Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith (19 page)

Hazel (L–R, Brady Smith, Bleyle, Krebs.) (Photograph by JJ Gonson.)

Swofford made the scene in Portland in 1990, drifting south from Seattle where he worked for bands like Mother Love Bone. At that time he was in thrall to the haunted addict musician Andrew Wood, who like Elliott occasionally recorded alone with a four-track. To Swofford, Wood—the subject of a DVD titled
Malfunction: The Andy Wood Story
—was genius in ongoing process. Heartbreakingly, he died of a heroin overdose in March 1990. Swofford split town, not sure of his next move. Needing to make money, he got a job at Coffee People on NW 23rd and Burnside, a ritzy street getting ritzier, with shoe shops and upscale salons, and a fabulous, cheap pizza joint called Escape From New York, run by a comically cranky, blunt East Coast transplant named Phil (Elliott’s dear friend Sean Croghan would work there). The coffee job was joyless; every day Swofford gathered up his measly tips and beat a path to the record store Music Millennium, a few paces south, where he spent all he had on seven-inches. In the ’90s the chief way to learn about new, obscure bands, apart from seeing them live, was through these typically two-track vinyl records. They had an A-side and a B-side. Bands chose the songs extremely carefully, because the seveninch constituted a calling card. It was an aural handshake. Many had inserts, with lyric sheets, pictures, or other band-related content, and the covers were artfully designed. Even the vinyl came in different colors—white, dark blue, red. As Swofford’s collection grew, each new acquisition slid into protective plastic sleeves, he drew the attention of Christopher Cooper, who worked the store at the time for five bucks per hour.

Blue-haired Elliott with Coffee People coffee, the shop in which Swofford worked for a time. (Photograph by JJ Gonson.)

Chris Cooper at Satyricon. (Photograph by JJ Gonson.)

Cooper had his own story. He’d attended the Parsons School for Design, then moved to Portland in 1991, looking for the “cohesive dream job,” some means of combining his design sensibilities, very refined, with his adamant love for music. New York was, for him, “a lot of experimentation.” He calls himself a “loose cannon.” He decided to get out, and very deliberately, with planful intention, he sought a fresh start. For a brief period he worked as a carpenter on San Juan Island, in Friday Harbor. Believing what he needed was a semi-Spartan existence, he set himself up in a cabin with no electricity or running water. It was back to nature. It was the anti-NYC. The money was very good, so he built up a nice nest egg. The shift to working at Music Millennium was a love choice—music was what he lived for. The pay wasn’t an issue, for the time being.

Swofford and Cooper hit it off instantly. “We were cut from the same
cloth,” Cooper says. “We bonded on the love of music.” A band they both adored was The Jesus Lizard, whom Cooper calls “powerful and amazing” live. He checked them out locally at Satyricon, then traveled to see them in places like Seattle, Olympia, and Vancouver, British Columbia. After one such show, Swofford gave Cooper a lift back to town, and as Cooper recalls, “during that two-hour car ride from Olympia to Portland we essentially laid the groundwork for starting a label.” They needed a logo, for starters, and a PO Box. The name was Cavity Search—a clever reference to the hiding of special valuables in dark, unexpected places.

Like no one before or since, Swofford and Cooper embarked on an impassioned, indefatigable crusade to absorb the Portland music scene. They saw everything; they knew everyone. It was, in Cooper’s terms, “like a self-taught grad program in building a label. I knew nothing about it. I just told myself I needed to learn how music is presented and sold and distributed.” The idea they hatched was simple. It was clear to both of them that Portland was special, exploding with talent and inventiveness, a hive of creativity. So five to seven nights per week they lived in the venues—sometimes at bars like the X-Ray, sometimes in basements or house parties. “We approached bands live. That’s how we did it. We were committed to finding the very best bands and putting out their two best songs.” It was exactly this mind-set that led to Hazel. Cooper had planned to check out Jakob Dylan, but Dylan canceled. So, opposed to wasting an evening, Cooper made his way to a Hazel show instead. What he realized was that, first, these were “amazing, creative, diverse people”—incredibly catchy musically, with a “crazy dancer.” The next response was fated, preordained: “This is the first band I want to work with. What I saw, I realized almost immediately, was mind-blowing.” The date was February 1992. It’s seared into Cooper’s memory. He and Swofford had CSR #1: Hazel’s “J Hell.”
⁸

Initially the label was run out of the pair’s bedrooms. It was a less than ideal arrangement, very DIY but limiting. In large part the challenges were simply a matter of space. So as things got going Swofford and Cooper rented rooms above Ozone that became, vaingloriously, “our first office.” The precise location was 11th and W. Burnside, directly across the street from Powell’s Books. Upstairs windows overlooked Django Records to the south, where Elliott and Garrick Duckler had breathlessly sold their Stranger Than Fiction
cassettes back in the high school days. This single room slowly became three rooms. It was here that Cavity Search lived, up to the late ’90s, when they moved to an East Side building just across from the Hawthorne Bridge.

