Elliott Smith and the Big Nothing

by Nugent, Benjamin

  Patrick followed Smith and The Softies to their next gig, at Rice University in Houston, and on to the one after that in Louisiana. After they parted ways, Patrick remembers, Smith left the tour early, possibly weary of life in the Geo that carried all three musicians from show to show. “The Softies told us that he had told them he was on all these amazing pain killers, opiates.” In retrospect, it was an early sign of problems to come, but it didn’t look like an overly serious one at the time. It was around this time that Smith met Dorien Garry, a doorkeeper at the club Maxwell’s in Hoboken, New Jersey. She was only eighteen, but they hit it off and he crashed at her place. She would come to be one of his good friends, and she remembers him as being admirably good-humored considering nobody had come to see him play.

  In fact, Marc Swanson remembers the earliest days of Smith’s solo career as one of the best times to be Smith’s friend. “When we really started to spend time by ourselves was when he started to play by himself. He would come to San Francisco, and I’d just meet him at the club; the first couple albums it was like I’d go meet him, he’d go throw his guitar in a cab, and we’d go to my house or a bar and hang out. He didn’t know a lot of people in San Francisco, and it got to be where there was an endless stream of people waiting to talk to him. So I think of that as a really nice utopian time with him, because that was even before the old Hampshire students were showing up, or anybody was, when Elliott would come to town.”

  When Swanson hung out with Smith during those times in San Francisco, there was a strong note of youthful earnestness in the conversations. “I remember him telling me, and we used to argue about it years after that, that he thought visual art was a better medium to—I don’t know about express yourself, but more pure, more respectful, and he said he tried to write songs like someone would paint. I would often argue with him, ‘No, no, no, music’s way better because you have this whole other element with this other group of people and you can work with melody as well as poetry.’ [He thought] the art world was kind of safe from this sort of mass media consumption and people were more pure about what they were doing. It wasn’t that he was an elitist about it, but we would jockey back and forth over whether it was better to make visual art or better to make music—which kind of shows our age . . . to think about one creative pursuit being better than the other. Now I just think it’s kind of silly. We were twenty-four, twenty-five, maybe twenty-six.”

  The sculptor E. V. Day, who befriended Smith later in New York, remembers Smith’s affection for the art world. “He loved art and had such respect for artists. And he really felt like artists were the best, like the top geniuses. Because it was pure expression—in music it’s filtered and it’s produced and it’s packaged and all these changes are made to your final product. And we would argue about all those different things.” Like Swanson, Day is successful. Some of her more famous works include exploding dresses, red tatters suggestive of flesh suspended in mid-air. She’s stretched thongs into a shape resembling fighter planes and arrayed them, dangling from the ceiling, into a fleet aimed at G-spot bull’s eyes painted on a museum’s walls.

  Of all the new connections Smith was making on tour, the most important may have been Mittleman. Once they’d formed their relationship, they’d stick together as he changed record labels (from Kill Rock Stars to Virgin to DreamWorks), moved around the country (Portland to New York to Los Angeles), went from being a member of a band with a solo project on the side to a crossover success story, and weathered break-ups with Joanna Bolme and other girlfriends. Her husband, Rob Schnapf, worked on five of Smith’s albums with his partner Tom Rothrock (if you include Heatmiser’s Mic City Sons). Smith would invite himself over to Mittleman and Schnapf’s house in LA, Schnapf later recalled, just to play croquet in their yard. When they parted ways in early 2001, Smith went through one of the hardest years of his life.

  Mittleman came into management after a long journey through disparate sectors of the music business. Working in music publishing at the powerhouse BMG in the early ’90s, she went to the Sunset Junction street fair in Silverlake and saw a performance by a young Beck Hansen. She gave him her card, he got her a demo, and eventually she persuaded BMG to give him a publishing deal. Rob Schnapf and Tom Rothrock recorded Beck’s hit “Loser” shortly thereafter, and put it out as a 12-inch vinyl single on their label Bong Load. Mittleman had proved she could find and break talent with the best of them. Two years later, she and Schnapf first saw Smith’s Jabberjaw show, where he had the crowd move outside to watch him play because of the extraordinary heat. She was moved by how silent he rendered the crowd.

