Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith (44 page)

There were thrilling developments. The main one had to do with location. Elliott had casually mentioned the possibility of recording at Abbey Road studios, the historic home of the Beatles. It wasn’t a serious idea at first, more a lark. But “for some bizarre reason” his label took the notion
seriously, they picked it up and organized it. A week or so later, Elliott found himself there, with Joanna Bolme and others, including Sam Coomes, who had played on the final Heatmiser record. “Just walking in the place was amazing,” he said. “I made up a song on the same piano they used for ‘Penny Lane.’ ” Most of the time, he says, he was busy thinking only about the songs, not about the fact that he was standing where the Beatles stood. Though it was certainly a very big deal, he liked to “play it down.”
¹⁵
Bolme was more forthcoming in a piece she wrote for
Tape Op: Book II
. “You name it, they got it,” she said. Steinway grand and tack pianos, a Hammond C3 organ with two Leslies to choose from, electric harmonium, vintage Ludwig drum kits, even a pub in the basement with beers on tap. Studio one was thirty-nine feet high; it’s where orchestras and film scores got recorded. Studio three gave Bolme a weird vibe. She learned it was where
Dark Side of the Moon
was recorded; the Spice Girls, Morrissey, and Phil Collins also used it. Certain songs included orchestration—violins, violas, basses, and French horns. Elliott’s process was to play out what he had in mind on the piano, then give it to an arranger. If he happened to hear anything that did not sound quite right, he’d get on the talkback right away. The players found it to be an easy day’s work, repairing afterward to the pub. They were used to orchestral music and to working with temperamental conductors. Last-second changes, the sort Elliott introduced, were no issue at all. “It’s their job,” said Elliott. Even some “little smart-ass rock ‘n’ roller” failed to rub them the wrong way.

In all something like five songs were recorded in various versions at Abbey Road, including “Stupidity Tries,” an alternate take of “Junk Bond Trader,” and an acoustic “Pretty Mary K,” along with others that did not make the cut, “Brand New Game,” for instance, and “Tiny Time Machine.” (Draft lyrics for that tune feature Elliott dressed in black, a knife in his back, people crowding up his path to the future. A girl with a place in the sun sells people shade.)

Apart from the turn-taking between large-sound songs like those recorded at Abbey Road and more familiar acoustic numbers, there are aspects of the record that came to be called
Figure 8
(finally released in April 2000) that make it yet another departure. The album features a cast of characters straight out of “Desolation Row,” including stick men, Sergeant
Rock, invisible men changing clothes, statues, clowns, heroes, hitchhikers, police, Son of Sam, junk bond traders, songbirds, generals, a gentleman in green, a girl named Angelina, and even some guy appearing out of nowhere, Bruno S. As it turns out, Bruno S. is Bruno Schleinstein, an actor in several ’70s Werner Herzog films, including
Stroszek
. He didn’t so much act; he played himself, more or less, and some scenes were actually shot in his flat. As the
New York Times
explained, “he occupied the roles of damaged characters so completely and genuinely, so uncannily, that it was never quite clear how much he understood about what use was being made of him by the director. His performances were riveting, but he was obviously not well mentally.”
¹⁶
Bruno’s personal history resonated for Elliott. He was beaten as a child. Nazis performed experiments on him. Music “gave him a measure of solace and a way to escape his loneliness.” Shuffling between institutions, he first picked up the accordion, then grew adept at piano, bells, and glockenspiel. For Elliott, Bruno S. was a “real man,” a sort of existential model of being, an actor who did not know he was acting. In draft lyrics for the song “Color Bars” he also calls him a mirror mind, dancing in disease. Wedging Bruno into the song makes for a shot of covert autobiography. He had no interest in being a film star. And music was his way out. No other record includes this sort of parade of characters, this congress of selves. Metaphorically Elliott tossed out a range of secret identities, the sum total of which signifies, cacophonously, who he might be: stickman songbird.

Figure 8
also unpacks a conspicuous army-related theme, the generals, sergeants, and noncommissioned officers all showing up at different junctures. A sergeant, for instance, breaks the key off in a lock in “Color Bars,” pinning Elliott in the place he comes from. Veiled suicide references appear as everyone wants Elliott to ride into the sunset, but he battles back, for the moment, declaring “I ain’t gonna go down,” a phrase he was drawn to as a symbol of giving up and losing all hope. “Pretty Mary K,” most likely about his mother, whose name was Bunny Kay, pictures a soldier in bed with a “wound to the head.” Again he has run into the sun; he calls out to the woman, but a man in a soldier’s uniform waves her away. One of Elliott’s most powerful images occurs in “I Better Be Quiet Now.” He says he has a long way to go, but no matter what he does, he seems to be getting farther
away. It’s two steps up, three steps back. He recalls a dream. He’s an army man, ordered to march where he stands, as a “dead enemy” springs and wails in his face. It’s a picture of torture, Elliott in the role of castle guard who’s expected to stand stolidly and imperviously as any manner of torment works to alter his features. The record externalizes the internal war.