Soon Elliott would meet Swofford and Cooper, and the event would change the direction of his life and art forever. He was, at the time, and like nearly everyone in a band or into music, an Ozone regular. Matt Schulte, who worked at the record shop from the start, recalls Elliott spending “three hours or more in Ozone once, thumbing through records one by one, saying three or four words the entire time.” He “felt comfortable there,” Swofford adds, “it was a safe place in which he could just hang out.” To Swofford, “Portland was the foundation that allowed Elliott to become the person he was and to blossom.” It was the scene, the bands, the politics, the personalities, and it was also the presence of Cavity Search. It’s difficult to believe, given his adamantine interests, the way songs easily formed themselves in his head, but for a short period post-college Elliott had “almost completely” talked himself out of playing music. In his head he was, as Gust used to call it, all “bunched up.” Part of the cause of this mental logjam was, funnily enough, college. Reading Kant and other major philosophers wasn’t a problem; Elliott liked learning about how people think, about categories of understanding and so on. But radical feminist philosophy, a major portion of his program at Hampshire, left him “demoralized.” Jason Mitchell always felt Elliott “was just too sensitive, too emotionally sensitive. He internalized everything, even stuff that wasn’t directly about him as a person. He never could shrug off or gloss over anything.” And it was the same for feminism. “I just took everything to heart in a big way,” Elliott says.
⁹
To be a straight white man, at the top of the Marxist mountain, fomenting hierarchical and patriarchal power structures, was a problem. To his list of woes, and it was always uncommonly long, sex and color became the latest additions. The best one could do—and this was the attitude pushed by fringe, hetero-sex-averse feminists he had spent so much time studying for his thesis—was to identify as a “nonsexist white male.” Men, by definition, could not be feminists. The most they could do was sympathize, stick up for the sisters. “It got to a point,” Elliott recalls, “where I couldn’t look at a girl objectively without thinking of all these questions.” He was, in his own mind, unworthy, illegitimate, innately flawed, worthless.

Jason Mitchell. (Photograph by JJ Gonson.)

He wasn’t the solution, he was the problem. And this was an assigned position he recoiled from; the worst thing he could do was embody it, in whatever form it might take. He began by searching about for something “useful” he might pursue in the world—jobs that were necessary yet not coveted by anyone else. The very last thing he felt comfortable with—ironically, what he would one day become—was to be “the straight white guy on the stage going on and on about my feelings.” Straight white-guy feelings were bullshit; they were what feminism aimed to expose, a power structure implicitly embedded in language itself. “Neil Gust was like, ‘You’re just talking yourself out of everything you want to do.’ He just kept insisting that we were going to start a band and I kept being like, ‘No.’ ” But no other option rushed into the breach. And Portland being what it was—music taking off, bands living together in apartments and houses all over town, writing original songs—Elliott was thrown back to a reality far more powerful than abstract theory. Music was who he was. It was what he did and what he made. It was the language he spoke.

So Neil won out. Portland, too, in its ambient way. The first step was easiest, a semi-foregone conclusion. Neil had heard Tony Lash’s drumming in Harum Scarum, on songs like “Catholic” and “Bald Faced Lie,” so one
half of the rhythm section was set. Tony, as it turned out, was down for starting something new. Surprisingly, he never actually “aspired to be a drummer,” but he did enjoy “rocking out.” All three were heavily into the D.C. Dischord bands picking up steam in the late 1980s—Nation of Ulysses, Fugazi. “Basically,” Elliott says, “we kind of wanted to be Fugazi.” Another inspiration was Chicago’s Urge Overkill, a double singer-songwriter attack led by King Roeser and Nash Kato, who met at Northwestern. Butch Vig produced their 1990 record
Americruiser
; it was a sound that inspired bands from Smashing Pumpkins to Nirvana, who used Vig for the paradigmatic album
Nevermind
; Urge Overkill later opened for Nirvana on the
Nevermind
tour.

The next step, far more difficult, and more freighted, was settling on a bassist. Several auditions were held, quite a few in fact, but nothing clicked. Alice Vosmek, whom Elliott knew from Lincoln High School, had dated Oberlin grad Brandt Peterson; she told Elliott Brandt was a bass player. Brandt knew Sean Croghan before leaving for college; Croghan was part of “the Gresham scene,” a group of musicians from a small town in East County, Oregon, about twenty minutes from Portland. So a meeting was arranged. Peterson caught up with Elliott at a café or coffee shop, the two sitting at an outside table. There was instant affinity, some of which had to do with the fact that Peterson wore a button proclaiming “Another Citizen for Gay Rights.” At the time the so-called Oregon Citizens Alliance, led by short, balding hatemonger Lon Mabon, was calling homosexuality a crime, leading initiatives to put the question on the ballot. Elliott told Peterson, “I like the button.” The attitude hurdle was instantly cleared.

Brandt was an Oregon Episcopal School, Catlin brat, each private, expensive schools on the west side of town full of kids Lincoln students sometimes mixed with and knew from grade school at Ainsworth on Vista. Like Tony Lash, he was raised by a single mom, the manager of a travel agency. There was no abundance of money, private school aside, so Peterson took Tri-Met to classes. He hung out with “disaffected kids” downtown, got heavily into the B-52s, Napalm Beach, the Rats (the Wipers’
Is This Real?
especially blew his mind) and although he grew up playing sax in high school bands—soul/jazz configurations—and even spent time in a “horrible” Devo facsimile (just as Elliott did, named the Spudboys), he bought his first bass in 1983, entranced by the possibility of “marking out the rhythmic feel of the tune, doing contrapuntal harmonic work.” The way the bass “sits underneath everything and drives the music” seemed to capture his interest, suggesting a new direction. Before college Peterson lived in a house on SE Ankeny with junkie roommates who stole his stuff; for money he washed dishes. Oberlin got him out of this hopeless grind; it was a complete immersion in music, an “intense musical experience” all around. He played with Orestes Delatore of Bitch Magnet, learned from an endless list of brilliant drummers. Then, in 1989, his “elite college liberal arts degrees in government and political science” behind him, he came back to Portland to live with Oberlin friends and found a job sweeping up for a cabinet installation crew, on a shift starting at three A.M. “I was a pretty committed drinker by then,” Peterson says, “and just as the bars were closing my shift would start.” The drinking was part of a larger gestalt, one Brandt shared with Elliott. As he says, unsparingly and with admirable candor, “I was chronically, clinically, severely depressed. Just very sarcastic and negative. Dysthymic is the official name for it. I was the average drunk with no self-awareness.”