Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith (40 page)

The Friday night events at Largo were Brion’s “private playground.” He’d conduct pop song chemistry experiments, building layered compositions from the ground up. According to a
Chicago Tribune
article titled “Who is Jon Brion (and is there anything he can’t do)?,” he’d begin “with a groove on drums, then shift to keyboards, then bass and guitar, all the while taping and looping each segment until a complete song appeared.” Even covers could be inspired beyond belief. He’d take something like Captain and Tennille’s “Love Will Keep Us Together” and fashion it lovingly, if not entirely unironically, into something lush and surprising. As Flanagan recalled, “Word got around, and it went from being a fun, casual thing to becoming an event … First people started turning up to see who would get on stage with Jon, but after a while it turned out that they didn’t care who would or wouldn’t get up; they were just into him.”
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Another novelty element was the “armada” of instruments he used night after night, either on his own or when sitting in with others. He picked them up at flea markets and garage sales, Optigans, Marxophones, Chamberlins, old Wurlitzers bought for fifty dollars. “Sometimes I keep broken stuff just because it makes this one great weird sound. And I’m not going to get rid of it until I can find a place where that one weird sound is going to have a happy home. Most of the stuff I do,” he explained, “is a coloring job. The hard part is finding human beings who know what they want to convey in a song. Unfortunately, there aren’t that many people who have a real individualistic stance.”
¹⁰

Mann, of course, was one such person. The two talked frequently and with “militant” intensity about the components of a truly good pop song. He had similar discussions with any number of intelligent, adventurous musicians out to undercut and challenge pop structures, including, eventually, Elliott. The two were introduced by Mary Lou Lord. At a gig she’d played an old Heatmiser tune Brion had never heard before, the JJ breakup number “Half Right.” “I absolutely loved it,” he said. He asked, “Does he have any other songs that are that good?” “All his songs are that good,” Lord replied.
¹¹
This sent Brion on a “mad hunt” for old Elliott albums. As he listened he “flipped out … Within two songs I was absolutely sold for life.”

At Lord’s suggestion Brion showed up at one of Elliott’s gigs armed with a vibraphone and a Chamberlin, saying “Hey, Mary Lou sent me down.” He offered to sit in at sound check, playing as little or as much as Elliott desired. By this point Brion knew Elliott’s entire catalogue, sometimes even better than Elliott did. If Elliott struggled to recall chords, Brion jumped in, “and Elliott would look over at me in absolute shock.”
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For Elliott, the attention must have been immensely flattering, a deep knowledge of his tunes in someone so gifted, along with a deep respect for what he was crafting. From that second on, Brion recalls, “we were pretty much close.” They would sit together after hours at the piano, working on or playing songs they both adored, like Elvis Costello’s “Blood and Chocolate” or “Saturday in the Park,” or tunes from Elton John’s
Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
. For what may have been the first time, Elliott, to a degree that went far beyond previous partnerships and collaborations, found himself face to face with a genuine peer, someone who understood songcraft just as well as he did and who heard in tunes the same magical changes. In fact, having studied it carefully, Brion became one of the most insightful interpreters of Elliott’s canon, aware to an amazingly subtle degree of what set it apart so decisively from the sorts of things others were attempting. “We had never met anybody else who had harmonically heard things in the same way,” Brion recalled. “It was actually downright strange at times.” If they happened to be listening to someone else’s music, they’d shoot each other glances at the same moments. Much of it had to do with harmonic invention, the “harmonic turn of phrase,” which in Elliott’s case was without peer, Brion believed. “His chord changes,” he said, “the internal motion of the chords, were always logical in a very beautiful way … He really loved the emotions that were generated by chord changes. He understood it better than anyone I ever met, quite honestly, by a long shot.”
¹³
At the same time, Brion felt, Elliott was no borrower. He had little interest in making his songs sound like older music he liked. What he was after was “new beauty,” an unmistakable modernity with “natural motion.” Some songs might sound Beatles-y, but they usually included changes that “never happened on a Beatles record.” That, Brion said, “was one of his many copious gifts.” On occasion the motion was contrary, an anomalous harmony giving rise to feeling. Brion noticed even Stevie Wonder DNA in tunes like “Independence Day,” the way chords drifted down appealingly.

