Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith (25 page)

And all along, to one side, the grown-up songs were forming. In his head massive back catalogs of sound piled up one after the other, but in shapes and structures not suitable for Heatmiser. In certain obvious respects, the feeling of mismatch was expected. Here was a person precociously skilled melodically, who had grown up on the Beatles and Jackson Browne and the very prog-rock, Rush-besotted noodlings Heatmiser avoided, yet finding himself now in the difficult position of having to fit such sensibilities into formats that couldn’t have been less hospitable. He could do it, he was doing it, it had all taken off promisingly, but the sacrifice grew harder to abide. So quietly, mostly surreptitiously, in a move that would alter the course of his life forever, Elliott decided to sublet his room at the Division house—he was leaving, but not really, since the spot was still his—and move in with Gonson, where he more or less lived, although never officially, for a year or a year and a half.
³⁰
It wasn’t just Gonson, actually. There were three other roommates, all connected with bands—Orphan’s Reason, Jack, Bedspins. In no time at all Elliott was “there more or less nonstop,” according to James Ewing, who now and then loaned Elliott equipment. “He had his issues,” Ewing recalls, and his art was clearly unusually “solemn.” At the same time, Ewing found him “sweet and funny.” Once they both got the flu, suffering through it while watching Ken Burns’s Civil War documentary. Another time Elliott wandered in with a Duran Duran single he’d bought, “Ordinary World.” He heard something in it, something he wanted to study. He played it “four hours straight,” despite its “cheesiness.” In terms of partying, Elliott did not smoke dope, says Ewing, although everyone else did. To Ewing it seemed he drank no more than anyone else. “Once or twice only did I see him drunk,” he recalls.
³¹

In this house on 29th and SE Taylor, what Gonson calls “note-taking” began. He’d always done it, but now the effort came with special care. “He was documenting songs he couldn’t use with Heatmiser,” Gonson says. “He recorded them without the band because he couldn’t record them with the band.” In some cases these were tunes he’d been carrying around in his head for years (such as “Condor Avenue”); in others, they came together on the spot. As Gust put it later, “He generated way more music than I ever did, and his process was way more developed. So he found a different outlet for it, and when he really started to get it right, it was obvious:
oh, that’s a lot better
. And I couldn’t be mad at him for it.”
³²

Elliott and James Ewing in the Taylor Street house where
Roman Candle
was recorded. (Photograph by JJ Gonson.)

It was all totally low-key and casual, almost ridiculously lo-fi. Gonson owned a learning guitar, essentially a toy with a short neck and small body by the name of “Le Domino”—there were dominos on the frets and around the sound hole. The strings were nylon, and Elliott slid bits of paper underneath to prevent buzzing. He adored the goofy little instrument and played it all the time around the house. Somehow it sounded bewilderingly good to him. At the time Gonson owned a vintage Schwinn bike weighing “about a million pounds” that she’d purchased in Boston. Elliott needed monitors in order to hear himself; Gonson therefore rode the bike over to Artichoke Records, where a collector worked, and swapped it for speakers. After buying a “Realistic” mic from Radio Shack they had what they needed, and Elliott, for the very first time, started writing and recording the songs that came to define him eternally, songs that, in their directness and softness, could not have been any more different than the songs he made with the band. He sat on a stool in Gonson’s basement, set up the monitors in the corners of the room, and got busy. It was all, as Gonson remembers, “as minimal as it could possibly be.” Looking for the best acoustics achievable under the limiting circumstances, he also occasionally recorded in the corner of the stairs on the ground level, or sat on the bed. He was all over the house, working track by track.

Elliott with Le Domino. (Photograph by JJ Gonson.)

Thematically, judged by an index of suffering, the songs were similar to the Elliott tunes on
Dead Air
—blistering examinations of a traumatized
inner life, now rendered gorgeously and inimitably, not drowned in miasmas of sound. Feeding the aesthetic was a surprisingly diverse set of inspirations. Gonson had been playing a lot of George Jones and Carter Family records, even the Carpenters, who covered several brilliant Bacharach compositions. Elliott had gotten very interested in how Joni Mitchell made records—he was listening to her, to Dylan, and to early Bruce Springsteen, his operatic, wordy, Dylan-obsessed albums such as
Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J
. and
The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle
.
³³
Gonson recalls Elliott watching a Dylan performance on TV, “really carefully checking it out, speechless, dialed in, really studying it.” Emotionally, he was on a thin wire, everything roiling and rising up. Gonson says, “He was so fucking angry and flipped out and furious,” and as he wrote in “Pitseleh,” he didn’t think it would ever pass. “I knew the backstory,” Gonson explains, “I was living it day to day. We bonded over it. In all these songs he was confronting abuse, really, for the first time ever.” And that particular connotation generated intense fear, if not terror. As usual, he brooded a lot about the songs’ possible impact. He was especially worried about hurting Ashley or Darren, Bunny too, or her family. So he rearranged early drafts, rewrote to such a degree that Gonson, who had heard all the original versions of the tunes, knew the recorded product by largely different lyrics. The sting was still there, just muted, more camouflaged. Symbolism softened directness.

