Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith (4 page)

Elliott was very deeply loved, by many, many people. The largest mystery of all is why he so often could not believe that. He knew it, it was obvious, he heard what people told him about how much they cared, but there was also a gnawing sense of worthlessness he never quite managed to rise above. Others valued his life with enormous displays of affection. He didn’t.

Surreal was the
word Elliott Smith used more than any other to describe his deeply improbable, man-out-of-nowhere appearance at the 70th Academy Awards, about which no subsequent interviewer failed to ask him, to the point where the interviews themselves must have seemed just as surreal as that 1998 night. The feeling was the opposite of schadenfreude, more an instance of enjoying the success of a person (also richly deserving) never pegged to be quite so successful. Elliott stood for the overlooked underrated, the loser plucked out and suddenly winning, and those talking with him, many of whom identified strongly, took obvious delight in the anomalousness of the outsized recognition. It was slightly absurd, slightly comical, but also slightly thrilling. Surreal, like its woollier cousin Kafkaesque, is a hackneyed trope, pulled out nowadays to describe a traffic jam in L.A. or a line at the DMV. But Elliott had it right. Surrealism equals incongruous juxtaposition, which captures the night’s original song category ideally. Here was Elliott Smith, looking barely adolescent, singing about faking it through the day with Johnny Walker Red, maybe the most un-Oscars-like opening line ever. And here, right beside him, was titanic Celine Dion, her heart forever going on, with a mawkish side of Michael Bolton thrown in for measure. It does not get more Kafkaesque. The
poète maudit
versus the anti-poets, the hero and the clowns.

Elliott’s shortened performance of the nominated song “Miss Misery” from Gus Van Sant’s
Good Will Hunting
might have been, in a closed universe, a career high point, a peak experience, an apex leading to more fame, more money, more opportunities. A complete game-changer all around, in other words. In some ways it was that, in some ways not. To Elliott, success was complicated, artistically and psychologically. Although it may have held momentary appeal, it wasn’t especially desirable. The year before, Elliott
was on a big pop kick, listening to
Magical Mystery Tour
every day. On that album’s penultimate song, “Baby You’re a Rich Man,” John Lennon (whom Elliott adored and often covered) asks two pointed questions: “How does it feel to be one of the beautiful people?” and “What do you want to be?” Elliott was set to find out, one way or another. As he told John Chandler years later, “[The Oscars] was a dream come true. But it wasn’t my dream.”
¹

Pre-Oscars, Elliott was nowhere near a nobody, but he was just as far from a major somebody poised for widespread commercial recognition. Outside of Portland and pockets of the West Coast, almost no one had any idea who he was. His whispery, withheld, homemade sensibilities fit badly with “big-time” aspirations; he was comfortably, satisfyingly unknown, playing mainly in tiny, intimate venues where adoring fans shout out songs and sing along to lyrics. There had been three individual albums on two different labels, Cavity Search’s
Roman Candle
(1994), with a long list of unnamed songs, Kill Rock Stars’s
Elliott Smith
(1995), and the
Magical Mystery Tour
–inspired
Either/Or
(1997). The last effort was unusually poppy, even upbeat in spots. As Elliott told John Chandler and Scott Wagner in April of 1997, “I’m feeling pretty good about songwriting right now. I feel pretty positive … I already did my time where I felt everything I did was a big piece of crap, and that the music business was going to grind me into dirt. Now I just feel good about it. I want to do it.”
²
A portion of this attitude change had to do with the nature of the music itself, which was less “idea-driven,” according to Elliott, less about catching feelings. But he’d also recently started taking antidepressants. He told Wagner he was on Paxil; he guessed it was helping.
³
“I spent a whole year with my head spinning around … What little notoriety that I’ve gotten bummed me out bad … It was extremely easy for me not to care what people thought about me when no one knew who I was.”
⁴
Once they did know, it was harder for Elliott to separate out what people saw him as—the lugubrious singer-songwriter, an appellation he disliked—from what he hoped he was. Preconceived notions were, as he put it, infecting everything. Yet with
Either/Or
in the can, skies cleared—or so it seemed—and inner dissonance faded.