Songs came together strangely at times, products of bizarre circumstance, not that it really mattered much. A song was a song. It worked or it didn’t, regardless of how it materialized. “Waltz #1” is a case in point. Apparently Elliott constructed its moody, eerie piano, overlaid with sleepy, sighing vocal harmonies, after listening for eighteen hours straight, high on mushrooms, to the song “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.” Flanagan recalled him sitting and playing it on Brion’s Casio, telling the story of how it came to be. Again, the waltz affection ran deep, ferrying feelings whose beginnings tracked back to the Texas years with Pickle, the difficulties with Charlie. As Elliott told Barney Hoskyns in April 1998: “For a while I made up nothing but waltzes. It was really weird. I wasn’t planning on that. But everything was, like, ¾.” As Hoskyns pointed out, there was art, on one hand, and chaos on the other. “You can’t fall apart totally if what you want to do is create,” he added. “You have to be able to function. You can’t just dive into the chaos.” Elliott agreed, in part, saying, “Even with that, it’s hard to represent chaos or an absence of something. It’s much easier to represent the presence of something, or a situation. People can be chaos, but it’s hard to fit it into some creative piece. People try to do it over and over, and it’s good that they do, but it’s hard.”
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“Waltz #1” was anything but chaos. It came from a chaotic space, an altered state of consciousness, but what it achieved, as allusive, appositely ambiguous lyrics got added in, was an august, chaos-defeating form, a magisterial beauty ill-befitting its origins. It was, in other words, art. Manifest chaos would come for Elliott many years later, when in 2000 and up to the last weeks of his life he worked on the songs for the album he never completed,
From a Basement on the Hill
. For now, he was in beauty mode. His inclination was to leave things pretty, not ugly them up with discordant soundscapes or “experiments in sonic texture,” as he put it to Hoskyns in late April.

Elliott’s January Largo gig included Brion on several newer tunes—waltz numbers 1 and 2, “Bottle Up and Explode!,” “I Didn’t Understand,” also a cover of “Walk Away Renée” by The Left Banke. Alone Elliott played “Between the Bars,” “Bled White,” and more. “Miss Misery” made its obligatory appearance, as did the guaranteed crowd-pleaser, “Say Yes.” Less than one week later the two covered the Beatles song “Rain,” a John Lennon B-side on the “Paperback Writer” single. The album Elliott would finish in
mid-April—it was mastered and complete on April 29—was to be called, initially,
Grand Mal
. Later that title was abandoned—a band by the name objected—and replaced by
XO
, a decision Elliott was marginally happy with, although he worried the phrase, its emotional connotation, might be “overly dramatic.” A song “Grand Mal” was recorded, with an opening similar to an earlier tune “Georgia Georgia,” but with the title going by the wayside, the song did too. A released version concludes with Elliott saying, “Forget it, now it’s too fast,” frustration clearly present in his voice. Apparently he could not get the tune into a shape he found acceptable.

Many of the
XO
songs were written in 1997, during a portion of that year Elliott called a bummer and a “drag,” referring to the cliff fall and the intervention that followed, plus his time, shortened, at Sierra Tucson. Friends felt
XO
was at least partly a response to those events, a sort of reaction, as one put it, to feeling really betrayed by a lot of people around him. The fact that the title suggests composed letters makes sense, each song its own missive, each targeting a different person or group, a collage of regrets, losses, and disappointments, sometimes pointedly delivered. Musically, it was a tried and true formula. With a camouflage of lyrics decipherable only by those in the know, Elliott expressed a rage he always disavowed if questioned directly. It was a way of having his cake and eating it too. Less autobiographically, the songs, as certain reviewers suggested, amounted to a Dylanesque moment. With the increased potential for polish, the virtually unlimited number of tracks available, and the use of unexpected instrumentation brought in, mainly, by Jon Brion, all of a sudden it seemed as if Elliott, like Dylan with “Like a Rolling Stone,” was forsaking his roots. Lo-fisimplicity had seen its day, never to reappear. The unhappily labeled folkie was now a glittering pop star. Would he prosper in that role, the question seemed to be, or would the label jump undermine the focused, quiet complexity of the earlier, mostly homemade recordings?

