Elliott Smith and the Big Nothing (7 page)

As much as Smith may have hated day jobs, the assumption in Portland at that time, says Krebs, was that nobody would ever make any money off their music. Nirvana and Sonic Youth may have shown it was possible, but nobody considered it a likely possibility for the members of the Portland indie coterie Krebs and Smith were part of. “You were really into music so you played in a band and everybody had a shitty day job, or two. If you had a bunch of Portland people around a table in 1991 or 1992, and said, ‘Well, this is going to happen to you: You’re going to be on a major label. You’re going to have a major drug addiction, which you’ll pull out of. You’re going to be on the Academy Awards. And you’re going to move to Chicago and become part of this culturally significant art rock scene. And you’re going to be a bar musician. And you’re going to buy a house,’—nobody would have believed that. It wasn’t even in the category of stuff you thought about. You played in bands because you grew up listening to cool bands and it was just natural.”

Heatmiser’s manager was JJ Gonson, who has made a career as a photographer and a manager since she abandoned her plans to be a musician as a young woman. By the time Krebs and Smith were working construction jobs together, she and Smith were dating, and soon Smith sublet his room in the house he shared with Gust and moved in with Gonson on Southeast Taylor Street. It turned out to be a life-altering decision—it was in that house that Smith started to put down the songs that started his solo career, leading him in a direction radically different from Heatmiser.

“The Taylor Street house was an old Victorian style, and it had a deeply set staircase with deep acoustics,” writes Gonson in an email. “Elliott did a lot of his writing and rehearsing in that staircase. He worked on those songs for a long time before he put them on tape, some of them for years. He recorded in the basement, which was not a pretty place. Lots of people had moved through that house, and the basement was piled high with abandoned stuff, so he sort of carved out a little niche, set up a stool and a mic stand, and meticulously recorded the whole thing, going back and punching in tiny changes, sometimes a single word or chord. The wonderful breathy sound on
Roman Candle
is largely due to the quality of the mic, or lack of it. It was a little Radio Shack thing—the kind you used to get bundled with a tape recorder. It had very little power and was very noisy. He also sang quietly, perhaps so as not to be heard by all the people always coming and going upstairs, so you can hear every breath and string squeak. The little powered studio monitors he used we got at Artichoke [Music, a store on Hawthorne Street]. The owner restored old bicycles as a hobby and I traded him an ancient, and very knackered, Schwinn I had found in an abandoned warehouse (doing a promo shoot for some bad metal band) for them. We had no money to get them. I don’t know what he would have done otherwise.”

It was recorded on an eccentric instrument probably no more expensive than the first guitar Gary Smith bought Steven in junior high. “The Le Domino is a tiny acoustic guitar, I think probably made in the ’50s,” writes Gonson. “We saw it at Artichoke Music and fell in love with it. It is black with tiny domino decals on the frets and around the sound hole. More importantly, Elliott loved the sound. So, I bought it and he played it for a long time, recorded all of
Roman Candle
on it and used it for his solo shows and even his first solo tour, before it started to get worn out. I still have it.

” At first, Smith just played the tape to his friends. Krebs remembers the first time he heard it. The two of them were working at “this warehouse being converted into small loft spaces for business and artists and whatnot. Elliott and I were doing shit work, on top of scaffolds, scraping ceilings and shit like that. So at seven-thirty, eight in the morning I’d come by his house and pick him up or he’d pick me up, and we’d drive downtown and we’d work for a couple hours, drink coffee and talk about music, and then we’d split for a couple hours and go to record stores and go back and work some more. It was a drag. It was a dead-end shitty job, but that’s where we got to know one another, and that’s when I first heard his music. He was like, ‘Yeah, I recorded some of my own stuff, you know?’ He had a little cassette, and it was a lot of the stuff that ended up on
Roman Candle
, this cassette. It was me and him fifty feet in the air on a scaffold listening to
Roman Candle
before it came out.” Krebs knew how good it was, and from the way he looks back on this time in his life it’s clear he mourns for it.

