Elliott Smith and the Big Nothing

by Nugent, Benjamin

  On the surface, this might seem to undermine Smith’s refrain that he was wrongfully understood to be a depressed guy, because the hunger artist was doomed and misunderstood, and his art consisted of self-destruction. The story isn’t so much about suffering as it is about the mindset of an artist, of somebody obsessed with some form of work. For Smith, probing the dim corners of human experience with music was a calling. But it was a calling that made people think he was constantly in pain.

  Moving into the last year of his life, Smith wasn’t nearly as downcast as one might suspect—he was mostly ambitious. Smith was too self-deprecating to say he was starting or participating in a movement. But he talked to Morgan as if the two of them had a mission to accomplish. “He spoke in terms of, ‘We are going to do these things, we are going to write songs with content, inspired by books that subject matter–wise are different from pop songs. Utilize the pop format, but infuse it with more substantial ideas, and manipulate the form in pop by adding intriguing, even polemical content. Acquire rules so you can break them, build up and deconstruct art, and play with the form.’”

  At the same time as he was forging ahead with his modest musical revolution, gathering fresh troops and equipment to help him along, Smith was also testing his own limitations, in a sad, wised-up way. Some of the topics Morgan remembers discussing with Smith long into the night in the summer of 2002 were distinctly brainy: Both of them had studied philosophy in college, and the subject matter included non-Euclidian geometry and Epicureanism. Chiba, who became closer to Smith during this time, would later recall to the LA Times that Smith was thoroughly amused by, and would read aloud from, a book that detailed what a nuisance the number zero is in mathematics. Part of this, Morgan believes, was that Smith was drawn to intellectual extremes. He was a radical in that he loved to inspect the roots of systems of thought. “He was always writing down books for me to read. . . . I think he was very interested in making the impossible possible. He was interested in unified theories, and these huge revelatory, there’s-a-bend-here-it-doesn’t-work [thoughts].” While he’d broken from the most radical feminist positions he’d taken at Hampshire, “he was not afraid of extremes in his life. If there were a theory that the world would collapse on itself, he’d be into it.”

  But there was another motivator behind the studiousness, Morgan believes: “Part of it was proving to himself that his brain still worked. The year before this rebirth when he got back with Jen, it was like, ‘Let’s see how much damage I’ve done.’” Before his descent into drug addiction in Los Angeles, he’d produced an acclaimed solo album once every two years and toured behind each one, despite the fact that when he was making the first three of those five albums he’d also been writing, rehearsing, recording, and touring as a frontman in Heatmiser and working enough hours at odd jobs to stay afloat financially. Now it was two years after Figure 8 had come out and he was nowhere near finishing the follow-up.

  The Smith Morgan knew during that time was still a prolific songwriter. “Elliott said he’s always had thirty or forty songs around, and it baffled him how Neil [Gust] would make time to write a song. Elliott was a channel, a conduit, he’d have a ridiculous amount of stuff. His curiosity was really provoked by his method and Neil’s method, and he could never imagine going, ‘Okay, I’m going to sit down and write a song now.’”

  Morgan found himself astonished by “the rate at which Elliott learned covers. And he was still covering ‘Long, Long, Long,’” says Morgan, referring to the Beatles song by George Harrison. The reason? “Because it was about staying around, is why.”

  “Long, Long, Long” might be interpreted as being sung from the perspective of a ghost. At the end Harrison makes some sepulchral moaning noises against a creaking noise that sounds like a coffin opening, and his delivery throughout is ethereal, wistful. But the lyrics are about redemption. “Now I’m so happy I’ve found you,” Harrison sings, and the bridge is directly about the past: “So many tears I was searching/So many tears I was wasting.” It is a ballad about trying to get rid of self-imposed suffering and returning to a place where you can relate to other people.

