Elliott Smith and the Big Nothing

by Nugent, Benjamin

  Last Call—sang “last call, sick of it all” then stopped and laughed and said that’s all he could remember

  Blackjack Davey—a Woody Guthrie cover, was very cool Happiness—didn’t get very far here either, may have sang the first few words

  The Biggest Lie—did this one pretty good, it was very pretty regardless, I loved it. Then he said thanks and that was it, walked over to the girl taping him (his girlfriend I believe?), talked to her for a second, came back and sat down, said, “just had to talk to my coach,” and carried on with more songs

  Thirteen—Big Star cover song, heartbreaking as usual

  Clementine—got thru around the first verse before he had to quit

  Independence Day—couldn’t get the guitar part right so he abandoned it

  See You Later—played this one very well

  Then he left the stage, the lady in charge of the stage got us to help bring him back out for “one more song,” and he obliged

  Everything’s Okay [not the actual song title]—he got thru most of this song but couldn’t remember the end I guess, so he had to quit it there

  Needle in the Hay—he asked if he’d already tried “Needle in the Hay” and stopped, and the crowd said yes, so he said he’d do it right this time. And he did, and it was great. Then he said he’d do it better next time.

  His fans might have been willing to quietly put up with the weirdness—“It’s been a while since Elliott played in front of anyone,” someone else writing on the site remarked sympathetically—but alarm bells went off around the music world. If people had wondered before if Smith was just singing about drugs without doing them, which was in fact the case at some points, they now couldn’t help but wonder if he’d been doing them the whole time. The way people looked at him as a musician and songwriter started to change.

  The effect on Smith’s reputation was particularly acute because his sets had so recently been near-perfect. From Portland to Stockholm his hallmark had been competence. It had been the clean page on which his lyrics and melodies could be understood in all their subtlety.

  Part of the problem during this time was that Smith—notwithstanding any falling-outs he might have had with old colleagues—just wasn’t particularly good at correspondence. People who might have rushed to his aid had lost track of how to reach him. “Elliott was a person who lived very much in the moment,” says Swanson. “When you were there you were everything. When you were gone I think you could feel pretty insecure about how he was always terrible about staying in touch. Always. Even before anything happened, I remember calling him three or four times threatening, ‘I’m going to punch you next time I see you,’ and he would always call me being like, ‘Okay, sorry.’ But he was always so sweet, every time I would see him he’d start babbling right away about how he meant to call, and thought about it a million times.”

  Swanson had once given Smith a bracelet. “He’d often bring up that bracelet, to let me know he thought of it every day,” he says. His annoyance with Smith for losing touch would “melt away so quickly because he was always so sweet and would bring up this very personal thing. It was nice, because after that when I hadn’t heard from him in a few months I would see a picture of a show and there would be the bracelet. And he made that known, that’s what it was, but he couldn’t, no matter what, he couldn’t [keep in touch]. And I don’t think I ever really took it that personally, which I think made it more okay for me than other people.”

  Smith was somebody who quickly attracted new friends, a likely reason why the move to LA stretched from temporary to permanent. Smith would eventually express frustration that he felt stuck there because of relationships that were important to him. “There was a sense that people wanted to take care of him, wanted to help him.” Swanson says. “There was a general sense that no one understood him, but then he would connect to people really easily so people could think they really understood him. Increasingly, that’s what made you more insecure as his friend, because you would think you were the one and then all of a sudden it was somebody else and you read it in a magazine. After [hearing] his music it was kind of undeniable why people wanted to be friends with him: He was a genius, and people like to be close to geniuses if possible. And even if they don’t think he’s a genius they’re willing to be close to someone who’s a celebrity.”

  But Smith was still discriminating in his choice of friends: “I think even celebrities wanted to be close to him and he would blow them off. He never had any sort of care of whether there was someone he should know, or anything like that, it was whether he connected with someone and whether they were nice.”

