Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith (24 page)

Nemo with cinder block. (Photograph by JJ Gonson.)

“Mock-up” imagines a possible secondary self, an alter-ego representing someone or something demonic. Again the verses are monotone, as if to underscore a basic malaise or sense of nonentity. Love appears but it’s a “wicked friend.” So the singer—Elliott—decides to get well on his own, but the sad truth is he’s “shot to hell” and all “fucking holes.” He even rails against his own self-pity, calling it melodrama—too much whiny complaining about sick pride and dead hearts and the fear that he’s dying. “Dirt” appears to be
an angry letter of sorts to Bunny; she’s that “china doll” feeling nothing at all—the same metaphor employed in
XO’s
“Waltz #2 (XO).” This doll is hopelessly in thrall to a man whom she can’t get over. Some lyrics prove hard to decipher, but according to online sources he’s compared to a “black ball” leaving hell in his wake. The stain rubs off, you become the same thing you adore, Elliott sings. And he ends with a declaration that he, too, feels nothing at all. He’s adopted the same defensive vacuity. It passes on, and then it’s constant. “I feel this way all the time,” Elliott writes in the song’s final line.

As she did in “Pitseleh,” Gonson (with whom Elliott was still together) serves as “Blackout’s” subject, the latter essentially an early draft, in wildly different musical terms, of the former. This time Elliott is the one rejected, whereas in “Pitseleh” he seems to do the rejecting, albeit reluctantly, because of who he is. He believes she’s disappointed in him, that he’s let her down somehow, falling apart right in front of her, self-medicating, even though “leaving you alone wasn’t my decision,” the implication being that he did it for the sake of the band. In the song the two sit on the sofa with a record playing, just as they often did in life, singing along or playing together. The same solution to pain emerges as it did in “Dirt” and as it did in many ways throughout Elliott’s life, taking different forms from time to time and being arrived at through different means. “I won’t feel a thing,” he promises, lack of feeling being more manageable, although hardly more satisfying, than feeling rejected or denied.

“Stray” once more has Elliott in a deep sleep, empty, shaken and angry. He imagines someone coming to take his place, to assume his disgrace, when he finally wakes up “in the Lone Star State.” Texas as symbol of trauma, the pain’s origin, is always readily available. As idea, it was a black that crackled and dragged. The notion of actually being there again, even despite what seemed to be partly good times with Pickle and Kim and friends, was a looming, anxiety-drenched proposition. In “Cannibal” Elliott’s head’s about to explode “like the Fourth of July,” but he still listens when his “mama calls me”; in “Lowlife” he’s a landfill “waiting on lies”; “Dead Air” has him suffocating all night, running around brooding and tight “when you’ve got no reason for brooding.” He keeps trying to speak out loud yet finds nothing but “dead air between you and me.”

The broken, skipping-record quality of the tunes wasn’t lost on Elliott; it is a line he uses in “Dead Air,” in fact. But self-disgust, misanthropy, and incipient violence were in the ether. Nirvana made that fact clear with tunes full of guns, blowtorches, and dazed self-loathing. The armor now cracked, it was no longer possible to avoid looking inside to find what was there, no matter how scabrous. What with the relentless liberation of feeling that the album unpacked, it ought to have given Elliott some pleasure or pride. He certainly got a lot out and spread it thickly. Instead, according to Brandt Peterson, he “got sick of
Dead Air
really fast.” He wasn’t happy with the lack of dynamics (a Nirvana signature, one they perfected); he also disliked the narrow mix and tempo. There was tension around recording too, although the experience was mostly positive. Beforehand Peterson had taken off for El Salvador with his sister, giving no explicit return date. When he resurfaced he stayed for a night or two in the Division house basement before finding a place of his own not far away. But the band attitude had been “What the fuck?” Elliott and Neil were committed, very serious. “This is what we moved here to do, this is who we are,” they told Peterson. And for a time Elliott was standoffish, the Central America venture threatening the band’s very future. Even now, Peterson honestly felt, in relative terms, less on board than the others. At twenty-six years old, he kept asking himself “how much longer do I want to get kicked out of people’s bands?” The possibility of alternative futures was hard to set aside. In retrospect Peterson saw his trip with his sister as a “very important turning point.” The ill will it engendered was a harbinger of things to come.

