Elliott Smith and the Big Nothing Read online

  The cover of Roman Candle features a photograph taken by Gonson. It shows Neil Gust and Amy Dalsimer, a friend from Hampshire, walking through an open-air market in Manhattan during an early Heatmiser tour. But the point wasn’t to put his friends on the cover rather than himself, even though it seems like a deliberate gesture of self-deprecation. “He really liked the way that picture looked as a ‘piece of art,’” writes Gonson in an email, and Smith asked Gonson to dig it up when it came time to select a cover image. In any case, the image reflects the content of the songs: They’re snapshots of apparently mundane but meaningful moments from characters’ lives.

  The first known Elliott Smith solo show took place at Umbra Penumbra, a now-defunct café near downtown Portland, in September 1994. Smith played a set there that was entirely solo and acoustic but still preserved some of the hardness of the Heatmiser sound. One song that never appeared on an album, “Big Decision,” involved verses delivered with the machine-gun speed of an auctioneer. But by and large the songwriting process Smith had developed by 1994 was one conducive to contemplative, rather than combative, music.

  “He was so good because he was constantly tinkering,” says Pete Krebs about Smith’s songwriting. “He wouldn’t sit there with a guitar and work it out, he would get a title and walk around at night, when he lived in the Heatmiser house and that neighborhood. . . . He said, ‘I’d just get these songs in my head and I’d just concentrate and work through where they went, and by the time I got back from my walk I’d have a song.’ It’d be more than a melody. He would arrange it and come up with a lot of information that way.”

  Through 1994, Heatmiser, and not solo work, was Smith’s primary non-construction occupation. But even before his solo career started in earnest, he expressed doubts about his place in Heatmiser to Krebs. “It was before the solo thing, really. . . . Heatmiser was the thing [Smith was known for]. Everybody kind of agreed with Elliott [about Heatmiser], and I don’t mean this as a slight to Neil or anything like that, but it seemed like his songs just kind of got lost in the wash. . . . Heatmiser rocked; I really liked Heatmiser. They were just really big and rocked really hard and we played with them a lot. There was a vibe to that band that was really incessant. You just really got into it. . . . Elliott just didn’t deal very well with the democratic process that’s necessary for a band. Elliott kind of needed a back-up band. It’s not that he didn’t like playing in a rock band, but I think he felt really confined by it. Being on the road, touring, maybe playing music that he felt like he had compromised on a little bit. I remember talking to him about [how] his tunes just kind of got steamrolled, the subtleties got steamrolled. And he just really didn’t like it. . . . Because Elliott . . . knew a lot about recording and microphones and he was really fascinated by that stuff, I think he really quickly identified what he wanted and how he wanted it and how he wanted to pursue the music he was playing. He and Neil were friends from way back so it seemed natural that they would have a band together. I don’t think he liked being in a rock band. It wasn’t an egotistical thing, he was just much better off as a solo artist.”

  In 1994, Smith and Krebs put out a split 45-inch on the tiny local label Slo-Mo. Krebs’s contribution was the song “Shytown.” Smith’s was “No Confidence Man.” It was recorded in one day, Krebs remembers, at a house then shared by Janet Weiss and Sam Coomes. “Our friend Moira [Doogan] . . . was like, ‘Hey, I’m starting this little label, do you want to do a 45?’” says Krebs. “And so we went to Sam and Janet’s house when they were still together, over there off of Hawthorne on 37th—Janet still owns that house—and there’s a little setup and we just did it in an afternoon. Elliott did all the engineering and I found all the weird noises. We both had these tunes and there’s a bunch of forks and knives and spoons hanging from a fishing line. It was an actual instrument they had in their recording [studio] . . . and I was just like, ‘We should put that on there.’ And Elliott had these dumb masks: a bear mask and a weird bat mask. There’s black-and-white shots of us with guitars wearing these masks. We took the pictures outside of Janet’s basement. We laughed a lot—we both have the same sense of humor—it was just kind of this dumb sense of humor. He had that old Domino guitar.”

