Elliott Smith and the Big Nothing Read online

  Heatmiser may not have received any international touring offers from Nirvana, but they did get signed to a reputable indie label that helped them build a fan base, grunge kid by grunge kid. Frontier Records, founded by Lisa Fancher in 1980 and based in Sun Valley, California, grew up with the Southern California hardcore scene and evolved with California punk. One of its earliest releases was Group Sex by the Circle Jerks, a band fronted by Keith Morris, the original singer for seminal LA punk band Black Flag. The label went on to embrace goth bands like Christian Death and eclectic rock bands like American Music Club. In the late ’80s they made their first major Northwestern acquisition by signing Seattle’s Young Fresh Fellows, the poppy, geeky forerunners of Barenaked Ladies. Along the way Frontier released the first album by Suicidal Tendencies, who went on to find fame on MTV. Heatmiser released three albums on the label: two LPs, Dead Air (1993) and Cop and Speeder (1994), and the EP Yellow No. 5 (1994).

  Frontier has made public two documents left over from Heatmiser’s tenure that suggest there was a generally harmonious relationship between the band and its office-bound handlers. One is a note from Smith in the handwriting familiar to readers of the lyric sheets to Roman Candle, Elliott Smith, and Figure 8. It has cutiepie Japanese cartoon characters printed on it, and an upbeat message: “Hello, here’s the tape and, well, some penguins and sharks—luv, Elliott.” A postcard the band sent from Ohio (it’s stamped with the logo of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame) is even sunnier. Addressed to “Our Friends @ Frontier,” it sends greetings from Gust (“Hi. We’re getting a lot of free drinks. Bet you wish you were with us. Ha Ha Ha. Love, Neil”), Lash (“P.U.!”), a possibly sarcastic Peterson (“We’ve made so many lovely new friends, and Indianapolis was great! Miss you, Brandt”), and Smith (“You can play ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ here on the jukebox. Lost my train of thought. Love, Elliott”).

  “They were really excited when Frontier approached them and they were doing really well in Portland,” Swanson recalls. “People really gave Heatmiser a chance,” says Bill Santen, a musician playing around Portland in the ’90s with a revolving cast of supporting musicians under the name Birddog. Built to Spill’s Doug Martsch, he remembers, became such a fan that he wore a Heatmiser t-shirt when he came to town.

  After Smith became nationally well-known, early Heatmiser songs became an in-joke for a lot of Elliott Smith fans who considered them vastly inferior to his solo work. But the band was part of a rock scene that blazed trails, largely as a result of Gust’s forthrightness about being gay in his lyrics. Portland would eventually become home to a lot of explicitly gay-themed punk bands, some of which described their music as “queercore.” But in the early ’90s—Heatmiser’s first record, Dead Air, was released in 1993—it was novel to hear gay love songs set to punk rock.

  “I really liked Portland compared to San Francisco because there was this whole scene up there where everyone was just into indie rock bands,” says Swanson, who’d moved to San Francisco. “It didn’t matter if they were gay or straight or whatever, which was a really big deal to me at that time. Whereas San Francisco had a gay thing but nobody went to see rock bands . . . it definitely wasn’t the same thing as Portland, where it was this whole contingent of the gay indie rock kids, which was a real revelation to me. . . . All of a sudden Neil and Elliott had all these friends who were also playing in bands who were gay guys.”

  On Dead Air, Smith sang lead vocals on eight songs and Gust on six. Some of the strongest songs on the album are Gust’s, because they seem best served by the feel of the band. Gust’s voice strains less than Smith’s to be heard above the tank brigade of the guitars. And in the context of Heatmiser, Gust’s expressions of gay-white-guy angst are often more interesting than Smith’s lyrics. Before queercore officially existed, it must have been refreshing to hear, over Fugazi–Minor Threat riffs, references to picking suits from men’s magazines (“Candyland”) and romantic plaints like “I don’t know what’s genuine/so I go back and forth with him” (“Can’t Be Touched”).

  But it wasn’t that novelty that attracted all of the band’s fans. There was a jock component at the shows, and it perplexed Smith; he remarked later that he felt like he was playing to kids who would have beat him up in high school, and that the tough punk personality he adopted for that band was a posture.

