To McConnell it didn’t seem like DreamWorks was hostile to what Smith was doing, only surprised. “We had meetings with Lenny Waronker and Luke Wood where we’d play them some of the songs. [Waronker] looked really tripped out by it. . . . I think he was probably thinking, ‘Oh my god, this is most crazy drug album I’ve heard in fifteen years.’ It was kind of like that. I think he felt almost like he was going back to the ’60s listening to this album. . . . Lenny seemed very supportive of Elliott. He seemed concerned, he also seemed afraid of Elliott too, kind of scared of him, intimidated by him. . . . It wasn’t like he was saying, ‘This is unreleasable.’ It was more like he was saying, ‘This is really fucking trippy.’”
Smith’s complaints about DreamWorks were of the kind very commonly voiced by artists about their labels, but they were adamant. “He wasn’t happy with DreamWorks at any time that I knew him,” says McConnell. “The whole time he was very unhappy with DreamWorks. He felt like they had let him down, they hadn’t promoted him correctly, they had spent all this money in the wrong way. They had spent a fortune on promoting his records, but it wasn’t, to him, how that money should be spent.
“He also felt that creatively they didn’t know what the fuck they were talking about. He was going to do the next record on his own with whoever he wants, and not make it polished, you know? That’s basically when he took this record into his own hands, and decided he was going to fight to get off Dream-Works, and a lot of the time he would just sit there and obsess about it, just talk about—‘Oh, those fuckers . . . ’—you know, there was a lot of that. Just basically, he would talk about people as if they were going to fuck him over, a lot of animosity toward DreamWorks.”
When I mentioned to McConnell that Marc Swanson says Waronker felt Smith was capable of doing a lot of his own production, he said, “That’s cool of Lenny to have said that. I wish Elliott could have heard that. Because he felt that way.”
It becomes clear from McConnell’s stories that during this period Smith was just as fastidious about protecting the independence of his music as he was about protecting the independence of his brain. The annoyance he expressed when Swanson suggested a rigorous dose of therapy was a lot like the suspicion he expressed of anyone’s efforts to fiddle with his new music. In both cases, his fear was of becoming normal, of some form of propriety impinging on his freedom to create and think whatever he wanted.
Even so, he knew he had a problem on his hands. He tried to get rid of it and he tried to hide it. “He was very into quitting drugs,” says McConnell. “I don’t think he liked being on drugs, and I don’t think he liked people knowing he was on drugs, necessarily. He was always lying to people about it. It was almost humorous to me. It was almost kind of a joke, ‘Yeah, I know. I’ve been straight for two weeks. I’m doing great.’ And then after he’d say something like that to his manager or whoever, he’d come inside and smoke some heroin and some crack. It was kind of a joke after a while—‘Oh yeah, guess who’s sober?’”
For a few days during this time when he was heavily addicted, according to Dorien Garry, Smith spent time with Fugazi’s Ian MacKaye in Washington, DC, talking about his problems. He hoped MacKaye, famous in the punk rock world for espousing sobriety, might show him a way out of his dependencies.
Smith also tried to solve the problem through unconventional treatments. Los Angeles, of course, is to alternative therapy what Florence is to Renaissance art. Smith had a man he called his “brain boss,” McConnell says, showing me a note Smith left on a piece of tape that once labeled the different tracks on a mixing board. The note says “psych appt. 2 pm” and indicates that whatever Smith was working on was still unfinished. McConnell also showed me a prescription pill bottle for Steven Paul Smith, left over from Smith’s stay at the house. The prescription is for Klonopin, an anti-anxiety medication known for its potential to create dependency. Smith at one point posed for a photograph, McConnell says, next to a pyramid of his prescription medicine bottles. McConnell remembers there being about ten different prescriptions. Smith also received visits from a man affiliated with the Malibu-based Telesis Foundation, says McConnell. Telesis uses some of the same 12-step meetings Smith seemed to reject in Arizona.
