Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith (28 page)

Elliott in the van loft space built by Peterson. (Photograph by JJ Gonson.)

A later gig in front of an A&R guy from Virgin Records upped the tension still more. “Fuck this,” was Peterson’s feeling. “I am not doing this.” In the last minute Gonson stepped in to broker a peace agreement, yet, according to Peterson, “a raw wound remained.”

It got to be unfixable. Lash and Elliott had a complicated relationship, but they had been friends since high school, and Lash, apart from his musical accomplishments, was a gifted engineer and producer. Gust and Elliott were almost symbiotically entwined, just as Elliott and Duckler were—the band’s two leaders, its creative core. And Elliott was always sensitive about disappointing Neil, who had a way of mostly bringing out his best behavior. Peterson was depressed, drinking to excess, occasionally a loudmouth, so the fit, personality-wise, always teetered on the edge of a deep drop-off. Finally Peterson, not Elliott, called a band meeting. He phoned Elliott up and asked that everyone get together. Although he was very terse about it, and definitely apprehensive—conflict averse to the bitter end—Elliott said okay.

Peterson took the floor. “If it’s going to keep being like this,” he explained, “I can’t do it anymore.” Lash was upset; he wanted Peterson in the group. In some ways he and Peterson had become counterplayers to Elliott and Neil. Elliott’s response, a distillation of months of frustration, was a cold
yet honest, “It’s going to keep being like this.” Peterson was hurt, though not shocked. After all, he had seen this day coming from the moment he and Elliott met, when he told him he’d kick him out of the band eventually, that that’s what tended to happen over and over, in several bands leading up to this one. “To be accurate,” Peterson says, “I did not get kicked out. I called the meeting and said I was not going to do this anymore unless things change. I felt deeply ostracized. Elliott could be fucking cruel. He could be mean.”

In sweltering NYC, where Heatmiser stayed with Josh (on right) and his girlfriend, along with Modest Mouse. (Photograph by JJ Gonson.)

Whatever the case, Brandt was out. In a final, well-meaning, but ultimately misplaced attempt at consolation, Elliott told Peterson “I want you to know you are a great bass player. It’s not about the bass playing.” In the moment Brandt took this to be an “asshole” comment, serving to underscore the fact that it was personal, that the problem revolved around
who he was
. It was, to Brandt, a final insult, although Elliott apparently intended the opposite. Peterson, in fact, never doubted his bass playing. He knew he was good. “My bass lines,” he says, “my playing was a key part of the group. It was not incidental or inconsequential.” In some small way even Gust tried seeing things from Brandt’s side. According to Peterson, Gust told him he wasn’t the first person Elliott had frozen out.

Many years later, in one of the last interviews he ever gave, Elliott looked
back on this time. Then, from the vantage point of 2003, he called Peterson “very confrontational” and “probably more punk, whatever that means.” It came down, he says, to “me kicking Brandt out even though everybody agreed to do it.” Brandt, in Elliott’s recollection, “started asking everyone personally if they wanted him out. Then it came to me and I said I wanted him out … I mean, he was an okay guy and we were friends for a while but he just kind of worked up everybody’s nerves. His sense of humor was such that he always had to be making fun of somebody. He was just not a good time … That guy was just such an asshole.”
¹⁸
This was to be Elliott’s final take on things; he would not live out the year. Lash felt the comments were “lame.” He allowed “that was clearly not Elliott at his most self-aware.” To Gonson it was all very sad. On one hand, she says, “Brandt loved Elliott deeply, and he cared a lot about the band.” On the other, he was always kept “a little at arm’s length.” “His input was limited even though he was a phenomenal bass player.”
¹⁹

A Heatmiser tour. Elliott and Gonson in an elevator. (Photograph by JJ Gonson.)

Cop and Speeder
, Heatmiser’s second record, would be Peterson’s swan song with the group. It was released by Lisa Fancher’s Frontier in 1994, a
few months after Elliott’s
Roman Candle
surfaced. This time reception was mixed, although in aggregate the feeling seemed to be that the record improved significantly on
Dead Air
. Vocals were a lot more up front, so what was being said came through discernibly. Friendly local rock writers John Chandler and Scott Wagner, who had followed Heatmiser closely from the get-go, called it more intelligent and well-written “than most card-carrying members of the aggro attack style can muster.” Some noted a powerful sense of mood encircling the record, with Elliott integrating his “seething whisper” into the full-tilt sound. The album, wrote
Trouser Press
, lashes out “with vehemence and a dark confessional candor that’s not always attractive but undeniably honest.” Others got the sense Heatmiser was struggling a bit to play heavy, powerful rock, hampered by their own introversion. The result, wrote Tyler Agnew, was “uneven,” with “several gems and more than a few stinkers.”
²⁰

Possibly the most bizarre song on the record, definitely among the most disturbing, although all the songs are disturbing in one way or another, is “Bastard John.” It describes a sexual assault by a deceiver who primes his victim with assorted promises sounding like “bullshit.” Once the victim played along, but no longer—“I’m not your bastard John … I’m not your kid anymore.” As mentioned before, in “Roman Candle” Elliott pictured himself hallucinating, in “Last Call” dreaming; here he feels “distorted,” but still fighting off the invasions of a seriously messed-up nemesis figure whose “present” keeps on giving every single day. “Bastard John” pops out for its graphicness, but again, it’s not incongruous. As with
Dead Air
, lyrics for
Cop and Speeder
describe a world of loss, disconnection, ennui, and dread, that moldy pessimism endemic to dystopian Portland. People lie and feel like fakes; they can’t be happy or unhappy, find nothing to stop real pain; lovers sounding like “songs with one fucking note” listen in silence over the phone; true love, whatever that is, blinks on and off “like a bad bulb”; and as Elliott puts it summarily in the oddly titled “Antonio Carlos Jobim”—Jobim wrote “The Girl From Ipanema”—“this is a record full of sour notes.” Musically, the album was much more varied than its predecessor; lyrically, it’s the same downer dirge. If there’s any happiness around, Heatmiser can’t find it.

