Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith (21 page)

Second Heatmiser show at the X-Ray in May 1992. (L–R, Gust, Peterson, Elliott, Lash.) (Photograph by JJ Gonson.)

Hazel’s “J. Hell” seven-inch had been so thrillingly successful, sales driven hard by a massive high school and college following, that the obvious question, a semi-urgent one, was what Cavity Search might bring out next. Hazel and Heatmiser played together almost once per month. There was an October 30, 1992, show at Satyricon, including Trailer Queen and Pond, a show on November 11 at Belmont’s, then several more in 1993, at LaLuna and Clinton Street. Cooper and Swofford made up their minds swiftly. Somehow, no matter what it took, CSR2 was going to be Heatmiser. A summit was arranged in the Division house basement. By this time Cooper and Swofford knew the material exceptionally well; they’d been hearing it live for months. The band ran through several songs they figured might have vinyl potential, and instantly Swofford had his A side, a decision he’d really made beforehand. The song was Elliott’s “Stray.” Next was the matter of the B side, and here things got dicier. Completely naively, Swofford suggested another Elliott number. Instantly he picked up on the band’s reluctance. These were dual singer-songwriters, after all, a hypothetical 50/50 split, Neil and Elliott. For a moment no one knew what to say. The minor faux pas lingered. Then Elliott spoke up. Tactfully, sensitively, but also with obvious force, he simply declared “no.” The other song would be Neil’s. The suggestion was made deftly, belying its implications; Elliott emphasized how he liked Neil’s song more than any of the other possibilities, and that was that. Swofford came away impressed; he acceded, naturally, to Elliott’s wishes. The B side would be “Can’t Be Touched.” And the deal was struck. But the episode underscored what was, for most observers, an open secret. This was Elliott’s band. To Swofford, “there was ongoing tension from the very beginning.” Elliott didn’t enjoy leading the charge, but his talents threw him into that role. It was inescapable. Still, his choice was to share the glory, at least for now.

The band Pond. (Photograph by JJ Gonson.)

The record’s black-and-white cover shows a group of suited men in gas masks, the backside reproducing a Bomb Incident Plan including fourteen tips, such as “designate a chain of command.” Production is attributed to Heatmiser, engineering to Tony Lash. Mixing occurred at “Dead Aunt Thelma’s.” The vinyl itself is white with a blue center label. And band contact, the person to reach for bookings, press, and other matters, is JJ Gonson. Prior to this moment, Gonson had spent three months in Europe looking at religious iconography, contemplating a project of an anthropological nature. For a time she figured on staying out of band management altogether, but when she returned to Portland, Heatmiser “sort of proposed.” She asked them what they wanted exactly, what they had in mind, what their goals were. “To make a living,” they all replied. A path, in other words, out of dead-end, dispiriting jobs like framing or scraping paint off ceilings or making copies at Kinko’s. “So that’s what we set out to do,” Gonson says. “Try figuring a way to get them free of their shit jobs, how to make money as a band.”

CSR2 7-inch “Stray,” in white vinyl and sky-blue label. (Photograph William Todd Schultz.)

