Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith (12 page)

A more unusual reaction, which Elliott later described to several friends, including Jennifer Chiba, was selective mutism, a kind of wordless living up in his head, not making a sound. He might have wanted, under the tense circumstances, to minimize the impact of his presence there, to be as inconspicuous and unimposing as possible, especially at first. It was also in his nature to be shy and quiet—he was never one for chit-chat, and when small talk was called for he burrowed inward. But there was more at work too. Elliott went notably silent in the presence of Marta. He did not let her in, he would not engage, there was an absence of social nicety. At the dinner table in this home people speak, Marta once exploded, according to Chiba. Marta apparently came to believe Elliott was more than slightly crazy—rather than merely opaque or passive-aggressive—a true pain to deal with, although in an interview on January 28, 2010, with
Oregonian
columnist Margie Boule (with the overweening title “The Truth About
Elliott Smith”), she emphasizes the fact that “Elliott had a very middle-class upbringing,” adding, “Once you get to a certain level of fame, it’s incredible the things people say that aren’t true.” She may not have actively disliked him at the time—she was distracted by the girls, no doubt, preoccupied by caring for them—but she clearly did not adore him either. The feeling was mutual (and in later years, this disconnect only deepened, to the point where Elliott told friends he “hated” his stepmother). In certain respects, then, Portland reestablished the dynamics of Texas. There was, on one hand—and in Elliott’s subjective framing—the loved biological parent, a person Elliott could feel close to and care for and rely on, and on the other a fraudulent, nemesis stepparent, a source of tension, anxiety, and fear. It’s not exactly a novel scenario, but the fact that Elliott experienced it twice, with two different families, obviously ups the emotional ante. He wouldn’t feel comfortable in his own skin until he moved out entirely, made his own world, one he could possibly live in and manage, but that was several years down the road. And as Pickle noticed, Elliott was just plain gone a lot: “He had a level of freedom and independence that surprised me, and he was able to handle it well, especially for a high school freshman.” A solution to turbulence at home was to not be at home, it seems. Elliott may have been too young to pursue that remedy in Texas—at least for most of his years there—but in Portland he was up for it, and it appeared to work.

That first spring break with Pickle in tow there was skiing in active snow at Mt. Hood, which Elliott enjoyed—he’d apparently received instruction during January and February—and a large amount of aimless wandering around, to places like Pioneer Square. On the first night of Pickle’s visit Elliott took him to meet a few of his new friends. In the car on the way over he proposed a ruse he figured might be amusing. Pickle was to talk with a “big, huge, ridiculous Texas accent.” “He fed me phrases,” Pickle says. “He wanted me to refer constantly to jumper cables and pickup trucks.” Then there would occur, at the end of the evening, a theoretically hysterical reveal. The Texas act would abruptly stop. But even though his throat hurt from all the strenuous voice work, Pickle says no one noticed. The joke was a dud, and therefore even funnier. Texas wasn’t so out of place in Oregon after all.

Another day the two were downtown again—the thrill of public transport
an ongoing, pleasant surprise for Pickle (“You would not want to ride the bus system in Dallas!”)—walking the streets and blowing whistles issuing a goofy sound. They passed a number of street dealers with lexicons of drug lingo—“Hey kid, you want to buy some used furniture?” Out of nowhere a car pulled up packed with older boys intent on hassling them. “We were not having it,” Pickle says. “They were stuck at the light. We told them to screw themselves.” Later that evening, at Clackamas Town Center, the same boys miraculously rematerialized near the food court. “It was four versus two. It scared the hell out of us. Pure panic, pure adrenaline.” The confrontation escalated; Elliott and Pickle got backed up against a railing, the ice rink one floor below, its Muzak filling the mall air, skaters executing endless figure-eights. Pickle just started talking. He launched into a non-stop, free-form monologue fueled by fear and desperation, and before long the older boys were “in stitches.” They wandered off shaking their heads. Disaster successfully averted.

But by far the main activity, the one that never stopped making perfect sense, was music. For Elliott, an early, transient, adolescent fireman dream was out—there was some sort of physical impediment having to do with height or weight. Being around his father now, he also imagined becoming a psychiatrist. He says he would have liked to have “done the same job.” And he’d read a lot on the subject, especially Freud. But he figured he wasn’t the type. Plus, as he put it, “I don’t have enough to offer other people.”
⁵
Back in Texas he’d considered training as a mathematician even, but he wasn’t sure how independent he could be—whether he’d need to work in a business or an organization or university. So the subject “what to do” always came back around to what Elliott was actually already doing. Writing songs, learning instruments, figuring out how to record, and with whom.

