Elliott Smith and the Big Nothing

by Nugent, Benjamin

  It was in 1987 that a Houston judge shut down three clinics operated by Hitt and forbade them to treat allergies and AIDS symptoms by injecting patients with urine, according to court records; the assistant attorney general said she sought the injunction because she felt the treatment was dangerous. The court ruled that Hitt misrepresented the effectiveness of the treatment and misrepresented his own qualifications. Hitt was not a medical doctor or a PhD, and he claimed both titles. He was found to have violated Texas laws a handful of ways. Among them was “selling, or offering for sale, a ‘new drug’ as defined by the Texas Food and Drug Act and by the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (Title 21 U.S.C. 301 et seq.) without having applied to or acquired approval from the Federal Food and Drug Administration.” Another was “engaging in false advertising by making false and misleading representations as to the safety and effectiveness of the treatment offered.” The most pertinent to Smith’s situation: “representing that Mr. Hitt is professionally qualified to diagnose and treat human patients when he is not” and “failing to disclose that claims made concerning the treatment were false, unsubstantiated, and undocumented, with the intent to induce consumers to enter into a transaction into which they would not have entered had the information been disclosed.”

  In Texas, the court enjoined Hitt and the companies affiliated with him, Allergy Control Group and Vita Scale, from (among other things) “representing expressly or impliedly that Defendant Hitt is a doctor, that he holds a PhD or any other graduate or post-graduate degree which he does not hold or that said degree is from a particular institution when such is not the case, that he is a licensed physician or that he is qualified or certified to treat any illness or disease.” The state hit him up for twenty thousand dollars, eighteen thousand of which covered its legal fees.

  Presumably the reason no article about Smith contains this information is because Smith was unaware of Hitt’s background, at least for a while, and didn’t feel the need to go public with it if he ever found out. He tried Hitt’s treatment after a few attempts to get clean through other rehabs. As Under the Radar put it, after noting that the center wasn’t FDA-approved, Smith apparently gave the place a whirl as a last resort and felt it helped him in ways that other places didn’t.

  Given Hitt’s legal history, it’s unclear what kind of treatment Smith actually received. If he got an IV drip that he thought helped purge his addictions, what exactly was in that IV? Given that the Texas judgment was quite clear on the point that Hitt misled his patients about the content of his treatments, and that Hitt’s signature is on the judgment testifying to his own acceptance of the judgment, it’s hard to feel confident that the drip going into Smith really contained the custom blend of amino acids it was supposed to. Smith told Under the Radar that he required a much longer stretch of treatment than most people who went to the clinic, that he received an unusually large amount of it.

  The clinics shuttered by the State of Texas purported to treat AIDS with filtered urine, which has nothing to do with what the Neurotransmitter Restoration Center purports to do: help addicts. But treating addicts was one of the numerous functions of a Hitt clinic in Tijuana that was searched by local health authorities before the eyes of an NPR reporter in 2001 and that closed that year after the inspectors discovered code violations. According to NPR, the inspectors found mucus samples and “tubs of unknown medicine.” They also said that Hitt wasn’t licensed to practice experimental therapies. As of this writing, there was still a Web site online for a William Hitt Center in Tijuana, with links to a hotel that advertises itself as housing many patients of the center. The place where Hitt’s clinic used to sit in a Beverly Hills office building is now empty, but the Neurotransmitter Restoration Center’s name is still on the directory in the lobby. It’s in one of the most expensive areas for commercial real estate in Los Angeles.

  This isn’t the first report on Hitt’s past—Pamela Sterling wrote about it in a New Zealand Listener article. The Associated Press covered the closing of Hitt’s Houston clinics, and, as noted above, National Public Radio covered a raid on his Tijuana clinic by local health officials.

  Still, Smith had undergone an apparent change for the good. “He told me he didn’t need heroin anymore,” says Morgan. “I was there in the transition period between the well-documented problems that were going on and during his rehabilitation at the institute. Paranoia? For sure. But it wasn’t constant.”