Gonson nurtured Heatmiser even as she helped plant the seeds for the solo career that would eventually help derail Heatmiser and take Smith places far beyond the Portland rock scene. If it wasn’t for Gonson, in fact, Elliott Smith’s solo work might have stayed stowed away on a series of tapes lying around Portland attics. According to her, Smith didn’t intend to put the songs on an album.

Two of the songs on
Roman Candle
stand out as being concerned with Smith’s childhood. “‘Roman Candle’ was the song about Charlie. And ‘[No-Name] #4’ is as much about Bunny as his songs are about any one with thing,” writes Gonson. Both of those songs were written with a level of frankness Smith might not have permitted himself if he was recording an album with release in mind. “Cavity Search [Records] had just recently started up, and [the owners] Christopher and Denny were friends of ours, and had made a Heatmiser single. I just used to hang out there sometimes, and this time I happened to have a cassette of what Elliott was doing and put it in. I was Heatmiser’s manager, so I used to carry stuff around and play it for whoever would listen—it was a habit that carried over to his stuff, though I wasn’t his solo manager (we were too close for that; he didn’t have one until later). They were stunned and said, ‘We want to release this—just the way it is.’ It wasn’t even a demo, not even that official, just friends hanging out together one afternoon. Elliott didn’t even believe it until they had pestered him about it for a while. He never meant for his solo stuff to be heard or released. I don’t think he ever would have considered playing it for anyone at any kind of label and probably was a bit horrified that I had. (I don’t remember, but I was certainly never a shy manager, and sometimes it was a sticky point between us.) Those songs were just something he needed to get out of his system that he didn’t think there was a place for in Heatmiser, who were (as one reviewer so pointedly put it) ‘Chugga Chugga Boy Rock.’ Heatmiser were
amazing
, don’t get me wrong, but their whole thing was very guitar-heavy and intense. Elliott had all these songs all piled up in his head, and nowhere to use them, so he put them on cassette. I think he did things he wouldn’t have done had he thought they might be heard in a real way—like the soaring vocal on the song we wrote together [‘No Name #1,’ working title ‘Saint-Like’]—which made Neil laugh the first time he heard it. A good thing, no doubt, that he could be uninhibited by his own lack of expectation. . . . I don’t think he would have written so candidly about his childhood if he had thought Bunny might ever hear it, either. It surprised him completely when people responded positively to what he was doing. It was much later that he brought that energy, or lack of it, to Heatmiser, in songs like ‘Half Right.’ Too late, sadly.”

Roman Candle
stands alone among Smith’s releases for its unusual attention to physical description in the lyrics. A year later, on his first full-length album,
Elliott Smith
, he would find a new poetic resource in drug metaphors. The song “Roman Candle” uses incandescence as a metaphor for repressed anger, as Smith expresses feelings toward Charlie Welch that mirror the feelings of many children toward stepfathers: “He could be cool and cruel to you and me/knew we’d put up with anything.” But a number of the songs thereafter, such as “No Name # 4,” are short stories; they ride on narrative, character, and description as much as on Smith’s distinctive finger-picking, not yet fully formed. The character that Gonson suggests partly represents Bunny Welch is described thus: “For a change she got out before he hurt her bad. . . /The car was cold and smelled like old cigarettes and pine.

” “Condor Ave.” would hold up throughout his career as one of Smith’s top-tier compositions. Starting with is first line, “She took the Oldsmobile out past Condor Avenue,” it stuck to the vernacular of workaday Portland. Condor Avenue is a not-particularly-striking road in southwest Portland. Unlike the aggressively streetwise New Yorkese employed by the Velvet Underground and the New York Dolls, Smith’s is a muted, civil, almost Midwestern tone in its reluctance to move past concrete description: “You’re in the Oldsmobile and driving by the moon/headlights burning bright ahead of you.” At the same time, gasps of incivility burst through: “Now I’m leaving you alone/you can do whatever the hell you want to.” The sentiment and the delivery are a blend of country and punk. The reticence of the small town competes with the frankness and toughness of the big city; the combination is deeply Portland.