  But Swanson remembers a Smith who clearly felt the rage in the music he was singing. “Elliott was a toughie. He was the lead guy on a lot of those songs and . . . I just remember him being so ‘raaah!’ He was pissed and it was obvious. And it was strong, it was there, his songwriting was really good, but he was obviously in it. I remember that one “Wake.*” I remember it being super powerful and the kids in Portland just going crazy.” Smith had gotten a tattoo: the state of Texas, a reminder of a place where, as he described it, he’d endured hardships and acted like a tough kid.

  While Heatmiser was acquiring its local following of fist-pumping kids, privately Smith and Gust had stuck to their arty Hampshire ways. As Swanson remembers, “He and Neil had posters of art work in the house. They had Jasper Johns [posters] and stuff, they didn’t have the Renoirs they got from their parents.”

  About a year after they left Amherst for Portland, they sent Marc Swanson a tape recording of some of the songs that would end up on the first album, Dead Air. It had the sound of a disciplined band, with precise rhythms and clear melodies, despite the onslaught of electric-guitar power chords. It was nothing like the Elliott Smith sound the world would come to know.

  It was during this period, as Swanson came up from San Francisco to visit Gust, that Smith’s shyness finally cracked, and the two became confidantes. “I remember one day while I was there I was like, ‘Can we go have lunch together?’ And he was like, ‘Really?’” says Swanson. “And I was like, ‘Well, Neil’s not up for it and we can go have lunch together.’ Things like that with Elliott were kind of a big deal; that meant we were friends.”

  At this point, Smith was obliged to take the kinds of jobs that frequently turn budding rock stars into law-school applicants. He later recalled that he once got a bad sunburn installing solar paneling—and bad sunburns are tough to come by in Portland. He was a skinny young man. The former Portland promoter Todd Patrick remembers Smith saying that in the early ’90s building contractors would give him illegal construction tasks that involved his ability to squirm into small spaces.

  “We were playing a lot, but it’s not like we were making any money,” says Pete Krebs. The two musicians hated their day jobs and were looking for a way to make money faster. “Finally it dawned on us we could be making twenty bucks an hour instead of ten bucks an hour [splitting the money with the carpenter who subcontracted to them], and so he and I got all the equipment to do drywall work and started doing sheet-rocking together as a little company. . . . We did a good eight or ten projects like that. . . . That was during the winter time and I remember it was always fucking freezing. . . . We drywalled, mudded, did all the plaster work on this houseboat up in Ridgefield, Washington, this tiny town on a river. It was the middle of winter and we’d drive up I–5 and get off at Ridgefield and drive though the fields to this little town, across the railroad tracks to where there was this community of houseboats, and we’d haul these big boxes of plaster shit out on these docks. It took us like twenty minutes to walk to it. It was freezing; it was right there on the river and it was just shitty work. It was a houseboat so everything was always moving. We had this portable propane heater that looks like a jet engine with flames coming out the back; that was the only way to heat this thing up, so it was super dangerous. So we did all this work, and got paid, didn’t do a very good job, and everybody hated it. About three or four weeks later there was some kind of storm, and it wrecked this houseboat. The houseboat sank or floated away or something. We were both happy about that and bummed out at the same time. Served him right, fucking rich guy.”

  As much as Smith may have hated day jobs, the assumption in Portland at
that time, says Krebs, was that nobody would ever make any money off their music. Nirvana and Sonic Youth may have shown it was possible, but nobody considered it a likely possibility for the members of the Portland indie coterie Krebs and Smith were part of. “You were really into music so you played in a band and everybody had a shitty day job, or two. If you had a bunch of Portland people around a table in 1991 or 1992, and said, ‘Well, this is going to happen to you: You’re going to be on a major label. You’re going to have a major drug addiction, which you’ll pull out of. You’re going to be on the Academy Awards. And you’re going to move to Chicago and become part of this culturally significant art rock scene. And you’re going to be a bar musician. And you’re going to buy a house,’—nobody would have believed that. It wasn’t even in the category of stuff you thought about. You played in bands because you grew up listening to cool bands and it was just natural.”

