted illness in the late ’80s, but he remembers the early ’90s as his halcyon years, a little Northwestern golden age overshadowed by the Seattle grunge phenomenon.

“Back then in the Portland indie scene, there was a crop of bands that came out all at the same time that were tight friends,” remembers Krebs, now a soft-spoken professional musician with wire-rimmed glasses and two full sleeves of tattoos, still living in Portland. “Everybody kind of knew everybody. It was a pretty extraordinary time because they were bands that had interesting things to say and cool sounds. So there were bands starting up of people who came from the same place, who grew up listening to cool music and just ended up in Portland at the same time. Everybody was in their early twenties, mid-twenties; it was this harmonic convergence that kind of happens all the time in different towns. In Portland it happened then, and it’s probably happened three times since. There was a strong sense of community there for about eight months. And then everybody started, like, ‘Holy shit—you’re touring where, you’re playing with who?’ You know, Calamity Jane touring with Nirvana for 20,000 people in Brazil or wherever it was
*
, you’re like—‘What?’”

Heatmiser may not have received any international touring offers from Nirvana, but they did get signed to a reputable indie label that helped them build a fan base, grunge kid by grunge kid. Frontier Records, founded by Lisa Fancher in 1980 and based in Sun Valley, California, grew up with the Southern California hardcore scene and evolved with California punk. One of its earliest releases was
Group Sex
by the Circle Jerks, a band fronted by Keith Morris, the original singer for seminal LA punk band Black Flag. The label went on to embrace goth bands like Christian Death and eclectic rock bands like American Music Club. In the late ’80s they made their first major Northwestern acquisition by signing Seattle’s Young Fresh Fellows, the poppy, geeky forerunners of Barenaked Ladies. Along the way Frontier released the first album by Suicidal Tendencies, who went on to find fame on MTV. Heatmiser released three albums on the label: two LPs,
Dead Air
(1993) and
Cop and Speeder
(1994), and the EP
Yellow No. 5
(1994)
.

Frontier has made public two documents left over from Heatmiser’s tenure that suggest there was a generally harmonious relationship between the band and its office-bound handlers. One is a note from Smith in the handwriting familiar to readers of the lyric sheets to
Roman Candle
,
Elliott Smith,
and
Figure 8.
It has cutiepie Japanese cartoon characters printed on it, and an upbeat message: “Hello, here’s the tape and, well, some penguins and sharks—luv, Elliott.” A postcard the band sent from Ohio (it’s stamped with the logo of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame) is even sunnier. Addressed to “Our Friends @ Frontier,” it sends greetings from Gust (“Hi. We’re getting a lot of free drinks. Bet you wish you were with us. Ha Ha Ha. Love, Neil”), Lash (“P.U.!”), a possibly sarcastic Peterson (“We’ve made so many lovely new friends, and Indianapolis was great! Miss you, Brandt”), and Smith (“You can play ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ here on the jukebox. Lost my train of thought. Love, Elliott”).

“They were really excited when Frontier approached them and they were doing really well in Portland,” Swanson recalls. “People really gave Heatmiser a chance,” says Bill Santen, a musician playing around Portland in the ’90s with a revolving cast of supporting musicians under the name Birddog. Built to Spill’s Doug Martsch, he remembers, became such a fan that he wore a Heatmiser t-shirt when he came to town.

After Smith became nationally well-known, early Heatmiser songs became an in-joke for a lot of Elliott Smith fans who considered them vastly inferior to his solo work. But the band was part of a rock scene that blazed trails, largely as a result of Gust’s forthrightness about being gay in his lyrics. Portland would eventually become home to a lot of explicitly gay-themed punk bands, some of which described their music as “queercore.” But in the early ’90s—Heatmiser’s first record,
Dead Air,
was released in 1993—it was novel to hear gay love songs set to punk rock.

“I really liked Portland compared to San Francisco because there was this whole scene up there where everyone was just into indie rock bands,” says Swanson, who’d moved to San Francisco. “It didn’t matter if they were gay or straight or whatever, which was a really big deal to me at that time. Whereas San Francisco had a gay thing but nobody went to see rock bands . . . it definitely wasn’t the same thing as Portland, where it was this whole contingent of the gay indie rock kids, which was a real revelation to me. . . . All of a sudden Neil and Elliott had all these friends who were also playing in bands who were gay guys.”

