Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith (23 page)

Elliott obviously enjoyed the story’s—and the tattoo’s—subtext. In 1997 he told an interviewer how the bull’s “too gentle and content to attain fame,” the “powerful beast doesn’t want to use his powers.” He adds, “it’s about someone who lives in his own interior world and doesn’t understand what’s going on around him, but he’s happy in it anyway. I like it.” Ferdinand’s the either/or dichotomy theme all over again, this time in static visual form. He’s a bull who doesn’t behave like a bull; he’s also an anomaly.
He doesn’t fit in, nor does he want to. He’s an effete bull, his horns pointless appendages. Just like Elliott most of the time, he will not get angry, or when he does, it is almost by accident. “Between is all you’ve ever seen or been” Elliott wrote in a later song, and the line captures him and Ferdinand equally. He wanted to be in a chugga-chugga boy band, but on the other hand, he really didn’t. He wanted intimacy, but he didn’t. He desired fame intensely, envied those, like Cobain, who had gotten it, complained when radio shut him out, fretted about having to tour when his records didn’t sell enough to make touring unnecessary, but fame also disgusted him, its phoniness revolting. And maybe most basically, he wanted to live, but at the same time, and in a way that sometimes seemed almost impossibly relentless, he truly wanted to die. Ferdinand turned out okay in the end. He sat and smelled the flowers. He was happy. Elliott was denied this positive outcome. I always feel like shit, he wrote. I don’t know why, I just do. The fight, in other words, was not always in him. Or if it was, it was usually directed at himself, the one person he fought with regularly.

Heatmiser’s self-released six-song cassette
The Music of Heatmiser
was recorded at Sound Impressions in Milwaukie, Oregon, over just two days in late April 1992, engineered by Bob Stark and mixed by Tony Lash. Gonson was not yet officially in the fold. She had spent time in Europe hanging out with Nirvana prior to the Reading Festival. That show, played with “unflinching ferocity,” in the words of the BBC, quickly became legendary. At the time
Nevermind
was selling 400,000 copies per week. Amid this mood of spectacular possibility, Gonson had her epiphany—rock ‘n’ roll was where she belonged; bands were her business; it was all too simple, clear, unmistakable. The songs on the Heatmiser cassette included, in the following order, “Lowlife,” “Bottle Rocket,” “Buick,” Peterson’s “Just a Little Prick,” “Dirt,” and the tune “Mightier Than You,” featuring rare vocal harmonies. In red ink in front of a sunburst backdrop a sunglasses-wearing Peterson holds a bass; he sports a foam-billed trucker hat onto which a friend had sewed fake leopard fur.

The concept, the vision, was very organized and almost conservative in its basic nature: two guitars, bass, and drum, with no room left for even a tambourine. It was basic, sharp, and direct, no fuss, nothing extra or unnecessary—zero prog-rock noodling, in the words of one review—in many ways the antithesis of the kinds of songs Elliott had arranged in Stranger Than Fiction. The long guitar solos Elliott had always waited for and looked forward to bringing off, from back in the Texas days, were gone. Two guitars chugged ahead with nonstop distorted growl punctuated by occasional staccato barks of dazzling friction. Melody was in short supply; the songs were anything but sing-alongs. In comparison, Hazel comes across as almost poppy, or at least far more melodically organized. “Mightier Than You,” the song Elliott did not especially like, was the one exception (much later it appeared on a Puddle Stomp compilation). Gonson recalls the tune as “very beautiful.” Her sense is that it might have taken the band in “an interesting direction,” one that never materialized, chiefly because Heat-miser lacked two mics when practicing, so harmony possibilities never got thoroughly explored. It simply wasn’t practical. It also wasn’t in the immediate game plan. At this point it was all about the pushing, roiling guitar back and forth, rumbling like a night train just beyond city limits, with scratchy vocals not always favored in the mix. The band was deliberately symmetrical, going back to the days of the first seven-inch. There were the Elliott songs, and the Neil songs, lined up one after another. If Elliott privately recognized any songwriting disparity, he downplayed it, denied it, even as others occasionally broached the subject. It would be two more years before he struck out in his own direction, one now buried in layers of hard-driving noise and guttural throat-clearing. Meanwhile guitars bore in on the nucleus of the tune. “It was poetry how Neil played the guitar,” says Gonson. “He was a truly gifted guitar player, maybe better than Elliott. Those two guys playing together was just stunning.”

Elliott and Neil goofing off with Peterson and Lash in background on couch. (Photograph by JJ Gonson.)

Neil’s birthday party, thrown by Frontier Records, November 1993. (Elliott, left, and Neil Gust.) (Photograph by JJ Gonson.)

The first real album,
Dead Air
, appeared in 1993 through Frontier Records. (At this point Cavity Search was still a “start-up label,” and so, according to Swofford, “it made more sense for Heatmiser to go with an already established label at the time.”) It was an exceedingly long negotiation, one that dragged on and on and left everyone, including Gonson, exhausted. In fact,
Dead Air
was recorded before any contract at all had been signed; although despite all that, or because of it, Gonson says “it was probably the happiest recording experience they ever had.”
²²
Frontier was founded in 1980 by Lisa Fancher, a Southern Californian with two sisters who grew up
listening to British Invasion bands. Originally she planned on calling it Frontierland, after her favorite section of Disneyland, but a lawyer discouraged that idea. Like Swofford and Cooper of Cavity Search, she had “zero experience” in the music business apart from record collecting and writing for fanzines (she reviewed the first Ramones album in 1976). Her inspiration, she says, was “feeling like I was directionless.”
²³
“I don’t know what made me think I could run a label,” she says. “I have no business acumen but at least I had pretty decent taste.”
²⁴
Her first release turned out to be a Flyboys EP (she calls the band “Day-Glo pop punk,” a “male Go-Gos”), but she struck it big with the Circle Jerks’
Group Sex
, which appeared in November 1980, and which proved almost impossible to keep in stock or in print. Later Frontier brought out Suicidal Tendencies and the Adolescents (and almost signed the Pixies) before branching out some time in 1984, after the punk scene had peaked, Fancher felt, in L.A. and Orange County. In the ’90s, which Fancher terms a “mean decade,” she signed another Portland-based outfit, Dharma Bums, fronted by Jeremy Wilson.