  McConnell came up with a plan to protect Smith from some of the effects of his problems. He met with mixed results, but it was a decision that profoundly affected the making of the album. “After about six months of working together, maybe it was less than that, we started buying equipment for his studio, and there’s a whole story about why he bought his studio—basically he was spending a lot of his money very quickly on things that weren’t going to be around, things that he was consuming. Drugs, alcohol, prescription drugs. Frivolous things: ice cream, just because he wanted to come home and eat the flavors. . . . He was just spending so much money, and I would even get messages on the machine from his financial manager. She’d be like, ‘Hey, I’m calling for Elliott, I’m real worried about his balance.’ He was spending thousands of dollars a week. Anyway, I sat him down on the couch, and I said, ‘Look, man, what do you think about buying your own studio? You could have all the gear you would want at your fingertips, and all the gear I have here at your fingertips. [It’s] kind of an investment, but [it’s] also so that you can have all the cool stuff that you love.’ And after talking for about two hours, he was like, ‘Yeah, let’s do it.’ So my whole plan was to save him from financial ruin. Basically, I just wanted him to have something as an investment, so that if he did hit rock bottom—he was on the street, homeless, all that shit—at least he would have $100,000 worth of equipment. And we bought particular pieces, carefully chose the pieces. We chose the ones that would escalate in value—the ones that he liked, but also vintage pieces that would go up in value. It was quite an investment. Pretty much the next day we started looking for gear. That’s when we found his studio.”

  That studio was near a vast stretch of car dealerships on Van Nuys Boulevard, in the heart of the San Fernando Valley. Part of the storefront-sized Valley Center Studios complex, the entrance was next to a dumpster, adjacent to the rear parking lot. Outside, heavy-metal guitar solos were often clearly audible. There was nothing secluded or ’60s or glamorous about it. For a long time, it was a far less productive place for Smith than McConnell’s house had been.

  “We did some work there [at the new studio], just trying to get the studio set up, and we quickly learned that all the gear was so old. We kept coming back here, eventually. That was when he decided, ‘I want to name the record after your place. That’s the only place the music can continuously get done, is here.’ . . . But somehow he thought the record was coming from the energy of this place or something. He’d be talking about the sound of the crickets here late at night, he would record the crickets. He’d take mics outside—they’re really frogs down by the creek, but they sound like crickets—trippy things like that, and he also just felt safe here, just private, felt kind of like it was an escape from, you know, a lot of the . . . he had some paranoia about people following him and stuff like that. But he also just liked being alone. He just liked that he could come here inside the gate, and be here. He would wander around the property with his headphones on listening to the mixes, on the trails and stuff, he really got off on that.”

  But no matter how much affection he had for the hillside basement, and no matter how productive he was there, Smith stuck to the plan of building his own studio.

  “Elliott decided to buy all of his gear—he had cool old gear and we bought all of it. And we bought separate pieces that we were looking for,
specific things, you know, stuff like The Beatles used, bought him a new board, a cool old Trident board, which are rare. One of them was in Trident Studios where The Beatles recorded a couple tracks on the later albums; when they didn’t want to be at Abbey Road they’d go to Trident, they did a few songs over there. He wanted that board because he knew there were only thirteen made and The Beatles had worked on it.

  “So anyway, we did some work there, just trying to get the studio set up, and we quickly learned that all the gear was so old . . . the board was so messed up that it had to be rebuilt, basically, by a technician. Well, months and months passed of technicians coming in and trying to work on the board, and some of them were dishonest, and these techs were messing up stuff more than fixing them, which was very frustrating for him.”

  Smith would try being his own tech sometimes, and while he would later tell Under the Radar proudly that he had fixed his mixing board by having a “soldering party” inside it, the combination of drugs and faulty equipment slowed the creation of the album to a crawl as Smith began to engage in the obsessive manual labor typical of somebody who’s been taking too many drugs and getting too little sleep. The freedom and wildness that Smith had hoped to attain by taking whatever substances he wanted and being as particular and dictatorial about his sound as he wanted had turned into a trap. It was the kind of trap he’d described in “Between the Bars” and in “Angeles,” the kind that uses license and comfort as bait to imprison you.

