Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith (22 page)

JJ Gonson and Elliott at Satyricon in 1992. Gonson says, “Whatever that little thing on a stick was, Elliott doesn’t seem impressed.” (Courtesy of JJ Gonson Photography.)

For the band, the JJ situation was worrisome. No one doubted she was a “massive go-getter,” organizing all the “shit” they didn’t want to concern themselves with.
¹⁹
For them, it was the music; for her, virtually everything else, from photographs to press clippings to questions of sleeve design. But her transformation into girlfriend was not met with “universal excitement.” It seemed “like a problem,” Peterson said. Gust was especially disturbed by the development. Because he and Elliott were exceptionally tight and had been for several years, Gonson threatened that feeling of exclusivity. The closer Elliott got to her, the less time he spent with Neil. To JJ the reaction felt like jealousy. Gust was possessive. “He thought, I guess, I was interrupting something.” And although Neil made a mighty effort to “be okay with me all the time,” inside he felt otherwise, Gonson intuited. It really wasn’t okay. It wasn’t what anyone had signed up for.

None of this was lost on Elliott. On the other hand, he was in love, and by virtue of a formula he had begun to perfect, the tumult brought inspirations. Gonson called it “emotional plagiarism.” In songs he told stories he could connect with because he had created the chaos, the chaos was the story, the subject matter. Way back in high school there was the frustration, maybe more self-doubt, more an inner sense than a true problem, about not knowing what to say in his lyrics. For that reason Duckler was a godsend. Now Elliott solved the difficulty by creating the situations the songs would explore, often in minute detail, yet always opaquely rendered. Part of the engine was the depression that fringed Portland’s chronic rain, the wetbrick reality that Krebs described. The bands were saturated with it. It was inescapable. According to friends the prevailing attitude, the local zeitgeist, was more or less “I’m a loser. Life is shit. I am shit.” During darker intervals Elliott “viewed all his life as a waste. He had his bouts,” one friend said. At the same time he was a deeply spiritual person, always interested in forms of religion, such as Buddhism, which he sometimes discussed with Gary Smith, or with Sean Croghan’s father. Part of him knew “this was not how he was supposed to be living his life”—mired, that is, in dead-end, internal suffering and self-generated despair. But the biography fit the persona. It
was hard not to latch on, however clichéd the tortured artist stereotype. Elliott saw through it, at times he dismissed it, but he also bought in, just as everyone else seemed to be doing. It was cool to be depressed. It was expected.

A subject Gonson and Elliott discussed with frequency was early trauma, what to do about it, how to deal with it. Can one forgive? Should one forgive? Pursuit of these questions was a constant, urgent theme in the relationship; they bonded emotionally through hurtful memories. Chaos begat depression, depression begat chaos. And everywhere Elliott looked, he found more of it. “Elliott suffered,” Peterson says, “but everybody suffers. Neil suffered. Tony suffered. We all suffered.” He goes on: “Abuse, though, is a kind of suffering that’s really freighted with victimhood. On the other hand, Elliott was sometimes obviously horrified.” Mainly it was implicit, assumed, the basic understanding being that Elliott’s childhood had scarred him. He shared some details with JJ, but not with most others. It wasn’t a topic he talked about openly until much later in his life.

And by necessity more than anything else, from the pain Elliott gathered artistic value. Pain was the muse. It had to be; it made the most of what was inside, what emerged when looking inward. On occasion the subject of antidepressants came up. His father, Gary, was a psychiatrist, after all, and in the late 1980s Prozac was all the rage, its effectiveness greatly oversold, with other SSRIs like Zoloft and Paxil quickly flooding the marketplace as well. But according to Gonson, Elliott was “literally in love with depression.” They talked about it all the time. Yet like other creative types, “he didn’t want meds because he thought they would damage his ability to write.” To be happy was anathema. Drugs might deaden the suffering, and what that might mean or how it might alter creative process was not something he felt like exploring at the time. “Happiness writes white,” the English poet Philip Larkin once declared. At this point in his life Elliott would have agreed instantly.

