Elliott Smith and the Big Nothing Read online

  ELLIOTT SMITH

  AND THE BIG NOTHING

  Elliott Smith

  AND THE BIG NOTHING

  Benjamin Nugent

  Copyright © 2004 by Benjamin Nugent

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Printed in the United States of America.

  Cataloging-in-Publication data for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

  First Da Capo Press edition 2004

  ISBN 0-306-81393-9

  eBook ISBN: 9780786738106

  Published by Da Capo Press

  A Member of the Perseus Books Group

  http://www.dacapopress.com

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  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9—07 06 05 04

  IN MEMORY OF

  AK , CR ,

  IN RETROSPECT SWEET KIDS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Alexandra Van Buren, Amy Williams, and Ben Schafer were essential. I was stunned they let me focus on Smith’s life and work even after his death became a news story.

  A stranger to Elliott Smith’s kin, I found them reasonable and polite. For information I turned to Smith’s friends and acquaintances; Marc Swanson was especially valuable for persuading others to talk and for setting straight many of my errors, as was Bill Santen for being the first of Smith’s colleagues to trust me. David McConnell, Dorien Garry, JJ Gonson, EV Day, Rob Schnapf, Pete Krebs, Andrew Morgan and everyone else quoted herein made the book much better than it otherwise would have been and enabled me to avoid anonymous sources.

  Gabriel Snyder led me to Alec Bemis, who led me to two crucial interviews. My sister Annie Baker duped Hampshire College security forces so that I could look at freshman photos. Jessica Flashman, Rachel Maude Reilich, Laura Stupsker and the Icehouse provided places to crash. Props to Matthew Elblonk.

  I am forever indebted to Mel Flashman and my parents, Conn Nugent and Linda Baker.

  INTRODUCTION

  ELLIOTT SMITH SITS hunched in a wooden chair on a stage in Portland, Oregon, in February 1999. He lists forward over his acoustic guitar to edge his mouth close to the mic, wearing the thin, conspiratorial smile of a person accustomed to talking to himself. His fingers pluck at the strings professionally, but his voice is quiet and he barely looks up between songs, so it’s easy to believe he’s singing alone. After the applause that follows each song, the hometown crowd falls into a clean silence—nobody reacts to the music, nobody moves, and nobody talks. The crowd doesn’t want to hear him perform, it seems, so much as it wants to overhear him.

  This is a singer whose solo career started out as a private affair, a series of songs he wrote largely under the stairwell of an old house in this city with no intention of making them public. Except for his father, Gary, and a scattering of old friends, the audience doesn’t know this. But Smith’s records and his concerts retain the feeling of internal dialogue and everybody picks up on it. Only when he acknowledges requests does Smith shatter the illusion that he’s singing alone.

  “How was New York?” somebody asks; he moved there from Portland almost two years ago, and now he’s spending more and more time in Los Angeles. “Okay,” says Smith, “I didn’t like it better there than I did here.” This is taken as a ringing endorsement of Portland—more applause. Later on, after a particularly long ovation, he stokes the local pride: “It’s really fun to play here.” Elliott Smith, by Elliott Smith standards, is really working the crowd this time. He’s dressed like a punk, with white patches on his knees and a wool cap pulled over his limp black hair, but it’s the quietest punk rock show I’ve seen. Smith sings like he’s contemplating secrets, and he is.

  Three years later, I’ll ask Lucinda Williams what advice she’d give a novice songwriter. She answers without hesitation: You have to look into the darker side of life. Smith’s music exemplifies this idea; his life had good and bad in it like anybody else’s, but he exercised a gift for writing about melancholy. He wasn’t the stricken cartoon depressive people thought he was; he was a wit, a philosopher, and a workhorse. But he was also an Orpheus, happy to explore the depths. It’s often said shortly after the death of a musician that there was nothing romantic about his problems, but Smith embroidered songs around scraps of turbulent emotional experience until the problems were romantic. That was the bond between his music and his life.

  The means by which that life ended have been “undetermined” since the LAPD decided in January 2004 that it acted hastily in calling the events of October 21, 2003, an apparent suicide. So far, nobody’s been charged with murder. There is no open-and-shut case for suicide or for homicide, but there is evidence that suggests some possible answers.

  Some readers, no doubt, hope for a book about Smith’s death, and some Elliott Smith fans surely will be offended by any discussion of his personal problems. It might be possible to fill a book with reminiscences of Smith giving money to the homeless and doing the moonwalk, but that would be as deceptive as writing a book that described only his sad moments. If I were to write exclusively about Smith smoking crack and weeping in taxi cabs it would be the Gossip Page version of his life; but the sanitized character sometimes put forth by people who liked Smith is a Personals version: “Good at Ms. Pac-Man, great sense of humor, loves to dance and talk Kierkegaard.” Neither provides much insight into how he came up with his songs, how he developed his empathy for the downtrodden, or how he acquired the wisdom evident in his lyrics.

