Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith (34 page)

“Alameda” is song two, and the sound quality, contrasted with “Speed Trials,” instantly jolts one out of a late-afternoon half sleep and into bright, sharp morning. Dylan once said that the way
Blonde on Blonde
sounded was exactly how he heard the world. “Alameda’s” sound is the way Elliott Smith heard the world. It is dazzling but also slightly overexposed to infinitesimally perceptible harshness. The one song that compares with “Alameda” on the first two albums is the majestic “Last Call,” which seems to come from a place no one’s ever been or even heard about. But in terms of sound, no song compares. So when listeners got to the second tune on
Either/Or
it was like finding a totally unexpected or possibly uninvited guest at a party who also happened to be the most interesting person there. Pete Krebs was talking about every Elliott Smith song when he said “You had never heard anything in your life that sounded like this,” each tune “full of that intangible thing Elliott had.” Still, “Alameda” hammers the point in; it’s a constellating moment.

The same snapping drum striking the same empty gas can punctuates the opening as guitar introduces the melody. The title is a street in Portland and the song walks it, almost like a march. Background harmonies sigh sleepily as Elliott’s voice enters, guitar still tracing the melody alongside. The mood is hypnotic, partly because of the drum slap on every second note—like the clap of the fading-out sound of shoes in “Last Call”—partly because of the high floating harmonies following the walker like thought clouds. Drums stop only as a short bridge appears, a pause in the musical shuffle, a tumble away from the main melodic line. Then it is back to marching again, like there’s somewhere he needs to get to. The song is about relationships, but it’s got nightmares too, along with an unnamed authority “champion”—Das Man—Elliott gets forced to bow to. As for relationships, they do not work. Beyond everything else, the main thing Elliott’s concerned about, he sings, is his own protection. He needed people around him to care—as JJ Gonson put it, “he kept his hook in you all the time then
returned every once in a while to check it”—but in the long run, when it came to sustaining connections, his “first mistake” was thinking he “could relate.” Nobody ever breaks his heart, the song says, because he beats them to it, he breaks his own: “the fix is in.” As themes go, this is the one Elliott returned to, not so much to hash it out or get past it, but as a self-punishing reminder of failures. He had himself on the hook as much as he had anyone else.

As he made the
Either/Or
songs he’d already ended the relationship with Gonson, and started up with Bolme, with whom he was very much in love, in a way that seemed—though he never spoke of it publicly, nor did she—unique, and even potentially lasting, a very good thing that might have made an important long-term difference in his life. So the songs fall in line; they chart feelings of intimacy, connection, hopefulness, but mostly fear, dread, and potential ruination. Whatever was working got broken, the emotional axiom, “Don’t count on love, and if by chance you get it, break it before it breaks you” (as he declares explicitly in “Alameda”). The victim, in other words, takes the role of self-protective victimizer. Thus in “No Name No. 5” his fingernails are bitten and his head’s “full of the past,” as if he’s assaying the formula, an inner law to which he’s anxiously beholden. Smiles might be sweet, he notes, but they fade fast. “Everybody’s gone at last” because that’s what they do, they go. He tells himself not to get upset; after all, he’s seen it already. There is nothing new wrong that wasn’t wrong before. In the end what he gets is a broken heart and a name on his cast.

“No Name No. 5” is a drowsy passive reflection, as if sung at night after several Jamesons and beer chasers. The line that lifts vocally, breaking free into a higher register, is “gone at last,” its last two words reflecting a wished-for state alone and away from the hell of other people. There are two other outright love songs on the record, one, “Between the Bars,” imagining active intervention, the other, “Say Yes,” grounded in surprised hopefulness. “Between the Bars,” with its “Rocky Raccoon” opening, pays instant homage to
The White Album
Elliott was listening to as he worked on the tune. It goes back a ways; he actually wrote the song in early 1996—some time before April—while sitting around watching
Xena, the Warrior Princess
. “She’s got a killer yell,” he tells a Knitting Factory audience. “But I was watching it with the sound off. I think it’s better [that way].” The plot,
maybe inspired by what he was seeing on the screen, is a rescue, albeit of an emotional kind. The girl is stuck in a state of unrealized potential; she spreads promises she doesn’t follow through on. The place he finally kisses her, “between the bars,” includes three possible meanings. She’s in a cell with her hands in the air; she’s between drinking establishments; or he’s finding her in the bars of a song, the one he’s singing—the girl is in the music. It is one of Elliott’s more assertive tunes; he is heroic in it, a sad savior, altering fate rather than getting his ass kicked by it. He and the girl will separate (verb) from the rest, where he likes her the best. It’s a rescue and an escape.

