Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith (41 page)

The song setting these two tunes up is older, first performed in spring of 1996. “Bottle Up and Explode!” is one of the several firecracker tunes, a cousin of sorts to “Roman Candle.” It’s an expression of dual identity. The “troublemaker,” a buried second self, proliferates below, gathering strength. Although he’s always been aware of his presence Elliott looks at him like he’s unrecognizable. But he’s coming through anyway, he can “make it outside.”
“I’ll get through,” he warns, “becoming you.” It is a canny song ordering. The bottled-up devil inside explodes, followed by “A Question Mark” and “Everybody Cares, Everybody Understands,” the songs written in the devil’s voice.

But the fire and brimstone is only part of the record, its own compartmentalized closet of rage. “Baby Britain” is a sublime pop confection with a slight nod to the Beatles’ “Getting Better,” about drinking with a girl who floats over a “sea of vodka.” The Beatles even get an explicit mention as the two listen to “Revolver.” A minor theme in the record is drink, and everyone seems to be getting hammered. “Bled White” has Elliott wasted in order to take away the curse (although all it does it make him feel worse). “Sweet Adeline” extols the feeling of sedation already mentioned. Happiness arrives only when the bottle’s broken, it appears. And although it’s hard to imagine any real solution, Elliott still musters a kind of half-baked hopefulness, deciding, at the end of “Bled White,” “I’m not fucked, not quite.”

Then there’s “Independence Day,” one of Elliott’s most hopeful songs by far about a “future butterfly” biding his time until finally he soars brilliantly. The temptation is to connect the tune to Elliott, to see it as a moment of positive feeling. In fact, it was written about his New York friend Josh. Dorien Garry is certain of this, since it was one of the few occasions Elliott told her explicitly what a song was about (he mentioned the same connection in an interview, as well, calling the song “optimistic,” its message being “you have everything you need to be happy but you’ve just got to wait a bit”). Garry knew Josh and had introduced him to Elliott. The two became close during the roving East Coast year. Finding the good in others was always a lot easier than finding it in himself, although it was there, of course, just constantly getting snuffed out.

The record’s crowning moment, Elliott’s crowning moment in fact, comes with song number three. “Waltz #2 (XO),” the album’s single, is a pop masterpiece from inception to close, cited even by one of Elliott’s heroes, Elvis Costello. The song went through a number of iterations, as Elliott, out of fear of what it might reveal, revised to disguise. The opening is inexpressibly ominous, a perfect distillation of dark intent, creating a mood of foreboding, as drums give way to repeated guitar chords much like those in “Everybody Cares.” Guitar lead then tracks a melody down as piano comes in to duplicate the same run. There’s a momentary pause, followed by a
skipped drum beat, and the first verse begins. In a weird way the song sounds like nothing else in Elliott’s corpus of work. It is a strange singularity—everything led up to it, but nothing resembles it. It’s utterly
sui generis
. The basic plot was described earlier. The setting is a karaoke bar, like the ones Elliott frequented in Portland, such as Chopsticks Express on East Burnside. Bunny sings a tune, as does Charlie. Her song, “Cathy’s Clown,” calls Charlie out; his, “You’re No Good,” summarizes his feelings about Elliott as a young man. As for Bunny there is ambivalence. She blunts her feelings, she pretends she does not see, and he actually reassures her, saying “it’s alright, nothing’s wrong,” although occasionally in live performances he replaced that line with “it’s alright, it’s all wrong.” His final conclusion is simple and heartbreaking. He’ll never really know her now—he’s left Texas behind for Portland—but all the same, he’s going to love her always.

The record was released August 25, 1998, with a collage cover of splashed black-and-white Polaroids and two oblique shots of Elliott crouched over with eyes closed in one, and tuning a guitar in the other. As usual Elliott is not the cover’s focus. His name appears at the bottom, but to make out the two images of him takes some doing.
Spin
noted the “sweetly inescapable catchiness” of the tunes, which hung around in your head “like stray dogs shown kindness for the first time.” Not self-pitying, not raging against the pain, in the suspect words of the
Spin
reviewer, Elliott is “just sad, and he understands his ache to make it sweet.” Others noted the increased amount of sounds at Elliott’s disposal, finding these to be a welcome expansion of what had sometimes been a “samey blandness.” To
Sputnikmusic
Elliott’s “imagery and allusions” were “beyond comparison,” and though he is said to “speak of suicide in an almost prophetic way,”
XO
“seems like the perfect record, almost too perfect.” The BBC observed an “expert maintenance of atmosphere.” The lyrics, they say, depict “clear emotional unrest,” and despite the fact that “situations get the better of Smith, resolution rarely presents itself.”
Treblezine
called the lyrics “heartbreakingly tender and true.” When the dust cleared many years later after Elliott’s death,
Spin
placed
XO
at number ninety on their list of best albums of the last twenty-five years (this was in February 2012),
Pitchfork
at number twenty-three of records from the 1990s.