  Besides, with some artists, a certain amount of bad behavior is excused by the strength of the work that dwells and feeds on that behavior. For those of us who didn’t quarrel with Smith personally, no self-destructiveness or self-deceit on his part could drain the fund of goodwill built up by his records. I’m a typical Elliott Smith fan, meaning that I fell in love with his music at a time when I wanted to fashion a noose out of my vintage t-shirt collection. In my first summer after college I broke up with my girlfriend, got into car accidents, and entered data into a computer at a bookstore; Smith’s first album, Roman Candle, became the only object, inanimate or otherwise, that understood me.

  While the role Smith played for so many people like me was companion in misery, Smith recoiled from articles that suggested he might be a poster boy for depression, arguing that the sadness in his words was necessary for making the happiness meaningful. In one sense this was an argument belied by action—Smith’s behavior and conversation often suggested he was more genuinely sad than most rock musicians. But he had a valid point in that his themes were different from those of misery’s usual representatives in rock. Robert Smith of The Cure, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, and Kurt Cobain all aimed their curses outward—at lovers, government conspiracies, and complacent masses—as often as they aimed them inward. In Elliott Smith’s songs the harsh light of his scrutiny shines almost exclusively inward, onto his most personal troubles. The happy moments come when the narrator finds he is liked and understood despite what that light has thrown into relief—when the self-doubt recedes and allows sweeter emotions to take root.

  Smith was no egomaniac; he criticized and doubted himself to the point of excess, and self-doubt was one of his undoings as a man and one of his great distinctions as a songwriter
. His narrators often feel contempt for their own impulses. From “There was a grown man dying from fright,” the first words of “Division Day,” to “I think I’m gonna make the same mistake twice,” a refrain in “Punch and Judy,” Smith fixates on character flaws. When you match up his life with his music, or consult his close friends, quoted in these pages, it becomes clear that sometimes he sings about himself.

  In 1991, the year Smith moved from Amherst, Massachusetts, where he attended Hampshire College, back to Portland, Oregon, where he’d been an honor student at Lincoln High School, grunge was about to enter its heyday. A chunk of the nation’s youth would soon cling to the pronouncements of Kurt Cobain, who was given to the inflammatory and the dramatic: “Rape me,” “God is gay, burn the flag,” “I wish I could eat your cancer when you turn black.” Cobain became, to his own amazement and consternation, a messianic figure for his millions of teenage and twenty-something fans. He publicly declared Portland a candidate for The Next Seattle, and the city was awash in loud rock bands. Smith was in one of them, Heatmiser, and unsatisfied with the music he was making. “I’ve been recording stuff on my own since I was in high school. By the time I was in a band, I lived in a part of the world where it was all grunge music,” he once told Rolling Stone. “Which I liked, but it seemed like, why would anybody wanna hear this right now?”

  He left behind grunge for four-track voice and guitar recordings, and wrote songs that aimed, in his own words, “to show what it’s like to be a person.” That may seem a hokey mission statement at first blush, but Smith’s songs were indeed concerned with the emotional fluctuations of everyday life, the ones brought on by average loneliness, decadence, apathy, poverty, love. His lyrics didn’t have to take the listener inside tantrums, the way Nirvana’s or Pearl Jam’s or Bikini Kill’s lyrics did. Bands like Belle and Sebastian, Bright Eyes, and The Strokes followed Smith in that direction, his albums having represented rock’s first steps toward reinventing itself once the well of grunge had run dry.

  There was a hole in popular music of the late ’90s where rock’s songwriters should have been. From 1995 to 2000, when most of Smith’s music was released, it was the best of times for Tricky, Wyclef Jean, Orbital, The Backstreet Boys, and, at the very end of the decade, the burgeoning New York dance-rock scene. Meanwhile, the audience for pop music decided pop could lose the people with guitars who delivered songs they’d written themselves from a seated position. After Kurt Cobain’s suicide in 1994, alternative-rock records stopped selling like they had when he was alive. The alt bands that survived, like Silverchair and Bush, stuck to the volume level and bellowing quotient of their predecessors but dispensed with the wordplay and folk overtones that set Cobain apart from Scott Weiland, the sensitive belter of Stone Temple Pilots. The indie rock world from which Nirvana had sprung was growing disillusioned with singer-songwriters too. Pavement broke up almost precisely at the end of the century. Other comparatively high-profile indie bands of the time, like The Make-Up, played rock-star caricatures on stage and on their CDs, retaliating against the fake earnestness of big-money alt-rock by being fakes. Still others floated off into experimental music largely because, as a delighted Thurston Moore observed, it was one genre guaranteed never to become popular, immune to dilution by major labels and hungry imitators.

  Most of the bands that helped Smith carry the torch for songwriting once he hit it big in 1998 didn’t find widespread recognition, but there were a few notable exceptions: The Magnetic Fields, a vehicle for Stephin Merritt, Smith’s rival as a lyricist and melody writer, and Belle and Sebastian, who followed in Smith’s footsteps more closely than any other band of the time period, achieved a degree of fame a year or two after he did. Belle and Sebastian’s frontman, Stuart Murdoch, laid down his intentions in “Get Me Away from Here I’m Dying,” off If You’re Feeling Sinister: “Nobody writes them like they used to/So it may as well be me.” If Smith had written a manifesto, that assertion would have been near the top. Smith had started writing catchy, traditional folk-rock songs with explicitly personal rather than sociopolitical content when grunge was at its peak commercially and artistically; when grunge died, it turned out Smith had chanced upon a key to rock’s revival.