The record was done, Peterson was gone, but Elliott’s doubts stayed. It’s hardly likely anyone, Elliott most of all, honestly expected Brandt’s departure to set things right. In fact, it had little effect on the fundamental conflict,
which was Elliott’s. He kept worrying the very same thoughts he’d been circling back to ever since he could barely force himself to listen to
Dead Air
. He wasn’t happy with the lyrical content. He felt disguised, “like a total actor.” He was “in denial” and “could not come out and show where I was coming from.” Even the band’s fans started rubbing him the wrong way. “It was kind of weird that people came to our shows, a majority of them weren’t people I could relate to at all. Why aren’t there more people like me coming to the shows? Well,” he decided, “it’s because I’m not even playing the kind of music that I really like.”
²¹
In other words, he was writing and performing for followers he had no interest in reaching. Cobain had faced the same unpleasant realization with Nirvana. To him, the band’s fans represented the same people who had made his life miserable back in Aberdeen, Washington—a horde of anti-artistic, homophobic, simple-minded yahoos. Elliott knew what the solution was, but it wouldn’t fix Heatmiser: More Elliott Smith.

Jason Mitchell had started his own recording enterprise along with friend Moira Doogan, the drummer for Trailer Queen. He called it Slo-Mo Records. He’d brought out a cassette titled
So What Else Do You Do?
featuring songs by Satan’s Pilgrims, Lovebutt, and Boise Courthouse, among others. It also included Elliott’s “Roman Candle” before that song even appeared on the
Roman Candle
record. Next came a seven-inch, the path everyone was taking at the time. The idea, simple at first, was for Elliott and Pete Krebs to do songs together, writing and arranging on the spot. Elliott didn’t get that message, for whatever reason; instead he recorded a song alone, the title of which Mitchell can’t recall. But he scrapped it and agreed to start from scratch. It was another low-key affair, a four-track experiment at a friend’s house near the Bagdad Theater on Hawthorne, on a warm mid-August day in 1994. There were goofy looking animal masks around, which Elliott and Pete slipped on for insert photographs, one taken in Krebs’s Volvo station wagon, the two driver-side doors flung open. “Masks sum up our relationship,” Krebs explained. “To me and Elliott it was a hilarious, dumb thing to do. Two sensitive songs by guys wearing dumb masks. He also had this dumb Dracula voice he’d go into. Just really dry, absurdist humor.”
²²
The cover for the record (by Chanda Helzer) is a cartoon drawing of two guys, one in a tie, standing before a red brick wall, thumbs hooked in pockets, expressions dour, squinting into the sharp sun. Each casts a hooded shadow. To the right is a driveway filled with cars.

Elliott with Jason Mitchell at the “merch perch.” (Photograph by JJ Gonson.)

Krebs’s contribution was “Shytown,” with Pete on cymbals, the vocals almost spoken more than sung, a creepy, high, jazzy piano intruding atop acoustic guitar. Now and then foggy-sounding moans interject, courtesy of a plastic “freak-out Godzilla” toy on hand. Krebs’s lyrics are comical self-mockery. His girlfriend keeps asking him whether he’s having a good time. She can’t quite tell, apparently. His job, he figures, is to entertain her friends—“I’m someone’s boyfriend and a TV set,” alone “with the jokes that I forget,” crossing his eyes and making faces. Krebs’s touch was light; the song’s a total charmer.

Elliott took a darker path, in a song written on the spot, to Mitchell’s amazement, although it’s hard to say whether he might have worked out parts of it beforehand. The tune, “No Confidence Man,” reads like an obvious companion to Heatmiser’s “Bastard John.” Both disentangle the same hairball of abuse, an insistent sameness of theme Elliott found hard to set aside. When something needed to come, this was what announced itself, recommended itself as subject, like some sort of particularly adamant Freudian slip. This time Elliott goes so far as to announce with the very first word who he’s talking about. It’s “Charlie,” with a band in his hand, a
rubber loop, spouting the same “bullshit” schemes and stories, with details never spelled out. This is one of the many instances in which others recall different first-draft lyrics. Gonson thinks she remembers “loop” as “stick” originally. The memory seemed to have something to do with a beating by a Ping-Pong paddle, the kind with a rubber surface on it, hence the reference to a “rubber loop” or circle. He “gave me nothing but grief,” Elliott sings, “you’re on it all the time.” At one point he hears bells at nine A.M.—a detail also alluded to in “Last Call.” All Elliott wants to do is sleep. Disappear into quiet nothingness, or what he, or Duckler, called “rhythmic quietude” in “Condor Ave.” (“Last Call,” again, imagines a similar quasi-solution.) Musically the song is a soporific monotone, sung in a stunned daze stripped of feeling. A flurry of Krebs’s shushing cymbals ushers the tune in before Elliott counts to four (counting aside, the song is a waltz, as discussed earlier). At points a soft octave harmony tracks the main melody, creating an incongruously pretty effect.