Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith (27 page)

As the penultimate tune, the song bookends “Roman Candle,” the album’s first track. He starts in anger, then ends with a wish that it all stop. In “Roman Candle” he’s hallucinating, in “Last Call” he’s possibly dreaming, so again there is the question of whether what he’s talking about is real or unreal. The fear of Hell that Gonson heard Elliott discuss with genuine terror finds a way in. He promises he’ll go to church, he’ll go to pray, he’ll sing praises to his maker’s name, as if performing some kind of obeisance. He will do his best, although he can’t seem to join in the celebration, to be as good as his maker made him. “Last Call” includes its own stalker, a “tongueless talker,” an icicle, a jaywalker who walks away with a clap of fading shoes. This person may be Elliott himself, his own worst enemy—in terminal “crisis” mode—or someone else. Whatever the case, for what might be the very first time in song, what Elliott seemed to be doing was voicing a passive desire to die. He’d been talking about it with friends, now he was singing about it too, putting it into the music. It was a bold move. It took courage. And it made for a nuanced, gorgeous declaration of blurred melancholic grandeur. Whether it muted any suicidal urges—lessened the intensity of the feelings by letting them out in the public, at least allusively—is hard to say. If it did, the relief was temporary. Like the tongueless talker the feelings returned. They walked away, but they returned.

When the album appeared it featured a cover shot by Gonson taken at a market in New York City. Oddly, especially for a first solo record, Elliott is nowhere to be seen. There appears, instead, a girl named Amy—a friend who had joined them, and whose last name Gonson can’t even recall—and
behind her, Neil Gust in a stocking cap. “Elliott was throwing a bone to Neil on that,” Gonson believes. “As in, ‘See? I haven’t totally abandoned you.’ ” It was quite the bone. Because it was Gust on the cover, and not Elliott,
Roman Candle
almost looks to be Gust’s record (although there are shots of Elliott inside).

Full R
oman Candle
cover shot, later cropped for the record cover. (Photograph by JJ Gonson.)

As for sales, it didn’t blow up in the first few months, as had Cavity Search’s “J. Hell” seven-inch. “It was a sleeper, a slow burn,” Swofford says. But critics fell madly in love. Looking back, John Graham calls Elliott an avatar for artistic Portland—literate, stormy, tormented, adored. The record—private and strident—“hit some kind of Portland indie-rock G-spot.” It was a “cerebral orgy.” The local fanbase “sucked it down greedily.”
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Rolling Stone put him beyond buzzwords like lo-fi and folk-punk, “ferociously talented” and in his own orbit, the record elegantly despairing, with some of the “loveliest songs about the dissolution of a soul ever written,” full of coruscating self-awareness, “hypnotic and terribly, unrelentingly sad.” It was—in a comparison Elliott always sniffed at—“Simon and Garfunkel after an idealism bypass.”
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For Elliott it was a bit much. The last thing he ever foresaw, ever
wanted to do, was upstage Heatmiser, or upstage anyone at all—his friend Sean Croghan, his friend Pete Krebs, both of whom also worked solo and would, in time, tour with Elliott as solo acts. Leslie Uppinghouse called him “the shyest performer I’ve ever met. It was so difficult for him, physically and psychologically, to publicly perform. To get over that fear. He had a lot to say and he found it hard to communicate verbally.”
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Plus, to make matters worse, the music subculture in early-’90s Portland was a cliquey, tight-knit tribe of people and bands and performers, all poor, all working hard. Elliott was “the king of metaphor, symbolism, double-entendre,” according to Uppinghouse, but still “everyone knew what the songs were about.” That fact increased feelings of awkwardness. “It goes back to this privacy issue,” Uppinghouse says, “there was this trust that you didn’t talk shit.” It wasn’t that Elliott violated the trust—he’d never do that. But he was walking a narrow line. The songs were unravelings of inner black knots, but they were also about relationships, attempts to connect, and on those occasions other people appeared—hence the metaphorical elisions, the constant masking.

Pete Krebs, Sean Croghan, Elliott, and Gilly Ann Hanner (L–R), of Calamity Jane, at a group show. (Photograph by JJ Gonson.)