  That leaves the questions of what forces in Smith’s life made him the songwriter he was, and where he picked up a moral philosophy that sometimes bordered on the Puritanical. Something compelled him to depart from the loud rock of Heatmiser and take up a folk-rock sound, with a vocal style so different from his previous one that it’s hard to identify the two styles as belonging to the same singer. Something made him sink into a troubled period toward the end of his life. The same characters, events, and ideas that shaped his songs shaped the trajectory of his thirty-four years.

  One of the unfortunate aftereffects of a premature death is the haze of convenient oversimplification that settles over the victim. To much of the press, Smith quite understandably looked like a simple case of an artist too sensitive to function in the hard world, let alone in the wasteland of Los Angeles. Some journalists did ample detective work on his death but nobody had much time to take a close look at the life that preceded it. Fans Photoshop’d the word “Hero” over his picture and propped it up against the Solutions store wall in Los Angeles (previously photographed for the cover of Figure 8).

  Neither the sensitive-martyr nor the hero tributes get Smith right. The Smith that materializes in interviews with people who loved him is a tough man, the kind that cracks his friends up at a bar even as they worry about his problems. And he often wrote songs from the perspective of an anti-hero, a character who leads by negative example. There was a trace in that narrator of Johnny Boy from Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets, the delinquent street kid who courted death by racking up debt to small-time mobsters. The extremity of Johnny Boy’s behavior awakened those around him to their own subtler self-destruction and self-deceit. When he died, he wasn’t a martyr; he had provoked destruction for no good reason and he knew it. But the effect he had on people who observed him was a kind of salvation. They saw he was a version of them, and with that epiphany came a shot at grace.

  Smith probably wouldn’t have cared for the idea of a book being written about him. It would have offended his humility and his desire to fashion his own identity. His position would have been that he was just an artist trying to get through life and make music. One of the most concise summaries I’ve encountered of Smith’s view of himself came to me from his friend, the sculptor E. V. Day:

  “We bonded talking about being an artist, talking about the loneliness, the solitude, talking about who has control, and why it’s important to make work. We talked with wonder and conflict about what we do. He had the ability to be very funny, but he also had the sadness, and his ironies made him a dynamic person. He always wanted to be truthful and real; he wasn’t a phony. He was a very pure artist. And when you live with that kind of purity, it’s really hard to deal with the rest of the world. Because you’re not playing on the same field. . . . It’s sort of about acknowledging that you’re so lonely in this individuality that in a way there is no payoff. You’re just trying to do more of what you do and stay alive.”

  This is the story of an artist who just wanted to do what he did and stay alive, and there’s nothing simple about that. First he did a lot of good work, and suffered, and survived. Then he was rewarded for his work, and he numbed himself, worked less, and did not survive. This book will provide clues to how it happened. Smith threw himself into the labor of self-expression to the point that he came to need it. Maybe this book will illuminate for a seventeen-year-old taking guitar lessons what it means to live that way.

  One

  AN INSTRUMENTAL : “ STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN ”

  STEVEN PAUL SMITH was born at 12:59 a.m. on August 6, 1969, at Clarkson Hospital in Omaha. The hospital is about fifteen blocks west of the Mutual of Omaha building and one block east of Saddle Creek Road, which arcs through the prosperous neighborhood that spawned the fo
unders of the indie rock label Saddle Creek Records.

  Steven Smith’s parents, a twenty-four-year-old medical student named Gary Mac Smith and his twenty-five-year-old wife, Bunny Smith, née Bunny Kay Berryman, lived nearby on 41st Street, according to his birth certificate. The apartment complex still stands, and if it stood in a place with greater extremes of wealth and poverty than those of the tidy neighborhood surrounding the Nebraska Medical Center campus, it would flirt with squalor. But in its current context, with students carrying their backpacks home from class and nearby vegetarian dining, the building looks merely humble and uncomfortable, like a cut-rate roadside motel. It’s shaped like a C, with a tiny courtyard of grass bisected by a cement path filling in the middle. The apartments are small, conjoined brick bungalows. It’s hard to imagine they allow an optimum level of privacy. They certainly wouldn’t allow a young couple with a newborn optimum space. But it was a one-minute walk from where Gary took classes. The hospital where baby Steven was born was essentially part of the campus.

  This must have been a trying time for the Smiths, he a native Nebraskan, she a Texan. They would part ways soon after the baby arrived, and Bunny would move with her son back to the state where she was born. The couple had married in Dallas in 1966, when Gary was already living in the little apartment on 41st Street. When Steven was one-and-a-half, in 1970, Bunny filed for divorce and was granted custody of their only child, while Gary, who had just earned his MD from the University of Nebraska College of Medicine, was granted visitation rights and asked to pay child support. He would go on to become a psychiatrist in Portland, Oregon, where he lives today.