Pickle had brought along his electronic keyboard, the Lowrey, which he set up in Elliott’s room. Elliott pulled out a flyer advertising a legitimate recording studio, and what he wanted to do was find a way to get over there. The rate was hourly—fifteen dollars per—and Pickle can’t recall where the money came from, but the two boys made their way, hauling equipment up a skinny stairway to a converted office upstairs, with professional-grade microphones and sound foam all over the walls and ceiling, and an eight-track reel-to-reel setup, with the possibility of various effects. In the end
four songs were recorded over four hours—all instrumental, no singing, mainly keyboards and Elliott’s Gibson SG guitar. Most of these tunes were carryovers from the Dallas days, but there was one new number in the batch, written by Elliott in Portland. Elliott was clearly into the process, the details of getting the sound just right. “He was very interested in recording and recording technology even then,” Pickle remembers.

The new number, “Inspector Detector,” he had written in the spring, just before Pickle’s arrival. Pickle watched Elliott finish it and work out the arrangement. This time, Elliott had worked on the keyboard, which was different, Pickle recalls, “since most of his songs at the time were guitar compositions.” The verse begins in a minor chord. When it comes back around, Elliott throws in a half-beat major chord. “That’s from a wrong note he hit when working it out. He decided he liked the major chord anyway, as an accent, but decided not to use it every time.” Inspector Detector was the name of a large, bearded, suit-and-tie-wearing police officer in the
Speed Racer
cartoon series. Pickle says, “At the time, I thought the riff/guitar solo in the middle conjured up images of a guy in a trench coat sneaking down a dark hallway looking through windows, on some secret mission.” Elliott’s guitar playing on the song was minimalist: “He doesn’t throw in a lot of flashy licks but hits some good notes to create an effect. He was already working out the ‘less is more’ concept that some musicians never quite get.”

The boys rerecorded “#37” during this studio jaunt too. It was in fact the chief reason the two booked the time—to get the song down on tape. One year before, they’d talked over the possibility of adding lyrics. Pickle came up with some but “I didn’t think they were that great and neither of us wanted to sing.” Why 37? Pickle guesses it was a take-off from the number 42 in
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
—humorously selecting a random number and assigning mysterious significance to it. “I know I read that book in junior high and I’m pretty sure he did too.”

Spring break over, Pickle headed back to Texas. Several months later, in July 1984, his first year of high school at Lincoln now finished, Elliott did the same. His life situation had reversed itself. Now it was Bunny he visited for weeks at a time—and Ashley and Darren—whereas before it had been Gary. The occasion, and this would repeat itself one year later, was his August
6 birthday. He’d spend it with his mother and his two half-siblings, and with Charlie too, of course.

By this time Elliott and Kim had broken up, although he would spend quite a bit of time with her, as it turns out. They phoned over the year he was away, and sent letters back and forth, but the “long-distance” relationship challenge proved to be too much. They were thirteen and fourteen, and it was largely “out of sight, out of mind.” They stayed friends all the same. To Kim, he was always a “dedicated” boyfriend. Very sweet, very attentive. In fact, she says, he was the type of boy a girl could take advantage of if she wanted to—but Kim never did. She recalls the breakup happening over the phone one night, prior to his return. One thing she noticed immediately was that “he was much calmer when he came back from Portland,” as if the time away from Texas, in particular, had done him a world of good.

Back in Cedar Hill, there was more music to make—as always—but Elliott also wanted to get high. This was new. Before it had been a rarity; now it was something more than that. It wasn’t a daily thing, the pot smoking, but Elliott told Denbow he’d been buying dope in the back of Tri-Met buses in Portland. Sketchy guys concocted elaborate shell games that kids picked up on; slowly they figured out what to say and do in order to get what they wanted. It wasn’t cheap, but it did the trick. Pickle almost never drank and he abstained completely from smoking. Denbow, however, was game. He and Elliott were accustomed to sneaking out—they’d done it many times before—so the basic plan was predetermined. Denbow would roll up at night in his pickup (he no longer relied on the rickety scooter), and the two would meander into South Oak Cliff, a rougher part of Dallas. “We were basically buying Mexican dirt weed,” Denbow recalls. It was terrible, but cheap—one-quarter ounce for ten dollars. A real bargain compared to what Elliott was used to paying in Portland. The effect dope had on his state of mind intrigued Elliott. Pickle, for instance, recalls a very long description by Elliott of how smoking marijuana appeared to affect his perception of time. He was into the phenomenology of the altered states experience. He approached it almost philosophically.

