Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith (6 page)

“Wouldn’t Mama Be Proud?”, also off
Figure 8
, reads like another Oscars-related number, although it’s hard to say for sure. Here Elliott’s a
great pretender, his mother a pretty NCO, or noncommissioned officer.
³¹
He said she’d have something to tell her friends about what he did in light of the Academy Awards, so her pride in him is a source of satisfaction. Though the sky has gone black, he’s told he’s on the right track; his mother knows he can keep it together.

Even much later tunes like “A Distorted Reality’s Now a Necessity to Be Free” contain, in some versions, surprising Oscar references. Draft lyrics picture Elliott fit poorly “in my Prada white” (crossed out) with the additional line, “didn’t have a chance,” also crossed out, replaced by “dollared up in virgin white.” “Go By” repeats the reference, although it’s not clear when he wrote the lyrics. It’s therefore either prescient in a weird way or retrospective, the first possibility most uncanny of all. He is wound up tightly, “dressed all in white,” some “torn main sail”—another sea allusion.
³²
He blows out to drift.

Fame is always a surprise. One doesn’t know what it means until it arrives. Before that, it’s an abstract, a possible future, nothing to contend with except intellectually. When it comes, though, it’s a problem. It fits or it doesn’t. It feels good or it feels bad. Elliott was always insistent that he wanted to make music
for himself
; if others happened to like it, that was fine, a pleasant surprise, but in some essential way unintended. Barry Manilow said the following about Judy Garland; it captures Elliott’s situation perfectly: “Everything she did was filled with the truth. I think that’s the big difference between her and everybody else. Everyone else, oh yeah, they’re great singers—they do verbal acrobatics. But they don’t tell the truth. This woman always told the truth.” Faking it is protection; it’s the faker on display. Openness is vulnerability. It is you up there, only you. Be careful, Elliott said, if you decide to be open. It’s your life you’re talking about. And in Elliott’s case, that life held secrets. No wonder he wanted the hype to decline. He was now a Somebody. But he preferred being a Nobody.

There are artists
who begin vaguely, aware of a gift but not sure what to do with it, how to make it tangible. This is perhaps the more average scenario. Then there are artists, like Elliott, who discover their medium immediately. One feels they were “born with it,” whether they truly were or not. Elliott was writing songs in seventh grade. They came in the wind. He found a voice and he never stopped making music, even after it was nearly impossible to do so. It only stopped when he stopped. The Best Original Song nomination, then, was hardly a fluke. From the sixth grade on, if not earlier, Elliott was writing an original song almost every day.

It all started prosaically in the suburbs of Dallas, Texas—first Duncanville and then Cedar Hill. Elliott spent the first fourteen years of his life there, a fact he later memorialized with a tattoo of the state on his upper left arm, a permanent visual reminder of a complex period, one he returned to frequently, in his head, in different types of therapy, and in the music itself. There was turmoil from the very beginning, almost from before the beginning. Smith’s father, Gary Mac Smith, left his mother, Bunny Kay Berryman, when Elliott was zero, as he liked to say. Reasons for the parting are impossible to describe. Neither Gary nor Bunny have spoken about it on record, nor have they said much at all about Elliott officially, electing to keep their memories to themselves. On record, Elliott also had little specific to say about his father’s departure. If the subject came up in interviews, which it did on occasion, he turned elliptical, politely signaled it out of bounds. No amount of coaxing ever succeeded in drawing the facts out of him. Friends of his, from the time and from later in his life, recall a mainly amicable separation. Some refer to possible infidelities. One recalls Elliott saying that his father, a Vietnam vet and psychiatrist (still practicing in Portland, Oregon, as of 2012), “ran off with a young nurse.” This may or
may not be true. But a conjecture is that the line from the song “King’s Crossing”—“dead men talk to all the pretty nurses”—obliquely references the event. Whatever really happened, Gary, his biological father, was gone, and with him the possibility of an ideal intact family. Elliott literally was zero, and he felt like a zero, he often said. His birth name was Steven Paul Smith, an appellation he never felt fit, one he’d eventually erase (although not legally).
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Had he been a girl, Chiba says, the intention was to call him “Monday.” For his first four years, life was Elliott and Bunny. It wasn’t easy, it wasn’t always perfect, but it was hardly a particularly painful time either. Pain came later, as it often does, a sort of deferred trauma. His father’s leaving was a prototypical first abandonment that left him wondering when the next one might occur.

