Elliott Smith and the Big Nothing

by Nugent, Benjamin

  That need started with the gig that would make Smith famous: writing a song for the Good Will Hunting soundtrack. Portland-based director Gus Van Sant decided that he wanted Smith’s music to play in the background during several crucial scenes of his most straightforward drama to date, based on a script by costars Ben Affleck and Matt Damon (then virtual unknowns). It was agreed Smith would contribute one original song.

  It would take Smith places he didn’t ever think he’d go, and it was the first of a string of commitments that rendered him temporarily homeless and then kept him in Los Angeles, a place he never chose to live. The house in upstate New York never materialized. “It’s really hard when you’re on tour all the time to say it’s worth taking all this money I have and doing this thing, buying this thing that I’m not really going to be at. I think there was a really important need for it, but the urgency got wiped out by the fact that he was becoming really successful,” says Garry. “There were people and places that he needed to be at and near.”

  By his friends’ standards, Smith was already remarkably successful, and he was already having episodes involving drinking and melancholic reflection that left them worried. In both departments, nobody had seen anything yet.

  Seven

  GOOD WILL

  EARLY ONE MORNING in the last days of 1997, Smith was in Los Angeles recording XO when he got a call from Margaret Mittleman informing him that “Miss Misery,” the song he’d written for Good Will Hunting, had snagged him a nomination for an Academy Award for Best Original Song. He was up against Celine Dion for “My Heart Will Go On” from Titanic, and Trisha Yearwood for “How Do I Live” from Con Air among others. It was the proverbial single stroke that indelibly changes the course of a life. Smith didn’t particularly care; an Academy Award was no big deal to him. But it was a big deal in that, for the people who don’t live in one of the constellations of indie rockers scattered throughout the western world, it put Smith on the map.

  Smith thought the Oscar thing was overrated on principle. “He was like, ‘The Oscars are just a bunch of people deciding that someone’s worth something, and it has to do with commerce and I don’t know who these people are and they shouldn’t be deciding and I don’t know why everybody puts so much credit into it,’” says Swanson. “I remember calling him the morning I heard about it in LA. From minute one he was weirded out by the whole thing, he was never really excited, or felt like he had gotten somewhere. He always looked at things analytically: ‘What does this really mean? This doesn’t mean anything.’ But of course to the rest of the world it meant something.”

  The practical effects of the rest of the world’s caring about the nomination were immediate and profound. “We had just started [XO] and then [the nomination] happened,” says Schnapf. “It was like, ‘Oh Christ,’ and the next six weeks he was deluged. It was like ‘Elliott who?’ and then hours of press every morning.” That necessitated a semi-nocturnal daily schedule for making the album: “Noon until we couldn’t take it anymore,” remembers Schnapf. “Usually twelve hours.”

  Worse, the personal consequences for Smith were huge. The most damaging rift to develop between Smith and his friends was the gap between his level of fame and theirs, as much as Smith didn’t care about being famous. “He often spoke about how come he was getting all this attention when there were are all these other good bands,” E. V. Day remembers. “How come his friends’ bands aren’t getting attention?” He felt it didn’t make sense that Sam and Janet’s music wasn’t as popular as his. “Quasi would never get as big, get the kind of thing he was getting. And he just couldn’t handle it, he felt so shitty about it. And it started all kinds of conflicts in their friendships and basically dissolved [them]. It killed the relationships, as opposed to the opposite, which I think he wanted, which was to stay friends. . . . One night when we were in this hotel on tour and Sam was staying on the bus, and he was like, ‘How come I have this room and Sam’s sleeping on the bus?’ And I was like, ‘Sam wants to be alone anyway, he did the job, he’s being paid, he wants to play with you, it’s okay, he’s doing it. And if you asked him to come stay in this room he’d do it anyway.’ And he’d be like, ‘But I feel so bad he’s on the bus and I’m in the hotel room.’ He just couldn’t deal with it. And you couldn’t then also say, ‘Well, you go sleep in the bus then.’ There were so many conflicts like that at every turn. And it was so painful.”