One of the more madcap and apparently enormously enjoyable offshoots
of
XO
was
Strange Parallel
, a roughly twenty-minute bizarro film made with Elliott by Steve Hanft, an independent film director responsible for Beck’s hilarious “Loser” video (filmed on a three hundred-dollar budget). In one short cut the cinephile filmmaker chain smokes in a darkened theater, observing in a French accent something along the lines of, “This has style but no continuity.” It’s an adroit description, a sort of built-in getting ahead of the story. As a kid Hanft had commandeered three records from his parents that he wore out listening to:
Yellow Submarine
, the Monkees’
Greatest Hits
, and Dylan’s
John Wesley Harding
. He went through a hardcore Devo phase, “then all of a sudden I was punk.” He sported spiky hair and started turning up at Black Flag and Bad Brains shows. Yet like Elliott his tastes were democratic. He liked George Jones, Fleetwood Mac, Leonard Cohen, and the Velvet Underground too. As he said by way of summary, “I can’t like music that is overproduced in a crummy way or has no spirit.”
¹⁶
Hanft also played in bands, one with Beck called Loser before the “Loser” single appeared. (Later the band name was changed to Liquor Cabinet.) His stage persona amounted to “screaming a lot in the mic wearing only underwear and a stupid wig.” Elliott came to some of these shows; his typical request was for a tune called “Beeper City.” As for filmmaking Hanft was always drawn, he explained, to “losers who are original.” He did not know exactly why except for the fact that “I love them.”

The film begins with Elliott scurrying across a road comically in order to exhume a guitar buried in the woods. A film crew of two keep wandering around Portland asking, “Have you seen Elliott Smith?” It’s established that no one knows where he is, he’s the archetypal nomadic free spirit. It is our fourth day here, they add, and although they keep checking out different bars in the hope of meeting up with Elliott, “he keeps giving us almost the right address,” they realize. Freeing the guitar from its underground hole, Elliott then sits and sings “Waltz #2 (XO).” At different points a bartender enters the narrative to say things like “Elliott is a real gentleman” or “He’s really quiet” or “He’s a lovely person.” In fact it is this bartender who provides the film’s title. He notes a strange parallel with Elliott in that he too is a writer, and what Elliott did in the bar was write. One scene features “Miss Misery” lyrics sitting face up on the bar as a toy robot shoots fire at them. It seems to be an acerbic comment on fame and on the tiresomeness
of the song in the wake of the Oscars. In a very nice touch Elliott lights a cigarette on the robot flame.

Scenes drop in desultorily, creating a collage effect to mirror, most likely accidentally, the
XO
cover. Elliott is shown recording “Brand New Game.” He’s filmed as an interviewer queries him, inaccurately, about performing at the Grammys. He’s shown smoking, with Joanna Bolme in the room too, in a white lab jacket. Larry Crane of Jackpot! recording, with whom Elliott recorded “Baby Britain” and “Amity,” which in its original version included Pete Krebs on vox, is heard to say, “It’s hard to find Elliott.”

But then the plot finds itself as Elliott sits in a hotel room watching a ridiculous Spanish infomercial for a mechanical hand. It promises to “expand your guitar virtuosity immediately” for three payments of 5,999 dollars. Elliott buys one from a guy on the street calling out “Get your robot hand! Robot hand is the future!” This is followed by a cut to a boardroom in which a man in a suit and headphones who’s been lurking throughout the film urges Elliott, along with several others, to “get the robot hand.” (He’s actually already gotten it, so the scene is a little nonsensical.) The absurd demands from “the suit” in the meeting pokes still more fun at the industry side of things, it seems clear. Elliott plays a small section of the gorgeous George Harrison tune “Isn’t It a Pity,” then says, with hilarious deadpan, “I think the music business will eventually crush me. But I’m ready.”

Things wind down goofily with a shot of Quasi, Sam Coomes in a skeleton outfit, Janet Weiss dressed as Cleopatra, sitting in a backyard talking about Elliott’s dark lyricism. Elliott then has a “good old daydream” on a plane, which leads to a blood-spattered scene of his arm being hacksawed off by a Jamaican surgeon, then later tossed on a bar where Sean Croghan appears as a drill sergeant, screaming at Elliott: “I can’t help you till you admit you have a problem!”—a loaded statement if ever there was one, under the circumstances. And: “You have to admit your future is uncertain!” Toward the end Elliott plays ZZ Top, followed by Rachmaninoff. The filmmaker intones, “Even though we worked on the film for a few months, Elliott was still a mystery to us. He lends a hand to all the lovely ones”—a robot hand, as it were, but still a hand, broadly speaking.