  Smith’s social life at the time was fairly typical for a Portland musician. In addition to doing construction with Krebs, he also worked as a painter with Ralf Youtz, drummer for both the original, temporary line-up of Built to Spill and the short-lived Doug Martsch–Calvin Johnson collaboration The Halo Benders. Todd Patrick—the Portland promoter whose club, 17 Nautical Miles, expired with a party in which a guest punched a hole through the wall into the Hallmark store next door—remembers Smith showing up for karaoke night at the Galaxy Lounge and hanging out at The Lutz.

  But his social reputation was unusual in two regards. “He was regarded as an eccentric guy, a very standoffish person, just painfully shy,” Patrick says. “But he also wore his emotions on his sleeve. . . . Because . . . he would successfully communicate his feelings and stuff like that, people would get to know him, they’d know how he was feeling. He was a shy human being who was also capable of being very nice and very moral and not cold and not a dick. . . . People kind of felt sorry for him, they kind of looked after him—unlike some other famous people in a small town like Portland. You get a little famous in Portland or any town of that size and anyone who’s not famous is going to be resentful. They’re going to say that your fame is undeserved and that you’re a snob now and this and that. Other people who have achieved a similar level of fame—various things were said about all those other people, but not Elliott Smith. Maybe it’s just because his whole painfully shy reputation covered any snottiness he may have betrayed towards people and no one ever took it personally when he’d snub them. But I think he was generally a decent guy who tried to be nice to everybody. Except for the fact that [people] thought he was really fucked up. People thought he was personally weird. Although I would say that among the people that knew him a little better than the average fan, there was a sense that he wasn’t as fucked up as he was made out to be.”

  During this period, Smith got the second of his two tattoos, the one of Ferdinand the Bull on display in the cover photograph of Either/Or. The character was invented by author Munro Leaf for a 1936 children’s book, The Story of Ferdinand, featuring the illustrations of Robert Lawson. Lawson’s cover image of a bull sniffing a flower was copied for Smith’s tattoo. In the story, Ferdinand was a strong bull with a peaceful disposition. Picked by a fluke to enter the ring with a matador, he refuses to fight. Instead of going on to fame and fortune, he decides to return to his old pasture where he loves to smell the flowers. Smith told an interviewer that he got the tattoo both because he wanted an image of a bull on his arm and because he felt some kind of solidarity with Ferdinand the Bull, a character who was regarded as a failure because he was unwilling to do the things expected of his kind. Smith said that he, like Ferdinand, wanted to work “outside the system.”

  “When I first met him I didn’t get it,” says E. V. Day, “and then I totally got it. It’s like . . . he’s this big bull who doesn’t want to fight and would rather sit down and smell the flowers and wishes he wasn’t this big bull. He’s small but he’s so big in his art and in his music. His music is orchestral and so this little man, this little beautiful man made this huge romantic music, and so his bigness, I think, is about the talent inside of him, the vision inside of him. I think he realized he was a big person in a lot of ways: his morals, his ideals, and a lot of things he could never live up to, the expectations he could never live up to inside of himself. I think it’s funny to think of him as this large bull too. That’s maybe the third element, which is the humor, which is survival. We’d talk about humor as survival from emotional agony, conflict, stuff like that.”

  That’s not the kind of thing Smith was talking about when he actually had the tattoo punched into his arm. “I was around for Ferdinand,” JJ Gonson writes in an e-mail. �
��He’d already got Texas. Ferdinand was done by the wife of a tattoo artist friend of ours. . . . They had a new shop; she was learning and it was one of her first jobs and took a very long time. I never quite understood why he did it. He had this truly perverse fascination with bullfighting, which he had actually never seen, and probably would have been put off by had he [seen it]. It was completely out of character for him. Somehow he had missed the point of the children’s story, which I’m not even sure he had ever read and which is about pacifism. Ironically, that would have reflected his actual character (I remember conversations about passive resistance) more accurately.”