A self-described obsessive worker, Gonson, once firmly committed, “worked her ass off for the band.” She was tireless and utterly “dedicated.”
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She had the contacts, she had a wealth of experience, and she made effective use of both. The inaugural gig, which Gonson missed, was actually Valentine’s Day 1992, at the X-Ray. Heatmiser opened for Nervous Christians, fronted by Dan Eklov, Gust’s co-worker at TIS, a digital printing and graphics resource. From there they played almost every weekend, still practicing twice per week. They got, over time, incredibly fast and tight, Peterson recalls. Shows were “never poorly attended, always packed” with growing and avid followers. Although
The Rocket
characterized Heatmiser songs as “personal rather than political,” and Elliott himself suggested Neil’s numbers, in particular, “don’t carry political diatribes that would be better off in a speech,” the political still got strangely personal in the early 1990s, thanks to the efforts of Mabon’s Oregon Citizen’s Alliance. First there was Measure 8, the group’s only statewide victory. It repealed an executive order banning discrimination based on sexual orientation; the measure
passed 53 to 47 percent (it was later overturned). Next came the infamous Measure 9 in 1992, which aimed to amend the Oregon Constitution, preventing what the OCA called “special” rights for homosexuals and bisexuals. In the incendiary words of the measure itself, the state would officially affirm how “homosexuality, pedophilia, sadism, and masochism” were “abnormal, wrong, unnatural, and perverse.” Throwing homosexuality in with pedophilia was an obviously vicious, ridiculous move, not to mention the labeling of homosexuality as immoral, a kind of living affront to the OCA’s imaginarily decent—and virtually sexless—citizens. In the world of Mabon—porcine and pusillanimous—there were normal people, and there were perverts, any borderline depraved. Measure 9 failed, but homophobia earned official sanction. Peterson recalls a lot of “hateful discourse” circulating at the time; Jason Mitchell remembers attitudes being somewhat more subdued, but Gust, especially, was “very out”—although not more than he was comfortable being. For Neil, Peterson says, “It was like, ‘I’m going to be in Portland and I’m going to be out.’ ” His sexuality was “an important part of his identity.” And it was also, in the lyrical content, an important part of Heatmiser.

These Portland bands consisted of unusually well-educated, smart, thoughtful twenty-somethings, from colleges like Reed, Oberlin, Hampshire, the Berklee School, steeped in gender politics, keenly attuned to the superstructural ideological dynamics of sexism, homophobia, patriarchy. For Elliott, as noted, such cultural critiques could become paralyzingly shame-inducing. In Hazel there were intermittent clashes between Krebs and Bleyle, the latter a “genius,” according to Gonson, adept at fomenting jarring but helpful chaos that fueled songwriting and performances, a sort of deliberate shit stirrer. Once she refused to record Krebs’s songs unless he changed their pronouns. Krebs found the idea absurd, but he understood its meaning. Says Brandt Peterson, “I saw Heatmiser as a band, not on a mission to be a queer band, but more attuned to the complexities of trying to make relationships of any kind work in your twenties without homospecific or heterospecific baggage … We all shared a sense of gender politics … Although, really, it would be just as accurate, technically, to call Heatmiser a gay band as it would be to call it a heterosexual band. Any of us would have been happy keeping the ambiguity of whether we were gay or straight intact.”

And there was ambiguity. Early reviewers pegged the band as a cliched “loud macho” outfit obsessed with chicks.
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The misunderstanding chafed (“I guess they listened close,” Elliott joked). Gust noted how the pronoun “she” was virtually absent from the tunes.
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The idea, then, that his songs focused on girls was preposterous; lyric sheets were created to counteract possible confusion. Now it was clear boys were the subject, and the band, predictably, got labeled queercore or homocore. As he always did when he felt friends were being bullied or targeted for mindless abuse, Elliott stuck up for his bandmates. He wasn’t down with any kind of victimization. He knew how it felt. “Hopefully it will come up more,” he said of the subject. “And we’re all gay in the band if someone’s going to be homophobic.”
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Gust added: “Most magazines tiptoe around the subject, even though I tell everyone in interviews that I’m gay. It’s all over the records.”
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There were moments when the issue was more than theoretical. At one show outside Portland, “fag this, fag that” comments could be heard as the band took the stage. “We were just nauseated,” Peterson recalls.
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Croghan’s Crackerbash took on the OCA explicitly, writing “A Song for Lon Mabon.” Apparently, according to press, Gust’s “Can’t Be Touched”—the B side for CSR2—also was OCA inspired. “I feel like a criminal,” Gust writes, “don’t crush me.” He asks, “will you judge me?” then declares “I thought I couldn’t be touched until they tagged me out.”

In Stranger Than Fiction a large number of songs tracked political angles, offering up various social critiques. In Heatmiser, as Elliott once put it, the personal was political—the message there, but refracted. Neil, he explained, “writes about life, like me, like anybody. He just happens to be gay.”
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Whether he tired of explicitness or simply grew more internally preoccupied over time, Elliott’s later, more realized work dropped politics altogether, save for very occasional and, one senses, reluctant forays into political themes, as in “A Distorted Reality’s Now a Necessity to Be Free,” where he wonders why his country “don’t give a fuck” (a line he arrived at only after thinking over several apolitical alternatives).