  During this tortured recording period, Marc Swanson and Lenny Waronker wound up discussing Smith at a chance meeting at Diner, a Williamsburg restaurant so centrally located with regard to the New York art scene that a gallery in Sweden once constructed a replica of it, flying out creative-looking Williamsburg residents as part of the package. Slender waiters with dyed floppy hair write the names of the specials in pencil on the paper tablecloths. Waronker remarked that Smith was probably capable of doing a lot of his own recording. Swanson was feeling the distance drug addiction creates between old friends, “waiting for [Elliott] to come back. . . . [Lenny] said to me, ‘I think he needed less production,’” says Swanson, “which I don’t think anybody else was telling Elliott. I had just assumed he wanted to produce himself and they wouldn’t let him.”

  Back in California, Smith’s self-recording was going slowly. “I think he would kind of be . . . just tweaking on stuff, not in the way of speed tweaking, he would be like trying to fix his guitar amp, and he might be on a drug run staying up,” says McConnell, “maybe doing coke or whatever he’d have to do to keep him up, and the prescription medicine he was taking would keep him up too. But he’d be up and just kind of like, ‘just trying to fold my cables.’ He would have bought a new piece of gear that he’d got real cheap off eBay, and sit there trying to fix it, and he didn’t really know what he was doing. He’d have a concept of how it worked, but he wouldn’t really know, he’d be bitching about it, like, ‘God damn it. I can’t get that fucking thing to work, aggh.’ He’d get real frustrated, pulling on his hair and stuff.

  “But it also reminded me very much of Thomas Edison or something in his lab, not sleeping. Yeah, a lot of it was drug-induced, but there were also periods when he wasn’t on drugs, when he’d be totally . . . It’s kind of interesting—one point I’d like to make regarding this—he’d be sober sometimes, and sometimes he’d be pretty drugged out, and what was interesting to me was that, when he was sober I was always expecting him to be like a different person . . . see things different. His body language and his talking were very clear and very present like a sober person is. But his ideas and the things he was saying, and his concepts, were all the same as when he was fucked up. Which was fascinating to me, because I know when I’m fucked up I’m saying things and thinking things differently from when I’m sober, but for him it was, even though he was acting sober when he was sober, the words were the same, and his ideas were exactly the same. When he was sober, he wouldn’t tweak as much. But he’d still have the same opinion, of music, of life, of people.”

  By this point, Smith was only occasionally able to successfully commit some music to tape. “This happens to a lot of people when they record. Almost everyone I’ve ever worked with can get caught in this rut, but for him it really spiraled out of control,” says McConnell. “You get a lot of work done, so that you feel like you’ve got it under control, but then maybe you take some time off from it, and it’s just really difficult to get back to work, to get back into the flow of finishing the album, and there would be like weeks going by where he would kind of be in the studio without getting a whole lot done. It’d be weird because he’d call me over there, and I’d get over there, and two days would go by, without any music getting done, and I’d be like, ‘Look Elliott, I’m going home, call me when you’re ready to work, when you’re ready to get some shit down.’ I wouldn’t hear from him for like a week, and then like a week later he still doesn’t have any work done. Sometimes I’d kind of force him to work, I’d call him up and I’d be like, ‘Dude, we’re starting tomorrow at one o’clock. Be there. This is what we’re going to do, we’re going to lay down guitars first and then start on vocals.’ And then I’d get two or three good days out of him, when I’d force him to work. But left to his own devices he didn’t get a lot done, especially when he was in his own studio, because I think he felt like he wasn’t having to pay by the hour. He’d just kind of cruise along.”

  Smith was working on an album that deftly used a grain of chaos to create an original feel, but far too much chaos had worked its way into his life. The studio in Van Nuys was a mess of non-functional equipment; his bank account was draining; and his live shows, a surefire way to replenish funds and maintain his reputation, were falling apart. The Sunset Junction experience wasn’t an isolated incident.

