Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith (32 page)

Heatmiser live, Elliott and Peterson. Elliott’s shirt reads, “Bloodhound, a Dog Gone Good Chew.” (Photograph by JJ Gonson.)

“Plainclothes Man” is the other standout. Again a dark presence loiters malevolently, scheming to get Elliott alone, working to fuck everything up, “always there when all else fails.” The antidote is numbing alcohol—all one ever really needs—or dreaming colorlessly as a way of avoiding more depressing Technicolor details.

Ross Harris directed the “Plainclothes Man” video. He had a history with Elliott. He’d done some photo work for Beck and got to know Mittleman, who gave him a chance to come up with ideas for a “Coming Up Roses” concept, the song from Elliott’s self-titled record with the sustained howling electric piano at the end. Others had also pitched, but as Harris saw it, “they wrote some pretty involved things.” Before generating his own premise, he’d spoken with Elliott, quickly realizing that “he was not the kind of person who is into some elaborate preplanned scenario.”
³⁵
So he landed the gig and met Elliott for the first time at LAX. The two had a meal with Harris’s family, plus a “beer and maybe a joint,” as Harris laid out his loose treatment—the camera would follow Elliott as he pawned his guitar
for food. They shot with a Super-8 camera in the Colonia District of Oxnard, and in Saticoy and Santa Paula, places filled with dive bars and beat-up storefronts. Elliott “pretty much went with” what Harris had in mind, but then again “it wasn’t like I suggested these high-concept things with an army of Elliotts being attacked by toys and shit.” A lot of it, Harris says, “was accidental.” As it opens Elliott’s in a small room wearing shades and white socks and a white belt, his Ferdinand tattoo visible on his upper right arm. A makeshift band accompanies—Grace Marks on drums, a snare, and a “guy from the neighborhood,” Raul, on standing keyboard. Elliott heads out with his guitar in its case, off to the pawn shop. The colors switch from orange to yellow to red to black and white. At one point, not acting in the least, he pitches headlong into the dirt of a country road. A hearse shows up—Harris’s friend had just bought it—but it’s depicted broken down, getting charged by another car, both hoods open. To Harris the image suggested a cheating of death. No dead soul would be taken today; death was dead, not any person. Finally Elliott gets his cash, shown counted out to him. He buys milk and Jarritos sodas with their neon colors—orange, bright blue, fruit-punch red. As he wanders along a sidewalk kids flow out, some with skateboards, and he passes the soda around, saving one for himself. (The kids were Harris’s nephews.) It’s an achingly sweet moment; Elliott smiles and laughs as the kids converge on him. The sense is that the jollity is spontaneous. The song then ends, the piano moan erased.

For Heatmiser’s “Plainclothes Man” it was a different story. With Virgin tracking the process, Harris filmed with a crew and camera man, the label making things “more difficult.” They shot, this time, in Santa Paula. “The idea,” Harris explains, “was to have a guy down on his luck and he sees these everyday objects and they cause him to get lost in a daydream.” A passing boat on a trailer produces reveries; even the picture on a condom box sends the titular character into a trance visualizing sunset walks on beaches. There’s a shot, too, of Elliott inexpertly tackling Gust shoulder-first, a sarcastic comment, Harris felt, “about the supposed tensions within the band at the time,” although of course the tensions were a lot more than supposed. Performance shots are interspersed with plot, the white-haired, white-mustachioed man wandering streets asking for cash. He’s a benign, feckless presence; nothing like the song makes him out to be—a stalker
bent on “fucking up” little boys in blue. In truth, the video easily could have finessed a far darker angle, fabricated a bit more menace. In performance shots Elliott makes zero eye contact, although he’s the singer. He looks to the floor, as if reading from a lyric sheet. His lack of affect rhymes better with the lyrical content. He’s in a long-sleeved button-down, his hair looking like he showered with lard. Just before Elliott is shown stuffing toilet paper into his jacket in a convenience store, then spiriting out the door, followed by the shop owner. The plainclothes man spies a woman in an upstairs window, shot in overexposed black and white. He is in love, we figure. But a cop materializes by her side, and they wave, smiles pasted on their faces; she’s the Law’s squeeze, not Plainclothes Man’s. The latter spits disgustedly on the sidewalk. No love in his black-and-white world.

