Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith (47 page)

All of the worst in Elliott, a clear representation of the suicidal rut he’d wedged into, was on ghastly display in August, when he attempted, terribly unwisely, a performance at Sunset Junction. He wore braided pigtails and a pink hat, in full George Harrison mode. He could hardly string sentences together, talking or singing, his speech slurred and garbled. Several songs
he aborted, or managed to get through in a truncated fashion, cutting them off in random spots. His delicate finger-picking abandoned him; mostly he strummed, almost amateurishly. He tried “Southern Belle,” dropped it, then segued into “Last Call.” On “Alameda,” as if talking to himself, he got to the point in the song where he sang “you can’t finish what you start,” then shut it down, smiling at the coincidence. Obviously, he was high and sedated, listing on a wave of legal and illegal drugs. “I’m sorry,” he offered, miserably. “I can’t remember the words. I’m so fucked up.” At this time it wasn’t just the heroin. In fact, to some, the heroin was the least of it. He’d taken to carting around thirty-odd prescription bottles in a toiletry travel bag he sometimes called his “man purse,” which he dipped into precariously. He had “zero objectivity” about what he was doing, his goal to “get high or to destroy himself.”
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A preferred defense was intellectualization, “he’d get obsessed with the action of meds in his body even if they damaged him,” studying putative mechanisms of action, interaction effects that were purely speculative. The crowd, on hand to witness catastrophe, chimed in with encouragement, egging him on, calling out songs, begging him to finish whichever number he’d started. It was the kind of performance almost never seen. Essentially it wasn’t a performance at all, nothing was held back, nothing concealed. This was life blowing up live. There was no end, no encore. When the music stopped Elliot wouldn’t step off stage and return, out of view, to who he really was. This was who he really was. Yet what people started to realize, not the least bit happily or reassuringly, was that Elliott actually could stay this way indefinitely. He had built up, shaped like a muscle-bound athlete, an ironclad constitution. Nothing took him down. He kept coming back. In the old days what he came back from was alcohol. He’d get hammered, then record the next morning, impervious to hangovers. Now it was everything, all the time, and he kept somehow living, even if it mattered little to him to do so, as if the fact that he stayed alive justified, or countered, the damage of the path he found himself on. If he wasn’t dead by now, why stop? Maybe this was, actually, the one way he could marginally exist. High, dazed, incapable of feeling.

So he did what was second nature. He went back into the studio. What else was there? Besides, the songs were waiting; they did not forget him, they did not abandon or judge. Shon Sullivan had a buddy and sometime
bandmate, Dave McConnell, with a studio, Satellite Park, on a cliff in Malibu. Sullivan was there as Elliott got down, yet again, to business. In fact, he was working on his own record with McConnell,
Blue Swan Orchestra
, which would appear in 2002, a set of tunes strongly influenced and inspired by Elliott, who had always championed Sullivan’s songwriting. He had written quite a few of the numbers while on the
Figure 8
tour, in spare moments on the bus or whenever he had a few hours to himself. Sullivan’s song “Summertime” features a diminished seventh chord first introduced to him by Elliott, in fact. While at Satellite Park Elliott, essentially on his own, tinkered some with “Summertime,” layering over Sullivan’s vocals a total of thirty-six overdubbed high falsetto harmonies. “He did it just because he wanted to do it,” says Sullivan. “Like, ‘Oh yeah. I did this vocal part. See what you think of it. If it works for you, great.’” Sullivan was touched. He loved it. With Elliott’s stealth assistance, the song soared.

“The hours were intense,” Sullivan remembers. “He’d want to work at night,” a detail jibing with the witchy three A.M. vibe many of the tunes possessed. At the same time, according to Sullivan, it was clearly a “very dark period. All the usual vices kicked back in.” It looked grim, Sullivan felt. Elliott was “very thin.” There were evenings Shon “hardly recognized him.” He was bored with the attitude everyone seemed to have, this sense that he needed to be rescued. He wanted none of it. To Sullivan, “that’s definitely what happened with Valerie, for instance. She was in way over her head.”

