Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith (16 page)

Lincoln High School senior photo, 1987. (Lincoln HighSchool Yearbook.)

In yearbook sidebars kids described their highlights of the year. Most listed snow days, finding five-dollar bills, or “extreme party violence.” Elliott’s offering was, as usual, amusingly outside the mainstream: “During lunch I was downtown with some friends. We were singing and joking around when a man across the street shouted over to us, ‘It’s raining violins!’ ” Seniors also penned “final words.” Tony Lash (from the year before) had proclaimed “One down, one to go; another town, and one more show.” Duckler quoted Winston Churchill: “God’s not dead, he’s alive and working on a less ambitious project.” Elliott recycled a Tom Waits line, “Just let me fall out the window with confetti in my hair.”

The now pressing question was what to do next. Duckler was off to Reed College, Hornick to Amherst; Lash had already started at Berklee. Dispersal was inevitable. For Elliott, the situation was complicated. There was a girl in the picture—pretty, freckled, auburn-haired Shannon Wight. Wight was politically involved, part of the club “SPLAT,” run by the talented Mr. Sweeney, who in free evenings took classes in classical Greek at Portland State University, taught by Dick Schultz. The club promised “a
new perspective on Latin America,” focusing not just on politics, but cultural aspects. Students dealt with real life issues, “instead of just consuming ethnic food,” according to that year’s yearbook. They also raised funds to host a Nicaraguan student.

Wight initiated crew along with Alice Vosmek (who later dated Brandt Peterson around the time Heatmiser was formed). The rowing team, coached by Tom Leonardi, practiced on the Willamette River, which divides east and west Portland. Wight and Vosmek worked with
Polyglot
too, Lincoln’s art and literary magazine. In a group shot she playfully throws her arm around a fellow
Polyglot
board member.

The highlight of Wight’s senior year was a two-month stay in Paraguay arranged through Amigos de las Americanas, an organization that sent students to Latin America for public health–related work. Wight taught women health and sanitary practices, even helping to build latrines. For part of the time she lived with a family in Contera Boca, enjoying the contrasting simplicity of the lifestyle. And although her Spanish wasn’t very good, she and her family acted out a lot of what they needed to say to one another. A picture shows her sitting and eating, surrounded by her Paraguayan hosts, wearing a braided ponytail and blue tennis shoes.

For a sizable number of Lincoln kids—or at least for their clasping parents, sometimes micromanaging every academic move—life had always been about scheming admission to prestigious colleges with names that bestowed instant status. Even the 1987 Lincoln yearbook was called “Gettin’ In,” and
page 225
printed senior “destinations”—Stanford, Smith, Amherst, UC Berkeley, Reed, Scripps, Duke, Northwestern, Cornell, Columbia. Other Portland public schools had no such illustrious listing to trumpet. At Franklin on the east side, for instance, senior “information” was unostentatiously shared, and by far the most frequent plan described was “work,” or else attendance at Portland Community College on SE 82 Avenue, a long strip dominated by cheap Chinese restaurants, car dealerships, massage parlors, and meandering prostitutes. Yet by middle school in the Lincoln cluster, and on through the high school years, prepubescent aspirants racked up extracurriculars, internships, and splashy volunteer credits helping out the less fortunate. They worked with tutors, avidly tracked down enrichment opportunities, learned exotic languages, brown-nosed teachers
to boost grades from B to A. It was a sort of career—puffing up the résumé, massaging GPA, practicing the SAT to the point of nausea. It was life or death. For Elliott, however, there was very little buy-in. He was exceptionally smart and his grades were excellent, but when it came to choosing a school, the decision was a passive one. He followed Wight to nontraditional Hampshire College, in Amherst, Massachusetts. As it happens, the two broke up before classes even started, but Elliott attended regardless, and made it through in four years.

Given his lack of genuine enthusiasm for college generally and Hampshire particularly, it’s not surprising that Elliott’s feelings about the school were mixed. He was not alone. Other kids had misgivings too, understandable in light of the nature of the school’s “invention” (as most phrased it) from scratch. When Elliott arrived in the late 1980s, Hampshire was almost exactly the same age as he was. It was an idea in constant revision, in a state of never-ending evolution, the deliberate creation of nearby colleges Amherst, Smith, Mount Holyoke, and University of Massachusetts. The idea was to reinvent higher education from the top down, to design an utterly new sort of undergraduate experience in which the “favorite tradition [was] lack of tradition.”
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Doors officially opened in 1970, when two thousand applicants competed for two hundred seventy spaces by sending in “anything that told about themselves,” from homemade bread to light shows. Admission posters proclaimed “1,200 students, 1,200 majors”—a sound bite capturing the self-paced, self-created ethos the school championed. Founders believed that “the best learning is that in which a student progressively acquires the ability to teach himself” and in so doing comes to “terms with his culture without being its creature.” Because it was never preordained how long the average student might stick around, kids identified themselves in relation to date of entry rather than date of graduation. Certain students managed to get through in the standard four years, as Elliott did, while others wound up on what was sardonically referred to as the “nine-year plan.” Attrition was a problem. The less focused, less effectively independent scholar might drift, paying the then-expensive tuition of twenty thousand dollars, before simply dropping out. There was no preset menu of required courses, no core curriculum. Instead students recruited faculty to work with them, then essentially wrote a learning contract stipulating agreed-on
paths of study focusing on anything from “Faulkner to folk music, molecules to microwaves.”
²⁰
As alum Chip Brown explained in a 1990
New York Times
article (“What’s New at Frisbee U?”) that many at the school regarded as heresy, “what emerged was a kind of graduate school for eighteen-year-olds.” Students got written evaluations rather than grades. Progress was assessed by way of a series of exams in three “divisions.” For Division I, where “to know facts is not enough,” students investigated “modes of inquiry” embodied within the college’s four schools—Humanities and Arts, Social Sciences, Natural Sciences, and Communications and Cognitive Science. Division II constituted what most other universities designated as a major, although it also stipulated Community Service and Third-World Exploration. Coursework and research were organized around a theme. As Brown put it, “Someone interested in weaving, for example, might jump off into an exploration of the chemistry of dyes; write a paper about the implications of weaving in aboriginal societies; work up a computer-based experiment in pattern recognition; or perhaps compose a sonnet sequence about the joys of being a Luddite.” Division III amounted to what is now called a capstone or senior thesis. A committee of faculty was assembled, followed by a thesis defense. “Undivs” were also recommended to students. These were “useful and thought-provoking” experiences such as managing a co-op. Sometimes they led to Divs, sometimes not.

