Elliott Smith and the Big Nothing

by Nugent, Benjamin

  Portland would be the place Steven Smith went when his family life in Texas didn’t work out, and where he became a professional musician. But Texas was a well from which Smith drew material, the place where he experienced life outside the liberal cities and college towns where he spent the rest of his days. He had a tattoo in the shape of the state on his arm, and while he might have scoffed at that tattoo’s significance, he pondered the Texan side of his family and his Texan childhood until the last.

  Bunny’s family had roots in Texas. She was born in Beaumont near the Gulf coast to a family of musicians eluded by commercial success—everybody played something and everybody had a day job. Smith told Under the Radar magazine that his maternal grandfather installed signs for a living. Bunny’s parents still live close enough to Dallas to attend local Elliott Smith tributes; they showed up at one hosted by a local record store.

  To see the environment that molded Smith’s childhood one must travel nearly 600 miles south of Omaha to the metroplex of Dallas–Fort Worth. It’s a sprawling fusion of two Southern business cities that has come to resemble urban Southern California with its sailor knots of freeways and armies of strip malls and chain restaurants. The western-wear boot and hat shops don’t become a feature of the landscape until you leave city limits, but it’s still Texas—there are preachers all over the radio, and folks in the area hear more country music than anything else. There’s the drawl and the Southern courtesy in everyday talk at shops and bars, along with traffic jams that are Angeleno in their scale and bitterness. Texas-sized American flags are visible from the freeway that snakes through the city center.

  It’s March 2004, a rainy day in Dallas, and heading south from downtown, first on the 35 and then on the 67, the drive to Duncanville takes about twenty minutes. A beige wooden sign welcomes me to town, and shortly thereafter I pass churches representing a full range of protestant denominations. The first church-ordained message that confronts me is spelled out on the marquee sign for a branch of the Church of Christ: “READ THE BIBLE IT WILL SCARE THE HELL OUT OF YOU.”

  This is where Smith spent his boyhood, in Duncanville, De Soto, and Cedar Hill, adjacent towns off the 67 freeway south of downtown Dallas. These are streets full of ranch houses and malls, streets that occasionally erupt in an explosion of passion for either Christianity or football. By the side of Camp Wisdom Road, one of the main thoroughfares, there’s a new megachurch roughly the size of an airport terminal. Churches abound, and they occupy relatively new buildings, as do local residences. Away from the larger streets is straight-up blue-collar and middle-class suburbia: one-story houses packed tight into envelopes of green. Some of the houses and lawns are spic-and-span, but some clapboards sport patches of rotten wood and some lawns patches of weeds, like soft spots on an apple. It’s spring and there are purple blossoms everywhere.

  A quarter of Duncanville’s 36,000 residents are black, a fifth Hispanic—substantially larger proportions of both minority groups than in the United States population at large. The local used-CD shop has a lone copy of Smith’s fourth solo album, XO, but it has a whole section devoted to local hip-hop. It’s the kind of suburban landscape often portrayed as housing unbroken fields of white families, but a lot of the people walking around local malls aren’t white. Duncanville is also diverse economically, in a more obvious way than one might expect: In a mall parking lot, a homeless-looking guy approaches me to beg through the open window of my car.

  Drive west on Camp Wisdom past the megachurch and a series of strip malls, and eventually you will see a football stadium towering on your left. It’s about the size of the football stadium owned by almost any amply endowed small Northeastern liberal arts college. A sign affixed to it consists of a circular drawing of a raging panther’s head and red letters reading “Panther Stadium.” This is a facility of Duncanville High School, and from even a slight distance it dwarfs the flat but expansive school complex. Aside from the larger churches, it’s the most imposing structure for miles, and the sign’s fang-filled maw seems as heartfelt a declaration of collective identity as the industrial-sized cross that bisects the front of the new megachurch. It’s a martial exhortation, and so is the slogan that appears occasionally on signs by the road: “Duncanville: City of Champions.”