  When Cavity Search quietly released Roman Candle in 1994, the reception was mixed, unusually so for an album nobody had heard of. “With Elliott you think about him being universally liked in a certain world,” says Swanson, “but I tried to cram that record down people’s throats when Roman Candle came out, and so many people were like, ‘Whatever, it sounds like Simon and Garfunkel, not my thing, really boring, all the songs sound the same. . . .’ I could never get anybody to listen to it, and then I figured out this really funny recipe: The time to get someone was to get them as soon as they broke up with someone. . . . I’d be like, ‘You should listen to this,’ and it’d be the same person I’d given it to six months earlier who said it was boring and sounded like Simon and Garfunkel, and they would come back to me, like, ‘Your friend’s amazing.’”

  JJ Gonson had opened a Pandora’s box by playing Elliott’s self-recorded tape for her friends at Cavity Search. The Northwest got its first taste of how distinctive Smith’s work could be when it was deeply personal and unaccompanied by a punk rock band. Still, nobody had any idea how good a guitar player and poet he was. That discovery would provoke the decline and fall of Elliott Smith, indie rock musician with a miserable day job, and the rise of Elliott Smith, big genius.

  * * *

  *Calamity Jane opened for Nirvana in a stadium in Buenos Aires. They were booed offstage.

  *The first song on Heatmiser’s 1994 EP Yellow No. 5.

  Five

  NEEDLE IN THE HAY

  BILL SANTEN GRADUATED high school a year early in Lexington, Kentucky. He was a thin, deer-eyed kid, classically good looking. He could play guitar and he surprised people who knew his proper Southern family with his determination to be a musician. Before he could drink, he headed to LA and then to Portland, and began to play acoustic guitar in bars.

  About a year later, he was a heroin addict standing in front of a house Elliott Smith shared with Sean Croghan of Crackerbash in northeast Portland, asking if he might borrow a hundred dollars. He’d called first, but Smith wasn’t exactly in the mode for entertaining company. “Elliott came out in his flannels,” Santen recalls. Smith took his friend upstairs and gave him what amounted to a career-counseling session. “Elliott mudded and drywalled his own walls,” says Santen, and he showed Santen how to do it, talking as he worked. When they walked out together, Smith gave Santen a wad of bills amounting to one hundred dollars.

  Later, when they were touring together in 1997, Santen put one hundred dollars on the table of a room they shared. “[Elliott] said, ‘I knew what you were probably going to spend this on, but it was time somebody took a chance on you.’” Looking back on his Portland days, Santen, who now lives in Kentucky and no longer has a drug problem, says Smith’s kindness helped straighten him out.

  The loan wasn’t the first act of generosity Smith had bestowed upon Santen. The two met sharing an acoustic solo bill at the Egyptian Room on Division and Southeast 37th. Now one of Portland’s most popular lesbian discos, back then “it was pretty much a strip bar,” says Santen. “We were doing it once a week and looking for different people to come play.” Santen wrote Smith a letter saying he liked playing with him. A couple weeks later, “he called up out of the blue and said he was going up to Seattle with Mary Lou Lord,” and invited Santen to share the bill at RKCNDY (pronounced “Rock Candy”), “a pretty stupid LA-style club by the Space Needle. . . . Everyone was coming for Mary Lou; nobody knew who he was.”

  Mary Lou Lord was by that time on Kill Rock Stars, the Olympia, Washington, label then synonymous with the feminist punk “riot grrrl” movement. The label’s main attraction was the three-quarters-female Bikini Kill, a loud, anthemic, political band with song titles like “Reject All American” and “Distinct Complicity.” But Lord, a native of Salem, Massachusetts, came from an entirely different underground: the T subway system in Boston. Having acquired a local reputation as a busker with an acoustic guitar, she stumbled across fame in the punk rock universe by falling into a romantic relationship with Kurt Cobain shortly before he settled down with Courtney Love, when Nirvana played Boston in the early ’90s. Lord had cut an EP for Kill Rock Stars featuring seven folk ballads and one rock song, “Lights Are Changing.” “Lights Are Changing” was a departure from her busker mode—it contained drums, bass, and electric guitar—and it was a split from the regnant indie rock sound of the day in that it was unabashedly a ’60s song. The melody and the chiming guitars recalled The Byrds and early electric Bob Dylan, as did the lyrics, which were not as concerned with social controversies as with old-fashioned relationship themes.