The record was released in February 1997, a little more than a year before the March 1998 Academy Awards. By summer and fall, whatever Paxil-abetted good feeling Elliott had manufactured was gone. He was
more and more depressed, suicidal, drinking heavily. There were blackouts, incidents of alcohol poisoning. At one point Elliott remembered “waking up on the street covered in cuts and bruises.”
⁵
At the Crocodile Club in Seattle he pulled friends aside to make various ominous-sounding pronouncements. Speaking in frightening past tense, he told them there was nothing any of them could have said. They had done nothing wrong. If I’m not around much longer, he warned, remember I love you. It was a clear, terrifying goodbye. By this time there had already been at least one suicide gesture, a jump from a car and a fall down a cliff. Now the fear was magnified; friends were concerned he was an imminent danger to himself. Various calls were placed, one to manager Margaret Mittleman, who had worked with Elliott since 1994. Roughly two weeks later an intervention occurred, organized by Slim Moon, the founder of Kill Rock Stars. In Chicago, and with the help of a counselor, Smith was blindsided, pressured to check into an Arizona facility that he promptly walked out of, fearing long-term confinement. “Some beautiful songs try to make you think that, for a moment, there’s no crap in the world,” Moon said. “But Elliott’s songs admit the world’s fucked up … He appeared really fragile, and he internalized everything. He would go on and on in his songs about how nothing was going to relieve his pain. But at the same time he was searching hard for something to relieve it.”
⁶

“It got kind of weird,” Smith allowed vaguely. “I started drinking too much and I was taking antidepressants, and they don’t mix.” On the other hand, he says he got a strange sort of optimism going, “even though the way I was living wasn’t showing it.” Mentally, he pushed for productivity and positivity. He told himself things were going to improve. “I’m never going to stop insisting,” he said, “that things are going to work out.”
⁷

But this internal pep talk came long after the fact. It sounded good, but it didn’t stick. In the moment, the intervention was infuriating—a humiliating, frightening ordeal—and it more or less ended Elliott’s relationship with Moon. For Elliott, suicide signaled a sort of freedom. It was an option the removal of which he could not abide, confinement nullifying a coveted escape clause. “Dying people should have that right,” he believed. Lacking it while locked up and under constant observation made him feel “even crazier.” His image of hospitalization was almost comically grotesque,
yet another Kafkaesque nightmare of panoptical conformity and fear. “Let’s just say I didn’t want to go there,” Smith told
New Musical Express
in 2000. “If you took TV culture and then focused it through a magnifying glass onto a blade of grass and burned it up—that’s what it was like in there, this concentrated version of the same kind of pressure that people feel all the time. You know, ‘Get ahead! Get ahead! Be like everybody else!’ It’s ridiculous. It made things worse. A lot of that seemed to be based on fear: maybe if we scare these people enough they’ll act like they don’t feel like they do.”

As he often did when dealing with residues of various types of negative emotion, Elliott shaped the experience into art, of a sort less indecipherable than usual. In what might be his angriest song, the acid “Everybody Cares, Everybody Understands,” a broadside against synthetic sympathy, the “chemical embrace that kicks you in the head,” he warns do-gooders they “fucking ought to stay the hell away from things” they know nothing about. “Memory Lane,” first performed just after the intervention, tracks the same line of thought. The title references Serenity Lane, a collection of Oregon drug and alcohol treatment centers, most located in Portland, where Elliott had lived. These are the places you go when you “lose the chase,” Elliott writes, when you are “dragged against your will.” All anyone knows is “you’re not like them.” So they “kick you in the head”—as in “Everybody Cares, Everybody Understands”—“and send you back to bed.” The solution is separation, which makes for a place to stay. He’s comfortable apart, he says. He’ll keep his doors and windows shut; he swears he’ll never tell a soul again.

Intervention backfired, it seems, or so say the songs. Elliott’s response was fury, a lingering sense of helper-hypocrisy and betrayal (a few of the interveners, after all, were also drug and alcohol users). So he closed down. All future openness would be limited to the songwriting, which itself grew increasingly, deliberately abstract, or to carefully selected intimates who might be trusted not to use confessions against him. Elliott was always very careful about what he revealed; there were subjects he refused to elaborate on. Intervention solidified that attitude. He resolved not to repeat any inpatient experience, even when it might have saved his life.