  The cause for the changes in Smith may have been psychological rather than medical, but the changes were real. It’s possible his change was due to something else that happened around the same time he went in for his final week-long stay at the center: He and Deerin split up and he moved in with a friend he had once dated, an art therapist named Jennifer Chiba. A slender Asian or half-Asian woman with friends in the LA music scene, Chiba had known Smith for about three years—they’d both performed bit parts in the same low-budget movie Southlander, made shortly after Smith moved to LA in 1999. He’d played a roadie; she’d played a pretty girl at a pool party.

  “Granted, I wasn’t with him 24–7, and I was in no position to interrogate him,” says Morgan, “[but] what I’ll say in general is things were really fucking bad prior to the rehabilitation institute, when he was moving out of the Snow White castle, or whatever you want to call it. Then—into the institute and then over to Jen’s—dramatic changes. Russ Pollard * would be like, ‘I can’t believe it. I haven’t seen Elliott looking this good in so long.’ He was a new person, and he was groggy and irritable and, yeah, paranoid, but then he was funny and warm and vital . . . still frail from the treatment, which was very radical. It was a rebirth—it was all about reclaiming his greatness and his identity and everything. Yeah, obviously he was still suffering some problems but he was doing better and everyone was taking note.”

  Smith’s own descriptions of his post-treatment state jibe with Morgan’s. The hardest part, he told Under the Radar, was lacking the strength to even reach for a glass of water.

  By that point, moving out of the Snow White cottage was probably deeply therapeutic in and of itself. Before Smith went to live with Chiba, who then became his girlfriend, he lived for a week at his studio, sleeping on a love seat, Morgan recalls. “The cottage was just Grimm brothers, it was weird. Why would you live there? It was right by the street . . . It had some notice, ‘Steven Paul Steven, aka Elliott Smith, blah blah blah,’ something like ‘leave me alone,’” says Morgan. “It’s charming and fairy tale. But the problem with the cottage was inside it was just a fucking mess. It had lots of cool stuff—there was tons of recording gear, and there was a piano there and some guitars, some artwork he’d done—but it was like Tasmanian Devil there. It was crap everywhere; it was like they were having a yard sale inside. You’d come over to see him and he’d be like, ‘Sorry guys, this place is such a mess,’ and it was funny because it’d recently been cleaned.”

  While Chiba eventually became Smith’s girlfriend, in the weeks after his Neurotransmitter Restoration Center treatment, Smith was in need of care more than romance. He may have become healthier in some ways after his rehab treatment, but his strength was gone.

  “Initially he was very weak [after his treatment],” says Morgan. “He was briefly at the [Snow White] cottage house and I was constantly checking on him to make sure he was all right, because he was so terrible about taking care of himself. Even when he was living in the studio beforehand, it’d be like, when you ate you’d naturally be like, ‘You want something to eat?’” And Smith wouldn’t eat. So Morgan started to try to monitor his diet a little. “I’d be like, ‘Elliott, I’m going to the grocery store. Do you want some water or a sandwich?’ And he’d be like, ‘Oh yeah, turkey sandwich.’ Then I’d go over there with my friend and maybe his sister would come and we’d show up with a week’s supply of water and all kinds of stuff, just because watching him sit up to talk to you at this point right afterwards, it’d be like watching your grandfather sit up. He was totally pos
t-treatment. He was totally getting better and still had an IV or some kind of, I don’t know, home treatment. One thing that was clear is that he was dehydrated. He wouldn’t eat a lot or drink a lot—but you’d give it to him and he’d be like, ‘Thanks, thanks, man.’”

  Oddly enough, Chiba and Smith developed a serious relationship under these conditions. He moved into her house on Lemoyne Street in Echo Park, and the Smith who was determined to churn out a masterpiece at great personal cost had downshifted. For a while, getting healthy was going to edge into his list of priorities.

  Smith’s relationship with Deerin tapered off gradually. “She was still in the Snow White cottage for a day or two and then he drove her to the airport, and she’d call the studio every day and check up on Elliott and stuff like that, and he just kept saying he couldn’t bear to break up with someone again,” Morgan remembers. “He just constantly kept saying, ‘I don’t want to hurt anyone,’ and was concerned with other people’s feelings where he was neglecting his own sometimes. It really shook him up that he had to go through a break-up.” Smith didn’t always take Deerin’s calls: “She never talked to Elliott. She talked to me a couple times on the phone. He was never there or ‘wasn’t there,’” says Morgan.