“I just knew he really had absolutely the ability to kill himself. From college I think it was really bad,” E. V. Day told me in an interview. But the moment I came to grips with what Smith was going through during the last few years of his life came when Mc-Connell showed me two pieces of black construction paper filled with dense, neat handwriting in silver marker. The rows are even and the entire space of both pages is filled. This, McConnell explains, was a document Smith made of one of his dreams during that time. He suggested to McConnell that he frame it in order to preserve it.
The two-page note begins with Smith musing over if he were able to physically assault himself, he would choose to do it; segues into a vow to stop buying cocaine; and eventually finds Smith reaching the conclusion that he must choose between drugs and relationships. Then Smith writes, “Must separate drug use from escaping my past and/or stupid ‘I don’t remember what happened.’” It’s hard to be sure what Smith is referring to by “stupid ‘I don’t remember what happened,’” but since he’s on the subject of “escaping” his “past,” it seems possible Smith was bringing up his uncertainty about whether or not he was sexually abused as a boy. Smith’s preoccupation with what he couldn’t remember had to stop being a reason to take narcotics. He had to find a more lasting way of putting his past behind him. The note concludes with a reflection that maybe the reason Smith is on anti-schizophrenia medication is because of how conflicted he feels, which is followed by a remembrance of a dream in which a huge ship was stretched and split apart, apparently a reflection of his own divided state of mind, topped off with an image of Smith digging at his own brain with a fork.
The fact that the note veers far from standard personal-essay structure shouldn’t in and of itself be seen as a sign that Smith was in a troubled state when he wrote it; when asked in an interview magazine if he’d ever write a novel, Smith said no, and explained that the kind of writing that came naturally to him was the kind of free-associative liner notes one finds on Dylan albums. The silver-on-black note at McConnell’s house is squarely in that tradition.
That said, it’s a rueful, vaguely suicidal series of reflections. Smith copiously reminded his listeners in interviews that his songs weren’t diary entries; here we have what is essentially a diary entry, and it’s grimmer than the grimmest of his songs. The vision of the ship stretched to the breaking point mirrors the vision of a Smith divided between an old self and a new one the former threatening violence to the latter. What this section of the note has in common with the first part is its implication that the past must be confronted. Otherwise, it will creep up to kill him from behind. The whole note is roundly anti-drug, in its way, from the vow not to buy coke to the observation that there must be a reckoning between narcotics and love.
At this time, Smith was striking out at himself, albeit in a quieter fashion than the above ruminations might suggest. Mc-Connell kept finding Smith had drugged himself into oblivion in places that were easy to find, “with the intention of killing himself. Which I didn’t know until much later. He would be like, ‘Dude you know the other day when you found me on the floor asleep for twenty-six hours? Well, I took twelve Klonopin and I drank a bottle of scotch.’ I’d be like, ‘Fuck, Elliott, why didn’t you tell me?’ ‘Well, I just couldn’t stand it.’ So he tried to kill himself a number of times here, but he was always in a place where I would find him and wake him up and be like, ‘Hey dude, what’s going on?’” McConnell says Smith would inform him of his suicidal intent “after the fact.”
“That first one he’d be like, ‘Hey, don’t tell anybody—if you do, it’s going to get worse, I will for sure kill myself.’ But I would take it up with his girlfriend, and be like, ‘Hey, Elliott tried to do this, would you please take the appropriate measures to
remedy this situation?’ I couldn’t call the police.”
But Valerie, like just about everybody who knew Smith, found Smith difficult to control. “Valerie’s reaction was basically, ‘I don’t know what to do,’” says McConnell. “God, she was so up and down. One minute she’d be real smiley and happy and passive—‘ Oh, that’s just Elliott’—the next minute she’d be in tears—‘I don’t know what to do about him, he’s going to end up killing himself and there’s nothing I can do.’ He later told me, ‘Hey, I tried to kill myself at your house at least ten times and it didn’t work.’ His statement about drugs was that he was invincible when it came to drugs, that he couldn’t OD. And he might have been right.”