One other feature is a litany of absolutes, a prison of superlatives. The word “everything” shows up at least twenty times, along with numerous nevers, nothings, everyones, nobodies, nowheres, and alwayses. The song “Everything Means Nothing to Me,” which Elliott once called his favorite, appears just after “Everything Reminds Me of Her,” as if to dismiss the prior sentiment. In other words, even she means nothing. Initially it was meant to just be piano but in the studio the ending morphed into something a lot more bombastic, with drums and strings sweeping over the title Elliott keeps repeating in a stepwise upward scale. Finally drums and strings fade, and what’s left is the lonely piano, chords now falling down the scale in counterpoint, as if to signify the dropping mood. Elliott told an interviewer the song was, for him, uplifting. It was good to get to the point where it all meant nothing. It suggested the possibility of radical equanimity. Just like
XO
’s “Waltz #1,” the tune was written in L.A. during a two-day mushroom bender. As he told
NME
in April 2000, “I’ve made some things up in different states, but that was pretty new for me.” Mushroom-abetted or not, the land of absolutes is a land of raised emotional stakes. If not always, never. Theorists of depression call it “all-or-none” thinking. He’s stuck on a side he never chose (“Easy Way Out”), he’s got nowhere to go (“Son of Sam”), nothing could have been done (“Happiness”), he’d prefer to say nothing (“Better Be Quiet Now”), and as he notes on the record’s penultimate tune, just before the closer “Bye,” a piano piece with a sound identical to that on “Figure 8”: “the monologue means nothing to me.” There’s a ghost in every town, the hero killed the clown, yet he can’t make a sound.

Despite all this several reviewers went out of their way to label the record Elliott’s happiest. The verdict seems like wishful thinking. Even people who did not know him felt an instinct to wish him well, to picture him rising above it all. He declares he’s a “silent movie,” they declare him “high on the sound.”

As it happened, the song receiving the most attention—he played it on
the Conan show in late April 2000, with Sam Coomes supplying sweetly high harmonies—was the uninvitingly titled lead track, “Son of Sam.” In interviews Elliott took care to note that, grisly title aside, it wasn’t about any actual historical figure. What he meant to convey was the image of a destructive, repetitive person, or as he also said, two destructive figures. He might have had anyone in mind; at the same time, he might have been thinking of himself, his circling tendency for sabotage, especially when it came to love relationships. He was, as noted before, his own “couple killer.” When things got good, he got suspicious, doubting that he could count on them staying good for long. On the surface, however, it’s one of his more obscure numbers, a mash-up of ellipses. A boss shows up, as do doctors and nurses. Even Shiva opens her arms “to make sure I don’t get too far.”

A proper music video was made that the label distributed to outlets like MTV, among others. Elliott per usual didn’t want some “hot-shit Hollywood guy to make God knows what.”
¹⁷
He’d got to be friends with Autumn de Wilde, who lived just up the hill from Elliott in L.A.’s Echo Park, on Sutherland Street (Elliott’s place was a 1920s bungalow, with Alyssa Siegel next door). She’d taken
Figure 8’s
cover shot, and although she’d never made a video, she was interested, and Elliott liked and respected her photographs. The result was a comment, it seems, on fame’s deflations. In a mix of still pictures and live action, Elliott follows a red-orange balloon along city streets, in a brown suit jacket and a T-shirt matching the balloon’s color. He grabs its string, but releases it again, only to recommence the chase. It deflates in front of the Sunset wall featured on the record’s cover. Elliott picks up the forlorn rubber heap, then walks through the wall’s door. The balloon appears to have led him there; it’s as if he’s walking into his own album, a very nice effect. De Wilde’s record cover shot includes a comical element. Shadow apparently rendered Elliott’s hair invisible; his bowl cut, therefore, is a computer simulation. As de Wilde explained, “I gave him the choice of three hairstyles.”
¹⁸
For the video itself, his hair is atypically washed and nicely combed. He almost does not look like himself; he’s a sunny honor student out for a city stroll.

