Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith (10 page)

From here there followed a metamorphosis into first-person narrative that Pickle traces to a Jackson Browne influence, the songs just a bit more introspective, a bit more confessional and searching. Elliott kept a poster in his bedroom of a halcyon nature scene from the flipside of a brochure advertising the Outward Bound program (which Pickle is quick to point out Elliott did not himself endorse; he just liked the image). The poster inspired a tune Elliott titled “Outward Bound,” recorded in the summer of 1984.
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Along with the slightly less fully realized “Ocean,” this qualifies as Elliott’s very first fully complete song with both music and lyrics. At least four distinct iterations exist, first with piano accompaniment, later with guitar, some sung by Elliott, some by Kim. Each iteration includes slight lyrical variations. It’s irrepressibly catchy, impossible to hear and not sing. It’s also positive, hopeful, bright, and future oriented, a definite outlier in the Elliott canon. The vibe is country, Kim’s vocal especially sweet and twangy (Pickle notes, “We ran a lot of reverb on it.
A lot
”). The story focuses on moving to a new life in the Northwest, “under a cloudy sky.” The singer, tired of running under the gun, abandons “the business life” to “write down my favorite sounds.” He sees the beauty in the trees, feels the cool and autumn breeze. “I’m outward bound” he declares, leaving the cities and the towns. “My life has just begun.”

“Basically,” Pickle recalls, “it was ‘This is what I like about the Northwest.’ He’d been there a few times to visit his father Gary in Portland. Not exactly a ‘fuck you’ to Texas, really. Objective observer-type stuff about the feelings he got when he spent time with his dad. So he’s in the song too.”

Strikingly, the time signature is ¾. The song, in some ways Elliott’s most complete, is a waltz, in other words, like many of the country/western tunes he could not help but absorb in those days, and also like several Beatles numbers, such as “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” and “Norwegian Wood” (whose time signature is a waltzy 6/8 rather than the more common ¾). “We had done plenty of ¾ in band class too,” Pickle explains,
so although the form itself wasn’t unprecedented, its effect on Elliott was. From the very beginning, waltzes had resonance. Later Elliott made use of ¾ again and again, returning to it either unconsciously or with deliberate intent, it’s hard to say. Something about its jaunty timings jibed ideally with his rhythmic sensibilities even back in eighth and ninth grade.

Beyond that, the waltz form seemed also to summon ancient feelings, acting as emotional trigger (or vice versa). It signified childhood mysteriously. So often, when Elliott turns to those days in his more mature songs, he drops into the same evocative time signature. “Flowers for Charlie” is a waltz. So is “No Confidence Man,” yet another Charlie-themed number. The list of Elliott waltzes is long. He even noticed it now and then in interviews. Not every one centers on childhood or Charlie, but enough do that the link comes to seem less than accidental. Waltz is the dream, childhood the dream’s latent content, its emotional subtext, one aligned with the other in symbiosis.

“Waltz #2 (XO),” for instance, the third song on Elliott’s 1998
XO
album—there is also a “Waltz #1”—is his certain masterpiece. It’s got a roadhouse, Wild West, player-piano feel to it. And yet again, the tune, with its staccato ¾ beat, takes him back to Cedar Hill, the suburbs of Texas with Bunny and Charlie. Waltz “Outward Bound” was no Texas fuck you, more a love letter to wet, green Oregon, and to father Gary Smith and the promise of a new life he’d been getting tastes of during those semi-regular trips up north. There’s love in “Waltz #2 (XO)” as well—qualified—but a deeper impulse is anger, aimed squarely at Charlie. Brilliantly laid out in metaphorical cloakings, the song’s a secret life history, summarizing Elliott’s feelings about the Cedar Hill atmosphere and the intricacies of his relationship with mother and stepfather. He was always exceptionally worried about the possible hurtfulness of his lyrics. The thought that they might cause harm pained him. So a habit was established according to which he’d begin songs directly, explicitly autobiographically, then revise away from fact toward vagueness and abstraction. Choice specifics grounded the song, but meanings trailed off into obscurity. Emotionally, it was an elision of the personal—there but camouflaged—a self-erasure. He was in the songs, they were him, it was his personal past reconsidered, the sum total of who he was, but they were more too, a mix of voices, first, second, and third
person, all getting a word in, all with something crucial to say. “XO,” as Smith told an interviewer in 1998, means “hugs and kisses,” the sort of thing people throw in at the end of letters. A more arcane, connotative meaning was “fuck off.” “But that’s a really rare meaning I didn’t know about,” Elliott explains, apparently sincerely.