  The Smith–Lord alliance was revealing in a number of important ways. Smith was still the co-frontman of Heatmiser, and by accounts he gave later on, staying in the band only as a favor to Neil Gust. “Neil never asked me to do that—it was just my trip,” he would later say of his determination to stick with the project. Heatmiser was, in Smith’s words, “trying to be Fugazi.” It would be an understatement to say they were grunge as opposed to folk-rock—they were about as far from folk-rock as you could go and still have verses and choruses. For a Heatmiser member to be traveling up to Seattle to open for a neo-folkie was, if not an act of remonstration, an act of broadmindedness. For Smith to perform with a folk-rock act at RKCNDY must have seemed fey in a distinctly un-Heatmiser way.

  Lord had discovered Smith because she was dating Slim Moon, the founder and owner of Kill Rock Stars. Not long after the release of Roman Candle on Cavity Search, she was deep in conversation backstage at a show featuring Moon and his band Witchy Poo, when Moon came and told her to come to see the guy performing. She hadn’t listened for long before she decided the “little punk kid” on stage was “the quintessential songwriter of our generation besides Kurt Cobain,” as she later put it in an interview with Harvard’s radio station.

  Lord introduced herself to Smith, who already knew who she was, and invited him to tour with her. Moon signed Smith to Kill Rock Stars and put out his second, self-titled album in 1995. While it was recorded in much the same way as Roman Candle, at home, it was promoted heavily, with posters of Smith appearing in record-store windows all over the Northwest. By the time Santen got to know him, his solo career was well under way through a Kill Rock Stars showcase at the LA club Jabberjaw, where Smith had met his longtime manager, Margaret Mittleman, and his longtime producer, Mittleman’s husband Rob Schnapf.

  Heatmiser was hardly a critically acclaimed platform from which to launch Smith’s solo work into a position of indie rock prestige, no matter how many Portland kids came to the shows. “I think most people who had good taste thought Heatmiser sucked,” says Todd Patrick. “They didn’t like them at all; they were a ‘grunge band.’ Which is funny because if you listen to Mic City Sons [their last album], they were going in a completely different direction. That band was not regarded very well. I think it’s almost surprising how much he [Smith] was accepted there by artistic people who had good music taste, critical snobs like yourself and I.”

  Smith’s task was to win over critical snobs as a touring musician, and in the beginning his solo tours were as uncomfortable as the next punk rocker’s. Patrick first met Smith in 1995 when Patrick was a twenty-year-old indie rock fanatic in Texas. He and his girlfriend of the time drove ten miles from their Austin home to Lubbock to see a bill in which Smith opened for The Softies, by a skateb
oard ramp. The two acts—The Softies being a quiet, largely acoustic indie pop duo consisting of Rose Melberg and Jen Sbragia, at that point based in Portland—were traveling with their guitars in a Geo, and as Patrick recalls things were not going smoothly. “They got kicked off their slot by Possum Dixon * at some bar in Austin. I tried, with this guy who owned a record store, to book them at a show”—Patrick’s first effort as a promoter. “It didn’t work.”

  But Patrick could offer Smith and The Softies shelter, and he found the obscure solo artist both kind and eccentric. “They stayed with us for four days, The Softies and Elliott. I got to know The Softies pretty well and I got to know what a unique guy Elliott Smith was—us and The Softies went out and bought some beer, and he spent the entire time in our apartment on our computer. We had an Internet connection, which was sort of unique. I guess he had never been on the Internet, and he spent the entire time in our apartment logging on. He didn’t leave, and he was very standoffish and he was constantly calling somebody. When he left he was really nice to us . . . he gave us copies of every record he’d made, his first single, a cassette, everything he had. . . . It was sort of incongruous that he’d been this really weird standoffish guy the whole time but he was so sweet.”