These apprehensions proved short lived, and in some ways fatuous. What happened was what always seemed to happen with Elliott. The new album was better than anything that had come before. Improbably he kept improving on what had seemed unimprovable, his art a linear, incremental triumph. As a group, the songs were “more rock,” he reflected, “but they just turned out that way. They didn’t have to be rock songs.”
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But then, as always,
the notion of preset categories—“shorthand ways of saying nothing”—held no interest. Folk he called a “ghetto of rampant sentimentality”—he knew that wasn’t him, from the moment he began recording in Texas. Nor was anything else, really. “The less I think about how I fit in the happier I am,” he told
Triple J
in a 1998 interview. “I don’t really care where I fit into anything or if there’s anything to fit into. It’s just that I like music. It’s not complicated.”

And in most ways, it wasn’t. What emerged was more of the same. The record recycled old and seemingly irrepressible lyrical themes, the ones at the center of all Elliott’s work because they were at the center of his emotional life. Love and hate battle each other as Elliott imagines burning history backward in the first song, “Sweet Adeline,” a nod to his mother’s musical side of the family, his grandmother in particular and her Sweet Adeline choral group. In “Pitseleh” the devil drives him to give up the thing he loves (here that “thing” is JJ Gonson). In “I Didn’t Understand” he admits “there’s nothing here that you’ll miss,” comparing himself to a “cloud of smoke.” “Waltz #1” circles the same dynamic, the same repetition. Because he never leaves his “zone” he goes home alone, wishing he’d never seen the girl’s face. “Amity” takes the formula to its extreme. God made him junk and he’s ready not to love, but “to go,” by which he meant stop living. The album’s second song—the breathtaking “Tomorrow Tomorrow”—spells out in the very first line Elliott’s own “eternal return,” as Nietzsche once called it: “Everybody knows which way you go/Straight to over.” Trauma gives rise to fixed, petrified sentiments that repeat compulsively to no emotional benefit. The past-focused songs keep predicting the same bleak future to the point where sedation alone, being “fully loaded,” stands any chance of disconnecting his head. He says twice in the first two songs he’s “deaf and dumb and done.” He’s heard “the hammer at the lock,” and there’s no way out of the space he’s in. Or there is, potentially, but when he tries following the “reflected sound of everything,” the noise coming out unstoppably—the music, in other words—even it does not lead to anything. He hears it, he makes it, but by doing so he is no less “done.”

Once again, the content of the songs makes for anything but an anti-depressant. Yet just the same, and just as before and always, the songs are undeniably, inexpressibly beautiful, practically Kafkaesque in their baroque suffering. The most attacking songs, the ones aimed at sanctimony and self-righteousness,
at people who seem to think they know what he needs, he groups together toward the end of the record. In “A Question Mark” he gives back hatred to the world that treated him badly, sickened by all the people who seem to know what’s up. Mockingly he repeats the words “you know” nine times, as if to call out all the people who tried setting him straight, who imposed their judgments on his life. The target is the delusion of misguided helpers; he tells them they can give him a call if they ever want to say sorry. But it’s with “Everybody Cares, Everybody Understands” that Elliott really bears down scathingly. This is the remade tune going back to college years, the one first recorded by Harum Scarum in 1989 for the cassette
Trick of the Paris Season
. Musically it is relatively unchanged in basic structure, but Elliott wrote new lyrics reflecting current thoughts and feelings. He first performed the reshaped version just around the start of the year, in January 1998, with the intervention still fresh. Here understanding amounts to a kick in the head, it’s fake, a “quiet lie.” It makes him want to scream and shout, but instead he lies dreaming, he retreats to the solitude of private inner experience, just as he does, too, in “A Question Mark.” There are two responses available, it seems—fury or isolation. Either satisfies, but the longer-term solution, the one he kept resorting to, was isolation. People think they mean well, he sings. They say they care, they say they sympathize, they say they want the best for him. But it is all bullshit. “Fucking ought to stay the hell away from things you know nothing about,” he snarls at the song’s end. It’s clear from the start something heavy is up. Elliott strums a single chord over and over, an ominous tolling of dark sentiment. At its close the song erupts with unexpected smart piano and layered instrumentation as it builds to a climbing crescendo, with Jon Brion on Chamberlin and vibraphone. It’s yet another example of Elliott expertly crafting a tune, as simple guitar chords give way in the end to a musical cacophony recalling Lennon’s “A Day in the Life.”