As all incoming freshmen were required to do, Elliott first lived in the dorms. There were two—the smaller Merrill House (with its “clothing optional” floor) and the larger Dakin House. Students might say, by way of introduction, “I live in Merrill C, floor two” or “Dakin F, floor three.” But as Elliott less than charitably confided in a 2003 interview for
Under the Radar
, most members of his cohort he came to see as “annoying” (he could not “stand the atmosphere”) so as soon as possible he moved out to one of the college apartments called MODS—Greenwich House, Prescott, and Enfield. Each pod in one of these MODS might accommodate anywhere from six to eight people, and each had a totally different feel depending on the group of students who had petitioned to live together. Those in MODS generally cooked for themselves; they did not eat in the dining hall. Some MODS were studious non-imbibers; others consisted of relatively hard-core partiers.

Elliott in his first year at Hampshire. (Courtesy Jimi Jones, Hampshire archives.)

Yet apart from the absence of clear, uniform requirements, the belief that students were responsible, like inchoate PhD candidates, for in dependent self-definition and the articulation of an original line of inquiry, despite the fact that most lacked any solid sense of foundational disciplinary knowledge, what really set the school apart was its hyperactivated culture, which Brown summarizes as “antisexist, antiracist, antihomophobic, and antispecist.” Around 1990 the professors in the five-college consortium were queried as to political identity, and apparently 100% of those at Hampshire rated themselves either radical or liberal. What students got, in some ways oppressively and sanctimoniously, was a total, unrelenting dose of culture war indoctrination. By Thanksgiving of freshman year the word “girl” had been banished from the lexicon. One could not be anything but a feminist of, ideally, the most extreme stripe. During orientation incoming classes attended tutorials with titles like “The Dangers of Casual Racism and Privilege.” It was a process of very determined unlearning geared to expose false consciousness. In courses students fell into the habit of prefacing each and
every comment with “As a lesbian, I believe …” or “As a member of an underrepresented class, my sense is …” One typical student told Chip Brown for his
Times
piece, “Sometimes it’s hard to be a heterosexual male here,” a feeling Elliott likewise failed to escape. Another felt as if “students are trying so hard to be open-minded they’re close-minded.” Yet another said, “I consider myself a feminist, but people on campus don’t think I am.”

For all the adhesively politically correct groupthink, most students still felt a sense of pride in the place. It was cool, politically progressive, avant garde. If you went to Hampshire, you were different, part of an experiment, part of a new, bold way of doing things in higher education. And for Elliott in particular, a major perk was the ubiquity of music all around Amherst and Northampton, clubs that were justifiably famous. On Pearl Street there were live venues galore—grunge, folk, singer-songwriter stuff, even tribute bands, including an excellent Rush outfit, all accessible for very little money. One of Bob Dylan’s sons attended the school around the time Elliott did, helping to start up a band of sorts called The Supreme Dicks. It was one part music, one part performance art, one part deliberate irritation. At some point, possessed by the prevailing spirit of adventurousness, a student started a baseball team, and on that one roster alone there were no fewer than nine people in different bands, some in several at once.
²¹
All around campus there were places to play, and the music department housed what was then a more or less state-of-the-art recording studio with a multitracking setup. Concerts were staged in the dining hall. Nirvana played there in the early years, as did Phish. Usually local bands served as opening acts.

In his first week at school Elliott managed by chance to make his next important and lasting musical contact, one that would persist for at least the ensuing six or seven years. “We started recording almost immediately,” said new friend Neil Gust, who like Elliott adored Elvis Costello, and as Elliott noticed, “listened to decent music.” But what most thrilled Elliott about Gust, and it would not have been an assessment he’d make at the time about too many other people, was that “he played the guitar better than me.” He could “make his instrument sound really good; [he could] make it sing.” Gust’s feelings for Elliott were equally expansive. He found him incredibly prolific, a true craftsman when it came to songwriting, and outrageously skilled at the subtleties of recording. For the latter their habit
was to rent a four-track from the music department that they kept for the weekend. The two fell in with a “Southern Californian stoner-photographer guy” sporting a cartoonish L.A. drawl, who liked music and “wanted to jam.” They’d get together with acoustic guitars—neither had access then to an electric—and although Gust found it occasionally “stupid and really embarrassing,” at least in retrospect, the stoner kid recited poetry on top of the music. It was, all things considered, pretty classic Hampshire stuff.