Constituting anything but mainstream MTV-type fare, and with its length, hardly a commercially viable vehicle for positioning Elliott as a
tender, sensitive artist type à la “Miss Misery,” the film illustrates both Elliott’s willingness to make light of his persona as well as his artistically experimental mind-set, how he wanted, to the very end, to leapfrog convention, usually sardonically. It also speaks well of DreamWorks, for that matter, since they officially produced it. There was no music video made for the record’s single, “Waltz #2 (XO),” but there was for “Baby Britain,” also directed by Hanft. It recycles shots of Elliott in the robot hand, but focuses on him in the studio with Bolme—for several years the relationship was on again, off again—as he plays every instrument in sight. A few live shots also get thrown in, two with Quasi’s Janet Weiss on drums. Bolme’s presence is especially effectively conveyed. It is always in passing, the camera never lingers on her, nor does it linger much at all throughout. But it’s clear, somehow, that she and Elliott are exceptionally close. She keeps popping up in the studio, hovering lovingly and supportively. Although it does not present itself in this way at all, the video comes across as a sort of love poem.

By October 17 it was back, forcefully, to the big time, as Elliott played “Waltz #2 (XO)” on
Saturday Night Live
. That Xena’s Lucy Lawless hosted makes for amusing serendipity given Elliott’s Xena love (at least with the sound off). Rumor has it that producers asked him to play “Miss Misery,” an idea he rejected. Jon Brion, it turns out, was part of the backing band that night, as he had been on the record version of the tune. Then it was off to Europe in the first part of November, Elliott playing Brussels, Paris, Norway, London, then returning to Seattle for the Deck the Hall Ball on December 9, 1998, an event also featuring Courtney Love’s and Eric Erlandson’s band Hole. Newer tunes kept entering the set lists: “Stupidity Tries” (the clever Oscars bash) and “Ballad of Big Nothing.” Two cover tunes made consistent appearances, too. “Thirteen” (already featured in Jem Cohen’s film
Lucky Three
) was a sweet Big Star number written by Alex Chilton after watching a Beatles performance. His band was British invasion–inspired, influenced heavily by the Beatles and the Kinks, just like Elliott was.
Rolling Stone
called “Thirteen” “one of rock’s most beautiful celebrations of adolescence.” (Elliott’s recorded version was later used, posthumously, in the 2005 film
Thumbsucker
.) Another cover, George Harrison’s “Give Me Love (Give Me Peace on Earth),” often closed this set of shows. Friends and
fans alike often debated which Beatle Elliott most resembled musically. Melodically, it is easy to see the McCartney influence in songs like “Baby Britain,” and Elliott sometimes stood up for Paul when others bashed his brainless poppiness. Elliott clearly adored Lennon. He covered “Jealous Guy” regularly during 1998, and some suggest “A Day in the Life” was his all-time favorite Beatles tune. Harrison is sometimes left out of these comparisons, although he shouldn’t be. In some ways Elliott’s songs are unmistakably Harrisonesque with their jangly swirling atmospheres, their way of sounding slightly off, slightly disarming while also listenable. Years later, according to Elliott’s friend Nelson Gary, Elliott even “started intentionally looking like George Harrison circa “All Things Must Pass,’” growing his hair longer, dressing like a hobo hippie.
¹⁷

The merciless touring, the interviews, the grinding fame-shot—Elliott seemed to handle it all passably well. It’s not as if he collapsed in a pool of panic at the Oscars. As he said so many times, to the point, in fact, where the remark begins to sound suspicious, the night was too bizarre for any real nervousness. Antidepressants might have helped to take the edge off, although in the long run they never seemed like a workable solution. No doubt his confidence was growing, the accolades shoring up feelings of self-assurance. He was very good, the world kept telling him, and even if large parts of him doubted that proclamation, some portion of the message must have started to snake through, to alter his always shaky self-perceptions. Still, he grappled with guilt. He told himself “What I do is no better than anyone else,” so why this success, and why for me? He was embarrassed signing autographs, being recognized. He made music because it was in him, not to please anyone. The latter was a constantly surprising side effect. There were stomach problems, brought on by nerves or drinking, or the combination of the two. He’d sometimes stop in the middle of performances to use the bathroom. But the wheels were in motion, fame had him spinning, holding on to the wheel for dear life. He loved hair-raising carnival rides, the ones no one else dared trying, and fame was a Scrambler like no other. Yet as 1998 faded into 1999, the
XO
touring chewed him up to the point where he got sick of playing his own songs. In March, for instance, as he worked his way from the Fillmore in San Francisco to L.A., New Orleans, Austin, Orlando, Nashville, New York, and Boston, he had exactly six
nights off. In April it was much the same—roughly ten nights off, with a second trip to Europe beginning on April 17.