  One lasting product of Smith’s relationship with Deerin was the foundation they created together. The Elliott Smith Foundation for Abused Children was devoted to raising money for exposing abused children to the arts, and Smith talked about it with pride to journalists and friends. It was the fruit of thinking he’d been doing for some time: “He started this foundation for abused children, and there was always this idea flowing around of abuse, but he didn’t talk about it much,” is how Swanson puts it. He declines to answer the question of whether Smith considered himself to have been abused.

  Whether or not there was any correlation between Smith’s break-up with Valerie Deerin, his going into rehab at the Neurotransmitter Restoration Center, and his decision to rekindle bonds with old friends, he did follow through on his professed desire to reconnect with people. In January 2003, Smith went to New York and played at the Bowery Ballroom and Lit, a small club in the East Village, with The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. “He was here for five days and we definitely talked every day and he called and stuff and I almost fell over,” says Swanson. “He was being more pro-active about staying in touch.”

  One of Smith’s songs from this time seemed generally concerned with reconciliation. “Flowers for Charlie” could be directed at least partly at Smith’s stepfather Charles Welch. “I’m not a good GI Joe,” Smith sings, “because I always hang low.” It works as an appeal to a conventional father figure from a rebellious kid, offering hope for a solution. The narrator both wants to get over caring about “Charlie’s” disapproval and wants to put an end to hostilities. Toward the end, he says, “You don’t have to hide.” That would make sense as a remark either toward Charles Welch or toward Smith himself. Of course, other interpretations are feasible—Smith might have been thinking about mending some of the bridges he’d burned recently with friends. “Charlie” could carry the meaning it had in the Vietnam War, for example, of “enemy soldier,” which would tie into the “GI Joe” reference and the theme of forging a non-aggression pact. But it wasn’t as if Smith’s old friends could simply take up with him where they’d left off. His old self wasn’t really there, says Swanson. “You could see like spots of it, but no. He was pretty out of it.”

  When Smith reached out to Morgan in the summer of 2002 Morgan represented new blood, a new colleague happy to keep Smith company and urge him on as he recorded. They’d met because a college friend of Morgan’s worked at a music store where Smith went to buy studio gear. His friend told Smith he ought to meet Morgan, who like Smith was a Beatles freak. “Elliott brought it up again,” says Morgan, “and said, ‘You should come over to the studio.’” Soon, Morgan was using Smith’s facilities to record his debut album free of charge, and for the six weeks he recorded there, providing Smith with a new confidante.

  Smith and Morgan bonded quickly, Morgan says. “We’d stay up all night talking about everything from The Beatles to non-Euclidian geometry to physics to women and love—we had this personality flash, just really hit it off.”

  Smith’s studio was part of a complex of studios called Valley Center Studios, and Smith was toying with what to name it. It was labeled Studio One, so Smith joked about making it Studio One and Only or Studio Lonely before he finally christened it New Monkey.

  The dominant mood for Morgan was the exhilaration of getting a break and working with an idol, but to Morgan it seemed that for Smith the mood was one of re-entrenchment. “When I met him he was in this massive give-up-or-fight place in his life.” He didn’t want to be seen, Morgan says, as a semi-retired Brian Wilson figure who once made great music. “Smith’s thinking was, ‘I don’t want [music] to be what I used to do. I want this to be what I’m doing.’”

  The comparatively upbeat new mindset was accompanied by a taste for assertive, catchy rock. “He was listening to music from way back, and he went through a huge Brit pop phase,” says Morgan. “‘Telegram Sam’ by T-Rex. We all thought it was a big dumb rock song, but he loved it. He was changing his messages on the phone. One was him singing ‘Hey Now’ by Oasis, and we’d be sneering like Liam, and he started playing ‘Supersonic’ [by Oasis] at shows.” Morgan and Smith were both Beatles maniacs, and talked about them at all hours, but Smith’s listening tastes were turning toward the Beatles rivals. “There were no Beatles albums around, but there were tons of Stones albums and Velvet Underground albums everywhere. . . . He never spoke in terms of, ‘I want to do this from The Beatles, do this to it.’ He was going through a big dumb rock phase, listening to T-Rex, loving Oasis. Not just early Stones, melodic Beatles-y Stones, but late ’60s/early ’70s boring, barroom Stones, in my mind. Sticky Fingers, Exile on Main Street. He had the rock out. He was looking for drum sounds, electric guitar sounds. I think he was expanding his sonic palette, his textures; he was mining for materials.”