  But just as Smith’s career was shaping up from a business perspective, a strange thing was happening to his reputation: His second, self-titled album, which Kill Rock Stars released in 1995, made people think he was a junkie. The first song, “Needle in the Hay,” seemed the most obvious bundle of references, including mention of “marks,” and meeting up with “the man.” Another song, “The White Lady Loves You More,” looked only slightly subtler: “Keep your things in a place meant to hide”; “Need a metal man just to pick up your feet.” Adding to the druggie ambience, the chorus of “St. Ides Heaven” featured Smith and Rebecca Gates (of the Portland band The Spinanes) singing “High on amphetamines/the moon is a light bulb breaking.” The cover of the album, a photograph by JJ Gonson that showed cut-out figures tumbling from a building like suicides, seemed like a portrait of the death-cheating soul that had written the songs. But Smith was no heroin addict.

  Not long after the release of Elliott Smith, Santen had a candid conversation about the drug with Smith. “He had a show in Boise with The Softies. And I was back in Portland and I was a mess and nobody knew, and I was like, ‘Elliott Smith, everyone knows he’s a junkie, and I’ll offer him a ride to Boise.’ And when we were up there I told him I was a mess, and he told me he’d never done it. I was pretty shocked by that. But not really—once you get in that kind of trouble you can tell if someone’s been through it or not.”

  On another occasion, says Santen, “we were driving back from Boise and I was having a talk with him, saying, ‘I don’t want to go back to Portland, I don’t know what to do, I’m in a mess with everything.’ We were talking about how heroin had taken over the city. I was talking about swimming across the Columbia River to get some heroin, and he was like, ‘I’d swim across that river for a piece of carrot cake.’ We spent the next two hours going around looking for carrot cake, after we were having this really heavy moment in the car.”

  You can hardly blame listeners for thinking Smith had a heroin problem. It’s hard to figure out what else might have inspired a song like “Needle in the Hay.” Smith said it was a “fuck you” song, to “everybody.” But the song doesn’t seem to be about somebody who’s been wronged and wants to tell everybody to fuck off. One hears both anger and humiliation as the narrator describes falling out of a bus at 6th and Powell (an innocuous downtown Portland location) and wandering aimlessly, shutting himself off, copping dope “so I can be quiet whenever I want.” In a semi-autobiographical read, such as Gonson suggests for “Roman Candle,” it is about trying to locate a hidden source of pain or misunderstanding. The “needle in the hay” could be just as much a metaphor for the painful places in Smith’s psyche as a metaphor for heroin—a needle in a hay stack is a sharp object concealed from sight that irritates from within, like a bullet that stays lodged in the body years after a gunfight. The song is perhaps less concerned with the experience of being a junkie than with Smith’s latent potential for self-destruction, his buried, unwanted impulses.

  One of the most telling statements about Smith’s songs came from Luke Wood, the label executive who worked with Smith at DreamWorks, shortly after Smith’s death, in a tribute hosted by the LA-based radio station KCRW. “I’ve never seen anyone better with metaphor in pop music than Elliott Smith, because he would talk about the layers of his lyrics in a very articulate planned-out way, and there’d be a metaphor for
something else that was a metaphor for something else and by the end of the song he would hint at you about what it was really about,” Wood said. “And that’s partly, I think, why the mythology behind Elliott and some of his personal issues is much larger than reality, because he used addiction or sadness or depression as metaphors for relationships or as metaphors for how you get through life.”

  The most important metaphor on the self-titled album is substance abuse. And Smith made it clear in an interview with the Mississippi-based zine Spongey Monkey that it was indeed a metaphor: “I just wasn’t in as bright of a mood when I was making it up,” he said. “The first one was more about people, that was the angle of it. The second one, I wasn’t hanging out with people as much. Sometimes people are like, ‘Oh, the second one is all about drugs and stuff,’ and it’s not about drugs. It’s a different angle or topical way of talking about things. Like dependency and mixed feelings about your attachment. It’s good for you on the one hand, and on the other hand it’s not really what you need.”

