Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith (29 page)

In some ways “No Confidence Man” encapsulates the new direction begun with
Roman Candle
. Now, and from here on out, the harsh, bitter scratching of Heatmiser receded in the rear view, replaced by liltingly pretty songs about ugliness. It was pain made beautiful: stoic, “saintlike” torment. The suffering was the art, an equation Elliott understood perfectly, the mode best suited for his native sense of apartness. He used to point to Kafka’s “Hunger Artist” story as a metaphorical self-summation, a portrait of the artist whose very appeal lay in his abject embodiment of tortured erasure, and whose last act was simply to die in a straw cage as crowds of voyeuristic onlookers evaporated. It was hardly a pleasant comparison, but it touched a deep nerve. If fasting is what you do, who you are, then it’s the most natural, authentic art—inevitable, genuine, clear. One goes with it, because going with anything else amounts to denial and fabrication, a refusal of individuality.

This question of individuality had been at the root of the label contract disputes Gonson was struggling mightily to resolve with the help of attorney Richard Grabel, the lawyer who had negotiated numerous major grunge deals, a hard-core figure known for tenacity and for getting “big chunks of money” for up-and-coming bands. Elliott—and eventually Neil Gust too—wanted “exclusion from exclusivity” clauses added to all future agreements, a provision heretofore virtually unheard of. The idea, growing more urgent,
was to protect the solo work, to keep it separate from proprietary claims that might be made on songs Elliott did for Heatmiser. The solo work he wanted to be his alone, to do with what he pleased. Yet as these entitlements were being hashed out—and as it happened, Elliott would get exactly what he wanted—the feeling was that he ought to record whatever material he currently had, just in case the request for exclusion went up in smoke. So it was back to work, alone as desired, this time at the Mississippi neighborhood home of Leslie Uppinghouse.

This next burst of songcraft was to become the moment when, in the words of Chandler and Wagner, “the shit really began to hit the fan.” But in most ways, if possible, it was good shit and a good fan. The work would lead, in its serendipitous way, to the Oscars (along with later work done for the album
Either/Or
). And to a new, larger label, Kill Rock Stars. Also, to a move out of Portland to New York, then to Los Angeles. It would signal, finally, the end of Heatmiser, but not before the appearance of one last album, the best the band would ever make,
Mic City Sons
. It was a fecund time. All the fervid independent recording was about to pay off magnificently.

The choice to record with Uppinghouse was an easy one. Elliott was aware of Leslie’s gifts with sound. Plus, the two friends (despite rumors, they were never lovers) shared an inward, shy personality type. Upping-house got the fact that Elliott needed a lot of privacy. She never pushed or pried. When the two spoke, it was always as much wordlessly as it was explicit. There was a lot of hemming and hawing, staring at shoes—that casual, relaxed, shared awkwardness one sees in acutely self-conscious teenagers. As Uppinghouse said, Elliott found it hard to communicate verbally. She just let him alone, left him to the task at hand.

Uppinghouse had grown up in the wealthy suburb of Lake Oswego (Lake Ego to outsiders), a bit isolated from Portland, although all her friends, she says, went to Lincoln. She saw a lot of music in the ’80s, attended countless crazy Poison Idea shows. She also played bass in “little loud punk-rock bands,” her first guitar warped and prone to buzzing annoyingly (like Elliott’s Le Domino). There was the art-noise band Mobius Strip, Pavlov’s Dogs, and Gopalm with Heidi Hellbender. Along the way she got to know Greg Sage of the legendary Wipers, and started hanging out at his studio, which he built. She calls Sage a “recording demon,” a “sort of genius,
a real taskmaster.” He recorded 24–7. His priority at the time revolved around constructing the “perfect vibe” in the studio, the one most propitious for the creation of truly stellar work. In short order Sage taught Uppinghouse everything she knew about recording. He was her guru, her swami.

In terms of equipment, for the work with Elliott Uppinghouse used two pre-amps made by Sage, one (for vocals) called “the blue knob.” With a wide signal it gave massive gain—super-clean, pristine power with very little distortion. When Elliott delivered his already emblematic whispery vocals, “it was just like he was right in your ear.”
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All tracks were laid down on an eight-track reel-to-reel, a Tascam 38 that Uppinghouse bought with her then-partner and quasi-husband Josh Mong, who also played in Mobius Strip. The house in which the recording took place was high-ceilinged with “lots of wood”—a bit like Gonson’s home, both contributing promising acoustics.