Together, “Condor Ave.” and “No Name #4” are the most fiction-like of Smith’s songs and they both involve troubled women in cars. The first appears to be a girlfriend who meets some bleak fate in an Oldsmobile. As she drives, the narrator tries to reach out to her and despairs at the impossibility of communication: “I’m lying here, blowing smoke from a cigarette/smoke signal signs that you’ll never get.” While the narrator and his beloved seem to be doomed by a failure to speak to and hold on to each other, the narrator encounters a man who shares his entrapment: A drinker, “bottle clenched between his teeth/looks like he’s buried in the sand at the beach.”

In this last description, Smith effectively deploys substance abuse as a metaphor for other forms of self-destructive behavior, and the metaphor is a handy one for several reasons. For one, a songwriter taking substance abuse as his literal subject (even if love is the figurative one) can easily steer clear of the Celine Dion clichés of contemporary Top 40 music, the language of hearts, embraces, great divides. And he participates in a hipper tradition, that of Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, and Kurt Cobain—their addiction laments, disavowals of vice, and caustic self-portraits. Whereas self-destruction in love is usually a series of verbal transactions—lying, cutting yourself off, arguing—self-destruction with drugs and alcohol is a physical process—clenching the bottle between your teeth, putting a spike into your vein. A storyteller need only make the concrete actions vivid to get his meaning across. That’s a powerful tool in a lyricist’s hands. The emotional danger doesn’t have to be compared to physical danger, as it is in the central metaphor of “Roman Candle”; in substance-abuse stories, the emotional danger springs from concrete action.

The cover of
Roman Candle
features a photograph taken by Gonson. It shows Neil Gust and Amy Dalsimer, a friend from Hampshire, walking through an open-air market in Manhattan during an early Heatmiser tour. But the point wasn’t to put his friends on the cover rather than himself, even though it seems like a deliberate gesture of self-deprecation. “He really liked the way that picture looked as a ‘piece of art,’” writes Gonson in an email, and Smith asked Gonson to dig it up when it came time to select a cover image. In any case, the image reflects the content of the songs: They’re snapshots of apparently mundane but meaningful moments from characters’ lives.

The first known Elliott Smith solo show took place at Umbra Penumbra, a now-defunct café near downtown Portland, in September 1994. Smith played a set there that was entirely solo and acoustic but still preserved some of the hardness of the Heatmiser sound. One song that never appeared on an album, “Big Decision,” involved verses delivered with the machine-gun speed of an auctioneer. But by and large the songwriting process Smith had developed by 1994 was one conducive to contemplative, rather than combative, music.

“He was so good because he was constantly tinkering,” says Pete Krebs about Smith’s songwriting. “He wouldn’t sit there with a guitar and work it out, he would get a title and walk around at night, when he lived in the Heatmiser house and that neighborhood. . . . He said, ‘I’d just get these songs in my head and I’d just concentrate and work through where they went, and by the time I got back from my walk I’d have a song.’ It’d be more than a melody. He would arrange it and come up with a lot of information that way.”

Through 1994, Heatmiser, and not solo work, was Smith’s primary non-construction occupation. But even before his solo career started in earnest, he expressed doubts about his place in Heatmiser to Krebs. “It was before the solo thing, really. . . . Heatmiser was the thing [Smith was known for]. Everybody kind of agreed with Elliott [about Heatmiser], and I don’t mean this as a slight to Neil or anything like that, but it seemed like his songs just kind of got lost in the wash. . . . Heatmiser rocked; I really
liked Heatmiser. They were just really big and rocked really hard and we played with them a lot. There was a vibe to that band that was really incessant. You just really got into it. . . . Elliott just didn’t deal very well with the democratic process that’s necessary for a band. Elliott kind of needed a back-up band. It’s not that he didn’t like playing in a rock band, but I think he felt really confined by it. Being on the road, touring, maybe playing music that he felt like he had compromised on a little bit. I remember talking to him about [how] his tunes just kind of got steamrolled, the subtleties got steamrolled. And he just really didn’t like it. . . . Because Elliott . . . knew a lot about recording and microphones and he was really fascinated by that stuff, I think he really quickly identified what he wanted and how he wanted it and how he wanted to pursue the music he was playing. He and Neil were friends from way back so it seemed natural that they would have a band together. I don’t think he liked being in a rock band. It wasn’t an egotistical thing, he was just much better off as a solo artist.”