  In 1973, a month before Steven Smith turned four, Bunny Smith became Bunny Welch when she married Charles Hughes Welch, Jr., a native of Longview, Texas. The marriage was presided over by an elder of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. That sect, which shortened its name to Community of Christ in 2001, is the second-largest denomination of the Latter-day Saint movement founded by Joseph Smith in the nineteenth century, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints being the largest at 11 million strong (according to its own estimate). Community of Christ members read the Book of Mormon along with the Bible but don’t generally call themselves Mormons because of the term’s association with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and because they believe the term was not originally associated with the church. Community of Christ claims about 250,000 members, and its headquarters are in Missouri, not Utah. The elder’s ministration of Bunny’s second marriage suggests that she and Charles Welch were Reorganized Church followers at the time. But Steve Pickering and Mark Merritt, friends of Steven Smith’s from junior high, distinctly remember Steven, Bunny, and Charlie attending a local Methodist church—it was Merritt’s church and the Welches started attending it when Smith was in junior high.

  The differences between the Mormon church and Community of Christ date back to the death of Joseph Smith, when one contingent, led by Brigham Young, settled around Utah’s Salt Lake, and another, the Reorganized Church, named Joseph Smith’s son Joseph Smith III its new ordained leader and remained in the Midwest. Community of Christ’s world headquarters are in Independence, Missouri, the place Joseph Smith proclaimed was the center of Zion, God’s idyllic kingdom on earth. For over a hundred years the church was run by Joseph Smith’s patrilineal descendents. The Reorganized Church never accepted the nineteenth-century century Utah Mormon practice of polygamy, and it came to reject secret temple rites and the baptism of the dead, two of the Mormons’ most distinctive and controversial practices. In the mid-’80s, the Reorganized Church authorized ordination of women as elders, which the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints still does not do. The church’s decision to change its name a few years ago is generally thought to reflect a desire among prominent members to no longer define itself in relation to the Mormon church and to move closer to mainstream Protestantism. Community of Christ’s official literature, as one might expect, is less conservative than that of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It allows that “there is no official church creed that must be followed by all members.” The church also supports the organization Call for Renewal, which is run by an evangelical Christian whose stances are left of center on poverty and environmental issues. Relatively liberal as it may be, Community of Christ is clear on the subject of judgment: “Our eternal destiny is determined by God according to divine wisdom and love and according to our response to God’s call to us. God’s judgment is just and is based on the kind of people we have become in relation to the potential of our lives.”

  The threat of divine judgment never completely left Smith alone in adulthood, as he explained to Spin: “Mainly church just made me really scared of hell. It still just scares the shit out of me. If you grew up being threatened with that, it’s really hard to be like, ‘Oh, it probably doesn’t exist.’ Even if everyone you meet tells you there’s no place like that . . . I would have to go to hell on a technicality—because there’s some things you’re not supposed to do that I can’t seem not to do.”

  One of his friends from adulthood, Marc Swanson, remembers the same concerns. “He wasn’t religious, I don’t think, but he believed in an afterlife. I know he was scared of going to hell and he was pretty serious about that.” On the other hand, Swanson remembers that Smith �
�didn’t like many organized things, or hierarchical things,” so he’d have probably chafed against a traditional religious practice.

  The house the Welch/Smith family gave as its official residence at the time of Bunny’s second marriage sits on Duncanville’s East Center Street, a quiet, curving street that could belong to any American suburb; it could have produced Dennis the Menace as easily as it did Elliott Smith. Brick, with a small cement porch sporting white columns a much larger version of which you might expect to see on a Southern plantation house, its side door opens onto a medium-sized, fenced-in backyard. There’s nothing at all unusual or fancy about it, but it looks like a much more comfortable place to raise a child than the apartment Gary and Bunny lived in when Smith was born. It’s also not far from Lakeside Park, the neighborhood where Smith lived during junior high. If there were moves between the time the Welches moved to town and Smith’s beginning junior high, the family landed close to where they started.

  Donna Barton, whose Duncanville family was friendly with Smith’s family and (at least, in Barton’s recollection) used Charles Welch as their insurance agent, remembers Steve, as he was then known, as a shy boy. Three years her senior, he stood by and watched quietly during an Easter-egg hunt, too cool to participate.

