Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith (15 page)

“Tunnel Vision” is a funkier groove with heavy bass, staccato piano chords, and runs that pounce and ramble as in the much later song from Elliott’s
Figure 8
album, “Honky Bach.” Vocals appear to be traded off with Duckler. At one point crowd noise voice-over gets interjected, a melange of chatting conversation. Although it’s all a state of mind, Elliott sings, he still
can’t quite get over his tunnel vision. In fact, everyone’s got their own tunnel vision. Some can kill and find it “intrinsically wonderful”; or feel like “they had a right to.”

The song “Sound to Me” is Elliott’s most personal. It starts with arpeggiated acoustic guitar, the kind of chord/slide pattern Kim always noticed in Elliott’s playing. This acoustic solo goes on at length, jazz style, with touches of flamenco added at intervals. Eventually a soft melody takes hold, interrupted by the chorus—“Summon me as one who cares/speak to me as one who dares/fight with me against a sterile death.” Talk with me, not at me, Elliott implores, and although it’s not certain whom he might be addressing, the autobiography seems obvious. He asks to be understood, not dismissed. He wants to be really listened to. Like with a lot of these songs, whether by Duckler or Elliott, politics enter in, driven chiefly by distaste at the policies of the Reagan years. The President sings lullabies to the “dozing nation.” Churches are the “morgue of the living.” Corporations back segregation, and
Let’s Make a Deal
is more than a game show. How can one be so dead yet somehow, at the same time, alive, Elliott wonders. It’s worth noting again just how political so many of these early songs are. That kind of lexicon came most easily, it seems. It was something to write about, a ready subject. It was also possibly safer, a way of cloaking the personal in generalized conceptual and ethical critique. Not that Duckler’s and Elliott’s grievances were entirely tendentious. Oregon was one of the vanishingly few states Mondale carried. Reagan-bashing was status quo for Portland. It would have been impossible to miss. All the same, these political leanings are absent from Elliott’s mature work, at least explicitly. The fiasco of George W. Bush, for instance, receives no mention, except very briefly and sans attribution. In later years Elliott finally braved the personal, he crossed that border, although never without hesitation, a fear that his words might sting.

The cassette concludes with the nearly ten-minute tune “Laughter,” another restless offering with discontinuous movement, unexpected stops and starts, a mixture of electric and acoustic guitar, and more blending of the political—“the porcelain President doesn’t want to think”—with words suggesting personal origins. Lyrics are credited to Duckler, but this time authorship seems possibly mixed. When Elliott sings “I see myself in my father’s mistakes,” and describes guilt bleeding out like something no one
ever sees—calling it “our form of laughter,” then adding “you can’t put us back together”—it’s difficult not to place the words in biographical context, especially because they resurface in altered forms later on. The mother figure appears too; she’s described as left-handed, worrying passively in a style suggestive, perhaps, of Bunny. The singer laments being born into a “fixed deck,” the cards doubting him. It’s a line reused in Elliott’s tune “Alameda,” where he shuffles a “deck of trick cards” like some “precious only son.”

Over the next few years, and with occasional minor personnel changes, these first two cassettes were followed by four more, two of which did not include Hornick:
Menagerie
,
Waiting for the Second Hand
,
The Greenhouse
(under the band name Murder of Crows), and
Trick of Paris Season
(under the band name Harum Scarum).
Menagerie
was recorded in three days in 1987, again at Woofbark Sound.
¹⁴
On the way over to the studio—actually a converted garage run by a skinny guy with a big moustache who explained, ambiguously, that he “was only there for free rides”—Hornick slid
Sgt. Pepper
into the car deck. “Elliott was happily surprised by this,” Duckler recalls. “I think the message was: On this day something strange and new is happening. That meant (without us even knowing it) that we were inviting in the idea that someone else would care about what we were doing. The mixture of this blessing of letting other people hear what we were doing had a particular excitement and worry about it.” The “letting in” wasn’t total, however. On the credits Elliott signed off pseudonymously as Johnny Panic, as he did later when he recorded other songs alone, for instance a playful a cappella version of the
Rocky
theme. Tony Lash was away at college, so drums were handled by Adam Koval from Lincoln, another National Honor Society member. Lash would return to play for
Trick of Paris Season
, which appears to send up an old
Life
magazine piece on a Paris nightclub maneuver in which a man wraps his mouth around another man’s head, as if to swallow it whole.

