Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith (3 page)

That Elliott wrote beautiful songs about painful or heinous experiences is a tendency he shares with Cobain, who often did the same (as in “Rape Me” or “Lithium”). Part of the appeal
is
the incongruity, the mismatch between words and melody. But the beauty in Elliott is more pronounced, more reliable. In some mysterious way it also seems more ingrained, part of a broader mode of being in the world. Again, it was easy because it was natural.

The music was extraordinarily accomplished. But the other part of the package was the words adorning it. Elliott was a brilliant thinker, a bona fide intellectual. He read widely and studied philosophy and modern systems of thought at Hampshire College, including poststructuralism, feminism, and feminist legal theory. He was interested in language, how words captured or failed to capture experience, their uses and limits. His sensitivity to and awareness of these matters lent his lyrics a complexity, an originality hard to categorize or compare. Songwriters like Bob Dylan—whose work Smith admired, especially the album
Blood on the Tracks
—or Joni Mitchell come to mind. But something about Elliott is
sui generis
. Parts of Dylan are nonsense. Riveting, imagistic nonsense—as in
Highway 61 Revisited
—but nonsense all the same, wordplay for the sake of wordplay, not always or principally in the service of meaning. And Mitchell could be fey, pretentiously poetical, a quality Elliott avoided entirely.
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Elliott certainly could be Dylanesque—abstract, symbolic, image driven. Songs like “Junk Bond Trader” and “Strung Out Again” conjure
High-
way 61
–style apocalypses, with skinny Santas, evil emperors, and parliaments of owls. He could also be Mitchellesque—delicate, attuned to subtler emotions. Yet in his core Elliott was a realist. The words have a sharp, hard edge. Most of the time he’s looking at particulars, describing something actual. It is always imbued with shades of feeling, but it’s tied to the world—situations, people, relationships. Punk-folk is one way to describe the aesthetic. There is an element of protest, of contempt, and the cultivation of an outsider viewpoint. Apocalyptic folk might be another. Never does one get the sense in Elliott’s songs that anything is going to turn out right in the long run. He was no Pollyanna. He was sadder, but he was also wiser.

Like most good art, and all great art, Elliott’s words combine directness and clarity with essential obscurity. They are simple and incomprehensible. They make immediate sense and then, on second listen, make no sense at all. They leave listeners wanting to know more. A line like “Her momma called me a thief/and her dad called himself commander in chief” appears to reference actual sets of relationships, but it does so at one remove. The context is personal, maybe autobiographical, but the vehicle is allusion, abstraction, metaphor. The critical consensus is that Smith was exceptionally open in his songs, self-disclosing. He also hides in them. He’s there to be known, but he’s also not there. He was a realist—tied to a world of fact—and he was a magical realist, especially later in his career, concocting incredible settings and imagery in which the personal achieved exaggerated representation. This was intentional. Elliott feared cliché. He feared being labeled, stuck in a box. So what he did, purposely, was confuse. In some instances the songs amounted to “sonic fuck you’s,” as he put it once—grenades tossed at simplifiers and pigeonholers.
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The other thing unique about Elliott, at least in relation to other rock stars, was his personality. Brandt Peterson, who played with Elliott in Heat-miser, warned me against hagiography. He suggested I resist all idealizing depictions. This is sound advice. Hagiography is unsustainable (and worse yet, boring). Still, it’s hard not to be impressed by the single-mindedness of interviewees. Most people who knew Elliott—well or just slightly—say roughly the same thing. He was a “super sweet,” “incredibly generous,” “gentle,” and “well-intended” person. Scott Wagner interviewed Elliott for
The Rocket
in 1997. He also worked at 1201, a bar Elliott frequented on SW 12th Street in Portland (it’s no longer there). The interview occurred at My Father’s Place, a different bar still in operation across the river on the east side of town, where Elliott played video poker and drank “whiskey with a beer back.” “He was super fidgety,” Wagner recalls. “That was just his way.” The article’s focus was music—Elliott’s Heatmiser days and his newer solo work—but also up for analysis was what Wagner and co-writer John Chandler called, in a nifty turn of phrase, the “Smith myth.” To Wagner, who had followed Elliott for many years, he was a “can’t miss, amazingly gifted talent.” “We’d hear a record and say, ‘Yeah, he’s a genius!’ ” But there was also something else, an unassuming gentleness. “He was never putting on an air,” Wagner says. “He was, if anything, distracted by the circus around him. His smile was always sheepish. He could never trust his happiness. He was just one of those guys—a flawed character you root for,” sort of “beat-up looking.” “Everyone wondered what his secret was. It seemed like he needed to mask something.”
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John Chandler, who interviewed Elliott on three occasions across his career, and ran into him in Portland frequently, zeroed in on the same attributes. “He was one of those people who lived with his filters open,” Chandler says. “He had a very low bullshit level. He’s the good part of Portland hipsterdom. He was never silly, loud, dumb, or buffoonish.”
²⁴
There were times, too, when the Smith myth got tough for Elliott himself. He was all too aware of the image fans foisted on him. It was him, in some ineffable fashion, but he also mocked it, fled from it. In a final interview with Elliott in 2000, which took place in late October, Chandler asked him what he planned to be for Halloween. “Oh, a morose, gloomy, sorrowful songwriter,” Elliott deadpanned, “who always dresses in black and all these people want to know about him and who he really is.”