When not scheming to get high the boys reverted to the usual ways of passing time. They shot hoops. They went to the Red Bird Mall. They also
snuck into R-rated movies. Denbow recalls seeing
Johnny Dangerously
with Elliott, also
The Outsiders
.

But this was all down time. The true mania was for getting the band back together, rehearsing and recording. They ran through “Ocean” and “Outward Bound” again, sometimes with small lyrical revisions. Another tune was “Barriers,” a Rush-inspired number for which Elliott played electric lead guitar, rhythm guitar, and acoustic piano. The last two verses are “pretty heavy,” according to Pickle, with intimations of mortality. Life goes on and on, Elliott sings, and mine may soon be gone; who knows how long before I sing my swan song. As usual, one version features Kim singing, another Elliott, who typically had to be pushed into recording vocal tracks. “He’s not yet a great singer,” Pickle suggests. “He’s aware of that himself and fairly unsure when it comes to singing, even when it’s his own work. Kim was definitely more confident, though there are spots when the melody is out of her range—and out of Elliott’s too. The idea of moving the songs to a different key to make things easier for the singer didn’t really occur to us. Even if we had thought of it, I don’t know if we could have pulled it off.”

These rehearsals paved the way for the most exciting prospect by far—heading into a genuine, truly high-level studio. In the back of a free publication called
Buddy Magazine
, Pickle’s dad found an ad for “Pla-Back Recording” (“hear the quality,” the ad trumpeted), run by a Lew Blackburn. Pickle made calls to set up a time and get directions. The studio itself turned out to be a converted garage in Blackburn’s home in South Dallas. He held a degree in music education and figured he’d try to make a go of it in the music business. (It did not pan out, and later he became president of the school board for the Dallas Independent School District.) The space boasted an eight-track reel-to-reel, a large professional mixing board, effects, quality microphones, acoustical treatment, and a piano. “We were all pretty impressed,” says Pickle, garage setting notwithstanding.

In all there were two trips to Pla-Back, one week apart. Summer band was on, and everyone—with the exception of Elliott—spent several hours per day on the parking lot at Duncanville High marching and learning music for fall. Drill activities were par for the course for freshmen—marching, counting, shouting. As a result Kim was actually too hoarse to sing on the night the group first booked the time. So they did a quick mix-down of the
instrumental tracks, then had to pay Blackburn to keep the half-inch master for another week, when they planned to return and add vocals.

The set-up was crowded. Elliott and Pickle wedged in to supervise mixes, along with Blackburn—who engineered—and Pickle’s father. They were hurried for the first instrumental mixes, so these wound up lacking studio effects such as reverb. Still, “we were happy with the final product and considered it a success,” Pickle says. No copies were printed up or distributed. Instead, each player got his own individual tape, “and that was about it.” Pickle also left with a quarter- inch reel-to-reel master he could play on his dad’s home four-track.

The songs—“Barriers,” “Ocean,” “Inspector Detector,” “Mayan,” and “Outward Bound”—were a mix of old and new. “Mayan” was a Pickle tune, the sole outlier, all others Elliott’s compositions. Pickle had been to Mexico with his family and found the ruins “cool,” so the name struck him as suitably evocative. Elliott suggested throwing in some heavy-metal hammer-ons, but Pickle talked him out of it. He did, however, at the last minute toss-off a forty-two-second classical-style acoustic guitar intro they kept. As the opening concludes power electric guitar chords crunch down, supplying a happy, upbeat melody, punctuated by Pickle’s synthesizer. “Inspector Detector” was played about thirty beats per minute faster than it was in Portland back in March. Elliott’s guitar solo pans back and forth from left to right—to all a pretty sweet effect. “Ocean” got a hefty dose of reverb, creating a sort of wave sensation from the effects pedal of Elliott’s guitar, the DOD Stereo Chorus.