Elliott had very strong opinions about all these songs and cassettes. They made him proud and happy, and he found it easy to work with, and be around, his bandmates and friends, but at the same time the feelings expressed sometimes struck him as embarrassing. His perfectionism and self-criticism got in the way of simple pleasures. Once he went over to Duckler’s and actually took many of the tapes, only to give them back in the end. As
Duckler put it, “Finding any room for him to accept (let alone enjoy) his own talents was almost completely impossible,” even though, of course, he was acutely aware of them. Although he didn’t devote inordinate amounts of time to moping around, his depression, according to Duckler, “was a fundamental part of who he was.” It helped him relate to others; it also allowed him to better understand suffering. And “when he was depressed he felt, as he would often say, more like himself than when he was not depressed.”
¹⁵
It was beginning to become, even in these adolescent years, a major aspect of his self-definition, a core posture. For now, its agonies were slight. Later they’d grow to be anything but.

When asked in 2003 about the Stranger Than Fiction recordings, Elliott was evasive (albeit jokingly), for the sorts of reasons Duckler cites. “I don’t want to say what [the name of the band was] because I don’t want anyone to dredge it up,” he laughs. Interviewer Marcus Kagler mentions the possibility of the songs coming to light. “No, no, no,” Elliott says. “Of course not. Otherwise why would I be so secretive about it? No, never. There were maybe a couple hundred copies of [albums] on cassette. I really promised myself a long time ago I would keep [them] from ever seeing the light of day. They’re not songs so much as a lot of transitions because that was my favorite part of the song. You know, when it goes into the chorus and comes out into the verse. They weren’t very linear songs, but they didn’t repeat much. I think repetition in rock music or any music at all really kind of got to me when I first started to write. I wondered why every part of the song wasn’t the most exciting part of the song.”
¹⁶

Despite this prevarication and dismissiveness, the reluctance to see much continuity between his juvenilia and his mature songwriting, the six cassettes are in fact precocious wonders, the kinds of compositions few fifteen-to-seventeen-year-olds could even dream of arranging or playing, let alone record in a fashion that was anything but totally amateurish. And it’s not true that the songs never saw the light of day.
Waiting for the Second Hand
, from 1986, with a picture of the four band members superimposed over a clock face on the front cover, features all lyrics by Duckler—on this occasion Elliott wrote no words at all—and music by Smith and Hornick. Credits include a running joke centered, for whatever reason, on fish. Hornick is listed as playing barracuda, Elliott as playing trout and long-nosed
pike. One particular song, the next to last on side two, leaps out from the rest like a hooked salmon (to continue the fish metaphor). The title is “Fast Food,” and the reason the track instantly pops is because it’s the first version of Elliott’s “Junk Bond Trader” from the 2000 album
Figure 8
. So fourteen years later, it did resurface. The melody remains perfectly intact; the lyrics—Duckler’s—get a major rewrite for
Figure 8
, although small sections of those persist as well.

