Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith (33 page)

Wherever one looked,
1997 was a strange, dismal, dysphoric year. Princess Diana died fleeing paparazzi in a Paris tunnel, the world sutured to what Martin Amis and Saul Bellow called the subsequent “event glamour,” the drawn-out collective mourning that led, months later, to a new version of an old Elton John song reaching number one on the charts. As if timed to heighten the ritualized despair, Mother Teresa also died, the two figures, both mothers, cemented together in memory, Diana receiving courtesy sainthood. The music world lost The Notorious B.I.G. and INXS’s Michael Hutchence, one by gunshot in the rap gang wars, the other by suicide with a belt tied to a doorknob, or, as was later suggested, by erotic auto-asphyxiation (although the coroner disputed this characterization). Sportscaster Marv Albert was charged with biting an unnamed sex partner, Eddie Murphy got stopped by police (though not charged) for picking up a transsexual prostitute. The pop charts were ruled by Mariah Carey and “MMMBop,” cotton candy by brothers Hanson. In indie land, Built to Spill, Modest Mouse, Green Day, and Radiohead released records; Bob Dylan, the artist who, according to Denny Swofford, Elliott ranked number one in his pantheon, put out
Time Out of Mind
, which Greil Marcus called a “Western, really, made of ghost towns and bad weather, a complete and uncompromised work of American art.”
¹
Ghost towns and bad weather describe Elliott’s songs too, many of them haunted, many overcast and misty like the Portland in which they came to be made.

For Elliott, the year was a tale of two cities, Portland and New York. It was, in cliché’s Platonic form, the best of times and the worst of times. Best in terms of the music, epitomized by the sublime mish-mash record
Either/Or
, released by Kill Rock Stars in early 1997. Worst in terms of the psyche that served it, whirlpooling in drink and depression more and more frightening by
the day. It was the same old story under magnification. The music kept rising, the person kept falling.

Like Elliott did, Heatmiser’s Neil Gust went his own way too, fronting a new band with the name No. 2, which years later, in 1999, put out
No Memory
, engineered by Bolme, Tony Lash, and another of Elliott’s close friends, Larry Crane, with whom he’d helped to start up Jackpot! Recording. Lash also played some electric piano for the No. 2 record, Coomes bass, and for two songs Elliott sang backup, an obvious sign that relationships were not entirely broken. About Elliott’s solo work Gust was, at first, enthusiastic. He called the self-titled record “flawlessly executed” and “tremendously inspiring.” Later works, however, he had some trouble with. “I start to hear him using music to attack himself and other people,” he said, “as his problems become more and more [pronounced]. As it goes on later I do find it hard to listen to.”
²
This turned out to be a standard reaction. Lash and Peterson felt the same way. They weren’t acolytes, their knowledge of Elliott’s catalogue surprisingly spotty.

The pace of Elliott’s songwriting from ’96 to ’97 was a dead sprint, a time when he wrote or recorded the songs that sent him into his own iconoclastic stratosphere. He was in what psychologists of creativity call flow, free from Heatmiser, untethered and generative to a degree new even for him, which is saying something. “Alameda,” “Between the Bars,” “Say Yes,” “Angeles,” “Division Day,” “Go By,” “Going Nowhere,” “Abused,” “Bottle Up and Explode!” (and covers of “Thirteen” and Bowie’s “Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide”)—all bewilderingly gorgeous tunes, all irresistible, all written in a lightning storm of artistic frenzy. It’s mystifying how certain periods in an artist’s life come to assume such proportion. Henry Miller liked to refer to the “mysterious X-factor.” Norman Mailer emphasized the need for some sort of activating wound demanding documentation, if it didn’t eat into you first and kill you. No wound, Mailer asserted, no great art. The wound made the difference. Elliott felt the wound in spades. It dominated his subjective sense of who he was, and his attachment to it would almost end him forever; but he was also enjoying the effects of sustained hard work. All the making of songs was paying off, and in a fashion he most likely recognized, even though he was quick to find fault in what he did. Like most great creators, he’d achieved a fluency that quickened and deepened the process at
once. The larger part of him knew he was very good; he struggled with performance, but he did not lack confidence. The smaller part was a merciless critic, as if anything coming out of him was axiomatically suspect or flawed. He found it hard to judge songs. There were times he thought they all sucked. Unlike Dylan, he struggled to shirk off all the crap piled on top of him. He worried the music business might grind him up, despite the fact that, by his own estimation, he didn’t sell millions of records nor did most people have any idea who he was. It wasn’t so much that others expected him to be huge; the conflict was internal, a clash between authentic self-definition and role playing. Elliott stood here, and right behind him, posturing and murmuring, stood the “Smith Myth.” They weren’t antithetical, but they weren’t tautological either. As he had said in April 1997: “You gotta get out there and show what it’s like to be a person, that’s what I’m gonna do. It might be good or it might be bad, but I’m gonna show what it’s like to be a person.”