On
Dead Air
, Smith sang lead vocals on eight songs and Gust on six. Some of the strongest songs on the album are Gust’s, because they seem best served by the feel of the band. Gust’s voice strains less than Smith’s to be heard above the tank brigade of the guitars. And in the context of Heatmiser, Gust’s expressions of gay-white-guy angst are often more interesting than Smith’s lyrics. Before queercore officially existed, it must have been refreshing to hear, over Fugazi–Minor Threat riffs, references to picking suits from men’s magazines (“Candyland”) and romantic plaints like “I don’t know what’s genuine/so I go back and forth with him” (“Can’t Be Touched”).

But it wasn’t that novelty that attracted all of the band’s fans. There was a jock component at the shows, and it perplexed Smith; he remarked later that he felt like he was playing to kids
who would have beat him up in high school, and that the tough punk personality he adopted for that band was a posture.

But Swanson remembers a Smith who clearly felt the rage in the music he was singing. “Elliott was a toughie. He was the lead guy on a lot of those songs and . . . I just remember him being so ‘raaah!’ He was pissed and it was obvious. And it was strong, it was there, his songwriting was really good, but he was obviously in it. I remember that one “Wake.
*
” I remember it being super powerful and the kids in Portland just going crazy.” Smith had gotten a tattoo: the state of Texas, a reminder of a place where, as he described it, he’d endured hardships and acted like a tough kid.

While Heatmiser was acquiring its local following of fist-pumping kids, privately Smith and Gust had stuck to their arty Hampshire ways. As Swanson remembers, “He and Neil had posters of art work in the house. They had Jasper Johns [posters] and stuff, they didn’t have the Renoirs they got from their parents.”

About a year after they left Amherst for Portland, they sent Marc Swanson a tape recording of some of the songs that would end up on the first album,
Dead Air
. It had the sound of a disciplined band, with precise rhythms and clear melodies, despite the onslaught of electric-guitar power chords. It was nothing like the Elliott Smith sound the world would come to know.

It was during this period, as Swanson came up from San Francisco to visit Gust, that Smith’s shyness finally cracked, and the two became confidantes. “I remember one day while I was there I was like, ‘Can we go have lunch together?’ And he was like, ‘Really?’” says Swanson. “And I was like, ‘Well, Neil’s not up for it and we can go have lunch together.’ Things like that with Elliott were kind of a big deal; that meant we were
friends
.”

At this point, Smith was obliged to take the kinds of jobs that frequently turn budding rock stars into law-school applicants. He later recalled that he once got a bad sunburn installing solar
paneling—and bad sunburns are tough to come by in Portland. He was a skinny young man. The former Portland promoter Todd Patrick remembers Smith saying that in the early ’90s building contractors would give him illegal construction tasks that involved his ability to squirm into small spaces.

“We were playing a lot, but it’s not like we were making any money,” says Pete Krebs. The two musicians hated their day jobs and were looking for a way to make money faster. “Finally it dawned on us we could be making twenty bucks an hour instead of ten bucks an hour [splitting the money with the carpenter who subcontracted to them], and so he and I got all the equipment to do drywall work and started doing sheet-rocking together as a little company. . . . We did a good eight or ten projects like that. . . . That was during the winter time and I remember it was always fucking freezing. . . . We drywalled, mudded, did all the plaster work on this houseboat up in Ridgefield, Washington, this tiny town on a river. It was the middle of winter and we’d drive up I–5 and get off at Ridgefield and drive though the fields to this little town, across the railroad tracks to where there was this community of houseboats, and we’d haul these big boxes of plaster shit out on these docks. It took us like twenty minutes to walk to it. It was freezing; it was right there on the river and it was just shitty work. It was a houseboat so everything was always moving. We had this portable propane heater that looks like a jet engine with flames coming out the back; that was the only way to heat this thing up, so it was super dangerous. So we did all this work, and got paid, didn’t do a very good job, and everybody hated it. About three or four weeks later there was some kind of storm, and it wrecked this houseboat. The houseboat sank or floated away or something. We were both happy about that and bummed out at the same time. Served him right, fucking rich guy.”