  Pete Krebs remembers one such conflict on Valentine’s Day, 1998, that nearly snuffed his friendship with Smith. “So we played this show at EJs *, and I opened up for him, and at the end of the night they were doing a Kinks cover band. He played with Neil and Sam, and Janet was on drums. They were doing ‘Sunny Afternoon’ or whatever. It was kind of like the Portland All-Stars playing Kinks tunes. And Elliott just had a mic, and I remember him walking around the stage like this [Krebs makes a ‘raising the roof’ hand gesture] singing Kinks stuff. It was really great and that was the night I heard he was going to be on the Academy Awards. And I didn’t really know what to say. I was just like, ‘Hey man, it’s really great you’re on the Academy Awards, you know? Congratulations. I really gotta go.’ And he took it really wrong. I think that he thought I was mad at him. He was drunk, so I think he thought his friend was saying ‘fuck you.’ I didn’t hear from him for a long time after that, and I think that had a lot to do with it.” Krebs’s congratulatory farewell was so brief because of a personal issue unrelated to Smith, but Smith took it as a rebuke. “I was really a mess that night when I heard [about the Oscars] and I had to go home. So it was really impossible for me to be genuinely happy for him, just because I was so mixed up with my own shit. I just remember him going, ‘Pete, wait, man, hey, be cool,’ and I was just like, ‘No man, it’s cool, I gotta go.’ That was before things really started to go topsy-turvy, and that’s when stories of Elliott just started coming.”

  The misunderstanding with Krebs was just a prelude to the massive discombobulation that accompanied Smith’s performance at the Oscars and the scores of post-Oscar interviews in which Smith was asked how it felt to suddenly rise above his element. He generally replied that the awards ceremony was “surreal.”

  A little more than halfway through the 70th Academy Awards ceremony on March 23, 1998, Madonna walked onstage to introduce the last three nominees for Best Achievement in Music, Original Song (the first two nominated tunes had been performed earlier in the evening). Against a purple-and-blue backdrop, between symmetrical pillars, Trisha Yearwood sang “How Do I Live” from Con Air. Then the set turned from blue-and-purple to black, the pillars slid away, and Elliott Smith entered from stage left.

  Smith wore a white suit with a maroon shirt and a darker tie. Prada, he told his friend Laura Vogel, “gave me shoes, and a belt, and a shirt, and socks. . . . I wore my own underwear.” Earlier in the evening, he’d had to bend his own rules to accommodate the Academy, he later recalled; a producer had offered him anything he wanted, and then informed him a chair would be impossible. So he performed standing, expressionless, launching into “Miss Misery” with just his voice and his guitar. At the place in the studio recording where the electric guitar usually chimes in, the Academy’s orchestra entered, following the chord progression with strings. After skipping from the first verse to the second bridge, there were no further edits to the song. The orchestra faithfully followed the chords, and descended into abject schmaltz only when it introduced a vaguely Celtic flute (or piccolo?) line during the final verse, an echo of a similar flute line from the movie’s incidental music that seemed designed to match the shamrock logo always placed beneath the movie’s title. At one point, the camera swooped in for an extreme close-up of Smith’s face, and it was composed, impassive. When the song was over, he took a bow, gave the audience a tiny smile, and exited stage right.

  Next, Celine Dion arrived and delivered “My Heart Will Go On,” which everybody knew was going to win. Then, in a fluke moment of indie-mainstream collusion, Smith, Yearwood, and Dion wa
lked back onstage and held hands, with Smith in the middle of the two women. They took a bow in unison, and walked off again.

  When the smoke had cleared, the two middle-aged guys with beards and glasses who wrote “My Heart Will Go On” were victorious—it was the year Titanic won everything. When Madonna opened the envelope, she laughed: “Surprise!” Celine Dion became a huge star. On radio stations everywhere, “My Heart Will Go On” went on and on.

  Elliott Smith and Neil Gust in their first house in Portland, 1991. Credit: Marc Swanson

  Smith with Doug Martsch (short hair), Bill Santen (long hair), and an opening act, 1997. Courtesy of Bill Santen.