It was hard to figure out how to react to Smith’s drug problems at this time. On the one hand, he didn’t like it when somebody intervened, as DreamWorks and Mittleman did. McConnell remembers Smith saying of Mittleman, “She tried to clean me up. Tried to get me on the bandwagon.” To which Smith’s response, Mc-Connell says, “was basically like, ‘Fuck that, I’m an artist.’ I don’t know, obviously Margaret would know more about it. But he definitely was resentful. She was on his shit list, let me put it that way, whereas maybe Rob [Schnapf] wasn’t really on his shit list.” The difference between declining to continue a professional relationship (as he did with Schnapf) and ending a professional relationship on a note of rancor seemed to depend on whether there had been some kind of attempt to get Smith off drugs. At the same time, McConnell, who showed Smith more deference in this area, couldn’t get Smith to finish his album in anything like a timely fashion, let alone take care of himself.
And Smith’s eating problems during the recording of the record were almost as bad as his drug problems. McConnell got the sense that crack was one reason Smith didn’t eat right, but not the whole reason. “I think it was partially just him, he just didn’t feel good when he ate. He just didn’t like the way food made him feel. You know when you eat and feel tired? He hated that feeling. And what he would do was he would eat ice cream late at night, he loved ice cream. We would go to the grocery store and buy two hundred, three hundred dollars’ worth of ice cream, stick it in the freezer, and it’d be every kind of ice cream you can imagine. But he wouldn’t eat real food. He’d eat nutritional bars now and then.
“One day I forced him to go with me to a restaurant, because he didn’t like going to a restaurant. So I took him down to a sushi restaurant, one of my favorite ones, down the street. I took him in there, but not against his will. He sat in the car. I said, ‘I’m going to go in and eat, you don’t have to go with me, but you know where to find me, I’ll be in there eating if you want to come in.’ And he said, ‘No, I’m not ready to eat food, I’m not going in your restaurant. No way.’ So I said, ‘All right, well I’ll be back.’
“So I had him in my car and I knew that he either had to sit in the car and wait for me or he’d have to come in. So I went in and I ate. Then after fifteen minutes he caved and he came in and sat down next to me and he had a bowl of soup. That was like—his girlfriend and everybody was shocked—‘Oh my god, you got him to eat.’ It was one of those things, you know? I kind of planned it, planned it all out, that he would, because I knew he’d eventually come in, and just out of curiosity he’d want to see what was going on. So he did. He had a bowl of miso soup, he ate about half of it. And he was like, ‘Mmm, that’s actually pretty good. Not bad!’”
Basement on the Hill had become an exercise in self-deprivation, a search for rock bottom. This becomes plain when you listen to the music. McConnell played me three tracks from Basement on the Hill; they all court chaos without abandoning prettiness. “Shooting Star” in particular is orchestrated to sound like something falling apart. The verse-chorus-verse structure is framed by guitar solos that compete for attention in the rough mix, and at the end the song gives itself over to them, with the drums leaving behind their regular snare on the two and four to join in the clamor.
The mix of the album that will end up being released is being worked on by Schnapf and Joanne Bolme as I write. “Passing Feeling” is more contained than “Shooting Star,” but still grittier and more flamboyant than the music on Smith’s other albums.
The piano that McConnell transformed into a tack piano, changing its sound to create ghostly reverberations, sits near the entrance to his home, and there’s a bandage taped to it with some of Smith’s dried blood still on it. Smith had cut his hand fixing up the instrument, and affixed the bandage to it afterwards as a humorous reminder of the battle he’d fought with it. The sound of the tack piano, like the guitars on “Shooting Star,” suggests entropy, the breakdown of order, flirtations with madness. In other words, the album aims for the same effects the darkest tunes on The White Album aimed for. This is Elliott Smith making his own “Glass Onion” and “Helter Skelter.”