Another song, “The Fix Is In,” was set early on. It proved, finally, to be a serious shit-stirrer as it came into focus. Elliott had recorded all the music first, Lash explains, and Tony got added in later, layering drums over the instrumentation—“Never,” Lash says, “an easy or ideal thing to do.” Because it felt wrong, as if it were somehow “rushing the song,” Lash kept reworking the drum part, trying hard to get it to a point he felt to be less frenetic and pushy. With each redo Elliott got more and more annoyed, more “bugged.” He resented the waste of his time. He wanted to be done, to move on. Lash says, “He really misinterpreted what I was doing as this mindless, unnecessary search for perfection. The perception was that I needed things to be too clean, too precise, too polished.” The sense Lash got, the one he always had, in fact, was that if Elliott wanted precision, that was okay; yet if anyone else did, it was a problem. As a group, the
Mic City
songs were looser and quieter, Lash believed. The stylistic shift was obvious and Lash was bored. With Brandt gone, replaced by Sam, who to Peterson was part of the “Elliott Smith fan club” (for the moment, at least), Elliott’s animus now worked its way toward Tony. Tony was in the way of what he and Gust wanted. Tony was the problem. There was never any open discussion of how things were going to be different, but still the sound “morphed into something new, something never articulated,” says Lash. Elliott was asserting himself, ham-fistedly assuming artistic control. And to abet this, Tom Rothrock and Rob Schnapf, Margaret Mittleman’s husband, were brought in to produce just after work began. They were Elliott’s allies, more
or less, serving Elliott’s cause. Lash says now he was “happy to facilitate the recording process,” but he chafed at the changes. As he’d explained before, he wanted to rock out, and rocking out was happening less and less.

In the irrepressible “Pop in G,” with its contemptuous title and its reference to imaginary Mic City Sons “dumbing everything down,” Elliott vented new feelings about Lash. Revealingly, the tune has a mixed-up provenance. Some sources attribute it to Elliott, some to Gust. The sense is that neither felt comfortable owning up to the sentiments inside, references not lost on Tony, who saw the song as a graceless “fuck you.” You are as good as they come, but you’re “such a fucking trial,” sings Elliott. “You make me feel like I’m half my age, and at least twice as nervous.” Lash is a “statue” in a bar with feelings to kill. He whistles “Sweet Caroline” cluelessly, not wanting anyone to speak their mind. What he does mostly is bother people on purpose, Elliott (or Gust) writes. The note about feeling nervous and half his age is interesting. The fact is, although he was in the process of overcoming just these hang-ups in 1996, Elliott always felt intimidated by Tony, a tall, quiet, slightly intense presence. Uppinghouse was on hand a year before when Lash helped with the mixing for Elliott’s self-titled album. She noticed Elliott’s sheepishness around Lash, his deferential attitude. Lash felt, she says, that the product was sloppy, a bit too DIY. He proposed fixing it up, smoothing out annoying elements like the misused electric piano. Uppinghouse disagreed. She felt to do so would destroy the integrity of the songs. She felt they should remain as is, just like
Roman Candle
had before. In the end Uppinghouse’s position won out, there was no polishing done, or at least nothing significant. But her sense is that, had she not been there to support Elliott, things might have gone differently. Standing up to Tony was a problem for Elliott, in other words. His impulse had usually been to defer. So with
Mic City Sons
the story was changing. Likely due to his solo success—reviews piling up that confirmed the saliency of his vision—Elliott was newly emboldened. The volume on the self-doubt had been turned slightly down. He knew what he wanted, and people were telling him that what he wanted worked.