  “Southern Belle,” another song from Elliott Smith, sounds in some ways like a folk song; it even has bluegrass touches. But the song starts with a droning guitar chord, and Smith maintains that drone and uses it to great effect. Like “Venus in Furs” or “All Tomorrow’s Parties” off The Velvet Underground and Nico, the heart of the song is the way the melody deviates from and returns to that drone. While at first “Southern Belle” branches out into acoustic bluegrass punk, the coda owes much to the Velvets. A second guitar track comes in to emphasize the drone note against the ongoing melody of the other guitar. It’s a more emphatic version of the pattern Smith established earlier in the song, with the drone doubled across two guitar parts. But for most of the song, there’s only the single acoustic guitar, carrying the drone on the higher strings and the melody on the lower strings. It’s a solo acoustic execution of one of the Velvets’ signature concepts.

  Smith’s ability to play two parts at once on the acoustic guitar made it possible for him to graft the Velvets’ style onto a song that had the energy and bitterness of early Dylan protest songs. He rectified the feeling of lethargy that accompanies most songs built around a drone by surrounding his drone with activity and maintaining a rhythm without heavier instrumentation that might have weighed the song down. The result is a song with both the sinister quality of the Velvets and the righteous energy of folk music, perfect for capturing the narrator’s disdain for the pernicious “you” he addresses.

  The lyrics are classic Smith in their mix of drug innuendo and scolding. “How come you’re not ashamed of what you are?” the narrator asks, before lamenting the fact that “you’re the one she got.” On the other hand, the narrator allows “I live in a southern town/where all you can do is grit your teeth,” which in the context of the more explicit drug references scattered throughout the rest of the album suggests the effects of amphetamines. The narrator’s contradiction corresponds to the mixture of Velvets-style rock and bluegrass in the music. And the tension between the two sentiments and styles is one Smith uses to his advantage over and over again. The strain between them runs from “Needle in the Hay” through “Speed Trials”; his self-titled album and Either/Or share that strain as a defining characteristic.

  On one tour in 1997, Santen would travel with Smith across the country to Atlanta, where Pete Krebs met Smith to take over Bird-dog’s slot on the way back to Portland. It was an enjoyable experience for Krebs: “Most of the time when we got together we would just have beers and crack jokes, so it wasn’t songwriters’ summit or anything like that. He was just a really funny guy. Maybe it was because we had a really similar sense of humor, but I just thought he was a fucking scream.” Krebs’s pictures from this tour include a series in which Smith does the moonwalk against the backdrop of a fittingly lunar Western landscape. “Elliott was a real good moonwalker, and we were at a rest stop in the desert in front of one of the Indian moccasin shops, with the desert mountains behind us.”

  “He called me up and he was like, ‘You want to do this tour? I need to make a hundred dollars a show,’” Krebs remembers. “That was a really interesting experience because before that tour, Elliott and I were kind of—we came from the same place. In my mind we were equal, not necessarily in artistic ability, because I always thought he was leaps better than me, but I just figured, ‘We’re friends, we come from the same place.’ But that was the first time I noticed an inequality, in a way. Elliott was beginning to get special treatment for what he was able to do—and rightfully so. People were definitely cognizant of what he had going on. In a way I think that in retrospect it was kind of naïve of me to have gone into it with that frame of mind. I flew down, like, ‘Oh yeah, me and Elliott are going to go on tour together,’ and I think he had the same thing. He was just like, ‘Oh yeah, it’ll be fun, tour with friends.’ He was always really good about playing with friends and helping out people. So we did this tour, but it was like touring with a star all of a sudden. The tour manager guy was hired to focus on Elliott. I don’t know who hired him—Margaret Mittleman was involved at that point. It was the first time I went, ‘Whoa, people outside of town really know who this guy is.’ He was much bigger outside of Portland for a while than he was here, it seemed to me. Because you had that exotic, ‘he’s not from here’ kind of thing, ‘brilliant genius from Podunk, Oregon, comes to New York City’ thing happening for him. It was really striking the way people would interview him and the way people would treat him. I kind of got to see that firsthand. It’s the situation where you’ve got a close friend or someone that you know really well and you don’t see them for a while and you hang out with them and something has changed in their life. They have a lot more recognition or money or there’s some inequality that happened, but you didn’t notice, or now things have changed. So you just sort of sit there and go, ‘Whoa, this is really different.’ That’s what that tour was like. It was really fun hanging out, and I think Elliott wanted things to be the way they always were, but all of a sudden he was thrust into this limelight being like this savant, this genius. People saying, ‘This is the greatest thing I’ve ever heard in my life.’ And this was before a lot of the big shit happened. After it was over I was just like, ‘Wow, that was a really strange experience.’”