Leslie Uppinghouse vividly recalls one particular early solo show upstairs
at La Luna, in the intimate, dark balcony space with a low stage. Uppinghouse was on sound, as she often was. Usually she and Elliott would talk beforehand, work out the details of what he wanted, make minor adjustments. This time there was no discussion. They were both incredibly spooked. The venue, small to begin with, was jammed. Elliott, Uppinghouse noticed, “was really throw-uppy nervous. I remember thinking he was going to pass out.” As he started the first song it was “ten-times slower than average,” the opening line a shaky warble. There was, in that moment, no telling what direction the evening might take. “But then,” Uppinghouse says, “by literally the second chord, we had them. They did not move a muscle. It was magic.” Graham and Baumgarten invoke the same occult ability in Elliott—“he poured himself out into the hushed atmosphere; it was then you realized Elliott Smith could be huge. And not just in Portland. He had a kind of magnetism that quietly worked its black magic ways.”
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A little-known fact about
Roman Candle
—indeed, about all of Elliott’s albums up to and including small sections of 2000’s
Figure 8
—is that high school friend Garrick Duckler’s lyrics continued to make regular appearances. This may be another reason why Elliott dismissed Cooper’s comment about the record having the intimacy of a diary. Sometimes the words weren’t even his; if they were anyone’s diary, they were Duckler’s. One example is “Condor Ave.” An original version of the tune, with Duckler’s words, shows up on a Stranger Than Fiction cassette (just like “Junk Bond Trader” did, just like “Everybody Cares, Everybody Understands”). “I’m not even sure that Elliott knew where Condor Avenue was in Portland,” Duck-ler says jokingly. When he retooled the song for the record, Elliott patched together old Duckler lyrics with new ones of his own; part of its obscurity, therefore, derives from the intermingling. In this case, the title was Duck-ler’s, as was most of the chorus. “Elliott said more than once he didn’t know how to credit me properly,” Duckler explains, “but I said that I didn’t need any credit and that the intermingling of the lyrics was more a sign of our friendship and influence within each other’s minds and lives, and he said that’s how he thought of it too.”
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In total, Duckler estimates that somewhere around two to four lines of his resurface in roughly every other song of Elliott’s, up to around the year 2000. It is a fascinating detail, one that, to unknowable degrees, scotches attempts at close interpretation because, at
any point, one might be dissecting a Duckler line, not an Elliott one. Others in the inner circle were aware of this fact. Tony Lash made the same point, even calling the revelation “explosive.” On balance, however, it seems less than that. This was no Bernie Taupin/Elton John–type arrangement. Two to four lines on every other song represents, at most, a minor inclusion; “It really is not something that I care about that much,” Duckler adds. He had zero interest in keeping any kind of official tally, nor does he even recollect all the specifics—which words were his, and where. Whatever Elliott wanted to use was fine with Garrick. But what the blending reveals, far more than anything else, was the depth of the friendship, the significance of what the two friends shared. Gonson, who describes an “infinite respect” for Duckler, calls him “really, extremely deep and intelligent.” He was, according to Gonson, a “lifelong friend” of Elliott’s, and unlike some of the other friendships from earlier days, this one was “not optional” in the least. It was essential.

Relations inside Heatmiser, however, were fraying.
Roman Candle
had not been threatening to the band initially, and Elliott always wrote songs of his own concurrently with Heatmiser tunes. In that way things were status quo. But Heatmiser’s vision, where things seemed to be going, was not Elliott’s vision. The sound, especially of his voice, struck him as inauthentic. The fit just got poorer and poorer. So in response, Elliott tried exerting more and more artistic control, yet without ever making his frustrations explicit. To Lash it was all “a bit passive-aggressive.” Elliott was getting more miserable by the day, but the reasons for the misery were never explored, and this only made everyone more frustrated, more confused. “I’m not passing judgment on his character flaws,” Lash says, “It’s just that he had a very strong artistic vision. And we could all be fucking difficult sometimes.”

There was ire to go around, and Lash tried playing peacemaker as best he could, but the possibility of keeping things intact receded. Something had to change. And whether or not it was fair, or made any sense at the time, all the growing animus crystallized around mercurial Brandt Peterson. Peterson was moody, sarcastic, prone to making flip comments—as he says himself. It was less a matter of degree than of kind. From Peterson’s perspective, Elliott had a “really disproportionate sense of personal injury,” to make matters worse; “shit that was just shit he’d take as being about
him.” Also, “once he’d decided you failed him he was unforgiving.” To Lash, after Brandt landed in “the bad column” with Elliott, there was no turning that attitude around. And customarily, according to Peterson, “Elliott’s default was to decide, ‘This person has disappointed me, and the solution is not to talk about it, but for this person to go away.’” Peterson felt targeted, as if he were “this impossibly coarse person”—which he sometimes could be, but usually was not. Peterson was holding back the band, Elliott seemed to have concluded. Even though Lash had his own John Bonham style, to Elliott it was as if Peterson, and Peterson alone, wanted Heatmiser to be some sort of Motörhead, “which was bullshit,” Peterson says.

A few incidents magnified, and to some extent justified, any festering resentments. At a show in Seattle R.E.M.’s Peter Buck was in the audience. This was, to be sure, a big deal. As he always did, and to a degree that, he felt, never seriously impaired his bass playing, Peterson dispatched several hefty margaritas before taking the stage. He was drunk, yes, but his performance was hardly “sloppy,” he maintains. But Elliott was in a rage, even though what was happening was standard practice. From there it just got more and more petty. At the show’s end Elliott would not talk to or even look at Peterson, who was having a hard time locating his car keys. As it turned out, Elliott had grabbed them but wouldn’t give them up. There was yelling, and the threat of some pushing and shoving, before Peterson finally erupted, “Give me my fucking keys! I know you have my keys!” A friend finally retrieved them.

Another time, during one of Heatmiser’s seemingly endless van tours, Peterson had built a loft in the vehicle to create some additional space for sleeping or just lying around and playing or reading. They had driven straight from Portland to Minneapolis, and everyone’s nerves were frazzled. Somewhere in North Dakota wind bent the passenger door, blew it open hard until it buckled. The van was old with no air-conditioning, and inside it got uncomfortably hot. Gonson came along for the ride, and also to photograph; she and Elliott were spending a fair amount of time apart from the others, holding hands, being in love. Throughout all this Elliott refused to speak to Peterson, to the point where it was “almost physically sickening,” Peterson says. Jason Mitchell remembers the same chain of events. “That was really fucked up,” he says. “A fucking nightmare.”