Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith (30 page)

One song epitomizing Elliott’s indecipherability, a tune he kept playing even in electric versions over the course of his career, is “Needle in the Hay.” (Years later it accompanied a self-cutting scene in Wes Anderson’s
The Royal Tenenbaums
, to Elliott’s displeasure.) As Uppinghouse noted, he worked hard at it, spent a lot of time getting it just right. There’s a drumming relentlessness to the song, Elliott hammering down on strummed and finger-picked half notes as it begins, jumping around the scale; the sense is
of someone knocking loudly and persistently at the front door, or of water torture, the drip drip drip getting harder and harder to bear. It’s never all that clear what is going on. The narrator’s riding Tri-Met. He gets off at 6th and Powell in Portland, pursuing a “downstairs” cure of some kind, one that lets him be quiet whenever he wants. His preference is to be left alone—that’s why he’s taking the cure to begin with. You ought to be proud, he says, “that I’m getting good marks,” dragging the “S” sharply in anger, a human approximation of tape hiss. Like so many other tunes, the song flips confusingly between first and second person. Two different people seem to be involved, the one riding the bus, and another, a doppelganger who wears his clothes, who’s head-to-toes “a reaction to you.” One striking reference is to a “hay stack charm” around a character’s neck. It is an incidental detail not exactly critical to the song’s meaning. But at the same time, it may have personal subtext. The so-called “Golden Age of Wrestling” featured a lovably charismatic five-to six-hundred-pound Texan, a barefooted, overalls-wearing, six-foot–four-inch hillbilly by the name of Haystacks Calhoun. His gimmick was a horseshoe charm he wore around the neck for good luck. Haystacks and Elliott almost shared a birthday—he was born August 4, Elliott August 6. Legend has it that Haystacks routinely ate one dozen eggs for breakfast. He also literally, or apocryphally, picked up cows on the farm and moved them across the field as needed. Quite possibly Elliott knew of this Goliath, either by circumstance or through Charlie. So it is Haystacks with a hand on his arm, the gentle-giant wrestler thrown into the plot, a direct reference to long-ago realities. Elliott for some reason makes him “strung out and thin,” the opposite of who he was. It’s Haystacks turned junkie, a shrinking Leviathan—although, as the first two verses play themselves out, it’s not easy tracking who’s who, the “he” and the “you” merging into a single figure.
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The song could be another blended effort, with a mix of Duckler’s and Elliott’s lyrics, because by the second section things get clearer. From there it’s all first person. The singer’s driven almost against his will to locate the man who’s going to make everything okay. This mysterious helper—a psychiatrist, a dealer—isn’t up to anything good, it seems. “I can’t beat myself,” Elliott says twice, as if he’s after some sort of ass-whooping delivered by a “downstairs” punisher. The bad guy comes up again in “Christian Brothers,”
which begins with similar half note strumming making it, musically, a companion piece. There he’s a bossy “bad dream fucker” blinking on and off, and although Elliott sings “it’s sick what I want,” he also can’t resist it. He won’t shake the “motherfucker’s” hand, but he wants him all the same—“come here by me.” In the end he registers his own self-destructiveness, a sort of self-defining vestigial force, singing “nightmares become me.”

Another song from this session is “Clementine.” For this Elliott and Uppinghouse called Leslie’s mother to get the folk song’s original lyrics, including a line Elliott used, “Dreadful sorry, Clementine.” It seems like a simple description of drinking in a bar, the bartender flipping around the “open” sign at the end of the night. But although in order to kill time the singer’s busy drinking himself into “slow-mo,” he can’t get “Clementine” out of his mind. The story, about a miner’s daughter who drowns accidentally, is surprisingly dark and strange. It’s actually the miner’s fault that his dearly loved daughter dies—he could not swim, so he could not save her. Thus like Elliott does in his own song, he consoles himself by drinking beer and wine in a tavern. Then he takes his own life.

Finally, and in many ways unsurprisingly, Bunny appears in the song “Southern Belle.” He always worried about his mother and what might happen to her without him. In his mind, she was alone and vulnerable (“Nobody talking now/No one’s about to shout”). Here the nemesis figure is up to the usual, giving people hell–“it’s what they expect from you”–strangely unashamed of who he is or sorry about what he’s done. “Killing a Southern belle” is all he knows how to do.

The songs kept coming; it was a virtual explosion of creativity, as Tony Lash would later see it. And what they did, as they added up, was make some sort of major change even more unavoidable than it already was. But there was Heatmiser to deal with still. The contract finally got hammered out after almost two years; Elliott had his exclusion from the exclusivity clause (Neil too, according to Gonson, who had done yeoman’s work.) No longer was the band with Frontier; after a confusing sequence of events and much back-and-forth discussion steered ably by Gonson, they signed instead with Andy Factor at Virgin. It was a major, exciting step up. And although he didn’t want to agree to terms with Virgin at all—because he knew Heatmiser was not what he aspired to do anymore—Elliott, mostly
out of a sense of obligation to Tony and Neil, finally got on board, albeit dismally. Quasi’s Sam Coomes was enlisted to replace Brandt Peterson; it was at Coomes’s house that Krebs and Elliott had recorded the songs for Jason Mitchell’s “Slo-Mo” enterprise. And thus, for the moment at least, it was half-steam ahead. There was an album to make and there was touring to do, and videos to produce. For Elliott it was as if a second self tagged along wherever he went. There was who he was in the band, and there was who he was alone and apart. Both were promising paths in the present, both also presaged a hopeful future. Superficially, he could not go wrong. But the fact is, one direction required a stultifying amount of compromise or else a collective openness to the prospect of changing band direction, and neither of those options seemed acceptable, for Elliott on one hand and Heatmiser on the other.