Then one perfectly average day Elliott gave the cassette to Gonson with the simple words, “Okay. It’s done.” Not exactly sure, at the moment, what to do with it, she carried it around forever. Now and then Elliott played it for friends. Pete Krebs, for instance, recalls listening to the songs as he and Elliott worked their crap job scraping lead paint from a warehouse ceiling in the Pearl District. What was crystal clear, to all concerned, was that the songs were a new direction, an ideal avenue of musical self-expression. Once created, their stark potency was undeniable. But Heatmiser was still in operation, and for the time being, it too was unstoppable. The five-song EP
Yellow No. 5
had come out, accompanied by, in the words of Frontier Records, “ceaseless praise,” with subtle hooks as welcome as “free beer.” There was a feeling of maturation in the newer material, a sense of sea change, the record tauter, more hook-filled than
Dead Air
—which Elliott had taken to
calling, in interviews, not a very good record—but with the same conversational guitar interplay between Gust and Elliott. The title was arrived at in one hour, according to Gust. “We had to come up with a name for the EP before it was going to some list that gets advanced to show that we have something new coming out,” he told
The Rocket
in 1994. Peterson had worked up an inventive cover design (he also did the cover for
Dead Air
), a painting with van Gogh overtones, of a kid in a field with a jersey sporting a yellow number five. That got nixed, although what remained—a male face with a car in the background—retains intimations of Vincent, the visage slipping and sliding in distorted half-profile.

Elliott was thus split, in a spot he often wrote about, “in between” two different destinies, not likely to remain parallel forever. Heatmiser was either going to become more Elliott or Elliott was going to become more Elliott. In the end, the songs did the deciding.

Sensing what she
had—a batch of songs that turned out to be the first serious solo work by a person who would later be called a “master” and a “genius” and “the best songwriter on earth,” but one that just as easily might not have been made at all had Elliott felt satisfied with the creative outlet that was Heatmiser—and having seen and heard it all take shape so organically, Gonson carried Elliott’s version of a basement tape, what she called “the least complicated record ever,” over to Cavity Search’s Chris Cooper at record store Music Millenium, his day job on NW 23rd in Portland.
¹
“I just gave it to him,” Gonson says succinctly. That’s what she did. She brought people together, she creatively made things happen. But it was a dicey spot for JJ to be in. She was managing Heatmiser, not Elliott (nor did she ever, out of a sense of duty to Heatmiser, manage Elliott as a solo act). She was not exactly pushing the cassette; it was more low-key than that. She just told Cooper he ought to give it a listen, then form his own opinion about what he heard. She knew it was good, but she had no clue whether Cooper or Swofford would feel the same.

At the time tension kept growing around Gonson’s involvement with Elliott, another reason to be circumspect. Brandt Peterson appreciated all she had done for the band—her organizational prowess, her work ethic, which was legendary—but as he said, diplomatically, “It seemed like a problem potentially.” Jason Mitchell had already called the relationship “a bit of a faux pas perhaps. But totally understandable too.” And Gust was nursing his own irritations. Plus, by now Elliott had essentially moved out, however unofficially, and that intensified feelings of confusion or even betrayal. He was not around much. He spent all his time at Gonson’s to the point where additional roommate James Ewing wondered what was up. Elliott hadn’t been paying any rent, but letters arrived for him at the house, student loan
bills made out to Steven Smith. Again, none of this was lost on Gonson. She and Elliott knew what a bad idea it was to become romantic. But they did. All they could do was minimize the resulting weirdness.

Now with tape in hand, Cooper settled in to study what Gonson had passed along. During breaks from his Music Millenium job he punched the cassette into the deck of his VW bus. He waited for it to say what it would. He opened up to let it sink in. Slowly, as he listened over and over across the span of days, alone in the front seat, parked on a side street, he found himself beguiled, seduced by the music’s simple majesty. He phoned Swofford: “You gotta get over here.” “I knew Elliott was making music on his own,” Swofford recalls, “not necessarily to put out. Just doing what he does and always did.” So Swofford also gave the cassette a listen. His first response, which didn’t last long, was that the songs “needed technical work.” He adored hardcore Heatmiser—which this was anything but—and the absence of production values bugged him. “It sounded like shit,” Swofford says, his perfectionist label-owner aesthetic driving his first impression. Yet after living with the cassette for twenty days straight, listening any chance he could, “I didn’t want anyone to touch it. It was
perfectly bad
,” he realized, the homely sound quality a large part of the charm and power of the total package.

In words others would claim as well, notably Lisa Fancher of Frontier Records, Cooper expressed his sense of the moment, a feeling of something large about to happen, something rare and unexpected, although not entirely shocking, given Elliott’s talents: “The thought was that we had discovered Elliott Smith. We recognized and saw in him something nobody else did. He was, like, our guy. He embodied why we got into the business. He was our Bob Dylan.”
²
No mean comparison, this, given Dylan’s leonine status in the minds of Cooper and Swofford. To them Dylan was the apex. There was no one better.

Yet at this point it isn’t clear Elliott wanted to go it alone. In his mind, the songs weren’t a record. He just wanted to record them, to get them down before they scattered and faded. Plus, maybe the songs weren’t even
his
; maybe they were Heatmiser’s, rough, adaptable sketches capable of somehow fitting into the chugga-chugga format. On the other hand, that sort of integration seemed like a stretch. “The thing about a band that can
get kinda boring,” Elliott said, “is like … there’s lots of rock bands and I get tired of turning everything into a rock song. I mean, I totally love playing the ones that ought to be like that but not everything I make ought to.”
³
Not that he didn’t try, to his credit. Elliott, at some point in 1993, actually played one of the tunes for Heatmiser. This was “Saintlike,” later titled “No Name #1,” for which Gonson wrote the music. But his bandmates laughed, Gust in particular, finding the sound almost corny and ultra soft. And according to Gonson, “that was the beginning of the end of the band. If they had not laughed, that could have been a Heatmiser song, and the band could have gone in a completely different direction.” They could have gotten softer, in other words. But getting softer wasn’t in the cards. It wasn’t what they were in it for.