“Say Yes” tamps down the feeling of power a little but it’s still, as Elliott once said, “insanely optimistic.” “It was written about someone particular”—Bolme most likely—“and I almost never do that,” he said in 1998.
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“I was really in love with someone.” In fact, as he notes in the song’s first line, he wasn’t just in love with a girl, but with
the world
, through her eyes. It’s a sweet simple melodic line, curving up then down then back up again still higher. Even the mood is uncertain, in other words, but finally, after teasing meanderings, it lifts to the top of a scale. He’s high emotionally and vocally. The song,
Either/Or
’s closer, depicts the aftermath of “Between the Bars.” He saved her and they separated, but then what? He’s not sure, it turns out. He’ll be the fool or the exception to the rule. He’s standing up, changed around, but his past tells him happy days make you pay and “feel like shit the morning after.” One especially brilliant line captures Elliott’s emotional checkmate: “Crooked spin can’t come to rest/I’m damaged bad at best.” It’s sung almost happily; there’s no bitterness in it, no resentment or anger. The song’s otherwise uplifting tone almost masks its meaning. The question is, given who he is, will he ever find true love? What can he love truly? Will love last? She’ll decide, he concludes, not him. She’s either going to live with and accept the damage, or she’s not. It is an open question in the song. But life answered it. The relationship with JJ ended in part because of Elliott’s darkness; and as Bolme said, she too found it more and more difficult to be with someone who placed no value on his own life. Years later, around 2000, Elliott told Jennifer Chiba the same thing he’d told quite a few important people in his life: it might not be a very good idea to get close, because he wasn’t planning to be alive much longer. Investing, then, was
betting on low odds. Love and happiness were sweet in the moment, as on “Say Yes”; but they were temporary. Standing up would soon be falling down.

Other songs stake out similar territories. The underrated “Punch and Judy” is a jazzy two-step pop standard sounding nothing like most anything else Elliott ever wrote. But the main characters keep saying the magic words in the wrong order, and someone’s “going to make the same mistake twice.” “Angeles” showcases Elliott’s guitar virtuosity, with its difficult, rapidly finger-picked opening. Sometimes in live performance even he wasn’t up to it. He’d stop and surrender, apologizing, then start in again in response to the crowd’s pleas. Then there’s the intense dejection of “2:45 AM.” He’s alone in center circle, the world fading to black.

It was a constant theme in interviews, the only question asked with as much frequency as questions about the Oscar night—why his songs, for instance “2:45 AM,” were so depressing, or whether he, like some listeners, found them depressing. The subject is reasonable, less artistically interested than concerned, and genuinely so, about Elliott’s state of mind, the viability of his life. What people seemed to want to know was whether his life was as bleak as the songs. Going to the nature of creativity and of creative process and product, the topic was anything but easy to flesh out. To start with, he was clear and insightful about the link between art and creator. He told one interviewer, “Those songs didn’t come from nowhere so if [they] seem bleak, then I guess the answer is yes”—the life
is
as bleak as the songs. He told a different interviewer, “Of course the songs have something to do with me.” There’s this idea—strange and naïve—that art or music stands alone, that it has no connection to the mind that made it, that it tells us nothing about that mind. Refreshingly, Elliott didn’t push that line of thought. The songs come from somewhere; he’s the one who made them up; so unavoidably and indisputably, the songs are about him, even when they are about other people. But he did not see the songs as bleak. “They have their happy moments,” he said. “Maybe that’s strictly mine. My own belief.” But the perception of darkness in the tunes, relentless darkness—that, he said, “is definitely a problem to me. It’s not like I want to carve out a little corner and stay there … I’d be really happy if I could write a song as universal and accessible as ‘I Second That Emotion.’ … Happy songs are great when they
come along. I mean, they haven’t come along a lot … It’s a big game to play, trying to make something that’s mainstream enough and still human.” To be mainstream was to erase complexity and darkness, to lie, in other words; to be human in the art was to let everything in, the full range of feeling, and what came, when Elliott did that, was usually sadness—or pain, loss, failure, disconnection.