To Jennifer Chiba, Elliott was a “weird mixture of confident and shy”; “more unsure than nervous,” in Wagner’s estimation. Always hoping the world was as well-intended as he tried to be, he displayed vulnerability openly. Even with total strangers he could be jarringly candid. In fact, according to another close friend, Smith was obsessed with telling the truth. It was virtually a family trait. Somehow truth always needed to come out, even when half-truths would have been a lot less discomforting. This candor was
one of the major elements of the myth—more real than legendary. Elliott spoke for the underdog. He was the outsider commenting lucidly from a distance, making fans feel less alone, their underdog pain beautiful. Always hyperaware of anyone being mistreated, Elliott was closely attuned to injustice and rejection. He spoke up, and he turned the other cheek. Even when he got shit on, according to another intimate, “he never shit on people back.” It was a matter of dignity. It was also simply the right thing to do, the kind thing. What Smith did not have, at least so far as I have been able to discover, was enemies. He was hard to dislike, impossible to hate, even though, like anyone, he could be judgmental, petty, or condescending at times, even downright mean. The strongest impulse anyone felt around him was protection, chiefly because he wasn’t very good at protecting himself.

An incident from winter 2003 is revealing. It illustrates several elements of Elliott’s personality simultaneously—his vulnerability, his openness, his self-consciousness, even his need to tell the truth. Elliott was performing at the Henry Fonda Theater for two nights, January 31 and February 1. At the end of the song “Pretty (Ugly Before),” someone in the audience called out, “Get a backbone.” It was a very strange moment, a rare expression of distaste, especially in the setting of a concert filled with fervid fans. According to two different people I spoke with who were at the gig and deeply in the know, the person delivering the insult was Valerie Deerin, they allege, a recent ex-girlfriend. These same two people do not believe Elliott himself was aware Deerin made the comment; it came amid the usual between-song crowd noise. At any rate, what’s interesting is Elliott’s reaction, which is complex and multidimensional. “Get a what?” he asks. “A backbone?” He goes on, “Get a backbone, what the fuck? … I could tell you a dream I had last night, otherwise I can’t be more fucking for real. I mean, honestly. Get a backbone? Okay. I’ll try.”

Shock and anger turn to obligingness. He says he’ll try. Then he apologizes: “I’m not trying to pick on you. Maybe I didn’t understand what you were saying. Whatever. I’ve been playing a lot of dark songs tonight, so I’m sorry … Don’t get bummed out. They’re just songs.”
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The next night, at the conclusion of “Stickman,” another self-denigrating number implying some amount of spinelessness, Elliott—this time aware
of the fact that Deerin had probably shouted the remark—revisits the incident. “Someone bringing up my backbone tonight? It’s here, behind me.” Several crowd members shout, “What?”

