Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith (13 page)

In the end the feeling was of prideful accomplishment, an outrageously productive way to spend a vacation/reunion. Although unnamed, this was a real band, Elliott’s first. They sealed the deal in a real studio, and left with a tape of original compositions, played with genuine skill and undeniable musicality. And the songs revealed range. They weren’t carbon copies. The waltzy ¾ “Outward Bound” with its catchy country/western twang sounded nothing like “Barriers” or “Inspector Detector.” “It shows,” Pickle adds, “just how versatile Elliott was as a songwriter, even at a very young age.” He also worked individual songs over and over, creating different versions in an attempt to maximize the overall effect. Lyrics would be tinkered with, new solos would get thrown in. Some songs might begin as piano compositions,
then transform into guitar-driven pieces. And bits from one tune, sections that never quite worked out, would show up elsewhere. The tendency was dynamism, not stasis. Writing songs was about rewriting, getting them into the best shape possible under the circumstances. In any case, the group left richly satisfied, with a sense of mission accomplished. The receipt for the studio time plus tapes shows a cost of $93.88, and to everyone involved, it was worth the money.

This irrepressible impulse to write and record, which originated in Texas with Pickle, Denbow, Kim, and Merritt, instantly reestablished itself back at Lincoln, when Elliott returned. It was what he knew, what he was good at, what gave him the most pleasure, so he just kept at it, constantly working to craft better and better, more ambitious and complex, more realized songs, and finding people to do it with. Through Elliott, Tony Lash (who a few years later would end up at the Berklee School of Music) met Garrick Duckler and Jason Hornick, both musical as well, and the drive to write songs and, more important, record them, absolutely exploded. Duckler, a clever, arty, startlingly intelligent kid with a sly smile in yearbook photos, was president of the Russian Club, which devoted itself to “learning the Russian culture and having fun.” There were potlucks, games of Russian Scrabble, attempts to tie-dye Russian T-shirts (whatever that amounted to, exactly). Hornick was co–vice president and treasurer. Both were academically accomplished, as was Elliott. Hornick in particular stood out. A bona fide superstar, he was an athletic scholar, class marshal, and Oregonian All-Star. He won the TJ Davis Scholarship, the Bausch and Lomb Award, the Reusselaer Award, and he was a member of the Math Club at Lincoln, Mu Alpha Theta, along with Adam Koval, who later joined the group as drummer after Lash, one year older, had graduated. Elliott and Hornick were two of six National Merit Scholar finalists at Lincoln, the selections based on PSAT and SAT scores, along with a submitted essay. A yearbook photo shows the boys side by side, Elliott in a Led Zeppelin T-shirt (a reproduction of the
Houses of the Holy
album cover), sporting an earring on his left lobe and a mildly embarrassed smile, his arm around Hornick, who peers off to the left. Hornick had a head of thick, curly black hair and sometimes wore a beard, surprisingly heavy for a high schooler (in certain pictures he looks about thirty, obviously an “early maturer”). These were kids of clear accomplishment, outstandingly bright, creative, with proliferating intellects and droll, ridiculous senses of humor. The music was driven by Elliott—whom Lash called the most gifted musician he had ever known, who played with “incredible feel and insight”—but everyone wrote songs, and everyone contributed ideas.

Elliott, Jason Hornick, and Alice Vosmek (L–R), National Merit Scholars, 1987. (Lincoln High School Yearbook.)

A school article, with the hopeful title “A Dream Coming True,” described the band in one of its early iterations, having formed, officially, in 1985. The name, at this point, was Stranger Than Fiction. Elliott played guitar and piano, and sang “many of the songs,” his voice still a work in progress, a necessary evil. Hornick, who had taken five years of classical and jazz piano, also sang occasionally, and played piano and synthesizer. Garrick Duckler contributed stand-up acoustic bass; he’d had two years of lessons. Tony Lash joined six months after the band’s formation, some time in 1986. “Although the band has not had many opportunities to play live,” the article explains, “they have worked diligently to produce a tape
that they hope to sell to a recording studio”—more likely, a recording company, and in short order there would be made, not one, but numerous cassettes of material. In 1985 it was Hornick and Elliott who crafted the “musical scores”; Duckler and Hornick wrote lyrics, as did Elliott on occasion. Lash recalls Duckler, especially, serving as the band’s wordsmith. When Elliott turned his attention to words, it was Duckler he consulted and worked with. A picture shows the group sprawled out on a lawn, Elliott in sunglasses and tennis shoes lying with his back to the camera, Lash on the right, also wearing sunglasses. The effect is Beatlesesque,
Magical Mystery Tour
era.

Practices were haphazard affairs; they got fit in, somehow, some way. Mr. Fernley’s band class met second period, and the group tried rehearsing however usefully they could in the fifteen minutes before or after class. A daunting prospect, to say the least, but it got to be a regular affair. “It was amazing we could figure the songs out in so little time,” Lash notes. “These were actually pretty complex arrangements,” tunes with almost no conventional pop structure, mostly sets of “discontinuous sections”—songs within songs, connected by passing chords of the kind Elliott first became fascinated with in Texas. The passing chords flirtation is interesting—and durable, for better or worse. To Lash, they weren’t always musically satisfying. It was as if “they never really landed” on any solid melodic anchor. Especially later, on Smith albums such as
Figure 8
, Lash’s belief is that the songs’ preoccupation with transitions, with getting from one section to another, “seemed to reflect Elliott’s more emotionally disengaged state,” as if the music described a psychological reality. For now, though, in Stranger Than Fiction, the stakes were considerably lower. Elliott was only just beginning to settle on the semblance of a style, a musical signature. The work was transitional, its aesthetic short lived. The idea was to see what came up, what worked and what didn’t. And unlike a lot of high school groups, bands devoted to clichéd, simplistic rock covers of the “Taking Care of Business” variety, scheming desultory house parties and possible far-flung bar gigs, there was scant interest in performing live. Recording was the thing; that was where the energy got directed. The tracks had to be laid down, they had to be cemented. It was a kind of obsession—creating cassettes, producing a body of original work. So most days after school, relying on whatever fourtrack
they managed to get their hands on, the group headed to someone’s basement—often classmate Eric Hedford’s just off Scholls Ferry Road—to compose, refine, and lay down tracks. The practice was to record live, then add vocals later. Looking back, Lash feels Elliott’s talent was essentially taken for granted, not fully grasped. “He could play all the stuff himself, with such depth of songwriting. He just had a lot of music in him, it was obvious. Music and ability.”

