Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith (18 page)

The obligatory grind
of college now over, Elliot headed back home to Portland, to the kind of existence—or at least living arrangement—he’d always wanted. As he said to an interviewer in early 2001, he started feeling “untwisted up” as soon as he “didn’t live with anybody.” No more lawn mowing, as in Cedar Hill. No more stepparents, except very occasionally, when necessary. No more attack dogs, loud summertime townies (who enjoyed calling Elliott a faggot), dorms, or half-assed hemming and hawing about what to do with his life. All the adolescent fireman talk evaporated (although other hesitations surfaced temporarily). It was time, at last, to commit to the idea of making a band. Stranger Than Fiction, Murder of Crows, Harum Scarum, the dabblings when on vacation in Texas—all juvenilia, very promising but overripe. It was time to get serious. And as Denny Swofford, co-owner of Cavity Search Records, put it, “Things were popping in Portland in 1991.”

The decade was ushered in less than auspiciously, with a legendary, literal bang, the cause of which remains a mystery to this day. Right next to Satyricon sat the abject, shabby Sav-Mor Grub grocery, pit stop for undesirables—alcoholics, junkies, transients, “the displaced, distracted, and dysfunctional.”
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It was where Satyricon patrons, many of them local college students from places like Reed and Lewis and Clark, commingled with an “entirely different series of social strata altogether.”
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Late one night the place was mysteriously—all too conveniently—blown to bits. Some said gangs were behind the evildoing, others pointed to the police, still others to city administrators, who viewed the erasure as a public service. The disappearance of Sav-Mor Grub, so went the basic sentiment, might lead to the disappearance of the people who frequented it, a magical, inexplicable sucking of chaos into a crater. (Didn’t happen, needless to say.)

A building was one thing; loss of life another. Larry Hurwitz ran Starry Night, a stone’s throw from Sav-Mor Grub. “Elliptical on the subject of gate receipts,” “ruthlessly competitive for his share of the local music market,” and rarely beneath assorted acts of intimidation, Hurwitz was a “slippery” impresario with a “consortium of underlings at the ready to do his perfidious biddings.”
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He generally covered his tracks; he generally kept his hands clean. But on January 20, 1990, more than one hundred eighty tickets to a John Lee Hooker show were discovered at the Starry Night door by Chris Monlux, one of the event’s promoters. Cheated fans were incensed. Who printed the bogus ducats, they demanded to know? Hurwitz promptly denied involvement, then dished out blame on a kid named Tim Moreau, his employee, whom he ostentatiously fired. Moreau disappeared, never to be seen again. Detectives scoured his apartment, finding credit cards, a checkbook, and one hundred fifty dollars in cash. There was little sense the kid had any plan of vanishing. All the more interesting was apparent evidence of counterfeit ticket conspiracies. Hurwitz hightailed it for Southeast Asia, where the law finally caught up with him. He was arrested for Moreau’s murder in 1998.

Then, finally, there was a near miss. Elliott’s Stranger Than Fiction bandmate Tony Lash was hanging out late one night at a friend’s house in North Portland. At the time, February 1990, he was drumming for Nero’s Rome. A stray bullet fired from the street ripped through a house wall, penetrated the back of a couch on which Lash was lying, then lodged in his lung, barely missing his spine and heart.
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The lung collapsed, and Lash spent several weeks in recovery, grateful for what was, in retrospect, a very close call, a random brush with death. The bullet is still in him.

In effect, as Portland rock historian S.P. Clarke explains, “vital layers of innocence and naiveté” were peeling away from the Portland scene, replaced by assorted seedy miasmas. Some kind of metamorphosis seemed near. Change was percolating. Physical structures and bit players formed part of the master narrative, but the real story, the one on which the physical structures and bit players depended, was the music, the art, the sounds getting made and played.

Portland was no average destination, more a second-rung rest stop between
far sexier Seattle and San Francisco where bands
most
wanted to gig. To Pete Krebs of the band Hazel, Seattle was nebulously “a little more rough, just a rougher scene overall.” The “guys were even bigger up there—big dudes, with long hair, all six foot three, like Soundgarden.” Portland was “rain saturated,” full of “wet brick” people. There was “a great deal of darkness to it. Not at all a very lighthearted place. We were a backwater,” Krebs says, the scene “gloomy, somber” and heroin drenched. Even the venues, like Satyricon, were toilets. The Wipers, a late-1980s Portland band, supplied the basic soundtrack in songs like “Doom Town”—according to which life was “incomplete,” replete with “blank stares” and a feeling of nonstop losing. In a word, depressing, the mood leaking out between downpours like dysthymic drizzle. There was also a sense of smallness of scale, with everybody once removed at most from everybody else. “It got to the point,” Krebs says, “where you could tell who was at a party by the bikes out front.” Hookups and dramas were commonplace, fueled by “drugs, alcohol, punk, rain, and violence.”
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Seattle, the nominal grunge capital of the world, was corporate, full of bands looking to get signed, hungry for mid- or major-label recognition, willing to do what it took to make it big. Portland was different, getting signed anathema, the kiss of death. “People were making music
for the sake of it
, for the sake of creativity alone,” says Jason Mitchell, Elliott’s close friend (and later, tour manager/merch man). “We thought it was like that everywhere. We didn’t know any better. It was just phenomenal music all the time.” The attitude was “Screw labels, we do what we want.”
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And of course, as always, this was part, maybe large part, braggadocio. No serious band works hard performing and writing original music to go nowhere. No serious band aspires to cashless anonymity. But that was the tacit aesthetic. And it was liberating. There was a freedom, originality, creativity, and patent level of bizarreness in Portland that defied easy categorization. It was anything goes. And the results were intoxicating.