Undaunted and definitely undeterred—in fact, enjoying the pseudo-controversy more than they liked to admit—the band played on as the OCA retooled, turning its warped attentions to county and municipal politics, where it passed two dozen local initiatives before the Oregon Legislative
Assembly authored a bill prohibiting governments from even considering LGBT rights measures, stripping all prior ordinances of lawful force. Antigay attitudes did not die, but Mabon and his OCA grew less strident, slowly degrading into irrelevance. Meanwhile, Cavity Search kept releasing Heatmiser seven-inches—for instance, 1993’s “Sleeping Pill” and “Temper” (CSR7, on blue vinyl), with a sleeve design by Neil Gust and photos by JJ Gonson, mixed by Tony Lash. Momentum was building, and ambitions rose beyond the hoped-for escape from crappy day jobs. There was a feeling that something big could be happening. Other feelings were taking off too, suppressed at first, but finally openly acknowledged. Elliott and JJ were falling in love.

No one thought it was a wise move. The first person they told—the excellent listener, de facto psychologist everyone told everything to—was Jason Mitchell. “This is a really bad idea,” he said. Bunny also weighed in. JJ had gotten to know her, they’d become “really close” and “liked each other a lot.” She advised, “Don’t get together; it’s a bad idea.” As JJ herself put it: “We both thought it was a bad idea.” Yet this unanimously bad idea just seemed, day by day, anything but bad, and irrepressible anyway. It wasn’t so much about the idea; it was about feelings. It came together quickly; it was always there potentially, just waiting for some sort of action that the two kept putting off. Yet, according to JJ, “it was impossible not to fall in love with Elliott.” She didn’t expect to, but she also could not help it. Though the two of them realized, without the slightest doubt, that they were creating the worst scenario imaginable—manager dating band member—they were helpless against the inevitable. “I was addicted to chaos at the time,” Gonson says, and as she was beginning to learn, Elliott was “addicted to depression.” Expressing a trend that would hold true for much of Elliott’s romantic life, the bond was forged through trauma, personal histories of pain and emotional struggle.

Even so, initially it was “very fairytale.” Elliott was sweet and wonderful, very tender, “super romantic.” He was compassionate and supportive as JJ extricated herself from a prior ruined relationship that left her reeling. He’d sing to her, or they’d play guitar together and harmonize, sitting on a mattress on the floor, the one piece of furniture a lamp with a beautiful gold dome—Peter, Paul, and Mary songs, Carpenters covers like “Close to You” (Elliott also liked the Burt Bacharach tune “Walk on By,” which he called the saddest song ever written), the infinitely mournful “500 Miles” (“If you miss the train I’m on/You will know that I am gone”). They cuddled a lot, Elliott picked her flowers. He called JJ “Pitseleh”—her father’s nickname for her, and the title of a later solo Elliott song about Gonson—and she called him “little bird,” her way of reminding him to fly. “Pitseleh,” which appeared after the relationship ended, revisits a feeling of doomed fate, with lyrics like “I’m not half what I wish I was” and “I was bad news for you … I knew it would never last.” All the same, in it Elliott’s apologetic: “I never meant to hurt you.” Gonson made Elliott various gifts—a silver bracelet, a ceramic cow with a note inside reading, “More than you ever knew, more than you ever know, I love you little bird.” Besides “Pitseleh,” the Heatmiser song “Blackout” was also JJ-inspired. Again, this time more contemporaneously, there’s a fear things won’t work out, an expectation he’ll be letting her down somehow, or worse, that she’ll be disappointed in what she discovers. The feeling was that good things turned bad. It was a constant lament, a self-fulfilled prophecy. As one close friend explained it: “He would make these bad things happen to him so he could do it by his own hand,” then tear himself up later. He was “obsessed” by an idea that his fate had been predestined when in fact, far more often than not, he was scripting it. Still, in the words of Pete Krebs, although Elliott made himself “out of reach,” he “liked being reached for.”