  Smith had his share of low-budget punk rock touring, both with Heatmiser and on his own, and this was travel de luxe. For a lot of indie rock bands, simply being able to sleep in hotels instead of on acquaintances’ floors is a magnificent accomplishment. “Margaret [Mittleman] had him really busy. He was constantly doing interviews and stuff, radio spots, and he had this handler guy—not that he needed it—smoothing out all the rough edges. It was a different kind of touring. It was like, ‘Wow, this is what it’s like when someone is smoothing out the rough edges,’ because you’re used to going on the road and starving. He drove us everywhere. We were always on time, we always ate, we always had a place to stay. It was amazing. I’d never toured like that before. I’d been eating shitty and sleeping in nasty places for ten years.”

  Krebs saw a new side of the music business, and he was also seeing a grim new side of Smith. It wasn’t because of heroin, that mythic destroyer of lives on tour; it was because of Smith threatening to do heroin. “Elliott was just kind of a drunk at that point. Maybe he messed around a little bit and took pills or whatever, but at that point [1997] he was always just kind of threatening to become a junkie. We’d go to the show and we’d hang out, and at some point Elliott would have enough drinks that he kind of started to do the ‘poor me’ thing: ‘You know, the world is just really hard for me, and there’s a side of me I don’t know if I’m going to be able to control,’ and dark allusions to needles, and it created this dynamic where people just sort of felt like, ‘Oh, here’s this brilliant guy and I have to save him from this really bad choice.’ And that was a dynamic I saw played out a lot, increasingly so, as he got more and more into his head. . . . I’m certainly not trying to dis him or
anything like that. He’d eat a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich during the day [only], so he would start to drink and then it’d be like, ‘I dunno man, I’m just like, just feel really horrible.’ And you’d be like, ‘Well, what’s wrong?’ And there’s like twenty minutes trying to get him to say what’s wrong, and he’d say what’s wrong, and then you’d spend the rest of the night trying to make Elliott feel better. For the first couple weeks of it it’s fine, you’d be like, ‘This guy is brilliant, he’s my good friend, he’s hilarious, I love him, I love being with this guy’—‘C’mon man, life is good, it’s really not that bad.’ But then after a while it just got to be a drag because you’d start to see it as this recurring theater production or something where Elliott was getting the response he really needed. Elliott got the response of people saying, ‘O god, isn’t it horrible that you might like destroy yourself? How can I save you?’

  “It was just like dark threats, of, ‘I have this thing that I really feel like I can’t control. And I’m keeping it at bay, but I want you to know I might not be able to do this.’ From what I understand—after that tour we didn’t see each other as frequently—that started to manifest itself as ‘I don’t know if I’m going to be alive much longer.’”

  Smith, the author of the self-titled record with the abundance of heroin references, was still thinking about the drug but not doing it. But talking about how there was a part of him susceptible to heroin’s temptations was alienating in and of itself in much the same way an actual heroin habit could be. Smith’s preoccupation with heroin frightened people and irritated real friends with its monotony.