Depression and anxiety correlate. The former usually leads to the latter, and vice versa. Peterson really “cared deeply” about Elliott, Gonson says; there was a time during which they were “really tight,” in Peterson’s words, and hanging out a lot. Brandt recalls a beach trip to the Arch Cape area on the Oregon coast. In his memory high school girlfriend and Hampshire
classmate Shannon Wight was along too, back in Portland and hanging out. The three of them decided to climb up a steep dune, applying copious amounts of sunscreen beforehand. It was all perfectly prosaic, an apparently tensionless little escapade, a respite from band demands. But once he reached the top Elliott experienced a major panic attack. Although Wight and Peterson tried to help him, talk him out of it, he could not move. He
would
not move. He was frozen in place. He was “scared and angry”—angry about being scared—and it took some doing to get him down. So there were occasions on which the inner turmoil proved beneficial, an atmosphere conducive to making music; but there were others when it was simply a pain, a wracking, self-limiting embarrassment that went nowhere good.

As one possible cause or, just as likely, a side effect of the building attachment to depression, Elliott developed an intense intellectual interest in Hell. He read about it, he talked about it, he even had nightmares about going there. What had begun in abstraction, a fascination with the concept, evolved into abject fear—of the prospect of eternal burning. As Gonson recalls, “He did not believe in God, the God of organized religion. But he believed in Hell. He had this fear of the devil popping up and grabbing him at any moment,” a kind of personification of anything evil, including thoughts of suicide. Even as late as
Figure 8
, recorded only a few years before his death, he described dreams of being an “army man,” and “dead enemies” springing in his face. It got to the point, in the early ’90s, where misery trumped everything else. He started to believe it was kinder to remove himself from people’s lives. Gonson tried reassuring him, saying “You don’t have to run away to save people from you.” At times this worked, but more often than not, it made no impact. When he went dark, he went darker than anyone else, to places where he seemed unreachable.

Of course, on the fringes of ubiquitous doom and gloom, there were good times too, hilarious times, most propelled by bottles of brandy or Elliott’s personal favorite, Jameson Irish whiskey, which both deepened the depression and made it somehow laughably self-collapsing. As everyone got drunker, tears diluting the alcohol, the darkness took on a slapstick quality. In terms of drug use, Heatmiser was a clean band. But like all Portland outfits of the time, they drank, occasionally heavily. It was “a Portland
thing,” one friend says, a virtual depression party that left people listing off bar stools at all the usual places, “bawling our heads off” between bouts of video poker, which Elliott played avidly. At the moment they were the “rock illuminati,” local rock gods, and they partied accordingly. One favored hangout was the impossibly beat Club 21 on prostitute-perfused Sandy Boulevard, just diagonal from EJ’s, a popular venue (now a jewelry/pawn shop). The evening might start with Elliott sitting around playing guitar, noodling with chord structures, listening for what might pop up, just like back in Texas with Merritt, and watching Univision on TV (with the sound off), or another favorite,
Xena the Warrior Princess
. Elliott loved cable TV; he loved bad comedies too, of the John Candy, Dana Carvey sort, the goofier the better. “You aren’t really going to watch this shit are you?” was a constant refrain. Also, as in Texas, there was a lot of simple listening to music, not of the sort one might imagine. Elliott adored sappy ’70s rock, the same bands he first thrilled to in Cedar Hill—Scorpions, Kiss, even certain Ted Nugent riffs. He was never precious. And all this aimless killing of time eventually led to organized hilarity. Jason Mitchell recalls one evening when everyone descended on Club 21 in cheap tacky thrift-store suits, proceeding to get absurdly hammered, smoking endless amounts of cigarettes (Camel was Elliott’s brand, later replaced by American Spirits). Karaoke was also a surprisingly intense, regular form of amusement, at Chopsticks Express or the Galaxy. Writer Scott Wagner—known as “Wags”—remembers one night when he and Elliott covered “Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys.”

Another obsession, irresistible enough to interfere with band meetings and rehearsals, was Sega’s “Sonic the Hedgehog” game, which hit the market in June 1991. The blue anthropomorphic character with an angry mien and shoes inspired by Michael Jackson’s boots, ran at supersonic speeds and curled himself into a ball before attacking assorted enemies. Originally he was to be a band member of some kind with a human girlfriend named Madonna, but that idea got scrapped. At the house just off Division everyone played the game compulsively, or else watched while waiting his or her turn. This went on for hours. Gonson occasionally tried interrupting the mania, usually to no avail. When finally Sonic was made to prevail, everyone fell out to one or another nearby bar to debrief the imaginary victory.