“Fast Food” starts with a recitation of weaknesses, delivered comically over Elliott’s electric piano and a synthesized trumpet riff (later replaced by electric guitar lead). He’s a masochist, didactic, infantile, an egotist, “plus a few synonyms which I could not list.” Several lines made it on to early
Figure 8
cuts—references to rhetoric, to a policeman directing traffic (“keeping everything moving, everything static”), to people being paranoid, to the need to make some sort of decision and a desire simply to be accepted—“Can you hear me as I am?” But whatever the version—1986’s or 2000’s—it’s a crowded, complex song, lyrically convoluted and musically obscure, lacking any discernible hook or even a bona fide chorus. It is a bit like Dylan—verse heavy, catchy, yet difficult to pin down. In a penultimate take that didn’t translate to
Figure 8
(where the song got dressed up and partly effaced in respect to meaning), Elliott expresses himself unusually clearly. He finds he’s living in a small reality, boring as a drug he’s tired of taking, reeling from the loss of a “first dream love” that failed “because you felt too much.” All he ever got, he says, was rhetoric, no sympathy, which turned him into a “sad symphony.” In the end he figures no one will ever quite connect “this broken heart together.” It was a form of broken that wasn’t fixable. His heart, shattered by tough love and bad love, was going to stay that way.

Before high school ended Elliott took one more trip to Texas. This time his Portland persona blared. He wore Birkenstocks and a Nike T-shirt, a perfect combination of new-age hippie and
Runner’s World
. His hair now was mainly blond, from sun that manages to infiltrate Portland around the middle of July or so. With the help of Tony Lash he’d been picking up drums, so at the tail end of an August birthday celebration for Pickle—his sixteenth, just days before Elliott’s own—he banged away with surprising panache as the rest of the boys tore into “Johnny B. Goode” and Kansas’s “Carry On Wayward Son.” Denbow, in particular, was a big Kansas fan, “Dust in the Wind” on everyone’s radar. The boys set up in Pickle’s living room “to crank things up to eleven.” At one point Pickle’s dad shouts to turn off the guitar effects pedal: “Can’t you hear that thing?! Y’all have torn your ears up!”
¹⁷
Two mics were positioned carefully, the jam recorded on Pickle’s sister’s boom box. Elliott adored the drum set, though it wasn’t particularly high quality. “He just loved to play,” Pickle says. “He’s not worried about it sounding perfect, not worried about the fact that he’s playing someone else’s song, not worried about jumping into a rock ‘n’ roll standard … There’s no sarcasm, no irony—just pure enjoyment of the music.” In the middle of things the drum kit actually falls apart—the bass beater shifting all the way off the bass drum—but no matter, Elliott keeps at it. “It was loud, fast, and sloppy,” says Pickle. “In short, everything that rock ‘n’ roll played by teenagers should be.” In the moment, Elliott set his clawing perfectionism aside. He simply let rip.

In Texas again for Pickle’s 16th birthday. (Standing, L–R, Kevin Denbow, Elliott, Mark Merritt. Steve Pickering in the foreground.) (Photograph by Dan Pickering.)

The birthday jam session, “cranking things up to eleven!” (L–R, Denbow, with back to camera, Pickering, and Elliott on drums.) (Photograph by Dan Pickering.)

Meanwhile back at Lincoln, high school wound down with the usual avalanche of festivities. Kids danced with dads at the Dad’s Club Barbecue. There was formal day and masquerade day, the latter including a tug-of-war at lunch on the back field. Band and choir held three different performances, one with boys in black and red tuxedos. The annual winter semiformal featured Nine Days Wonder playing ’60s and ’70s rock, Grateful Dead and the Beatles. The school play was
Grease
, which “fried the stage.” And in June the annual Rose Festival arrived, complete with a so-called Fun Center along the waterfront, its Ferris wheel rising above the platform of the Morrison Bridge. This typically several-weeks-long event included a Starlight Parade, and a larger, more lavish Rose Parade that years later Elliott made the subject of a song by the same title. From floats people threw out candy “that looked like money”—milk chocolate coins wrapped in tin foil. That year’s theme was “When I was a Kid …” Princesses from every high school in town finished the prompt with lines like “To me, being a kid means keeping dreams and wishes alive,” or “One of the best things about being a kid was that it was limitless.” Lincoln’s representative on the court was Mara Linville; although the school was “very supportive” of Mara, she did not win the “Queen of Rosaria” title.