“Waltz #2 (XO)” kicks off with a hard, blunt beat, followed by vaguely ominous-sounding, A-minor guitar chords. Piano enters—that saloon vibe Elliott always enjoyed, even from the Cedar Hill days (“It almost sounds out of tune,” as Denbow said, “but still it works somehow”). The setting is a karaoke bar. Bunny sings the Everly Brothers tune “Cathy’s Clown” (“He’s not a man at all … Dontcha think it’s kinda sad/that you’re treating me so bad/or don’t you even care?”), a possible allusion to Charlie, whom Elliott had seemed to link with clowns in other songs too. He can’t read her expression. She just stares off into space. What Elliott notices—the Charlie subcurrent—she does not. But his feelings for her are obviously positive. He vows, “I’m never going to know you now/but I’m going to love you anyhow.” (An earlier song, “Dirt,” foreshadows the China doll reference: “You’re a China doll/You don’t feel nothing at all … You can’t get over him/Because you know what’s in there.”)

Then the next singer’s name is announced. To Elliott it’s remote, but somehow familiar. He’s doing fine now, he says, the forgotten name some sort of painful stimulus; he’s glad it fails to register. The implication is that the second singer is Charlie, and his message—the song he covers—is “You’re No Good,” made popular by Linda Ronstadt. Elliott characterizes “You’re No Good” as an act of revenge for the message of the first tune. It’s also the reaction Elliott often got from his stepfather—a habitually fault-finding perfectionist, a fact Charlie refers to in the letter he sent.

The third verse revisits the “You’re No Good” theme. Elliott asks “Mr. Man” to leave him alone: “In the place where I make no mistakes/In the place where I have what it takes.” If living with Charlie could sometimes be toxic, an atmosphere of never-ending close scrutiny and summary judgments resulting in feelings of worthlessness, then the mistake-free place Elliott imagines is one emptied of Charlies, a place he can just be who he is without fear and anger. Live, Elliott sometimes heightened the song’s contrast between Bunny and Charlie. Instead of “XO Mom,” which he sings in
the recorded version, he said, plainly, “I love you, mom.” It’s the kind of bald declaration Elliott was not usually inclined to make, preferring instead to keep the autobiography a lot more scrambled. On one hand, he seems to be telling Bunny he does not blame her for Charlie, and what he did; on the other, he allows himself a small amount of disappointment, finding her emotionlessness (in the first verse), neglectful, as if he wanted more feeling from her, as if he wanted her to stand up for him more than she did (a fact confirmed to me by several of Elliott’s very close friends).

On balance, it’s hard to arrive at any certain position about what, exactly, happened with Charlie. What presents itself is the usual clotted, messy biographical chaos of competing vectors. Judging from the letters he wrote, Charlie regretted his parenting. It was too strict, too unforgiving. He acknowledged that, and he tried apologizing. But friends like Pickle and Denbow, both of whom spent large amounts of time in the Welch household, noticed nothing conspicuously harmful. The sense, however, shared by Merritt, for one, and by later friends to whom Elliott had confided, supplying varying degrees of detail, is that he had lived through several damaging scenes, events that went beyond insults and other personal attacks. Some friends, after all, can’t talk about Charlie without becoming visibly emotional. They had heard too much; they had seen the effects of Elliott’s time in Texas, through Elliott’s eyes, at least. As later bandmate Brandt Peterson said, “The basic understanding was that he had been physically hit,” despite the fact that Elliott never provided (to Peterson) any details. “But he wasn’t trotting it out there like ‘poor me.’ ” Peterson recalls arriving at Elliott’s house one morning, just after he had awakened from a dream “that troops were storming up the stairs, coming to get him. He was in a state of panic. It was genuinely terrifying. He wasn’t making the shit up.”
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The dream, Peterson believed, had some connection to a fearful history, if not, in specifics, to Charlie particularly. And as other friends confessed, there were things they knew about Elliott’s time in Texas that they will never tell; it would not do anyone any good, they say. At the same time, Elliott’s memories of mistreatment tended to enlarge themselves, his disclosures growing more and more extreme, more unguarded. Even he expressed doubt on occasion—Was he recalling accurately? Was he reconstructing more than remembering veridically? Depression has a way of pushing memories
around, like a blindfolded person gets steered when struggling to pin the tail on the donkey. It is impossible to say. Maybe Elliott had it right; maybe he was, in some form and to some degree, abused. Or it may be that he elaborated on a past in order to make it more effectively explanatory. It had to be bad, he figured unconsciously, because that’s what the present was, and that’s what the future promised to be.