In a simple sense what was going on with Elliott was not all that unusual. Self is part story; we script who we are. Everybody has his or her own personal myth, the master narrative we tell ourselves and others about who we are. It can be factual, it can be fictionalized. A portion of Elliott’s myth exists in the songs, of course, in lines like the “devil’s script” selling him the “heart of a blackbird,” for instance. In that way he was different. Unlike others not so artistically inclined, he pulled from experience songs that told stories, and those songs possessed themes implying deep concerns—the myth in progress, constantly updated and refined. Also, on a large scale, other people, usually people who did not know him, or knew only the songs, imposed myths on him—the “troubled troubadour,” the death-obsessed existentialist pop star, the DIY god, the avatar for dreary gray Portland. These were the notions Neil Gust, among others, felt he was beginning to buy into, the ones that, in some ways, he resented, but in others found himself living out. Brandt Peterson, whose concept of Elliott is as nuanced as anyone’s, spoke of the “cult of Elliott Smith.” To him there were two main readings. For some people, those not cult members, Elliott wrote “whiny, narcissistic songs” of failure, weakness, victimhood. For others he was “insightfully introspective,” with a freighted backstory lending “weight” to the tunes. This is yet another component of every possible myth—the
origin tale. There are torturous beginnings—omitting all the good times with Pickle, Denbow, Kim, and Merritt, with his parents, with Ashley and Darren—but these are overcome by dint of art promising total freedom or even redemption. For a portion of his life this was the space Elliott occupied, the archetypal forked road. One route led to redemption, the other contamination. Everyone in Elliott’s life kept urging the redemption direction, waving him forward. Yet Elliott, much of the time and against his own interests, chose the darker side streets.

Recorded in 1996, “Pictures of Me” is an instance of sizing the myth up and refusing to accommodate. Elliott worked on the song for days at Undercover, JJ Gonson’s new venture beneath the Morrison bridge on Portland’s east side, near where the opening of Gus Van Sant’s
Drugstore Cowboy
was filmed. It was part performance space, part compilation/project label. The idea was to produce cover albums (hence “Undercover”). Cat Power did one. Local bands did too, essaying ’80s new-wave tunes by the Go-Go’s, Gary Numan, and others for an EP called
Tiger Stripes Forever
, put out on yellow and black vinyl. For one of those songs Elliott actually produced (Gonson can’t recall which tune this was). The label’s most successful record was
Crash Course for the Ravers
, a set of David Bowie covers. Its release coincided with a Bowie anniversary; serendipity led to sales of around eight thousand copies, which set the label up nicely for several additional years of operation. For JJ Elliott recorded Bowie’s “Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide,” a choice suggesting more than slight courting of the Smith Myth. Gonson believes the song was made for the
Crash Course
record, yet, for reasons possibly having to do with timing, it didn’t get included. Additional projects included
Fleetwood Mac: Patron Saints of Pop
, on which Jeff Buckley appeared singing backup on a tune recorded by his girlfriend (“That’s All for Everyone”), and
Letters to Aliens
, a “totally over-the-top” two-disc set, Gonson says, complete with postcard and sticker inserts.