By this point, what with the thousands of hours of recording, the tours and the sometimes high-stakes performances in front of different eminences, Elliott had finally grown comfortable and confident with his voice, an instrument he took a long time coming to terms with. But still, “he needed a lot of privacy for it.” So what Uppinghouse did to get things rolling was to set everything up then step out of the room, leaving Elliott alone to hit play. “It was just something we were doing,” she says, “and none of it was important at the time. My relationship with him—we never talked about anything. I didn’t bug him. I didn’t bother him with anything that wasn’t necessary.” Neither even quite intended to make a record at all, so in that way the experience resembled
Roman Candle
. There was no sense of goal, no prearranged end point. “He was just putting stuff on tape,” as far as Uppinghouse knew or cared. There was urgency connected to the contract situation, a feeling of wanting to make the most of the time together—and Elliott was “super efficient”—but that was about it. They even threw in some goofy stuff. Uppinghouse had an old Italian twelve-string Vox with a cool sound—they tried making use of it. They also featured “a real funny keyboard,” one they were mutually enamored with, but it came through too loudly at the end of certain songs and proved to be a problem during mixdown. Another sound making its way onto recordings wasn’t exactly a sound
at all, or at least not a bona fide instrument. Uppinghouse owned a boxer named Anna who loved Elliott so effusively and was always so excited to see him that it was necessary, before Elliott arrived for the day, to take the dog out for a vigorous walk as a way of settling her down. As Elliott recorded alone in his space, Anna took to lying just outside and whimpering, her nose pressed against the bottom door crack. Uppinghouse swears the dog can be heard on a few of the tracks, although to make out the soft moaning requires very careful listening.

Through all of it what struck Uppinghouse most was a technique Elliott had perfected nearly uniquely and for which he would always be known—his ubiquitous, masterful “double-tracking.” For the vocals there tended to be a minimum of two to three tracks in fact, although some songs had even more. Track one comprised the main vocal, track two repeated that vocal identically, then track three added slight harmonies. “He could sing multiple versions of vocals pitch-perfect,” Uppinghouse recalls, “each exactly the same, with no deviation at all, entire songs from start to finish.” Typically he’d record a guitar track, then a first track of vocals; with those in his headphones he’d then record the third track. “He would mess around and hit harmonies or just hit it straight.” These days, according to Uppinghouse, artists try “all sorts of crazy things to get a double-tracked vocal,” such as running tracks through a pitch changer then onto a new track. But “Elliott just had a great ear and excellent vocal control so he could nail vocal tracks till the cows came home.” In what may be his last interview in June 2003, a transcript of a conversation he had with one of his idols, the Kinks’ Ray Davies, Davies asks Elliott about his “nice double-tracking vocals.” Elliott describes the sound as “a lot more organic.” He liked using it “so much more than delay,” which can sometimes achieve a similar effect.
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Now and then Elliott shyly asked Uppinghouse to weigh in, to tell him whether something “was stupid”—more dread of cliché, an attention to aesthetic authenticity. But mostly he’d work out parts as he was recording, in between takes. He’d lay down a track, come out from the room he was in, then return to lay down something else. It was a constant back-and-forth. “He spent a lot of time designing, particularly for the song ‘Needle in the Hay.’ He worked out a lot of that on the fly.” It was easy to tell when
songs were totally done in his head, says Uppinghouse. “They would go pretty fast and he was more critical about them.” Others he’d “monkey around with, work out for a while before recording them.” It was these songs, the new ones, he tended to be most enthused about. “I see that a lot in artists,” Uppinghouse says. “Once a song is finished in their mind they are looking for something new to inspire them … I’m betting the ones that didn’t make the cut were the older ones.” Those felt staler, less immediately alive.

All this went on over many long days. Elliott’s focus was unwavering, a real sight to behold. And though she knew he could be a partier and liked to drink, sometimes to excess, Elliott at this time “was never a drug taker,” Uppinghouse says, “never anything like a public nuisance. I’ve worked with some of the gnarliest people there are, so I know it when I see it.” Uppinghouse’s sense, being there in intimate contact day after day, watching the songs come to life, watching them find a final form, was that as Elliott made his art he was “isolated from his demons.” Demons might have been a slanting force. They might have functioned as a tap root at times. The songs—“peopled with losers, boozers, dreamers, and ghosts that alternately drift and plummet through their existence, looking for the next big fuck up,” as Chandler and Wagner mellifluously put it—might have transported listeners into demonic territories, sites of pain and unrest. Yet, allowing for all that, the music was craft. If demons dragged along they were pulled uphill on a chain, beholden to the one real aim: art. They were art’s side effect, chiseled raw material, not the other way around. Or so Uppinghouse saw it.