  The White Album still exerted force over Smith, and he clung to the idea of From a Basement on the Hill being a double album with thirty tracks. But the songs he started to make up were changing along with the way he wrote and recorded them. Smith’s way of treating himself had become gentler, his thinking less aggressive and confrontational and more regretful, introspective. If “Shooting Star” was the banner song of the six weeks Smith spent living at McConnell’s house in Malibu, the song that best signified Smith’s new existence was “Memory Lane.”

  “Shooting Star” had been a bitter song that disavowed connection to the “you” it addressed in its lyrics and declared the emotional independence of the narrator in its wild music. In Mc-Connell’s recollection, the lyrics carried a specific meaning for Smith. “His favorite line was ‘Your love is sad, shooting star.’ He’d talk about that, he’d sit there and he’d tell me, ‘Can you imagine, someone’s love is sad?’ You know? That was about an ex-girlfriend. He never said who.”

  “Memory Lane” was the opposite, a gentle, folky lament built around Smith’s finger-picking. It’s unclear in the final version, but the way Smith tried recording it reflected a theme of regret. “One of the most sad yet beautiful nights,” says Morgan, “was when Elliott was in a real bad state, and it was me and him and he was playing my dad’s twelve-string, and I [was helping to] start and stop a tape machine, and he was recording ‘Memory Lane,’ this brilliant amazing new song. He was in a real bad state but he thought he’d record it; he wanted to document the state he was in.His voice sounded ragged. He thought maybe it’d be cool having—in my words—a Johnny Cash performance.”

  The house on Lemoyne Street where Smith lived with Chiba for the last fourteen months of his life stands halfway up a long hill from the basin where Sunset Boulevard becomes the exhaust-coated spine of Echo Park. At the bottom of the hill is a neighborhood that appears almost entirely Latino, with the exception of a couple hipster bo
utiques and the Brite Spot, an old burger joint now gentrified. As you climb past block after block of small houses with children and dogs playing in lawns, Hispanic blue-collar gradually gives some ground to young middle-class. One block contains a yard decorated with a sign informing passersby that the house is guarded by a “pit bull with AIDS.” The barking of a wide variety of breeds provides the soundtrack for the climb. A few blocks later the sounds have faded and an old car sports a Jim Morrison bumper sticker. Flowers twist around tastefully distressed latticework. A glance down the hill affords a vague, blue-gray tableau of downtown skyscrapers. Between the houses you can see the opposite hill, which is barnacled with houses like the ones on this street as well as a square brown apartment complex covered with cramped balconies. Erratically cut grass and palm trees fill the dells. This is a place where cool LA and poor LA dissolve into each other.

  The house itself has one story exposed to the street, the bulk dropping out of sight down a hill. It’s not altogether unlike a Hampshire College mod. On the left side is a door and a path leading away from the street. Whether or not privacy is what attracted Smith to the property, it certainly allows for seclusion. And like so many other aspects of Smith’s life it teeters between toughness and hipness. Any way you look at it, it’s not the kind of structure one envisions as a den for an LA rock star of the old school.

  Chiba was a friend of Smith’s when he moved in with her, but not yet a girlfriend. Smith was courting her, says Morgan, and would try to figure out what songs he should learn to play for her on the guitar. When Morgan suggested “Race to the Prize,” the first song off the Flaming Lips album The Soft Bulletin, it was a eureka moment.

  After Smith died, Chiba told the LA Times that Smith once told her that reading Kafka’s short story “A Hunger Artist” would help her understand him. “A Hunger Artist” is the story of a man for whom fasting is a passion and a vocation. He sits in a cage for up to forty days at a time without food. For the people who come to see him the fasting is an impressive ordeal, but for the hunger artist it’s a necessity. He fasts under squalid conditions, and after the crowds lose interest and nobody is paying attention he fasts beyond the forty-day maximum. He’s discovered near death. He never liked any food, he explains, and wouldn’t have fasted if he’d had food, but still clearly remains attached to and engaged in his fasting.