  Smith won a local competition for a piano composition in elementary school—likely Central Elementary on East Freeman Street—but life as a rock musician started in sixth grade at Duncanville’s William H. Byrd Junior High (now William H. Byrd Middle School) on Wheatland Road. Steve played clarinet in the school band with Julie Doyle, who is now a member of the Dallas indie rock ensemble The Polyphonic Spree, known for their exuberant live show and uniform of white robes.

  “He dressed like most average guys in junior high—conservative,” writes Doyle, who grew up entirely in Duncanville, in an email. “He was on the football team. Average hairstyle. There were only a handful of kids who were considered punk rockers or stylish dressers.”

  The enduring friends Smith met at Byrd were Mark Merritt, Steve Pickering, and Kevin Denbow. They were the kids he played music with, the closest thing he’d ever have to a band in Texas. It started in sixth grade, when Mark Merritt and Steve Smith struck up a conversation in the lunch line. “We sat down and there was this shoot-the-shit discussion about guitar and music,” says Merritt. “We discovered we both played a little bit and after that both of us started hanging out.”

  Soon, they convened to play guitar on a regular basis. “He’d been playing long enough to know the same amount of chords I did,” says Merritt, who’d started playing at eight and whose father had been giving him informal lessons for a couple of years. “The only [guitar] I had at that point was my dad’s Gibson classical, and eventually Gary [Smith] got him a Martin Sigma acoustic guitar, and acoustic pickups and a Peavey Backstage amplifier.” Sigma is a cheaper division of Martin, the premiere brand in acoustic folk guitars. A Peavey Backstage is a small, modestly priced amp, and pickups are the devices that electrify an acoustic guitar in order to generate volume and texture. “I showed up at his house one time, and he was like, ‘Look what my dad got me.’ That would have to be not too long after we first met, I would have to say ’81, in sixth grade. That was the guitar I remember him owning; from time to time he would borrow one of mine.” If Smith owned a guitar before the gift from Gary, Merritt doesn’t remember it. Smith’s equipment wasn’t top of the line, but it was better than Merritt’s.

  “Shortly after we met was when he had his guitar and his Peavey amp,” remembers Merritt, “and I got hold of this piece-of-shit electric guitar and spent ten dollars of my allowance on an amp. I would bring over this shit guitar and this shit amp, and we were thirteen years old, and we put my cheap-ass little amp on top of his Peavey and we thought we had our first stack. It was pretty cool. My amp was made out of plastic, but we thought it was so cool to stack one on top of the other—it was like two feet tall and it gained a little more prominence if you put it on a chair in the acoustics of the garage—and play our little tunes. We just thought it was such hot shit.”

  There were no originals at this point, only exercises and covers. “Both of us being young and somewhat naïve to the whole process, we were still kind of teaching ourselves how to play—we started experimenting with finger styles and we were fooling around with open chord tunings, like experimenting with how high you could tune a high E string before it snapped. We would try Pink Floyd tunes, and Beatles tunes, and finger-picking and open chords. We would teach ourselves everything from ‘Amazing Grace’ to ‘Puff the Magic Dragon.’”

  The same school year Smith befriended Merritt, he found another musician and comic in Steve Pickering. “We met in English class in sixth grade,” says Pickering. “I sat behind him and we were both trying to be the funny guy in class. The teacher would call on him and hand the paper back to him and he’d say something funny and it was my challenge to say something funny back. In sixth grade, humor was mostly insult humor.

  “I just wound up at his house on a Saturday. I was riding around that neighborhood on my bicycle, and I asked another kid riding his bicycle where his house was and knocked on the door,” Pickering recalls. By seventh grade, Pickering, who like Smith played clarinet in the school’s band (Merritt was a trombonist), had joined Merritt and Smith as a pianist, although by Pickering’s reckoning Smith played piano better than he did despite Pickering’s five years of lessons. What impressed Pickering most was the day Smith sat at the piano in the Welch living room and picked out a Dan Fogelberg song he’d heard on the radio.