One such evening Elliott was outrageously drunk but kept ordering Jamesons anyway, and kept getting served. He’d cart his drinks back to the table, and friends took turns “accidentally” knocking them over. “What the fuck?” he’d exclaim, “Are you people wasted?” According to Mitchell, booze never made Elliott angry. In fact, he says, “I never saw Elliott mad.” Depressed, yes; sobbing, yes. Or, as Pete Krebs captured it in a 2003 interview, “I can’t say that I’ve met anybody quite as fragile and almost comically freaked-out as Elliott.”
²⁰
All the same, his memories of Smith are of a “really funny, really super-smart, caring person,” not a crazy person or drug addict. Mitchell agrees: “He was too smart. Very funny. Sensitive. Generous … He would spend hours listening to fans who identified strongly with his music.” It was impossible to miss his “delicate nature,” Mitchell explains, “and a lot of people around him were very protective of him. But though he could be easily crushed at times, he could also be a total rock.” It sometimes got to be confusing, these alternating extremes. The root feeling, the sense Elliott elicited from anyone who knew him even slightly, was that he was “too emotionally sensitive. He internalized a lot more. You could never get to the bottom of the suffering. He could not explain it.”
²¹
Except in the songs; the songs were the dissertation.

And as Denny Swofford realized early on, Portland itself sharpened the songs; it was the perfect rainy foundation for Elliott’s brilliance. The college name change set the stage for self-redefinition, songs dropping from the skies like so many extraterrestrials, an endless supply of Elliott pet E.T.’s. All the brilliant, quirky, creative people around the scene—from Krebs to Bleyle to Gonson to Gust—just added to an already heightened feeling of possibility. Ideas kept coming, ambitions caught fire. Gonson steered Heatmiser’s fortunes ably, they were free to concentrate on music and performance, and she was there for Elliott when he needed her, a sympathizer who could identify with the sorts of traumas he’d endured, the Old Testament visions of Hell. She’d been there too; he wasn’t alone. Around this same time Elliott happened upon still another opportunity for self-definition, a visual representation of a contradictory identity. He’d already gotten a Texas tattoo, with a “sun that looked like a saw blade,” as Gonson recalls it; Elliott says it resembled the sun in the KC and the Sunshine Band insignia. Actually, the state was originally meant to
be
a sun. A muscle man,
giant tattooist asked Elliott, “What do you want a sol blade on your arm for?” He didn’t, actually, so the sun turned into a map of Texas. Texas, in other words, was an act of revision, a later incorporation.

But the next tattoo, drawn coincidentally by the wife of the muscle man, speaks of deeper interior realities even than Texas. Gonson recalls Elliott being oddly taken with the idea of bullfighting, the man versus beast mythos, the concept of primordial struggle that he tended to romanticize. They argued about the subject, at times almost comically. JJ had been to bullfights in Portugal, and she emphasized the brutal, gruesome nature of what she’d seen firsthand—the bull being tortured, then taken out back and shot. It wasn’t pretty; it wasn’t romantic. Even so, to Elliott it “represented this cool thing,” and he was not dissuaded. He decided he wanted a bull on his arm, “maybe because they’re stubborn.” The Schlitz Malt Liquor bull was a first option. But it was promptly rejected. What he got, in the end, was almost farcically removed from notions of a powerful, beastly bovine. The bull transmogrified into Ferdinand, from the children’s story by Munro Leaf. That modest little tale, which Elliott grew up on, is a pacifism manifesto, an allegory of role refusal. Most of the little bulls in the piece run and jump and butt their heads. Not Ferdinand. He prefers to sit quietly under a cork tree and smell the flowers. One day five men arrive in funny hats to pick the fiercest bull for fights in Madrid. Ferdinand retreats to his cork tree. But a bee stings him, and he leaps up with a grunt, butting and pawing the ground as if crazy. The five men shout with joy. Here, they figure, is the fiercest bull of all. So they take Ferdinand away in a cart. But in the ring in Madrid “Ferdinand the Fierce” will not fight. “He saw the flowers in all the lovely ladies’ hair and he just sat down quietly and smelled.” The men take Ferdinand home. “And for all I know,” Leaf writes, “he is sitting there still, smelling the flowers just quietly. He is very happy.”