  On May 2, 2002, Smith shared a bill with Wilco at the Rivera Theatre in Chicago, Wilco’s hometown. By this time the American indie crowd had heard the stories of Smith’s shambolic Sunset Junction performance, and the Rivera show confirmed their worst suspicions. Smith explained at the show that he’d fallen asleep on his arm on a plane and couldn’t feel his fingers; it’s hard to imagine the flawlessly tight musician Smith had been in 1998 offering that kind of excuse. “I felt like I’d walked into my house to find Robert Downey, Jr., sleeping on my chaise lounge,” wrote the indie rock Web site Glorious Noise of Smith’s performance that night. Andrew Morgan, then an unknown young musician living in Chicago, with no connection to Smith, remembers the show as “sad and brutal to watch.” After Smith’s death, the site Pop Matters published the saddest recollection of that night: “He didn’t even seem to know where he was: ‘I love Portland,’ he announced, apropos of nothing.”

  Morgan would get to know Smith soon afterwards, when he was in the middle of giving up the punishing lifestyle he’d stumbled into while recording Basement on the Hill. In August 2002, Smith checked into the Neurotransmitter Restoration Center in Beverly Hills, an addiction-treatment clinic run on principles developed by Dr. William Hitt. This was the second of Smith’s two stays there, Smith told Morgan. Smith described his treatment to Under the Radar as being hooked up to an IV that delivered saline solution and amino acids, which, he said, “kick all the shit out of your nerve receptors. The different proteins in the amino acids eventually sort of rebuild the damaged neuro-receptors.” He talked about the center like a convert: “I was coming off of a lot of psych meds and other things. I was even on an antipsychotic, although I’m not psychotic. It was really difficult, but also something to get the word out about because it doesn’t cost as much as it does to keep someone in a twenty-eight-day rehab. It’s usually a ten-day process, but for me it took a lot longer. I think most people just go there for a week. . . . But nobody seems to know about it. There’s been like 15,000 people treated with it, and its success rate is 80 percent versus 10 percent for the normal twenty-eight-day twelve-step.”

  Smith’s description matches official Neurotransmitter Resto
ration Center language. The center’s Web site credits the NRC with treating thousands of people, and in a short documentary a man who’s supposed to be Dr. Hitt portrays his technique this way: “Within a few days, three or four days, we’ll have the craving for drugs James [the client depicted in the film] has used totally obliterated. We feel our success rate is probably close to 80 percent. The treatment feels almost like the substances they’re using.” The film shows a client being hooked up to an IV in non-descript chambers that will look familiar to anyone who’s been in a typical family doctor’s office. It also shows Hitt preparing medicine for eventual use on a client. Different amino acids, he explains, are effective for curing addiction to different substances, so each client gets a different cocktail, depending on her or his type of abuse.

  The clinic Smith appreciated so much was run by a man who’d been found in a Houston court to have misled his patients, in violation with state and federal laws. Court papers show that Dr. William Hitt, credited with developing the process the Neurotransmitter Restoration Center uses to treat addiction, lied in Texas about being a doctor.

  The clinic’s Web site broadcast impressively ambitious descriptions of his credentials. The rap sheet on Dr. Hitt would be an inspiration to any screenwriter looking to deliver the next Chinatown. The Center’s Web site states, “Dr. Hitt has been honored with numerous awards as a scientist and physician, including the Van Leeuwenhoek Award of France for excellence in microscopy and the Ely Lily Award for his discovery of a new system of microplasma.” There may be an Ely Lily Award, but Eli Lilly and Company, the multinational pharmaceutical corporation that introduced Prozac, bestows no such honor. There may be a Van Leeuwenhoek Award of France, but the Leeuwenhoek Medal, bestowed by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, is one of the highest honors in microbiology. Dating back to 1877, it is given to a scientist once every ten years, and the winners include Louis Pasteur. They don’t include Hitt.