Figure 8
was met with the usual ethereal accolades, its top chart position ninety-nine in the U.S., thirty-seven in the U.K. “Shows the artist at the peak of his powers,” gushed
Rolling Stone
, a “haunted high-water mark,”
Elliott’s perpetual bummer expressed with “exquisite purity” and “ruthless, sad-eyed insight.” The magazine ranked the record number forty-two in its list of the hundred best albums of the 2000s.
NME
agreed, calling the record “Smith’s finest effort to date,” “awash with pretty ambiguities and difficult twists.” “Everything comes together with nary a wasted note,” said
Sputnikmusic
, the album “timeless” and “universal.”
Pitchfork
marveled at the effortlessness with which Elliott seemed capable of “crafting albums of instantly accessible pop,” an ability his musician friends recognized early on. Every song was good. He almost never misfired. There were rarely any simple duds.

The summer 2000 tour introduced a few new wrinkles. To this point Elliott had been mostly backed by Portland band Quasi, in his words the best rock ‘n’ roll outfit in the world, Coomes on bass and Sleater-Kinney’s Janet Weiss on drums. Coomes remained, but Scott McPherson took over drumming duties, and cowboy-hatted multi-instrumentalist Shon Sullivan, whom Elliott nicknamed Goldenboy, was brought on for guitars, piano, and occasional cello. Sullivan had seen Elliott before at the Troubadour, when he strode out in a hunter’s cap, carrying his guitar in a case. He played songs from the self-titled record, and Shon was “blown away. He was so spot on.” Yet again, what registered most with Sullivan at the time, what registered with everyone, was the fact that “all the songs were good. Every single one!” Later he watched
Good Will Hunting
and realized, “Hey! This is that guy.”
¹⁹

The two first met at McPherson’s home in the Fairfax District in L.A., just after
Figure 8
appeared. They played through a number of tunes to see how things might work out, Sullivan essentially auditioning. Piano parts, he felt, “were tricky,” full of “crazy chromatic runs” as in “Everything Means Nothing To Me,” and unique ways of “fingering chords and triads.” The piece Elliott liked to call “Honky Bach” struck Sullivan as especially “foreign” in terms of its phrasings, a result, most likely, of Elliott’s mainly self-taught piano. In all they rehearsed just three days—“Elliott wasn’t a big rehearsal guy,” Shon adds—then it was off to the U.K. and a “huge, huge show” at the Reading Festival. Sullivan sensed “it was a relief for Elliott to be away from the U.S.” He’d always felt “really, really stressed out” when family or friends were in attendance, so playing for relative strangers was an
easier experience, less fraught with emotion. On the tour bus they kept a battery-operated keyboard everyone messed around on, and after shows Elliott enjoyed cranking up The Stooges’
Raw Power
record. As was his habit, he’d play it over and over. Another tune he was “obsessed with” at the time was Lennon’s jaunty “No Reply,” about a girl who lies. Its A-minor, A-major shifts inspired a new song Elliott was then calling “Somebody’s Baby.” He tried it out for Sullivan, asking “You think I say
baby
too many times?” That very night the band played it in a musty civic hall.

One thing no one anticipated, a series of events, in fact, that weirdly duplicated Dylan’s electric rejection of folk, was crowd displeasure. It was hardly the norm, not a terribly big deal, but now and again people started calling out “do acoustic!” They wanted the old Elliott, not the new one with the fuller sound. They wanted “Roman Candle,” not “Junk Bond Trader.” At times amateur music historians in the crowd cleverly shouted “Judas,” the same accusation leveled at Dylan. And copying Dylan’s reply exactly, Elliott said “I don’t believe you. You’re a liar!”
²⁰
The new songs “caught people off guard,” Sullivan recalls. They weren’t getting what they thought they’d paid for. All the same, “it was the direction Elliott wanted to go in,” Sullivan says. “He didn’t want to do more acoustic tours.” He’d been there, he’d been the lonely tortured troubadour, and he was restless for new modes, new forms of expression. The older stuff bored him, and if he played it now, which he still did on occasion, he electrified it, in the process amping the songs up with gloriously unexpected energy, breathing heavy, almost grungy life into them, as in a truly spectacular September 2000 performance in Seattle at Bumbershoot.
²¹
What is fascinating about these electrified revisions of the acoustic material is how well the songs came off. They had always seemed intrinsically acoustic, ill-suited by definition for any other treatment. But they weren’t at all. They could actually rock, as with “Needle in the Hay,” the Bumbershoot opener. It was almost as if, with some of these later performances, Elliott returned to a Heatmiser mode. He demonstrated what many had sensed all along, what JJ Gonson, for one, had argued back in the early ’90s: Elliott’s solo material could have, with the right finessing, fit into the Heatmiser vibe.