Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith (43 page)

But like always, it was touch and go, the agreement more fragile than ironclad. They liked each other, that much was clear. It was possible to envision a future, maybe not always a rosy one, maybe not one bereft of all pain, but a future nonetheless, a way of possibly being together. So Chiba immediately asked, “What do you propose we do about it?” Elliott’s answer was unexpected but characteristic: “I’m too depressed for a serious girlfriend.” Chiba, of course, was depressed too; she didn’t see why shared mood problems ought to disqualify the positive feelings they seemed to have. But Elliott held back. He wasn’t sure he had it in him to stay alive, agreements notwithstanding. In fact, as he told Chiba, he’d been entertaining the possibility of dying “accidentally” so as not to hurt those who loved him, using drinking and drugs as instruments of self-cessation. Plus, there was Joanna. How could he like Chiba, he wondered, if he was supposed to be with Joanna? Chiba says Elliott felt as if he had “ruined her life,” and sometimes when he returned from Portland he’d be “super depressed.” All the same he loved Joanna; in many ways she was the one constant in his life, apart from the music, which she was indirectly a part of, at least in terms of the recording process. It was all very frustrating, confusing, a mixed bag of hopefulness and clear-headed self-doubt, but in the end Chiba came away impressed, if not undeterred. Elliott seemed unwilling, admirably so, to “allow his demons to destroy a relationship with someone else.” He said he wished they had met at a different time. For her part Chiba knew what they shared wouldn’t evaporate; she told him she’d always be there, yet privately wondered whether she could wait “for him to go
through whatever it was he had to go through.” This turned out to be a prescient question. What Elliott was about to go through flung him into an abyss.

For now, that abyss was still one year off. And there was plenty to take his thoughts away from inner checkmates. For one thing his grandmother died, and after taping a Jon Brion show at the Santa Monica pier he had to fly out the next morning. This turned out to be the first time Elliott hung out with Alyssa Siegel. He was worried about getting to the funeral on time, so she wound up volunteering to stay with him at his hotel. “That’s how stressed out he would get,” Siegel says. “He didn’t ask me to stay, I offered. It was clear he couldn’t deal with the idea of doing it by himself.”
⁶
He slept as Siegel finished a crossword puzzle. When she got him to the airport, Iggy Pop was also on the flight, a strangely reassuring coincidence. Back from the funeral, he recorded later in 1999 the Lennon tune “Because” for the
American Beauty
soundtrack, the film released in September. It was noteperfect, as George Martin proclaimed, a slow build of texture, all soaring multiple falsetto harmonies that, at first, Elliott did not think he was up to. When the film came out he hesitantly made his way to the afterparty, its location marked by strewn rose petals. As Autumn de Wilde recalled jokingly, “He was miserable.” Showbiz stuff was never his thing; he was more at home in dive bars like Club Tee Gee or the Roost, at least on nights when they weren’t overrun by frat boys from local colleges. But it was a triumph. Here he was in yet another film. His star kept rising, whether he liked the attention or not.

Siegel recalls another moment that inspired, in an indirect fashion, the concept for the next album. She and Elliott were driving around L.A. (like in high school with Garrick Duckler, he drove around all the time, and when he did, there was always music playing, his own or someone else’s) and she slid into the car stereo a tape with songs from the kids’ TV show
Schoolhouse Rock!
Jazz singer and pianist Blossom Dearie had lent her bright, childlike voice to three of the tunes, “Mother Necessity,” “Unpack Your Adjectives,” and “Figure 8.” On the latter, Dearie’s sharp-edged vocal punctures the unspeakably eerie, saturnine roll of the piano. The effect is transporting, the song in its first and final portions seeming to issue from some gloomy, vestigial portion of an infantile unconscious, like a dream one
wakes to partly recall. The middle portion of the song gets a lot more bouncy, with Dearie singing multiplication tables. She concludes with a high vocal run—“place it on its side and it’s a symbol meaning infinity.” As Siegel remembers, the two listened to the tape several times, its atmospherics registering strongly. When Elliott got back to his house he sat down at the piano and worked “Figure 8” out. Then some time in July or August at Capitol Studios in L.A. he recorded it along with numerous other songs, including the piano piece “Bye,” “Junk Bond Trader,” “Color Bars,” and “Everything Reminds Me of Her.”
⁷
Elliott’s version of the “Figure 8” piece models itself on Dearie’s (although he recorded just the first section, and with less instrumentation). There’s the same juxtaposition of crisp vocals with muffled, faraway piano. The song’s theme of a circle turning around upon itself struck a nerve. It’s a picture, inescapably, of infinite repetition. To Elliott it suggested the dead-endedness of flawlessness, a kind of going nowhere and going somewhere at the same time.