In an exceptionally smart, subtle, tasteful, and in many ways beautiful short account of those years at Lincoln and his friendship with Elliott, Garrick Duckler describes what the two were up to in Stranger Than Fiction, and how the songwriting and recording process tended to play out. One fact is that Elliott took the task extremely seriously; it was not some kind of toss-off hobby, the sort of thing teenagers do “for the fun of it.” “I was not a musician,” Duckler writes, “or, at least, a very good musician, and I think in some ways this is what made writing songs together fairly easy—that it was something that two friends did together because they were comfortable and free around each other rather than something that came from shared musical proficiency … I think we trusted each other not to be too cheesy or too cold or too intrusive or too meddlesome, but to be helpfully analytic.”
⁶

Duckler (a psychotherapist now in San Francisco) finds some “adolescent grandiosity” in this, but only partly; he and Elliott shared a very specific, private way of talking and thinking about their internal lives, to the point where it felt as if they existed on a deserted island, cut off from the experiences of others, who spoke in ways incomprehensible to them. It was a long inside joke when they were together, and sometimes it was funny, sometimes not particularly so. But they found it made no difference so long as what they created together was surprising or at least entertaining in some way. They knew what they were up to but then, on the other hand, they didn’t. It was all very intuitive.

Duckler could not and did not try to compete with Elliott on the level of musicianship—few people did—so most of the time he sent along lyrics that Elliott put to music, although other times Elliott would play something of a melody Duckler would try fitting words into, always a poetic and rhythmic challenge. At times Duckler and Hornick also collaborated, and other lyric writers were sometimes brought in as well. Whatever the case, assembling words was not, initially, a task Elliott instinctively took to. His chief role, as it had been in Texas, when the vast majority of songs were instrumental, was to create sound. Between Duckler and Elliott there was that almost uncanny, somewhat mysterious, wordless symbiosis, an ability to share ideas that were iffy and nascent. Although everything revolved around the fixation on making tapes (the process of craft), inevitably or even necessarily—this was a band, after all, not a set of studio musicians—performances did occur. One took place in fall of 1986, at Lincoln’s homecoming dance. Duckler, standing behind his upright bass, wore an off-white oversized suit resembling David Byrne’s from the Talking Heads’ 1984
Stop Making Sense
tour, while Elliott, his hair short, sported a white T-shirt and psychedelic shorts. In a yearbook picture he plays electric guitar lefthanded, the image reversed.

Elliott backstage with Jason
Hornick, several years post–high school. (Photograph by JJ Gonson.)

One of the band’s initial efforts was 1985’s “The Machine,” employing, as Elliott remembers, “this drum machine called Dr. Rhythm, which was
not slick in any way at all. It didn’t even sound remotely like real drums. The cymbal went ‘chhhhhhh.’ So we’d program that and something else at the same time onto a track. We did a lot of bouncing or ping-ponging, whatever you want to call it. We’d try not to put more than a couple things on the same track. Everything was totally dead. We didn’t have any effect at all.”
⁷
The description does the song little justice. It sounds joylessly mechanical, the effect of a bunch of fifteen-year-olds messing around with apparatuses. In fact, “The Machine” is an ambitious, ornate number, kicking off with smoothly repetitive, looping piano that also provides transitions between verses, hopped up by pouncing synthesizer. Elliott’s John Lennon affection is sweet and obvious; at times he adopts an obliquely English accent. And the song is a social critique, also along Lennonesque lines, an attack on racial, sexual, and religious prejudice; although much quicker paced, it owes a debt to Pink Floyd’s “Welcome to the Machine,” which describes a similarly deadening indoctrination. At one point near the end Elliott tears into a slightly gratuitous, over-the-top guitar solo before it all sweeps to a close, the kind Pickle talked him out of during the recording of “Mayan.”

The tapes, from here, just kept coming, the songs almost embarrassingly easy to come by. It is the beginning of a trend all his musician friends came to recognize in Elliott—he was alarmingly productive, alarmingly fecund, “high on the sound,” as he once put it. He could write tunes in a single sitting, and they were actually stunningly good. There was this impression of effortlessness, and for others it was impossible to keep up, so they just stopped trying. Duckler notes six different albums over two or three years, almost all of which were recorded, not in studios, but basements or kitchens. Some of these were sold to friends, or given away, some got bought at Django’s, a fact that took the two friends out of the more comfortable, risk-free realm of “misunderstood geniuses.” In the event a real person purchased the music—a true stranger—then it wasn’t a secret society anymore. The word was out, on the street; people were listening to what they made. News of sales always left the band in a “blurry daze.” They’d imagine possible reactions—“I can’t believe they went to that banal chord progression after the minor third. I’m going to throw myself out the window!” One purchase was made by a girl who worked at Django’s, who
seemed, to Elliott and Duckler, way too cool to be listening to Stranger Than Fiction. They resolved never to go back. It was simply too stressful.