  Heatmiser’s manager was JJ Gonson, who has made a career as a photographer and a manager since she abandoned her plans to be a musician as a young woman. By the time Krebs and Smith were working construction jobs together, she and Smith were dating, and soon Smith sublet his room in the house he shared with Gust and moved in with Gonson on Southeast Taylor Street. It turned out to be a life-altering decision—it was in that house that Smith started to put down the songs that started his solo career, leading him in a direction radically different from Heatmiser.

  “The Taylor Street house was an old Victorian style, and it had a deeply set staircase with deep acoustics,” writes Gonson in an email. “Elliott did a lot of his writing and rehearsing in that staircase. He worked on those songs for a long time before he put them on tape, some of them for years. He recorded in the basement, which was not a pretty place. Lots of people had moved through that house, and the basement was piled high with abandoned stuff, so he sort of carved out a little niche, set up a stool and a mic stand, and meticulously recorded the whole thing, going back and punching in tiny changes, sometimes a single word or chord. The wonderful breathy sound on Roman Candle is largely due to the quality of the mic, or lack of it. It was a little Radio Shack thing—the kind you used to get bundled with a tape recorder. It had very little power and was very noisy. He also sang quietly, perhaps so as not to be heard by all the people always coming and going upstairs, so you can hear every breath and string squeak. The little powered studio monitors he used we got at Artichoke [Music, a store on Hawthorne Street]. The owner restored old bicycles as a hobby and I traded him an ancient, and very knackered, Schwinn I had found in an abandoned warehouse (doing a promo shoot for some bad metal band) for them. We had no money to get them. I don’t know what he would have done otherwise.”

  It was recorded on an eccentric instrument probably no more expensive than the first guitar Gary Smith bought Steven in junior high. “The Le Domino is a tiny acoustic guitar, I think probably made in the ’50s,” writes Gonson. “We saw it at Artichoke Music and fell in love with it. It is black with tiny domino decals on the frets and around the sound hole. More importantly, Elliott loved the sound. So, I bought it and he played it for a long time, recorded all of Roman Candle on it and used it for his solo shows and even his first solo tour, before it started to get worn out. I still have it.

  ” At first, Smith just played the tape to his friends. Krebs remembers the first time he heard it. The two of them were working at “this warehouse being converted into small loft spaces for business and artists and whatnot. Elliott and I were doing shit work, on top of scaffolds, scraping ceilings and shit like that. So at seven-thirty, eight in the morning I’d come by his house and pick him up or he’d pick me up, and we’d drive downtown and we’d work for a couple hours, drink coffee and talk about music, and then we’d split for a couple hours and go to record stores and go back and work some more. It was a drag. It was a dead-end shitty job, but that’s where we got to know one another, and that’s when I first heard his music. He was like, ‘Yeah, I recorded some of my own stuff, you know?’ He had a little cassette, and it was a lot of the stuff that ended up on Roman Candle, this cassette. It was me and him fifty feet in the air on a scaffold listening to Roman Candle before it came out.” Krebs knew how good it was, and from the way he looks back on this time in his life it’s clear he mourns for it.

  Gonson nurtured Heatmiser even as she helped plant the seeds for the solo career that would eventually help derail Heatmiser and take Smith places far beyond the Portland rock scene. If it wasn’t for Gonson, in fact, Elliott Smith’s solo work might have stayed stowed away on a series of tapes lying around Portland attics. According to her, Smith didn’t intend to put the songs on an album.