This idea of endlessly skating the very symbol of infinity, a Beckett-like stasis in the midst of apparent motion, stuck. It appealed to Elliott’s Kierkegaardian leanings, the nausea and pointlessness and absurdity of existence, suggesting, as he explained, “a self-contained pursuit that potentially could be kind of beautiful and has no destination.” One “can’t get out of it,” he added, “without ruining it. I kind of like that.”
⁸
The song itself, “Figure 8,” never made it on to a record. It was “there until the last minute when it was replaced by ‘Easy Way Out,’ ” he explained. The song got dropped, but not its sentiment. Elliott elected to name the album after the Dearie
Schoolhouse Rock!
tune. “Figure 8” captured where he was at, where he was always at, the majesty of, in his way of thinking, going nowhere.

In interviews leading up to the record release, the usual probings came, this time made more piquant by a perception of inchoate stardom. Sitting for these was its own figure eight; at times it appeared no one ever came up with anything new to ask, the questions recycling themselves, tracing identical arcs forever. Was he a loner? Were his songs autobiographical? Why were his songs so sad? What did he expect people to feel when listening to the record? Does his music have a healing effect? At times he was obviously annoyed by the sameness. For VH1 he sat with tightly crossed legs and tapping toes, far crankier than usual, determined to say as little as possible, a blonde female interviewer growing more flummoxed by the second. But sometimes he rose to the occasion. John Mulvey singled out his maddening inconsistency, telling him “come on, check your script,” to which Elliott shouted, “Everybody’s [inconsistent]. Everybody pretends like they are more coherent so that other people can pretend that they understand them better. That’s what you have to do. If everybody really acted like how they felt all the time, it would be total madness.”
⁹
There is an interesting exchange on the subject of autobiographical source material, a topic Elliott always tried finessing as best he could, saying, for the record, “I will do anything I can within my power to prevent myself becoming just another cartoon rock star with all manner of dysfunctions,” while at the same time, occasionally, in ways not within his power, doing anything but. His songs, he emphasized, are dreams, little movies; “you can watch if you want,” he noted, but the aim wasn’t to make people feel like he did. Interpretations focused on personal secrets he found “insulting.” “True songs for me are about mystery. Their charm is that they are open-ended.” The notion that he just has a “bunch of issues” he unloads on strangers? “Not the case,” he maintained. Still, when questioned specifically, when asked in detail about what sound like cogent hypothetical readings of lyrics, he allowed, “Maybe,” as he “blows cigarette smoke towards the window, from which he’d presumably like to make his getaway.”
¹⁰
The difference seems to be between what the songs are often truly about and the myth Elliott would prefer to represent. He admits that certain songs on the new record did have something to do with, for instance, the lingering resentments about Sierra Tuscon, then quickly adds, “I don’t want to perpetuate the notion that if somebody plays music, they must be fucked up or crazy.”

Elliott at piano in 1999, around the time of the making of
Figure 8. (
Marina Chavez/Corbis
.)

As with
Magical Mystery Tour
and earlier records, at the time Elliott was obsessed with what might be, by critical consensus, one of the most “fucked-up and crazy” albums ever made, Nico’s
The Marble Index
. He called it the perfect antidote to L.A. He liked how it put him in a trance. Nothing moved except the vocals, he said, monotonously wavering over static music. The record came out in 1969, the year of Elliott’s birth. Nico wrote the songs and played her signature harmonium; avant-garde composer (and former Velvet Underground member) John Cale arranged, adding glockenspiel, electric viola, bells, mouth organ, and bosun’s pipe. Nico’s musical pedigree is dense. At Warhol’s suggestion she appeared on The Velvet Underground’s debut album, as, in keeping with Warhol’s stylings, chanteuse. Dylan wrote a song for her, and the Stones’ Brian Jones recorded her first single, produced by Jimmy Page, no less. Assorted efforts to come to terms with
The Marble Index
read like reluctant, frankly terrified night terrors.
Trouser Press
called it “one of the scariest records ever made.” The
Guardian
found it “remarkable,” possessing the “annihilating beauty of a later Mark Rothko painting”—Elliott’s favorite artist—then added fore-warningly, “if you’re ever in the perfect mood to play
The Marble Index
, then it’s probably the last thing you should be playing.” Even Lester Bangs weighed in, in a piece titled “Your Shadow Is Scared of You: An Attempt Not to Be Frightened by Nico.” The vocals, to Bangs, call to mind “twisted
pterodactyl shrieks,” the harpsichord jabs like “murderous hailstones,” Nico herself lying “interred in the endless wastes of the arctic night.” The record, in short, is a brief reactive psychosis, a sort of schizophrenic apophany. Musically, there is zero affinity between the songs Elliott was recording at the time and the songs Nico made. What thrilled him more than the sound was the record’s absolute apartness, its originality and uncategorizability. His goal, if there was one, was to make
Figure 8
“indescribable.” In other words, to make it a little like
The Marble Index
, or like Rothko.