He was always careful to note that he didn’t feel any sadder than anyone else he knew. “I’m happy some of the time,” he’d usually say, “and some of the time I’m not.” The mood was more harmony than motor anyway, he suggested, even though, like most people, he found it harder to write when happy (“People tend to play better if they’re not on a winning team,” he said dryly). Anything he was trying to work out or think over—drugs, drinking, women, friendship—anything frustrating him in some way—those were the subjects he turned to. He didn’t care whether he understood what he was talking about in the lyrics. As with dreams, he said, “It’s good if you can understand what your dream meant. But whether you do or not, it’s having an effect on you. And on a certain level, you do understand what it’s about,” whether you know it or not.

Whatever the case, the songs “are the only important thing,” he said. And they did not need to have a point, they did not concern themselves grandly with what was wrong with the world. They were, he believed, descriptive, impressionistic, pictorial—“like a bunch of photographs burned into each other.” Before he started, “it’s usually a picture. Like describe a picture: Two people are in a room and one person has just insulted the other but the other hasn’t realized and the conversation has broken down and one person knows why but the other person doesn’t.” But pictures have content, they embed stories, capture scenes. Here, in keeping with the kinds of situations explored in
Either/Or
, Elliott singles out relationships. “I’m interested,” he explained, “in the way people interact but don’t necessarily connect. Or don’t connect fully … Like dependency and mixed feelings about your attraction or your attachment … It’s good for you on the one hand, and on the other hand it’s not really what you need.” He compared human connection/disconnection to atoms, which are “mostly space, there’s very little material there. They appear to be mostly material but it’s actually just space. It doesn’t take much to make something seem real but on closer
inspection it’s very empty.” As a kind of summary, these thoughts—unusual for Elliott since he didn’t often get into the origins of the songs’ content—serve as artistic statement. When he looked inside to assess and evaluate, to describe the picture, what he saw, the target that popped up, was relationships. At first they seemed real, at first they seemed good for you, necessary, helpful, but as he turned them over in his head what struck him was the empty space between. Like addicts who seek to heighten their natural state—depressives who drink, manics who smoke crack—Elliott sometimes sought isolation. And judged entirely by its effects in and on the life, that strategy backfired. Or, from a different angle, it worked, because he got what he wanted. To say “it’s only the songs that matter” is a cliché. But he meant it and lived it, and probably died it.

So what Elliott was after, always, was letting everything in, holding nothing back, the frank fullness of life, what artists are in the business of showing. What that meant, some of the time, was being a hurt, damaged person. This lent poignancy to the words and music, drew similarly vulnerable fans in, but the day-to-day life had to be managed. Now and then he checked to make sure he was “still here,” as he said in “Last Call.” All he “aspired to do was endure.” Embracing only what was would require radical Zen-like self-acceptance, a moment-by-moment nonjudgmental awareness Elliott struggled to enact. This all got hyper-real in 1997. Very strangely, under peculiar circumstances, Elliott ran off a cliff. Without emotion he told interviewers, at least two of them, “Yeah, I jumped off a cliff, but let’s talk about something else.”
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It was an invitation to pry and a refusal to enter into the details, strange in light of the explosiveness of the confession. What he seems to be doing is heading the interviewers off at the pass; it’s a subject he’s not willing to get into. And judging from the quote provided, his statement appears to be a response to a question, less a confession per se. About one year later he was more expansive. He told
Spin
: “I got freaked out and started running, it was totally dark, and I ran off the edge of a cliff. I saw it coming up and I wasn’t like, ‘I’m gonna throw myself off this cliff and die.’ ” It was more “who cares,” he said.
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