The question of drug use is not incidental. Several of the songs Elliott worked on alluded to drugs—for instance, most obviously, “The White Lady Loves You More.” Because of this, people started wondering, whispering. Was Elliott actually on heroin? In Portland? Pete Krebs says no, he was not. To Krebs it was more “shtick,” more nominal than real. Heroin was another Texas—a fear repository, one more possibility to dread. Elliott liked to conjure catastrophic outcomes, Krebs says. Things that might, but probably wouldn’t, happen. Things beyond his control, things that may befall him. Shooting heroin, Krebs says, was one of these. Elliott himself said much the same thing when the question was put to him directly. He told
Chandler and Wagner, “Everyone read the songs at a very surface level, they wanted to know why there were so many songs about heroin … But I used dope as a vehicle to talk about dependency and no self-sufficiency. I could have used love as that vehicle, but that’s not where I was.” Then he added, obscurely, “I’m just trying to make things so I enjoy being me.”
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This was in fact the more fundamental question—how to enjoy being me. No lasting solution to that question ever seemed to present itself forcefully. And it wasn’t that heroin ever stopped being a strong lure even in the Portland days. There were people around, according to Gonson—people who ought to have known better, people whom Elliott trusted—who suggested the drug to him as a method for fighting off, for treating, depression. They said he could use it and not become addicted. He listened, and out of a feeling of desperation actually thought the prospect over carefully. It was seriously tempting. This idea—opiates for mood disorder—had been around since the fifties. Certain depressives, a minority in the scheme of things, responded only to opiates and not to more traditional remedies. So the issue was complicated. There seemed to be legitimate, medicinal reasons for thinking of heroin as an option, especially in light of the utter intractability of Elliott’s pain. The notion was preposterous on its face, but Elliott was vulnerable, open to pacifying rationalizations. He did not try heroin in Portland, but it’s not that he didn’t consider it, didn’t want to try it. It was his own tantalizing, secret siren.

As with
Roman Candle
, the set of songs recorded at Uppinghouse’s are succinct, deceptively simple, mostly acoustic tunes that showcase Elliott’s guitar dexterity, with rapid runs and intricate finger picking, although on occasion other instruments appear, such as soft drums and cymbals, harmonica, or the comically bleating keyboard drawing “Coming Up Roses” to a close. No single song leaps out as exceptionally powerful; there’s no “Last Call” in the mix, no obvious showstopper, although “Angel in the Snow” and “The White Lady Loves You More” feature gorgeous lullaby melodies, gentle and sweet, with the kind of captivating appeal Elliott always aspired to ever since finding the Beatles mesmerizing back in Cedar Hill. His songs, as he emphasized, were pop tunes, not monolithic, message-dominated folk. “The only tradition I like,” he told Carsten Wohlfeld in 1998, “is the tradition of a pop song being short and melodic. The singer-songwriter thing is kind
of irritating because so many of them have made grand statements about what’s wrong with the world … I just like to describe a situation and how you feel about it. I try to put all the things I like together”—the word-besottedness of people like Dylan and Lou Reed, plus the melodic aspects of the Beatles. What he was after, it seems, most consistently, was just that—melody, not meaningfulness. The latter took a back seat. In fact, one of the things he liked about pop particularly was its ambiguity—it wasn’t, in the best of instances, quickly decipherable lyrically, and it might mean several things at once. That’s not to say themes don’t appear, of course. And this time, unsurprisingly in light of the heroin fascination, the theme is drugs, the quick fix, the cure—as a possibility or an idea, if not an actuality. “Good to Go” features a junkie girl saying “you can do it if you want to.” In “St. Ides Heaven” people weigh in warningly about what “you should and shouldn’t do, but they don’t have a clue.” “Alphabet Town,” according to JJ Gonson, addresses heroin’s temptations directly, Elliott tagging along as a friend makes a buy in New York’s “haunted” Alphabet City. “I know what you want and it’s what I want,” Elliott writes. There’s a hand on his arm—as there is in “Needle in the Hay” and in “Single File,” where his arm’s got a “death in it.” “Let’s go out, I’m ready to go out,” he announces. What the songs document is vacillation, the ambivalence of wanting what part of him knows he needs to avoid. Strung-out people keep grabbing his arms, needles show up—“cold white brothers” in his blood; he throws up whatever gets shot down. It’s one scene of temptation after another, and there’s dialogue between the characters. Will they judge him, will they say it’s okay, will they give him permission, license to do as he wishes. It’s as if, in song, he’s mulling the subject over, imagining scenarios and future outcomes. But he can’t make up his mind; he never arrives anywhere. He tours the junk paradise but he never punches a ticket in. He’s still on the outside.