Sub Pop, a label founded in 1986 in Seattle, had also checked out Heatmiser, although according to Elliott, “I don’t know how interested they were, to tell you the truth.” Plus, Frontier actually returned phone calls, despite having kept a staff “too few to play a full-court game of hoops.”
²⁵
“We can have attention whenever we need it,” Elliott explained at the time.
²⁶
“It’s not like we’re getting the short end of the stick,” said Gust in 1993. “They do a great job. I love everyone at Frontier, all four of them!”

At this time, and for most of the band’s tenure, in fact, Gust was “kind of the business guy—super sweet and real communicative,” according to Leslie Uppinghouse, who mixed and toured with numerous Portland bands, including Crackerbash, Hazel, Pond, and the Spinanes, as well as Heatmiser (and later, the solo Elliott). There were three leaders, in Uppinghouse’s view, Lash, Elliott, and Gust, although as usual Elliott was disinclined to stand apart in any way, whereas “Gust wanted to be the front man.” Gust and Elliott were always giggly, like “thirteen-year-old girls”—goofing off, joking—but “there was a real love there too.” Generally Elliott was very nervous, especially in performance, although Gust “never was.” “Neil would be perplexed most of the time by any drama circling around things.”
²⁷
Gust did the “pre-work,” Uppinghouse says, although as far as sound at shows went, everyone in the band seemed to want different things. They settled for a sharpness with delay and reverb, a basically muddy kind of mix. None of this ever seemed to stress Gust out; he was on an even keel most of the time, yet if Brandt started acting the hooligan, which came naturally, or Elliott’s equipment blew up—as it seemed to do a lot—“Neil would glare.”

Elliott in L. A., during Heatmiser tour, checking out the Frampton star. (Photograph by JJ Gonson.)

According to a review in local music paper
The Rocket
in 1994,
Dead Air
made hardly a media ripple when it was released (although it spent months on the paper’s Northwest Top 20). Still, solid word of mouth assured
decent sales and sent critics scrambling to catch up.
²⁸
Part of the problem was an entrenched, genuine attitude of esprit de corps with other Portland bands, of non-competition. “None of us like to grandstand a lot,” Elliott said. “None of us are super into having all the attention diverted to us, even for a little while when we’re playing.” Perhaps because of this basic reluctance to get out and demand attention or to fabricate some sort of strategic edge of anomalousness (which Hazel, for instance, possessed in spades with Fred Nemo), reaction ran the gamut. Comparisons were to Fugazi, Hüsker Dü, Helmet, the Replacements, Mission of Burma, grunge, punk-metal, alterno-metal, Quicksand, Seaweed—the list was long. Some called the album ho-hum, pretty straightforward, powerful power pop, the tunes, though, “sweeter than a mouthful of Dolly Madison Zingers.” Others called it a textbook example of the strengths and weaknesses of early-’90s indie hard rock by “angry/sensitive young men,” just barely distinctive enough “to rescue the music from the merely generic.” Ned Raggett at Allmusic.com made the surprising, and probably not entirely supportable, assertion that Gust was the band’s “true creative touchstone,” with a knack for anthemic, empowering choruses “infused with emotional passion.”

The record clocked in at thirty-seven minutes, fourteen songs fired off in total, two of them—“Lowlife” and “Bottle Rocket”—straight from
The Music of Heatmiser
cassette. “Stray” was re-recorded from the Cavity Search seven-inch, as were the remaining tunes. Heatmiser produced, along with Steve “Thee Slayer Hippy” Hanford, onetime drummer for Poison Idea, a punk band formed in Portland in 1980. Swofford felt the record was “perfectly raw,” the best representation of the band’s live power (and his favorite Heatmiser album by far). The coughed-out lyrics, too, with Elliott again in serious Joe Strummer mode, are raw and incredibly harsh, more angry and hurt than sensitive. It would require monumental interpretive panache to locate the slightest connection between the ethereal sentiments in Stranger Than Fiction and those of
Dead Air
. It is as if, in Heatmiser, Elliott yanked out by the hair some heretofore buried poltergeist and let it wail blistering truth. What made this return of the repressed possible is hard to say. Maybe intentionally, the record came sans lyric sheet, so the words could only be guessed at, and most head-banging listeners missed obvious themes. The loud attack, a pummeling by noise, also simultaneously released and obscured all the feral self-deracination going on. “Still” starts things off with buzzing guitar and monotone verses. The theme is fear, denial, and deception, which together make for intensely physicalized emotional pain. “Don’t open my body up,” Elliott shouts, “I don’t want to be in my body,” as he turns his face up to an overhead light and keeps his eyes closed shut. It’s as if some surgery is being performed, the idea of which makes him “ill,” but he takes it because he figures that if he just shuts up, it will all be over soon. A possible subtext is abuse, but another is the need to keep secrets inside, protected against invasions.