Thankfully, life in its zanier moments punted Elliott out of the Nico daze. On New Year’s Eve 1999 he was back in New York, playing the Knitting Factory, a gig he closed with the song “Last Call.” Afterwards Rye Coalition’s Dave Leto, whose band featured a “brashy Jesus-Lizardy mix with Led Zeppelin and AC/DC,” threw what he called an “epic” Y2K party with Dorien Garry (Leto lived next door). Elliott dropped in after the show in a hooded full-length red robe and slippers.
¹¹
By the time he arrived everyone was totally wasted. They had gotten their hands on a smoke machine. Elliott set it off over and over until it triggered the fire alarm, then ran off screaming and dancing. You could not see the person in front of you, the smoke was so thick. He and Leto tore through Garry’s record collection in search of the Stones’
Performance
album, which, once located, they played on repeat for ten hours. “He was obsessed with that album too,” Leto notes. Leto in fact spent a lot of time hanging out with Elliott in the New York days, “back when he was just a dude at Dorien’s.” Then “it was all jokes, seeing if you could push the limit to the most vulgar thing you could think of, cross-the-line-type stuff.” On occasions when Elliott was asked to DJ in Brooklyn, Leto came along. “Mobs of Brooklyn kids would crowd around,” he remembers, “saying, ‘Hey! I’m a huge fan.’ ” Strangers were always “trying to get a piece of him, make a connection. They felt like they knew him. He was always so courteous with everyone but after a certain point we felt like we needed to make an escape.” For Leto, these exchanges epitomized Elliott’s attitude toward fan worship. “He had zero care for money, fame, adulation. All he wanted to do was make music.” When Dave and Dorien came upon some of the stuff he’d left behind in the move to L.A., they found “sizable checks he didn’t bother to cash” as if the money meant
nothing. The songs brought the money, but the money wasn’t the reason for the songs.

By 2000 Elliott had around twenty-five songs in his pocket, all solid, all promising, the embarrassment of riches he faced routinely. He thought, at first, about making a double record, something he had contemplated even back in the
Either/Or
days. “If I could put out a record every six months I would,” he said. “People used to, but it’s not how the monster is meant to operate.”
¹²
The feel of the tunes—more dense, more edgy and biting—recalled “someone who isn’t in a band emulating one.” At the same time the point wasn’t “to make anything more complicated,” Elliott explained. “Actually, there wasn’t any point. I just started adding instruments because I could,” as he had done with
XO
.
¹³
The precise number of songs actually became an issue, according to producer Rob Schnapf. One idea was to keep the set at eleven or twelve, but then, when two or three songs got nixed, or the tune “Figure 8” set aside, the collection “had this humpback … it became overly weighted in one way or another.”
¹⁴
For the label—“the wrong people making all the judgments,” as Mittleman put it—less was more. Schnapf disagreed. He told people, “We can’t abide by this twelve-song rule. We need to make [the next record] as long as it’s going to take to make sense … I thought it was going to tie everything together.” In the end, “people didn’t get it. It didn’t do it.” Then it was all about culling material, making impossible choices that, no matter what anyone did, never felt satisfying. Elliott’s instinct at the time was to go grand; he wanted a bigger sound, big production, not the “stripped-down, right-in-your-ear” intimacy of early years. But Schnapf kept after him, steering him toward more acoustic stuff, telling him they needed to make sure they got that side of him. At first Elliott resisted, but he slowly came around, the fugitive pleasures of simplicity coming back to him as he blew through one new song after another.