  Smith was actually performing for an audience again. He never orchestrated any kind of comeback fanfare for the show he played at The Echo in Los Angeles that fall, and he probably wouldn’t have wanted people to think of it as a comeback because he didn’t want them to feel as if he had ever gone away. But he played for the first time since his recovery that summer on October 1. “It was the night I left LA, and we were sitting backstage, and he was nervous,” Morgan remembers. “He was nervous about going back because of the trials and tribulations.”

  Smith had returned to playing out not much more than three months after his last Neurotransmitter Restoration Center visit. Things may have been on an upswing, but Smith still wanted to finish the album and release it without the label he was signed to. “Elliott wanted flat out of DreamWorks, he didn’t want anything to do with them,” says Morgan. It’s not surprising that Smith might have found the DreamWorks relationship frustrating, given the inherent tension between an artist who sells more copies of an album than he’s ever sold before (about 200,000 in the case of XO, compared to 100,000 each for the two Kill Rock Stars records) but not nearly enough for an average major label to turn a profit. By the turn of the century, a major record label generally needed to sell around a million copies of an album to make a significant profit on its investment. The hope for any major-label album was that it would at least go gold, selling 500,000 copies domestically. DreamWorks, while it saw Smith as a great artist, not a cash cow, could conceivably have encouraged him to figure out how to move toward gold on the next album.

  And Smith had never liked anyone telling him how to adjust his music. In Heatmiser he’d blanched at how his songs had been changed when passed through the “filter” of his bandmates’ musical contributions. He lamented to Morgan that the piano part that was added to “Baby Britain” immediately “dialed up The Beatles,” and felt he’d let it get away from him. He referred to Schnapf and Rothrock as his “quote, ‘producers,’” making quotation marks of his fingers.

  Smith was determined to make the album in his own studio now, despite the time he’d put in with David McConnell in Malibu and, to a much lesser extent, at two other studios: Cherokee and Sound Factory. But the decision to achieve a new kind of independence was accompanied by a desire to reach out to figures from his not-so-distant past. “He was rediscovering Heatmiser, and we would sit around with Jen just blaring Heatmiser. And I’d be like, ‘Man, it’s your early Beatles period.’ This light bulb went off—he was like, ‘Thanks, man.’ He realized he’d improved, but looked back on it with fondness. It was this last kind of rebirth in his life, and he was reconnecting with people he’d cut off, and so it was commentary about Tony or Sam and stuff, and we’d also listen to tons of unreleased Elliott Smith songs, and he’d be like, ‘This is okay,’ and ‘Turn it off,’ or ‘I just don’t know.’

  “He was very much the absent-minded professor,” Morgan says. “Not only would he lose lyrics to songs, but master tapes would disappear. He poured out songs. There were so many he would get bored of or forget or misplace. When he was in a creative streak, it’d be like, pow, song.” The gift was supplemented with work ethic: “When he first went to LA his neighbors would complain about hearing the same piano part over and over; he’d work really hard and really diligently to finish [the song].” The absent-minded professor/staunch independent combination could be a dangerous one—it’s hard to see it as purely coincidence that his bad period took place after he broke with Margaret Mittle-man, his manager.

  This makes one of the songs Smith wrote late in life seem like a reckoning with this aspect of himself. In “A Distorted Reality Is Now a Necessity to Be Free,” the first verse starts with “I’m floating in a black balloon,” an efficient way to paint a picture of somebody in a state of unhappy isolation that has as its compensation a sense of freedom. The narrator g
oes on to assert in the chorus that “I’m sorry that you’re chained to the ground,” and “no big brother is going to bring me down.” Elsewhere in the song he talks about the ways emotional dependencies can be mutually destructive: “You drive people like you drive a car/until you don’t know where you are.” The guitar that comes in at the end is both triumphant and downbeat, a combination of the guitar in Prince’s “Darling Nikki” and George Harrison’s darker moments.