The songs treat Charlie as an irritant, like an obscure, dissonant sound one intermittently hears and tries tracking to its origin. He always seems to be there, in name or in effigy. Poet Sylvia Plath had her “bee sequence,” a set of poems devoted to the subject of her long-dead father Otto (a bee expert), her own restive poltergeist. Elliott has his Charlie sequence, equally urgent, equally drenched in pain and loss. Charlie is not by any means the lyrics’ preeminent theme, he’s not ubiquitous. But he also refuses to sit still. And Elliott’s attitude vacillates; he’s not sure how to dispatch the Charlie haunter, or how, exactly, Bunny figures in the equation. As noted in one song—yet another waltz—he brings him a flower, declares the war over; he’s got enough trouble, he figures, just trying to stay alive in the present. (As he told one probing interviewer, he didn’t see much point in putting his thoughts about Texas out in print because “the person” has apologized.) Elliott wants to move on, to forget—something he talked about often—to put it all behind him. Yet Charlie modulates into nameless, spreading menace, always trying to get Elliott alone, the cause of “sick confusion headaches.” Elliott’s a “bastard,” a “little boy in blue” in the song “Plainclothes Man.” “Someone’s going to get to you,” he says, “and fuck up everything you do.” Even his feelings for Bunny start qualifying themselves. People tell him he’ll rediscover his love for her, “But I don’t know/I don’t think so …”

Another of Elliott’s least disguised songs, one that never made it on to an album, probably with good reason, is titled, with apparently intentional obscurity, “Some Song.” Here both Charlie and Dallas are named outright, Charlie a one-note symphony—of denigration, one guesses—who beats Elliott up over and over, turning him into a freak who pines for a violent girl, someone who’s unafraid, who might exact a surrogate revenge. Elliott pictures himself heading to Dallas with murder on his mind, TV having taught him how to kill. Notorious murderer John Wayne Gacy even comes to mind—the so-called “Killer Clown” targeting young boys. It’s a striking
reference. If Charlie is “Cathy’s Clown,” then a clown killer seems especially poetic. (Gacy was beaten by his father, who repeatedly verbally assaulted him.) The song includes no murder, but it ends with the realization “I’ll never be fine.”

“2:45 AM” is still another Charlie/Bunny number. Like “Some Song,” it’s unusually direct; friends see it as almost anomalous in its open expressions of feeling and attitude. It starts with Elliott sleepwalking, his memories no longer muted, but talking. Almost sympathetically, Charlie is described as the boss who “couldn’t help but hurt you”; and he turns Bunny into a deserter. Pain of abuse is coupled with love loss. It may not always show, but Elliott is cracking up, he says, and looking for someone—some hard, tough ally—to erase past harm. The song ends with him walking out on “Center Circle”—a place, one assumes, of isolation, and also danger. “Both of you can just fade to black,” he sings. “Been pushed away and I’ll never come back.” Drums kick in as the song fades, blunt snare runs that sound like gunshots.

So the music, the many waltzes, took Elliott toward a difficult childhood, but it also took him away, recording on Pickle’s dad’s four-track, or listening to Beatles records in his back bedroom. It was reminder and escape at once, as art so often is. But there was a different dad, a real dad, too. Far from the vantage point of Texas, Elliott at first found Gary Mac Smith an “enigma.” He had taken off, he was a concept, a mental structure—part deserter, part potential solution. As Elliott recalls, his father had come back from Vietnam a hippie, living in Los Angeles initially, writing songs “about the things he knew—horse racing, drug dealers.” He was, maybe more than anything else, a contrast, an antidote. To Elliott, Dallas was religious, constipated, essentially “white-trash,” a place where ambitions stopped at earning more money than your neighbors, buying bigger cars. At age five Elliott stayed with Gary for the first time, he says, and did so for a week or two on subsequent summers. That was the regular routine, the set-up for visitations. The impression was of his oddness—“I even thought he looked kind of weird.” There was some anxiety as well, not so much about how he and his father would get along, or about being disappointed with what he saw in his father’s world, but about Bunny, leaving her alone with Charlie, believing, rightly or wrongly, that something might happen to her. Gary collected
records, Elliott recalls, and while on one of these early trips he fell in love with the Beatles’s
White Album
, a crush he’d never get over. “On my mother’s side of the family,” he notes, “nobody was listening to that kind of music.” Instead it was “Gershwin, jazzy ballads, old stuff like ‘Moon River.’ ” Gary taught Elliott guitar, showing him chords for Dylan tunes, Beatles too. Everywhere Elliott turned there was music, it seems—the kind his mother’s family played, and the kind, far more exciting, that his father made available. It was in his blood, and it was a fundamental aspect of whichever family he happened to be with, in Texas or anywhere else.