  Smith poses as a deep singer-songwriter on tour with Santen, 1997. Credit: Bill Santen

  Smith takes in a show with Jeff Buckley, Bolme, 1996. Credit: Ramona Clifton

  Smith watches Lou Barlow's farewell-to-Boston performance, amidst '90s indie rock crowd, 1998. Credit: Ramona Clifton

  Smith with Dorien Garry and Santen, on tour in Princeton, New Jersey, 1997. Credit: Courtesy of Bill Santen

  Smith discovers a cassette containing Hank Williams Jr.'s "All My Rowdy Friends Have Settled Down," Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1997. Credit: Bill Santen

  Smith with Glenn Kotche and Amity, 1997. Credit: Bill Santen

  Amity dyes Smith's hair in a hotel room on tour, 1997. Credit: Bill Santen

  Smith plays Boise, 1997. Credit: Bill Santen

  Smith rests, on tour with Santen, 1997. Credit: Bill Santen

  Smith plays craps with Janet Weiss on tour in Washington, DC. Credit: Ramona Clifton

  The tack piano at McConnell's house with Elliott Smith's bandage taped to the side (Smith sustained the injury repairing the piano), 2004. Credit: David McConnell

  The basement on the hill, David McConnell's studio, 2004. Credit: David McConnell

  Elliott Smith's favored guitar during the sessions at McConnell's studio and a couch he slept on, 2004. Credit: David McConnell

  Dion and Smith had already had a short moment of bonding backstage. Whether Dion remembered it is anyone’s guess, but Smith did. “After the Oscars,” says Swanson, “we talked about Celine Dion, and I was like, ‘So how was that?’ He was like, ‘Oh, she’s so nice.’ She came down to his dressing room or something, and said, ‘Hey, good luck, this is probably going to be hard for you, it sounds like you haven’t dealt with a large crowd like this, good luck.’ And after this we’d constantly be running into people coming up and talking to him, people who didn’t know him, and saying ‘Oh, how’s it goin’, saw you on the Oscars, so, how was that?’ And [they’d] make some derogatory Celine Dion comment, and every time they’d do it, I’d be like ‘gasp,’ and this look of rage in his eyes would come up and he’d be like, ‘You know, she’s a really nice person.’ And they’d always recoil and be like, ‘Oh, no, I’m sure she’s really nice.’ It was this whole idea that someone would judge someone they didn’t know, even though of course he could judge people he didn’t know. I thought that was a cute thing about him; he was defending Celine Dion all the time.”

  Celebrities didn’t become a major presence in Smith’s life, despite the fortunes awaiting the stars of Good Will Hunting. Smith was still nervous around major musicians. “There was a show he played in New York and Grandaddy was opening, and David Bowie showed up,” Clifton remembers. “It got to be sort of ridiculous. He didn’t actually come into the dressing room, and he may have been there because he was really interested in Grandaddy too, but I remember people coming in and saying, ‘Elliott, you gotta come out,’ and going out into the hallway. Bowie’s a little man, but he’s got that voice, and Elliott was just really modest, pleased but a little overwhelmed maybe. If he had the time to go into a corner booth and just talk, he was interested. He would be concerned about how is your life going, and your work. The most time I ever spent with him was during those first four and five years . . . during the last four years he didn’t have the time anymore, but then it was more insulated. There were always people around him who would always protect him a little bit, and I would always be like, ‘He knows me, I’ve been around for a long time, I’m not just somebody trying to get a piece of him.’ But they didn’t know. It was harder to spend any kind of time.”

  Speaking to Under the Radar years later, Smith would say, “After Either/Or, the Oscar stuff happened and that kind of derailed my train. Although it took a lot for it to fully derail.” So what happened?