  Smith had approached this territory before. In “St. Ides Heaven,” on the self-titled record, he’d spoken of a moon that “won’t come down for anyone.” The character he talks about in the verse is someone you’d probably want to come down, given the way he’s staying aloft, “high on amphetamines” and walking around late at night drinking. This is the paradox he puts to the listener in both songs: What I’m doing is self-destructive and perhaps beyond my control, but you have no right to think you understand me well enough to intervene in a helpful way.

  It’s no wonder some kinds of rehab wouldn’t work for Smith. When explaining to Under the Radar why he went to the Neurotransmitter Restoration Center, he said he tried more conventional programs but couldn’t honestly take the first step. If you consider that the first step in Alcoholics Anonymous and other twelve-step programs is acknowledging a higher power than oneself, it becomes easy to understand why Smith would have rejected their help. He didn’t like to trade intellectual independence for psychological health. The appeal of the Neurotransmitter Restoration Center must have lain partially in the fact that it advertised an entirely physical cure. You hooked up to an IV; nobody tried to get you to concede a philosophical point. It left him physically feeble and intellectually whole.

  Even if the implementation of this outlook in Smith’s personal life could be problematic, it did help produce good music. The sound on “A Distorted Reality Is Now a Necessity to Be Free” is almost as important and distinctive as the music. Any trace of the sheen that separated XO and Figure 8 from his earlier albums is gone. Each instrument’s tone is robust, gritty, and clear. It’s as if a contemporary rock band, having absorbed the influences of the past thirty-five years, traveled back in time to the studio where Rubber Soul or Beatles for Sale was recorded and used the same sound equipment. Far more than the parts of Figure 8 that were recorded at Abbey Road Studios, “A Distorted Reality” sounds like something manufactured in the ’60s.

  Months after Morgan had worked on his album at New Monkey, he spoke to Chiba on the phone and she told him the studio was finally up and running. It seemed conceivable that if Smith wanted to, he could now have the album out in 2003. Of course, as Morgan recalls, Smith at this time in his life was meticulous enough to spend an entire day perfecting a song’s drum sound.

  Morgan’s presence in Smith’s life had had a practical function as well as an emotional one. Smith had blown through enough of his touring money that while he never asked Morgan to help pay rent on the studio or chip in for use of the equipment, Morgan did, at Smith’s request, pay an electricity bill. Smith could have made money playing out whenever he wanted, but it’s hard to imagine someone in such a fragile state hitting the road for a national tour. And he had an album to put out.

  Smith told Morgan he wanted the studio to be a place where “good bands” who were “nice people” could come to record for free or at least for cheap. Blake Sennett, a member of the LA rock band Rilo Kiley, was one of those musicians. He was embarking on his first album for his new band, The Elected. In addition to providing his own songs and bands, Sennett provided his own producer: Mike Mogis, the man behind the sound of Saddle Creek Records. Rilo Kiley was on Saddle Creek and benefited from the signature clarity that Mogis bestowed on records by their label-mates The Faint, Cursive, and Bright Eyes. The completion of New Monkey as a functioning studio may well have rested largely on Mogis’s shoulders.

  There was a violent disruption amidst what looked like gradual progress. On November 25, 2002, Smith and Chiba went to see Beck and The Flaming Lips play at the Universal Amphitheatre, in Universal City, just north of Hollywood. According to Under the Radar, security “assaulted and arrested Smith without probable cause.” The officer who arrested Smith injured Smith’s back, the magazine says, and as a result Smith was forced to start taking pain pills, which worried him and Chiba because of his history of addiction. The officer’s report described Smith interfering with the arrest of a violent concertgoer.

  McConnell remembers the event like this: Smith saw a cop dealing with some kids outside the Amphitheatre in what he thought was an abusive manner, and after Smith and the officer exchanged words, they started to wrestle. “Elliott put up a great, great fight. This guy was twice his size, you know, this cop. He was really giving him a run for his money. Finally the cop sprayed him with pepper spray and took him down, and they cuffed him.” Elliott was still kicking and shouting, McConnell remembers, as they pulled him into a car. “That was the last time I saw him in person. [After that] there were messages, like, ‘Hey, I want to finish the album.’”