Heatmiser visits Disneyland, around the time of the Virgin signing. Gonson is with purse, Andy Factor is front right, Shelly Shaw far left. (Photograph courtesy of JJ Gonson.)

At this point Gonson was out. She’d found Heatmiser a booking agent (Shelly Shaw), she’d made the Virgin deal—a stellar accomplishment—but with the end of that negotiation came the end of her service to the band. (As a thank-you, Andy Factor sent her and Elliott a box set of Nick Drake
records; an interesting choice, since it dovetailed more with Elliott’s solo work than his work with the band who’d just signed the deal.) Also at its end was Gonson’s relationship with Elliott. It was never a good idea to begin with, as they both acknowledged. But now the added stressor, one Gonson always felt a little vulnerable to herself, although she never tried it, was heroin. The drug was a new girl with whom Elliott had grown infatuated. He hadn’t indulged, but he hadn’t put the idea aside either. It was a crush. It was also a way out of pain, or so he had been told, and that made the lure irresistible. It was a new path of self-destruction too, and along with it a means of finding something Elliott always sought in one way or another, and wrote about relentlessly—oblivion. A feeling not only of painlessness, but of nothing, which amounted to the same thing. Gonson had no interest in dealing with the prospect of heroin. In no way did she want to abet it, even as a bystander. Yet by the day Elliott seemed more and more entranced. The danger was imminent. And it wasn’t only Gonson he talked with about the drug. The prospect surfaced even with people Elliott hardly knew. “We all had quite a few conversations,” Jason Mitchell recalls, about suicide, about depression and drug use. “More than we were even comfortable with.” Heroin wasn’t life, it was anti-life, it was death. And though everyone energetically warned Elliott against it, they also knew, deep down, the warnings only went so far. He listened, but he didn’t listen. As always, part of him wanted to live, part of him wanted to go on making music forever, but part of him also wanted it all to end. Mostly, as he said again and again in songs, he wanted to forget. Gonson’s drug years were mercifully behind her. They had to be if she wanted to stay alive. So she got together with a new man, and Elliott got together with the woman who’d broken up with Gonson’s new man, Joanna Bolme, who had also lived with Pete Krebs for a time. It was all comically incestuous. Everyone played together—Bolme an outstanding bassist—and everyone was hooking up. It had always been that way. The songs, after all, were secret communications among a very insular set of people, all of whom knew the subtext implicitly. But Bolme? The coincidental link with Gonson struck some as suspicious. Over time her relationship with Elliott grew to be exceptionally meaningful and important; initially, however, the coupling was perceived as a small “fuck you” to JJ, a final cut. The split had not been easy either. Heroin was one part of it, a partial cause, although Elliott was not using. But James Ewing remembers several long talks between Elliott and JJ on the front porch of the house; it was clear to him something difficult and serious was up. JJ had always been very maternal; she loved to love and take care of people, even feeding them as she came to discover a creative talent for cooking. All this suited Elliott, who needed all the love and support he could get. But for whatever reason he was “very determined” to end things, Ewing recalls. Slowly over many days and weeks the breakup played itself out depressingly.

Elliott at AIM Fest. Joanna Bolme is second from left in sunglasses. Sean Croghan is to Elliott’s right. (Photograph by JJ Gonson.)

So Elliott moved to SE 19th, just off Belmont, near a small park and tennis courts, eight blocks or so west of Gonson and not far from the Heatmiser Division house. Gust came along to the duplex-style home with separate kitchens and two entrances at the top of the steps, doors numbered 1 and 2. Jason Mitchell and Gust took the upstairs suite, Elliott and Sean Croghan lived downstairs. Elliott bought an eight-track reel-to-reel, and on the modestly sized front porch they passed time recording Uncle Tupelo tunes, an alt-country band whose first album was titled, coincidentally, “No Depression,” a dizzy blend of hardcore punk and Hank Williams. They hung out at Montage, at Dot’s on Clinton, at Club 21 on Sandy. Sometimes
Gary Smith stopped by to visit—jamming or talking philosophy or Buddhism—also Shannon Wight, Elliott’s high school girlfriend, whom Gonson remembers being around still. While they rented it the house was for sale, and for a brief time Mitchell and the others thought of buying the place, but they could never figure out how to put sufficient money together, and the odds of actually getting a loan were slim at best. It finally did sell, and they moved to a different place near Fremont, a home owned by a black woman named Mrs. White. The new rental had a basement that Elliott liked because it seemed like a space he could possibly record in. Mostly what Elliott did to pass the time was what he always did wherever he was: read, or sit around smoking cigarettes and noodling on guitar, watching Univision and
Xena
, “writing in the glow of the TV static,” as he put it in “Junk Bond Trader.” “My hands just make songs up without me even being involved in it, because I play guitar a lot during the day,” he said in early 1997. “My fingers just do whatever they’re doing while I’m watching
General Hospital
. Sometimes I go, ‘Oh, good job, fingers! I liked that.’” Other times it was “What was that? Wait, do it again.”
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More writing occurred as Elliott walked the streets at night, when the moon was out—hence the profusion of moon imagery in his work, he says. Friends recall driving alongside Elliott crossing one of Portland’s many bridges and asking him if he needed a lift somewhere. More often than not he’d say no. It did not look like it, but he was working. The mechanics of songwriting was a constant line of thought and conversation, the obsession with structures of chords. All afternoon Elliott would play, waiting for magic progressions to erupt accidentally. Lyrics he’d just spit out, rarely attaching intense personal importance to them, although, of course, they sometimes said more than he knew or cared to know. His custom was to write a song and lyrics in one day, then record it that night. And he recorded anywhere and everywhere.