But as 1997 dragged painfully on, something unexpected altered the mood. Through a mutual friend, Smith met filmmaker Gus Van Sant in
Portland. They hung out a little, discussed home recording—something Van Sant was also interested in—questions about different microphones and cameras. Van Sant came to see Elliott perform, although as Elliott clarifies, “He didn’t discover me playing in a coffee shop or anything, like I heard somebody wrote. In fact, I’ve never played in a coffee shop.”
⁸
One of Van Sant’s old boyfriends knew Smith; he introduced Van Sant to the first album,
Roman Candle
, which he listened to while shooting
Good Will Hunting
. “When we edited the movie,” Van Sant told
LA Weekly
in November 2003, “we put all of the [Smith] songs into it, so the spirit and sound of the movie is largely Elliott Smith.” Editing took place in Portland, and at some point in the process Van Sant called Elliott up. They had coffee, talked, and then Van Sant showed Elliott the movie in his home, on a VHS tape. He told Elliott, “Now, don’t be shocked too much, because we’ve put a lot of your songs in there. And normally I wouldn’t show you the movie with your songs in it, but they work so well that I want to.”
⁹
Elliott “really liked” the film, he said, “which was great, since I don’t like a lot of movies.” He found he related to some of the characters “to a certain extent where I could get into the vibe of the movie.”
¹⁰

As Elliott explained, Van Sant also wanted him “to write a song for the movie because he thought it would be nice.” Miramax, too, preferred a new number, since “you can’t be nominated for an Oscar if the song came out on a record before.”
¹¹
The result of this gentle pressuring was “Miss Misery,” which was not, as it happens, an entirely new song, although that’s the story Elliott was urged to tell. In fact, in an early version there is no mention of the title character, no Miss Misery at all. Instead of “Do you miss me, Miss Misery, like you say you do?” Elliott writes, “But it’s all right, some enchanted night, I’ll be with you,” a line including a modicum of hopefulness. In the former, the Oscars version, Elliott hopes he’s missed, but he isn’t quite sure; he distrusts what he’s being told. He guesses the imagined woman would rather see him gone. She might prefer he vanish “into oblivion.” It’s a portrait of a jangled ambivalent relationship. The alternate take suggests resilience. Elliott can’t hold his liquor, he writes, but he does all he can to keep his attitude buoyant, he tries staying positive.
¹²

Who is this Miss Misery? Some suggest she’s girlfriend Joanna Bolme, who accompanied Elliott to the Oscars (he was provided with one extra
ticket). Around that time, Bolme says, things were changing. “We had an on-and-off relationship by then. Drug use on his part was the main culprit. Drugs, and his lack of interest in his own life.”
¹³
That last detail—indifference to life, a passive wish simply to die—suggests another inspiration. Miss Misery might be depression itself, Elliott’s muse of melancholy. He was a major fan of Kierkegaard, whom he read at different points throughout his life. The Danish philosopher himself suffered from lifelong depression. No reductionist, he saw the affliction as an absence of faith, a failure to expect joy, happiness, goodness, purely the fault of the person in torment, who could, if he worked at it, will himself into a different state. “My depression,” Kierkegaard writes, “is the most faithful mistress I have known—no wonder, then, that I return the love.”

In the
Good Will Hunting
version of the song Elliott’s narrator barely manages to get by, with alcohol’s help. He pours poison down the drain, but it puts “bad thoughts” in his head. A stranger in the park tells him he’s strong, hardly ever wrong, but he shrugs these sentiments off. He doubts Miss Misery really wants him around. One of Elliott’s themes is oblivion, its lure and solace; here he imagines vanishing into it. He says he tries to
be
—to keep existing “in the life”—but comes back to Misery when she wants him to; he’s under her thumb, he’s at her mercy. A constant in Elliott’s life, as in Kierkegaard’s, was suffering. Torment was his faithful mistress too. He returned to it because it was what he knew—the “gentle sadness” of melancholy. Yet as he did when faced with most clichés, easy labels tossed his way, he nuanced around simplification. Discussing suicide, whether it’s courageous or cowardly, he calls it “ugly and cruel,” and says he needs his friends to stick around. Then he adds: “I prefer not to appear as some kind of disturbed person. I think a lot of people get mileage out of it, like ‘I’m a tortured artist’ or something. I’m not a tortured artist, and there’s nothing really wrong with me. I just had a bad time for a while.”
¹⁴
In fact, he was pretty consistently tortured, but he wasn’t only that. He wanted badly to get healed, he tried assorted treatments, including Paxil and other nontraditional remedies, but they only partially or temporarily sufficed. Miss Misery kept reappearing, literally and metaphorically.