  According to court records from the Beverly Hills County Clerk’s office, which handles Universal City cases, Smith, Chiba, and the concertgoer were arrested that night by the LA Sheriff’s Department. Each was charged with unlawfully obstructing a peace officer. Smith didn’t attend the arraignment on January 27, 2003; a lawyer, Ed Rucker, represented him. Rucker again represented an absent Smith and filed a not-guilty plea on his behalf at a court date on March 4, 2003, in Beverly Hills. After representing Smith at a series of court dates throughout the spring, Rucker was granted disclosure of peace officer personnel records. In the end, Smith came into court on July 3, 2003. He pled no contest to disturbing the peace, as opposed to the original charge of unlawfully obstructing a peace officer. He was asked to perform eighty hours of community service and pay a fine of $150, showing proof of his completed service by January 5, 2004. He remained on his own recognizance—that is, out of jail—throughout the trial process documented in the clerk’s records. It looks like an unremarkable plea bargain. Chiba was also represented by a private attorney, and the charge against her was dismissed. The concertgoer, who used a public defender, made the same no-contest plea as Smith to the disturbing-the-peace charge. A probation and sentencing hearing for Smith was set for July 6, 2004. How Smith’s sentence might have differed from the service and fine described in the record is unclear.

  Meanwhile, rumors swirled around LA that the cops had roughed up teenagers unnecessarily and asked Smith to get out of the way, then arrested him when he refused. On April 26, 2003, six months before Smith’s death,www.sweetadeline.net posted news messages that Smith had cancelled shows because he had “suffered a severe injury in November which has progressively gotten worse.” He’d gone on with shows “despite chronic pain and subsequent treatment issues,” the site explained. “He recently had an adverse reaction to new medication prescribed to him and he is now undergoing different treatment for this injury. At this time he is hesitant to reschedule or schedule any shows until he feels confident that the treatment is healing him and that it will enable him to play shows.” He was back to playing shows again by May 3, when he played Austin’s Steamboat at a benefit for Gwyn Allen Owens, a local musician and schoolteacher.

  The Web site and Under the Radar both provided contact information for Rucker and asked witnesses to come forth. That seems like the gesture of folks confident of his innocence.

  Smith probably pled no contest because he didn’t want to risk going to jail. The incident haunted him in early 2003, even when he was far away from LA in New York for some of the handful of shows he played there in the last year of his life. “When I saw him when he was here for that Jon Spencer [Blues Explosion] show,” says Clifton. It was right at the time he didn’t know what was going to happen and I think that day or the next day his lawyer had to go into court and represent him, so it was really on his mind, and he was very, very worried about what would happen. But he said they were outside and
saw a kid being belligerent or something and saw the cops pushing him around and really attacking this kid when he didn’t deserve it, and kind of brutalizing him. And he said that he stood there and purposely watched to witness it, because they wanted to witness it and they planned to report it. The cops noticed that he was doing it and were like, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ and when he responded they somehow pulled him into it. He said [he and Chiba] ended up getting pepper-sprayed and arrested that night. But when he was talking about it he didn’t know what was going to happen and he was very frightened and he was very worried he was going into jail. And he was saying he didn’t think he could stand it there, and he was really scared about what could happen to him then, and what he might have to do to protect himself while he was in jail. He was really worried about that. Because he knew that he’s not a typical guy to end up in jail and he was worried about the sort of people he’d encounter there, and I think he’d become kind of paranoid about what might happen and was thinking about really awful stuff happening to him if he was put in jail, and he couldn’t stand it. So at the time he was saying if he could get through that and win this case then he hoped to leave LA. He was really pissed off at LA at that point. He felt that the cops were criminals and it was an inhumane kind of place. He was really ranting, he was really upset about it, and [Chiba] was trying to reassure him but she was also really scared because she was involved too.”