Heatmiser outside the Sands. A Gust tune on
Dead Air
was titled “Sands Hotel.” (L–R, Elliott, Gust, Lash, Peterson.) (Photograph by JJ Gonson.)

Somewhere in the Midwest with Heatmiser. (Photograph by JJ Gonson.)

For now, though, the next step was obvious: touring. Time had arrived to take things beyond the already-conquered Portland. A West Coast run was cobbled together, with dates in places like Vancouver, Eugene, and Seattle. Gonson also booked bigger stuff. At first Heatmiser opened for Pond. There was a surreal gig in a hotel ballroom in Bakersfield. In L.A. the band camped out at Lisa Fancher’s place. Depending on the city, the shows were fairly well attended. One photo by Gonson puts blue-haired Mitchell at his customary “merch perch” in front of an array of hanging Pond and Heat-miser T-shirts, Elliott giving him a chaste peck on the cheek. Promo shots included a dyed-blond Elliott in a bear suit surrounded by smiling band-mates, his arms joined high in the air. Others made use of “heat”-related props—candles and glowing orbs, and another in which Peterson set his hand on fire with rubbing alcohol. He sticks it, ablaze, toward the camera lens as Tony Lash looks on in profile, Elliott in a white stocking cap with two stripes around the front. A few gigs were practically comical and more than a little dispiriting. One show was scheduled at a sports bar that didn’t serve alcohol, TVs encircling the room, patrons glued to the action. The band decided to bail. Another had Heatmiser playing to Jason Mitchell, the sound guy, and Neil’s brother, no one else in attendance. Travel was usually by rented minivan, which sometimes got broken into; a stereo was stolen in San Francisco. They all took turns driving and stayed with friends or fans along the road, or else rented rooms with two beds, each shared by two people. “One poor motherfucker slept in the van,” Mitchell recalls, an outcome they rotated. It was, surprisingly, mainly business. Mitchell had anticipated a party every night, “but I was disappointed.” By show’s end everyone was too exhausted from the combination of driving and playing to get any sort of buzz on.

Elliott in bear suit for Heatmiser promo. (Photograph by JJ Gonson.)

Heatmiser promo shot, Elliott with hand around glowing orb held by Tony Lash. (Photograph by JJ Gonson.)

Another Heatmiser promo, with Peterson setting hand on fire with rubbing alcohol. (Photograph by JJ Gonson.)

But there was a lot more than only travel torpor at work, or disappointment over gigs inadequately promoted. Almost from the instant
Dead Air
was in the can, Elliott began developing—mostly silently—an alternative narrative. His feeling, according to Peterson, was that he couldn’t make “grown-up music in the context of this rock group.”
²⁹
This feeling no doubt came as a surprise even to Elliott himself. After all, he was the one who had returned to Portland to start this band. He was the one who got Tony Lash to drum for it. Also, Elliott was writing half the songs; it was in his basement that the band rehearsed; it was his then-girlfriend, Gonson, who managed. So, all that being true, if Elliott wasn’t making the kind of music he wanted to, it was his own doing. Consequently, the frustration came with a fair amount of guilt and self-doubt. Letting down the people whom he’d worked to get so ardently on board was a possibility that gnawed at him endlessly. Yet, on the other hand, it was becoming increasingly clear that keeping the enterprise going, maintaining the status quo—writing, recording,
touring, giving interviews—would require, to a degree he was also disinclined to accept, a hefty amount of self-denial. It was, all things considered, a bit of a no-win. He could keep not being himself, or he could start imagining the grown-up sound he was after. Neither option came without cost.