The studio’s location encouraged anything but lifelessness. Visually, the place was a revelation—angled into a hill, with an expansive view of the rich blue Pacific flattening out into infinity like a massive pastel plate. It was a kind of nirvana. But the feeling as Elliott and McConnell worked ran in an antithetical direction. Elliott, it quickly became clear, was a complete mess. The afternoons with Pickle laying down “Inspector Detector” on his father’s four-track, or with JJ in her Portland basement, or with Upping-house and her boxer Annie whimpering at the door—all this receded to a dot on the horizon. They were someone else’s life by now. They belonged to a history that seemed to have no connection to the present. Now, through fall of 2001 and on into 2002, it wasn’t just heroin taking Elliott away. He was smoking crack. He was abusing benzos like Klonopin. He was, to get some energy back, relying on Adderall, an ADHD med. He had become a
living drug cocktail, a human pharmacy, spending, on average, fifteen hundred dollars per day on his habits, according to some rough estimates. There was no way to help him, McConnell recalled. “He would have killed himself before he let anyone intervene.”
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McConnell says he had Elliott on a sort of suicide watch (whatever that means exactly). “At least ten times” he tried OD’ing, apparently.
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“He would say things like, ‘The other day I popped fifteen Klonopin, thinking it would help me die and it didn’t.’ ” Or, “Fuck man! I just did eight hundred dollars’ worth of drugs in an hour. What’s wrong? What the fuck!” No one had seen anything like it. Nothing fazed him. He absorbed any blow then stumbled back for more, begging to get hit, begging for the TKO that never came. In his mind it was all very scientific, his body and brain a carefully conducted experiment. “He knew more about drugs than most therapists,” says McConnell. “He talked about it like a scholar. He had medical books”—the Physician’s Desk References he bought at thrift shops, out of date but still usable, Band-Aids serving as bookmarks.
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McConnell recalls one drunken night in which the two posed for pictures in front of prescription bottles, stacked like a pyramid. It was crazy, he says. Besides, the regimen made no sense, each drug canceling the effects of another. In addition to the Klonopin and Adderall, the crack and heroin, there were antidepressants, antipsychotics, Elliott’s brain a chemical soup.

At one point he referenced a possible psychotic episode while making
Figure 8
. This wasn’t something anyone else seemed to know about. It’s contestable whether it happened at all. But Elliott said he’d carved the word “Now” into his arm with a knife, sick of everyone foisting possible futures upon him. He claimed he had written “Everything Means Nothing to Me” with blood dripping out of him, congealing viscously. The more common story was that he’d been on mushrooms at the time. Perhaps he was actually referencing that; perhaps there was more going on, it’s impossible to say.

But high or sober, unhinged or clearheaded, music got made, of a kind utterly new. McConnell set up mics all over the house—a virtual nerve spaghetti—so that when inspiration struck, he’d get it on tape. In keeping with what was going on internally, the inner discord, Elliott’s aim was fierceness. The sound had to be raw, uncooked. The sound had to be nasty,
“sonically twisted and lyrically abstract.” He had spoken before about the impossibility of capturing chaos, how it was worth trying but hard to bring off. Now he gave it a shot, the songs like drip paintings splashed across canvas, nearly unrecognizable as art. In the back of his mind the model was the
White Album
, a disjointed, free-form mix of styles, some tunes sweetly melodic, some snarling and screeching, like Lennon’s “Yer Blues.” On purpose he’d detune guitars. He waved aside concerns about pitch. If anything sounded pretty or traditional, he’d efface it, wanting the music to “make your stomach churn.” In short, the songs were a mirror. They were a way in, not a way out. They advertised dysfunction, a portrait of the artist as perfected, frank, brutal mess.

The way McConnell saw it was simplified. It seemed, to him, like catharsis. “He was getting shit out,” McConnell felt. “Lyrically,” he said, “this was the most profound record I’ve ever heard in my life, from any artist. I’d hear the words and I’d just start crying. He was really speaking to his oppressors … Saying a lot of things he just had to get off his chest.” Yet catharsis implies relief. And there was none of that. If Elliott got things off his chest, they didn’t dissipate. They were lethal. They came out and stayed, pointing fingers, jabbing him in the chest. And the songs weren’t just about oppressors. More than attacking real and imagined enemies, Elliott attacked himself. He was the target. The weapon might have been jammed, but the ammo was live.

In all, the sessions resulted in nearly a dozen songs, including, in various versions, finished or unfinished, “Stickman,” “See You in Heaven,” “Little One,” “Mr. Goodmorning,” and others. The vibe was “My Bloody Valentine,” a band Elliott was into then, injected with melody—a swirling, looping metal machine music not unlike Velvet Underground’s “The Murder Mystery.”