  The lead-up to the Oscars may have constricted the recording schedule of XO, but there was a sudden, major upswing in popularity that was evident when Smith was on tour. “He played downstairs at the Middle East, and suddenly the place was really packed and everybody was yelling for ‘Miss Misery,’” remembers Ramona Clifton. “He was like, ‘Oh okay,’ but the crowd sort of expanded. Within the indie scene people loved him, but then he had gathered enough people who were watching the Oscars. Suddenly he was doing all these interviews and his name was everywhere. I think he was really happy—I think he wanted people to hear his stuff, but not necessarily in that way. The Good Will Hunting thing happened really fast—it wasn’t his album, it was a soundtrack, and it wasn’t his own baby. He tried as best as he could to deal with the attention; he always looked a little bit lost with it but he never complained about it. I think he had a hard time sometimes dealing with the bigger crowds, more college kids, more people yelling.”

  “Miss Misery,” the song that defined Smith in the eyes of Oscars viewers and headline writers, wasn’t a fair representation of Smith’s work if you thought it was all about depression, but it was if you considered it to be all about ambivalence. The chorus hook, “Do you miss me, Miss Misery, in the way that you say that you do?” puts in sharp relief both the narrator’s emotional dependency on the woman of the title and the knowledge that she’s probably not healthy for him. In her absence, the narrator looks to alcohol as a substitute: “I’ll make it through the day/with some help from Johnny Walker Red” are the first lines. Later on he talks about how succumbing to “oblivion” is “easy to do,” a statement that applies equally well to love and narcotics.

  To E. V. Day, Smith’s new life was more destructive than any of the secrets he kept bottled up had ever been. Recognition helped decimate his support system, and Smith found himself unable to scrap together a new one as sturdy as the old. “I think it was the new life,” she says when asked if sadness about the past was festering and making Smith more self-destructive than he had been. “Because if you listen to the earlier albums it’s all the same depth and sadness and composite characters who sound like his lovers but it’s really his stepfather and twisted into these love songs, essentially. But it’s composite stuff that I think he was always singing about. Even in Heatmiser he was singing about those relationships. I don’t think they were the new relationships that were necessarily worse. It was the whole structure. He used to have friends, real friends. He was surrounded by some of the greatest, loving people: like Quasi, those people were really great friends of his. And Neil, and Swannie [Swanson]. He had smart, talented, no-bullshit friends who didn’t do drugs. I think he missed it and I think he sabotaged it, and that was kind of one way to have control over his situation.”

  In a mostly unpublished May 1998 interview with Laura Vogel (a few of Smith’s sentences were published in Elle), whose zine he’d contributed to at Hampshire, Smith expounded at length on his new prospects. For all the reports that came later that Smith was a private person, the interview shows Smith not particularly concerned with his nascent renown.

  “It’s a happy accident,” he told Vogel. Fame, he went on, “makes some things harder, but doesn’t really come close to making it not worth it. It distracts your attention all of the time. It’s easier to play music if you don’t constantly think about how you’re perceived by people. If things go well and you get a bunch of attention for a while and [people] are asking you questions all the time, it redirects your attention to how they perceive you. . . . It’s not a
bad thing.”

  Vogel followed up by asking him if he ever wanted to “move to the mountains and just say fuck it.”

  “Not the mountains, but yeah,” he allowed. “No, I’m pretty committed to this . . . powering through any obstacle, and it’s not really an obstacle.”

  Vogel asked him about groupies, mentioning the ubiquity of “thrift-store PhD’s” at his show at Tramps in Manhattan, “including moony-looking girls in vintage glasses frames.”

  “I don’t know, usually after I play, I run off,” replied Smith. “I don’t think I really come across as a good groupie prospect. It’s not like I’m going to be . . . ”

  Vogel: “Bringing them back to the tour bus for some blow?”

  Smith: “Right. You know, having all of my security guys spec out all of the ‘hot babes’ from the audience. . . . Though, on this last tour I was kind of blown away by the occasional totally blunt proposition . . . and I get so into the mode of ‘Oh, thanks, thanks a lot,’ and someone would come up with this totally blunt proposition and I’d be like, ‘Thanks, thanks.’ It freaks me out, I so don’t feel like that kind of guy. . . . Apparently you don’t have to be handsome . . . or tall.”