Sometimes, the Smith-McConnell sessions slid into the creative bacchanalia associated with late ’60s rock and with California in general. About once a week, McConnell would join Smith in some form of drug use—usually it was coke (they mixed “Shooting Star” coked up, late one night) or inexpensive black tar heroin, both of which Smith could procure easily in downtown Los Angeles, but occasionally speed, which Smith found harder to come by. The songs are infused with the melancholy of somebody pursuing a version of rock and roll long abandoned by the people who first came up with it: the sun-kissed California of The Byrds and The Doors and Harvest-era Neil Young, a place and time and approach to music that aimed to express of states of mind that had never been adequately expressed before. It was a place and time before glam rock increased the distance between rock stars and fans and punk rock eliminated it, when musicians tinkering on beautiful secluded real estate in Malibu could feel isolated without feeling guilty about it. A discarded dream of the ’60s haunts From a Basement on the Hill. Those rough early sessions, with the drugs, the reverence for The White Album, and the rejection of anything like a regular work routine, produced music that was melodious but lawless. Smith felt he had to put himself through a maddening process to make the songs he wanted to make, and he was probably right.
It didn’t last. Like some of his brilliant ’60s progenitors, Smith started to lose it. “He felt like DreamWorks was following him for a while,” says McConnell, “that they were spying on him. There was one point he even thought the CIA was watching him. He was always seeing white vans everywhere.”
Smith—and maybe the drugs—even made McConnell wonder what was going on. “He talked like a crazy guy on drugs, and a crazy paranoiac. But it’s funny because I’d watch him, and actually he had a point. There were white vans everywhere following him. It was really bizarre. I was like, ‘No, this guy’s cuckoo,’ but then I’d go in the car with him and for like three days we’d be driving around, and he’d be like, ‘Look, dude, it’s a fucking white van.’ It was really strange. There was one point we went to go get a prescription pill one night, and this white van followed us to the fucking drugstore. We got out of the car, went into the drugstore, and these two guys got out of the white van and went into the drugstore and were watching us inside the drugstore. It was really bizarre. It could have been one of those crazy things, where maybe he was right and maybe DreamWorks wanted to get bad dirt on him, but in all probability he was just paranoid.”
Smith’s behavior got to be heartbreaking. “There were times he would come up to this house, up the hill,” says McConnell, pointing through the window at the soft green gumdrop hills. “Valerie would drive him as far as Los Flores Canyon right here, [and] he’d make her stop right down there, see where that car is driving? He’d make her stop right there, and then he’d come up the hill through the bushes. He’d walk through the bushes, sneak through, ’cause he didn’t want the CIA to see where he was going. And then he’d come up and tap on the door.” McConnell whispers: “‘Hey, it’s Elliott, let me in quick before they see me.’ And then Valerie would pull in the front gate. I’d be like, ‘Fuck dude, where’d you come f
rom?’ And he’d be like, ‘I just came up through there.’”
Smith’s appearance during the LA years changed rapidly. Sometimes he looked as if he were in the midst of physical trauma, and sometimes he looked fine. But the moment when alarm bells went off about Smith’s health among his audience was the Sunset Junction Music Festival on August 18, 2001.
Sunset Junction is one of the two hearts of Silver Lake (the other is a district adjacent to the Silver Lake reservoir, where the club Spaceland sits). It’s just east of where Hollywood Boulevard shakes off its scuzzy Hollywood odor, turns southeast, and merges with Sunset Boulevard. Immediately after the two boulevards meet, Solutions, the audio-supplies store with the black-and-red swirls that made the backdrop for the Figure 8 cover photo, emerges on the right. The stage where Smith performed on August 18 lay shortly west of that point. He came on solo with his acoustic guitar and proceeded to launch into a set that onlookers found painful, even as fans continued to sing his praises afterwards. His hair was bound into two braids, Willie Nelson–style.
One fan’s account of that show, posted on the fan site www.sweetadeline.net goes like this:
Shooting Star
Let’s Get Lost
Somebody’s Baby
Say Yes—stopped the song right before “crooked spin can’t come to rest” cause he couldn’t remember it
Alameda—stopped this one early too
Son of Sam—did the first 2 verses and the bridge fine, but didn’t try the last verse. . . it was still good though
Pretty (Ugly Before)
A Passing Feeling
Division Day
Needle in the Hay—abandoned right around the second verse
Angeles—beautiful, the crowd helped out a little bit on the words
Between the Bars—also beautiful, didn’t need our help this time
Southern Belle—didn’t even make it to the words before he stopped, he just couldn’t get the guitar part down
Elliott Smith and the Big Nothing Page 19