One tune epitomizes the new direction better than any other, the searching, merciless “King’s Crossing.” It stands alone. Along with “Waltz #2 (XO),” or possibly “Last Call” from
Roman Candle
, it’s Elliott’s unquestionable masterpiece, drug-addled and suicidal, as if through dark magic he dragged it out by the hair, kicking and screaming. It had been around for a while. He’d recorded acoustic versions; it was on cassettes he’d sent to friends. In that form it was sweet and sad, no major departure from the
songs he’d been making since first going solo. With the new treatment it grew fangs, snapping at empty air like a cornered dog. The lyrics went through several revisions, some just as effective as the finished version. The picture he presents is pitiless. He’s a scraping subject bowing low; he can’t go any farther down. He’s the “singing scream of a failing fake.” Judges, appointed for life, reach harrowing conclusions—everyone needs to die in their prime. He said he wouldn’t pay attention; he finds he already has, however. Someone tells him to grab his gun; if he doesn’t, the world below will destroy him. You’re a hero, he decides, “once you’ve become no one.” Beverly Hills fat cats show up. Skinny Santas with slurred speech say something, but he only understands “every other word.” The song starts with aimless electric guitar, chattering voices discussing someone falling out of a tree, Elliott singing a high “ahhh.” Then, smoothly and seamlessly, piano chords appear, on Philip Glass–like repeat, as if they could go on forever, as if they could be the song in its entirety. When vocals kick in, the piano drops out, music tumbling choppily, like it’s falling down the stairs. As Elliott reaches the line, “I can’t prepare for death any more than I already have,” drums stumble in, as if to drive the sentiment, pounding the message. He’s “seen the movie,” he says. He knows what happens. “It’s a hell of a role, if you can keep it alive.” Whether he “fucks up” or not makes no difference. He’s got a date with a rich white lady, a heroin anima. “Give me one good reason not to do it,” he shouts. But he doesn’t really want an answer; the question’s rhetorical. In any case, when he played the song live, Ashley—and later, Jennifer Chiba—fell into the habit of calling out, “Because we love you.” Love was the reason. People cared, people wanted him alive—that’s why not to do it. But Elliott serenely answered back, “So do it.” Do it
because
he was loved. Do it to set others free from him. Do it as a gift. The song ends with a twin plea, part directed at himself, part at others. “Don’t let me get carried away” and “don’t let me be carried away.” The prescience of these lines is terrifying and uncanny. Interestingly, they arrived as a last revision. Initially in the song, pretty nurses and instruments on a tray were meant to “take the sickness away.” In final form hope has faded. It’s not sickness coming to an end. It’s Elliott.

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By December 20, 2001, Elliott was back home, temporarily, in Portland, at the Crystal Ballroom downtown. The crowd was deliriously energized, Elliott less so, his speech slurred, his guitar playing knuckly, his ability to remember chords and lyrics always in question. The silence was thick as he sang, alone, all acoustic. But as songs concluded everyone erupted, screaming out requests, telling him he looked great, telling him they love him. At one point someone said “Come back to Portland.” “I’m gonna come back to Portland,” he replied, then added, “I think. I’m gonna move out of L.A., that’s for sure … It sucks.” A girl near the front informed him it was her birthday; she asked for “Miss Misery.” He wasn’t sure he could bring it off but he tried, then aborted it. “I put that one way out of my mind. It was too much,” he explained. “Division Day,” a tune possibly referencing the street he lived paces away from back in the Heatmiser days, ended similarly. He did not get through it, saying, “I don’t know this anymore. There has to be a major fuck-up somewhere.” As he finished “True Love,” his heroin sweetheart tune, he told everyone “that’s a true story. An epic.” It’s a confession of his mental state. As was his custom at the time, he carried with him his bag of pills, his man purse. Sadly, he showed it to friends, as if almost proudly providing evidence of how messed up he was, as if to say, “I know I’m hurting you all. I’m sorry”—but not, they felt, sorry enough to stop. Stopping was not in the plan. Drugs in all forms had become, friends realized—this time more forcefully than ever—his new self-identity. The voice was the pills. They were a veil over everything. The person they saw in front of them was a shell. He said he wasn’t capable of feeling. He seemed like a zombie, he seemed lobotomized. For many who knew him this was to be a final image; some never saw him again. The holidays came and went, and he was back, not to Portland, but to L.A. Impossibly, there was more trouble awaiting him. It would get worse, then better, then worse again.