  Their social lives were not entirely limited to playing music indoors. It’s a wholesome, unadventurous existence Pickering remembers sharing with Smith in Duncanville: “Everybody had a basketball hoop in their driveway; it was your dad’s obligation to install a hoop. We would ride our bikes around the neighborhood, ride to the library, ride to the 7-Eleven to play video games. The 7-Eleven had Ms. Pac-Man. I remember he was a lot better at basketball than I was, but he wasn’t a vicious competitor. He’d win about 75 percent of the time. I was friends with another guy in the clarinet section, and the three of us would tear around the neighborhood on our bikes. Occasionally we would go up to the bowling alley.”

  But Smith was not average in the way he approached music. According to Pickering, “In sixth grade it wasn’t a huge part of what we did, but it was in the summer between sixth and seventh grade that I noticed that he was musically inclined beyond other people I knew.”

  Smith cast his junior-high experience in bleaker terms. He recalled a scrappy, redneck upbringing much grittier than what Merritt and Pickering remember of the childhood they shared. “I got into a lot of fights in Dallas and was just sort of a hostile person,” he said in a 2003 interview with Under the Radar magazine. “I’d get into fights about once a week or two. I don’t think I ever really picked a fight, but I would totally fly off the handle if somebody said word one. You had to be like that or you’d get more shit. But I didn’t have to be as much like that as I was. I was pissed off about other things—at home—so if anybody said anything at school, I’d just [shakes his head] . . . And I didn’t even win most of the fights. I wasn’t that big, but sometimes it’s the little guys who’ve been beat on enough who figure out how to hurt somebody, even though they’re not going to win. You have to fight harder and faster.”

  As far as Doyle recalls, Smith wasn’t one of the little guys who was picked on. While he grew into a diminutive, five-foot-nine man, he wasn’t small enough by junior-high standards for it to be a stand-out characteristic: “I have no memories of him being bullied,” writes Doyle. “Steve was a big guy in those days.”

  Merritt and Pickering don’t remember him as particularly big or small for his size; it was only later that he would come to be smaller than most boys. Nor do they remember him getting into fights with any kind of regularity at Byrd or during his one semester at Duncanville High; the two of them remember just one bout. “I didn’t see it personally
,” says Pickering. “I remember that he had to go the principal’s office, which was a big deal at the time. The kid he got in a fight with was a substantially larger kid. I wouldn’t have called him a bully, but I remember thinking, ‘Wow, I would not have fought that guy.’ He was a big stocky guy. While they were waiting to see the principal they worked out whatever difference they had.”

  The differences between Smith’s memories of Duncanville and those of his Texan friends suggest that Duncanville acquired a special symbolic quality for Smith after he left for Portland. He would sing in “Southern Belle” of a “southern town/where all you can do is grit your teeth.” It was a Southern town that represented for Smith an attitude to define himself against—one of traditional, redneck masculinity. Much of his day-to-day life there might have been standard-issue suburban leisure time, and it might have been a place where he was able to work at his music the way most kids in garage bands do. But elements of a rougher existence found their way to the forefront of Smith’s descriptions of Texas.

  Smith had an older, female friend who drove a muscle car with a grim reaper painted on the hood. In Pickering’s recollection, she wasn’t so much Smith’s girlfriend as an older student at Duncanville who took the small group of freshman boys under her wing. “It was a big, fat-ass muscle car,” says Pickering. “She played clarinet and he played the clarinet. It would have been summer ’83, at marching band rehearsal,” that she and Smith met, he says. “She wasn’t a metal head. She did buy us tickets to go see The Police in the fall of ’83 at Reunion Arena. She invited Steve and he invited me. It was the Synchronicity tour. Steve was into it; he knew a bunch of Police songs—he knew all the words to ‘Roxanne.’ That was the first concert I can remember him deliberately going to with people of our age group. The girl with the car had to get [tickets] for us, because our parents wouldn’t let us camp out all night in front of the Ticketmaster. We were in the first balcony and it was a huge-production arena rock show.” Smith told Under the Radar magazine about a separate occasion when he got drunk and played pool at a neighbor’s house; neither Merritt nor Pickering remembers this.