“I don’t know. Last night someone said to get a backbone … I’m pretty odd playing as it is. I don’t know. My answer was, I’ll try.” Not in any way singling out Deerin, which would have been uncharacteristic, Elliott says, “It’s like, people think …
some
people … they need to take you down because they think you think you’re better, like that you’re some kind of hot shit, to take you down, and that’s just bullshit. Fair enough? That was my little tirade tonight.”
²⁶

Not a very major tirade, as it happens. It’s remarkable—Elliott does not tell the person to fuck off. He doesn’t ignore the person either, the easiest response of all. Instead he confirms his honesty. He can’t possibly get any more real, any more vulnerable. He vows to try, to grow one, to get stronger, in effect agreeing with the insult’s sentiment. Then he says he’s sorry, and the next night makes a point of announcing that he does not think he’s hot shit, he does not think he’s any better than anyone else.

All this was in a peculiar musical context; Elliott was performing, in a position of vulnerability, and the catcall arrived out of the blue, utterly unexpectedly. But it would be a mistake to imagine Elliott as timid, unable to access anger. Over the years he did get into a number of fights, even during middle school in Texas. He never initiated these scenes. In every case he was standing up for a person who was being insulted or mistreated. One such episode occurred in a bar in Brooklyn. A friend or girl was involved; a group of guys were trash-talking. Elliott took a stand and, as a friend describes it, “got the shit beat out of him.”
²⁷
At one point during the tumult a bottle was broken; Elliott was dragged across the glass, which cut his back badly.

On a different occasion Elliott, his sister Ashley Welch, and Jennifer Chiba had gone to hear friends Beck and the Flaming Lips at Universal City Walk in fall 2002. Flaming Lips was the opening act, in what some called “the coolest marketing ploy of all time.” The buzz, apparently, was that Beck’s “brilliantly somber”
Sea Change
album was a “snoozer,” so “hiring a psychotic carnival like the Flaming Lips to back him up would not only liven up the gigs, but open ticket sales to an entirely different audience.”
²⁸
At intermission Elliott and Chiba wandered backstage for a drink and to say hello to people. In line ahead of them was a young couple they did not know, engaged in a verbal argument, some run-of-the-mill domestic dispute. Cops were summoned; they began roughing the couple up, pounding their heads against the pavement. At first, Elliott stood close by, alerting the officers to the fact that he was watching what they were doing. The officers demanded he move aside; he refused. The standoff escalated, and after several seconds Elliott was pepper sprayed. He reacted strongly by waving his arms and reaching out, at one point, according to police, making physical contact, albeit unintentionally. The officers then took him down, drove their knees into his back, cuffed him, and carted him off to the facility’s jail. While doing so, they slammed him into walls, causing his ears to bleed. Afterward Chiba and others took him to an emergency room. Charges were filed and never dropped. In fact, they were active at the time of Elliott’s death. He hired an attorney to contest the allegations, but a scheduled court date was postponed. In any case, the incident had long-term effects. Elliott was intensely worried about the prospect of going to jail. He also came to fear police retaliation of some sort, all during a time when his drug use was causing high amounts of paranoia anyway.

Lips front man Wayne Coyne, whose performances sometimes begin with him descending from an alien mother ship in a bubble and floating across the audience, wasn’t pleased with Smith’s backstage behavior. “It really was nothing but sad,” he told
Billboard
in the days following Elliott’s death. “You just sort of saw a guy who had lost control of himself … He was everything you wouldn’t want in a person … It was horrible … It was ugly.”
²⁹
Steven Drozd, the Lips’ drummer, added: “There’s an undercurrent of fucking real sadness in a lot of his music that just fucking crushes me. And that’s just really the way he was. I hate to sound that way, but he really was. And I can hear it in his music. That’s totally him.”
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In the end, what Elliott left behind, what he lived, amid the sadness, the struggle to get past his particular form of psychache, was compassion, more than anything else, compassion and genius. Compassion made him uniquely lovable. Tales of his sensitivity to others’ pain are legion—he didn’t judge, he didn’t lecture. He moved quietly, invisibly, as on the occasion when, seeing a homeless man sleeping on the street, he tucked a hundred-dollar
bill in his boot, a small gift for the person to be surprised by and grateful for later. The genius is just as stunning. That he was able to make his art while fighting off addictions, holding suicide at arm’s length, is astonishing. It’s a testament to the power of his gift, which was irrepressible. There was no self-extinction drive in the gift, only the gift-maker. To live for one’s art is a cliché, but for a time the music did seem to keep Elliott alive, until the pain of living eclipsed the pleasure of the sounds and lyrics. As he put it once in a song, he was high on the sound, but there’s no power in the air. The battle’s on the ground.