  Two of the songs on Roman Candle stand out as being concerned with Smith’s childhood. “‘Roman Candle’ was the song about Charlie. And ‘[No-Name] #4’ is as much about Bunny as his songs are about any one with thing,” writes Gonson. Both of those songs were written with a level of frankness Smith might not have permitted himself if he was recording an album with release in mind. “Cavity Search [Records] had just recently started up, and [the owners] Christopher and Denny were friends of ours, and had made a Heatmiser single. I just used to hang out there sometimes, and this time I happened to have a cassette of what Elliott was doing and put it in. I was Heatmiser’s manager, so I used to carry stuff around and play it for whoever would listen—it was a habit that carried over to his stuff, though I wasn’t his solo manager (we were too close for that; he didn’t have one until later). They were stunned and said, ‘We want to release this—just the way it is.’ It wasn’t even a demo, not even that official, just friends hanging out together one afternoon. Elliott didn’t even believe it until they had pestered him about it for a while. He never meant for his solo stuff to be heard or released. I don’t think he ever would have considered playing it for anyone at any kind of label and probably was a bit horrified that I had. (I don’t remember, but I was certainly never a shy manager, and sometimes it was a sticky point between us.) Those songs were just something he needed to get out of his system that he didn’t think there was a place for in Heatmiser, who were (as one reviewer so pointedly put it) ‘Chugga Chugga Boy Rock.’ Heatmiser were amazing, don’t get me wrong, but their whole thing was very guitar-heavy and intense. Elliott had all these songs all piled up in his head, and nowhere to use them, so he put them on cassette. I think he did things he wouldn’t have done had he thought they might be heard in a real way—like the soaring vocal on the song we wrote together [‘No Name #1,’ working title ‘Saint-Like’]—which made Neil laugh the first time he heard it. A good thing, no doubt, that he could be uninhibited by his own lack of expectation. . . . I don’t think he would have written so candidly about his childhood if he had thought Bunny might ever hear it, either. It surprised him completely when people responded positively to what he was doing. It was much later that he brought that energy, or lack of it, to Heatmiser, in songs like ‘Half Right.’ Too late, sadly.”

  Roman Candle stands alone among Smith’s releases for its unusual attention to physical description in the lyrics. A year later, on his first full-length album, Elliott Smith, he would find a new poetic resource in drug metaphors. The song “Roman Candle” uses incandescence as a metaphor for repressed anger, as Smith expresses feelings toward Charlie Welch that mirror the feelings of many children toward stepfathers: “He could be cool and cruel to you and me/knew we’d put up with anything.” But a number of the songs thereafter, such as “No Name # 4,” are short stories; they ride on narrative, character, and description as much as on Smith’s distinctive finger-picking, not yet fully formed. The character that Gonson suggests partly represents Bunny Welch is described thus: “For a change she got out before he hurt her bad. . . /The car was cold and smelled like old cigarettes and pine.

  ” “Condor Ave.” would hold up throughout his career as one of Smith’s top-tier compositions. Starting with is first line, “She took the Oldsmobile out past Condor Avenue,” it stuck to the vernacular of worka
day Portland. Condor Avenue is a not-particularly-striking road in southwest Portland. Unlike the aggressively streetwise New Yorkese employed by the Velvet Underground and the New York Dolls, Smith’s is a muted, civil, almost Midwestern tone in its reluctance to move past concrete description: “You’re in the Oldsmobile and driving by the moon/headlights burning bright ahead of you.” At the same time, gasps of incivility burst through: “Now I’m leaving you alone/you can do whatever the hell you want to.” The sentiment and the delivery are a blend of country and punk. The reticence of the small town competes with the frankness and toughness of the big city; the combination is deeply Portland.

  Together, “Condor Ave.” and “No Name #4” are the most fiction-like of Smith’s songs and they both involve troubled women in cars. The first appears to be a girlfriend who meets some bleak fate in an Oldsmobile. As she drives, the narrator tries to reach out to her and despairs at the impossibility of communication: “I’m lying here, blowing smoke from a cigarette/smoke signal signs that you’ll never get.” While the narrator and his beloved seem to be doomed by a failure to speak to and hold on to each other, the narrator encounters a man who shares his entrapment: A drinker, “bottle clenched between his teeth/looks like he’s buried in the sand at the beach.”

  In this last description, Smith effectively deploys substance abuse as a metaphor for other forms of self-destructive behavior, and the metaphor is a handy one for several reasons. For one, a songwriter taking substance abuse as his literal subject (even if love is the figurative one) can easily steer clear of the Celine Dion clichés of contemporary Top 40 music, the language of hearts, embraces, great divides. And he participates in a hipper tradition, that of Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, and Kurt Cobain—their addiction laments, disavowals of vice, and caustic self-portraits. Whereas self-destruction in love is usually a series of verbal transactions—lying, cutting yourself off, arguing—self-destruction with drugs and alcohol is a physical process—clenching the bottle between your teeth, putting a spike into your vein. A storyteller need only make the concrete actions vivid to get his meaning across. That’s a powerful tool in a lyricist’s hands. The emotional danger doesn’t have to be compared to physical danger, as it is in the central metaphor of “Roman Candle”; in substance-abuse stories, the emotional danger springs from concrete action.