Lash also knew what he wanted, though, and it wasn’t this. Not only was Elliott dissing him in songs and (less so) in person, he was also announcing indirectly where his true interests were by keeping up a daunting touring schedule at the same time Heatmiser recorded in the Ankeny
house. From February to September 1996, Elliott was out performing his own songs, sometimes with a stray Heatmiser tune thrown in, in Tempe, New Orleans, Amherst and Bryn Mawr Colleges, Atlanta, Tempe again, the Knitting Factory in New York City, and Maxwell’s in Hoboken. Along the way new songs were being auditioned, to appear on later albums, many among his most arresting—“Angeles,” “Between the Bars,” and “Say Yes,” among them. It was plain Elliott was finished with Heatmiser, and Lash did everyone the courtesy of at last killing the crippled beast. Possessing an above-average talent for crafting angry letters, Lash harnessed it and let rip. In a late 1996 e-mail he told Elliott “screw you.” Apart from simply “venting a huge amount of frustration,” he accused Elliott of placing no value on his personal relationships in the band, his long friendships; all he cared about was the music, Lash said, and despite what he might believe, music was only part of the picture. Bands were people; the feelings of people needed to be accounted for—their hopes, their commitments, their expectations. “If you don’t want to do this anymore,” Lash suggested, “let’s just call it off, end it.” Elliott was nonresponsive. For a long time he was ambivalent about copping to his loss of interest; he felt bad about it, fearful of what it entailed. But he knew he was unhappy; he knew he was not having fun anymore; he knew he had taken over—he and Neil—and that doing so unilaterally and without explanation had destroyed the band. Lash was only saying, then, what everyone else was thinking. So Heatmiser didn’t so much die as fade away almost silently. Lash and Elliott did not speak for at least a year, although later, by accident, they made a sort of peace by means of a chance encounter at a coffee shop. This détente was partial, however. Ill feelings never dissipated entirely. And although not exactly deliberately avoidant when it came to Elliott’s later career trajectory, not disinterested or dismissive of his later success, including the 1998 Oscar nomination, Lash never listened to Elliott’s work, at least not the majority of it. To this day (2013) he has not heard entire albums. They would have been painful to hear, for one. Plus, what brief bits he stumbled on did not appeal to him.

There were, for inexplicable reasons, a few more performances, these with John Moen of the Maroons and Dharma Bums—and later The Decemberists—taking Tony’s spot. Jeff Stark reviewed one such 1996 show for
SF Weekly
. Brendan Benson with his occasionally Elliott-esque leanings
opened—Stark for some reason found him Pollyannaish, spouting the power of positive thinking. Stark described bassist Coomes as looking at certain points “like he was either fucking or severely drunk.” Gust was charming yet “borderline square,” his button-down shirt bespeaking “geek chic.” Elliott wore an Adam Ant T-shirt. He was “muscular and handsome,” says Stark, acting for all the world like “he’d left his depression in rainy Portland.” Slim chance of that; Elliott rarely left his depression anywhere. But still there was a lot of goofing off. In a bit of lovable roughhousing, Gust pushed Elliott down in the middle of one song. Coomes at one point announced mockingly, “We’ve got Soren Kierkegaard on guitar,” indicating Elliott, who replied “This one’s called ‘Fear and Trembling.’”

It sounded like good fun, but it was unsustainable and it was over, a last paroxysm of transient positive vibes. Finally openly avowing what he’d known even from Cedar Hill with Pickle and others, and from high school with Stranger Than Fiction and its later iteration Harum Scarum, Elliott told friends what interested him most was wearing all the hats. He could play bass and think like a bass player. He could play drums and think like a drummer. He could sing, then sing over himself with double-tracking, then harmonize with himself on a fresh track. He could, in short, make a band with chemistry out of how he wanted it to be if it included other real people. As he put it later in the song “Can’t Make a Sound,” why want any other when you are a world within a world? His approach, which required a Paul McCartney–like jack-of-all-trades virtuosity, left other people out of the equation. They were not necessary. In so many ways, psychologically, artistically, interpersonally, and as a reflection of personality, the solution was perfect. He
was
a band, so why be
in
one? He’d performed his apprenticeship, he’d tried including other players, often generously, self-effacingly; yet from here on out, with occasional minor and usually short-lived flirtations, he’d go it entirely alone, the way he liked to go it. Isolation took him through a tunnel to a bright world “where you could make a place to stay,” he sang once, past self-hatred, guilt, and shame. Musically, he
was
a world within a world. Whether he could succeed in being that in life may have been a different matter altogether. Anyway, Elliott Smith was now
Elliott Smith
.