Fifteen to twenty bands played the circuit in mixed bills, at Satyricon, the X-Ray, La Luna, EJ’s, with roughly one thousand loyal followers packing the houses, weekend after weekend. The trend in names was for single staccato monikers, sharp punches to the solar plexus: Hazel, Sprinkler, Pond, Lungfish, Crackerbash, Joybuzzer, Sugarboom, Bedspins, Iceburn, Antenna (“We’d joke,” says Krebs, “ ‘Hey! Want to go see Table? They’re playing with Chair this weekend.’ ”). It was “power pop at its finest,” says Denny Swof-ford, “some strange combination of brilliant and uncomfortable. Just like a circus act. But upbeat and positive.” Neil Gust recalls a feeling on arrival of “enormous energy and enthusiasm to rock out. It was a competitive and energetic scene.” Krebs, for his part, recalls “no competition at all. We used to actually draw straws to see who would play first and who would headline.” Even posters were made with the express intent of making it difficult to tell who was at the top of the bill.

A poster for a mixed show at La Luna. (Photograph by Henry Love.)

Pete Krebs (left), Elliott, and Hazel’s Brady Smith. (Photograph by JJ Gonson.)

In some ways Hazel’s Krebs epitomized the zeitgeist. Born in Orange County, he ended up at Oregon State University in Corvallis, a talented, artistic kid who didn’t “apply myself” in high school and who wound up spending time in a military school in Pennsylvania. His dad was a boxer and war hero, his finger blown off at Pearl Harbor, his face slanting sideways from angled blows he took in the ring. Just like Elliott once he got to Portland, Krebs was raised by his biological father, along with a new mom—a stepmother—who herself had two girls from a prior marriage. OSU was cut short when Krebs got diagnosed with Hodgkins Lymphoma, for which he received radiation treatment in Portland at St. Vincent’s Hospital. It did the trick; there was no chemo. He’d mostly taught himself guitar at age ten, with short-lived lessons from an angry classical guitarist in a wheelchair. For the first few years of his early adolescence “all I listened to was the Beatles”—a habit Elliott knew well. Then he came across various journalistic accounts of the punk phenomenon and bought up all
the Sex Pistols, Clash, and X records he could get his hands on. “X was
the
band,” he says.

Needing cash, Krebs found work in a warehouse in what is now called the “Pearl District” but which, then, was anything but tony. There he met Reed College grad Brady Smith, a bassist who turned him on to the Pixies and Shocking Blue, a band Kurt Cobain had also admired. The two wrote an album in “a couple nights,” and “cobbled together some bass lines.” Jody Bleyle, who later helped form Team Dresch, a serious all-girl band, signed on to play drums. A Reedie like Brady Smith, she was small, short-haired, deliriously happy on stage, ferociously feminist off—an “out of control Muppet,” according to Denny Swofford. At the time, Krebs shot pool with a dancer and self-described “spirit man” named Fred Nemo. They talked casually about adding some sort of performance art element to the group. There was little esoteric or highfalutin about it; they simply thought it might be cool. And so, in a task “critical to the success of the band,” Nemo supplied psychedelic inflections. Slightly balding with a long, stringy pony-tail, he convulsed around the stage. One typical shtick put him in a pink tutu firing plastic heart-shaped arrows into the audience. In a YouTube video of “Joe Louis Punchout” performed live at the X-Ray he ricochets wildly in a calico dress, buffeted by invisible obstacles, in front of a pair of boys, almost jockish, in backward baseball caps banging their heads to Bleyle’s complex, disjointed rhythms. The song is hard but infinitely subtle, intelligent pop, short and sweet. Krebs, in a genius of understatement, plays it totally straight in round glasses, white T-shirt, and blond hair (he looks, in fact, very much like Cobain). Nemo’s “whack shit onstage”—swinging a rotary phone by its cord, standing on stepstool ladders while balancing a pitcher of water on his head, stripping down to bikini briefs and sliding into a women’s one-piece—made for its own contrapuntal adornment. The music paid scant notice. Deliberately, it wasn’t in on the joke. “I had no idea what he was doing most of the time,” Krebs says. “I didn’t want to get fucked with while I was playing. But I never thought of him as anything but a bandmate.” “J Hell,” a Hazel seven-inch vinyl record, named for Krebs’s college girlfriend Janel (who later sang in the band Trailer Queen), sold fifteen hundred copies at a rapid pace.
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Kids picked them up at shows, or at independent record stores like The Ooze or Ozone (which Janel ran and co-owned along with Bruce Grief, and which some considered the nucleus of the Portland music scene at the time). Clearly something exciting and potentially profitable was taking root amid the mayhem and chaos. And in the middle of it all, in some ways fomenting it, were two avuncular entrepreneurs, a pair of deeply committed music madmen (and Dylan devotees), Christopher Cooper and Denny Swofford.