As Elliott hammered out “Pictures of Me,” JJ kept a safe distance. By this point the two weren’t speaking, not because they didn’t want to, but because it was too hard to try. There was ongoing tension, too, between Gonson and Bolme. “Elliott and I stayed away from each other,” JJ says. “If we interacted it ended in drama and tears. One of us would always start crying. It was awful.” But from an adjoining room she listened over and over
to the pounding of the drums, a track Elliott kept reworking in keeping with the tune’s first line, “start, stop, and start.” His ambivalence reaches an apex in this song, musically straightforward, lyrically complex. The tune builds slowly, a held synth chord giving way to climbing acoustic runs—as if he’s heading straight for the top—then it’s all guitar chords pouncing down on the beat, with synth doubling them or departing for harmony. No drums kick in until Elliott works his way through the first few verses. On one hand, the song’s a rejection of “all these pictures of me” of which he’s sick and tired, external interpretations of identity that keep getting pushed his way, that he can’t avoid seeing, even though they strike him as totally wrong. For kicks he flirts with them even as he hides, looking at his feet, frozen in fear every time they appear. He’s got himself to “tease and displease,” he sings, and in some ways to blame for all of it. He’ll end up the victim of his “own dirty tricks”—his desire for fame, for success, and his simultaneous disavowal of the pretense of wanting it in the first place and doing what he can to get it. The song says he knows the game, and he knows he’s playing while despising it all the same.

In an unreleased version the plot’s simpler. He sees a girl on a blue screen, an image of the one he loves. But another guy appears. “I couldn’t compete,” he says. “Don’t expect to see me begging you please.” The finished take obscures the girl, the lover who leaves him, and focuses more on the image, although this “other guy” remains, a jailer wanting Elliott on his “fucking knees.” In the first version he’s competing with a guy for a girl; in the final version he’s competing with himself for the image (that sells “personal hells”). The song thumps to a close and the chorus repeats as if to fade, but its bottom drops out; there’s a musical descent like a fall, like sound hitting an elevator shaft. “Everybody’s dying just to get the disease,” Elliott sings three times. It’s a chilling final observation. The disease is the big blue screen of fame—which Elliott predicts with “Pictures of Me,” the Oscar performance more than a year off. It may kill him to get it, to find what he wants but doesn’t. Reviewing the song, Chandler and Wagner advise, “Don’t let the Beatlesesque bounce lull you … This candy apple has a razor in it.”
³

The record on which “Pictures of Me” appeared was the anything but declamatory
Either/Or
, its existentialism front and center. The songs,
emerging from different moods and head spaces, employing jarringly different production values, were recorded all over the place, some at Joanna Bolme’s house, some at Elliott’s or the Heatmiser house, at Undercover, Laundry Rules Recording—Larry Crane’s home studio from 1994 to 1997—and The Shop. Elliott saw these tunes as less theory-centered and more about achieving a sort of poppy irrepressibility—in a word, “catchiness”—though ideas, befitting the Kierkegaardian title, were not in short supply. Practically speaking it was an embarrassment of riches, and that fact made the record almost impossible to get done. They were too many songs, around thirty or so, and here again, unlike the first two solo albums (critically adored but not commercially successful), recorded when the background noise of expectation and modest acclaim was easy to mute, the “little germ,” as Elliott said, of what people wanted from him made it harder not to care, not to tangle himself to the point of paralysis. Creativity was easier when no one looked forward to a next potential big thing. The songs were easily the best he’d ever made, yet picking through them, selecting which to include and which to abandon, was harrowing, an exercise in self-doubt and second-guessing. In fact, he preferred when other people sang his songs because then they sounded more real, more like songs. “When I play them,” he said, “they just sound like things I made up and I have no idea if they are good or bad.”
⁴
As noted, a chief ambient influence was the Beatles, especially
Magical Mystery Tour
and
The White Album
. (With respect to the former, he says he turned it off after “Penny Lane,” skipped “Hello Goodbye” but really liked “Blue Jay Way.”)

The album cover looks like a UPS ad—all browns and oranges—Elliott smoking in his “Heli-Jet” cap (a helicopter company) and a Hank Williams Jr./Bocephus T-shirt, behind him a graffiti-strewn mirror filled with curlicues, and just below it two oxymoronic commands on the wall: “Fuck you” and “Turn on.” The back is a lit chandelier resembling a Rorschach inkblot.

The muffled fuzz of “Speed Trials” starts the record off, a tune that would have been more at home on either of the first two albums. Its hollow drumbeats echo like a felt stick striking an empty gasoline can. Their snap grounds the song perfectly, a bee-bee gun day at the rifle range. The lyrics also describe an echo or ricochet, tracking the same thought paths spelled
out above. “Sweet high notes” of the kind Elliott was known for “echo back to destroy their master.” The “little child” thinks he’s tough—that’s the act, at least—but all the people he feels superior to “know what’s the matter.” The human pinball follows the path of least resistance. Life’s a speed trial—all preparation and qualification, no race.