Bunny taught school in the Dallas area, a career lasting thirty years. First grade was her passion, but she covered all levels, mostly elementary, at a number of different schools, serving a variety of populations. The kids loved her, and she loved them back. Her family included many amateur musicians; playing and singing was a regular occurrence. Elliott always expressed insecurity about his voice. He wasn’t the sort of person, he said, who could wake up in the morning and immediately sing perfectly on key. He had to work at it, find his style, his truest tone. Bunny and her mother were naturals. It all came easily to them. Margaret Berryman, Elliott’s grandmother, sang in a Sweet Adeline choral group; she also played piano. Bill Berryman, Bunny’s father, joined the Musician’s Union when he was just a teenager so he could play at dances. At that time he specialized in drums (an instrument Elliott took up too). Bill Berryman’s real talent, however, was the “vibes”—sometimes called the vibraharp or vibraphone, visually similar to the xylophone or glockenspiel but with aluminum rather than wooden bars. Berryman’s gift for the instrument was nationally recognized; he was always in several bands at once, even well into his 70s and 80s. An online flyer from December 2006 describes him—then 87 years old—as a “musician, mason, and minister who shares his love of music by playing his vibraphone at local nursing homes and assisted living facilities.”
²

Berryman didn’t choose music as a primary profession; it was simply too difficult to earn a living. Instead he made and installed signs. For a time he owned a motel; he welded; he built barges; and he worked for the
Titche-Goettinger Department Store in Dallas, managing the store’s commercial division. But music was the constant, his true joy and passion.

There were occasions when Berryman and his wife Margaret babysat Elliott in the Oak Cliff area, and music always featured. One grandparent might sit at piano—Bill Berryman played it too—as the other sang, or both sang, in harmony. These babysitting afternoons would have been among Elliott’s first exposures to music, played by genuine and abiding lovers of the art. Bunny had a younger brother, Price, also in bands as a guitar player. Occasionally he sat in as well.

Like her parents, Bunny played piano some. She was also in a number of choirs at Graceland College (no connection to Elvis). The school, currently, is a private liberal arts university with campuses in Iowa and Missouri, changed from the days when Bunny attended. Founded in 1895 as Lamoni College, it was established by, and affiliated with, the Community of Christ, formerly known as The Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (or RLDS). Graceland was not exactly Mormon when Bunny was there. Some describe it as more Protestant-like, with all the “weird aspects” of Mormonism excluded. Its mission was to proclaim Jesus Christ and to promote communities of joy, hope, love, and peace. Its members adopted no official religious creed, believing instead that the perception of truth is always qualified by human nature and experience. In other words, the so-called “faith journey” was held to be highly individualized and heterogeneous.

Elliott’s grandfather Bill was ordained as a minister, working as pastor for the Dallas Restoration Branch of the RLDS, which proclaimed the church’s “original doctrines,” including the “privilege of worshipping Almighty God according to the dictates of conscience, and allowing all men the same privilege, to worship how, where, or what they may.” In a short summary of what he stood for, and how his faith directed his life and actions, Berryman said simply, “I try to teach about how to live and get along with your fellow man.”

Growing up with religion all around him did not turn Elliott into any sort of official believer. The family actually only went to church “sometimes.” He did, however, refer to an “idiosyncratic version” of spirituality, a church “of which I’m the only member.” “I see no reason,” he said, “not to
believe in whatever I want to. I almost don’t care if I’m correct in what I believe. If there’s nothing more than what you can see happening, that would make the world seem small.” As for what happens when you die, Elliott was agnostic. He didn’t much like the idea of being buried or “burned up.” As he put it, probably more than half-jokingly, “I would prefer to walk out in the desert and be eaten by birds.”
³
Elliott never quite warmed to the idea of God, never embraced it personally or intellectually. Hell was a different matter. The idea fascinated him, unnerved him. In later years he’d sometimes sign his name “Helliott,” as if declaring some invisible affinity.

From day one Elliott, born August 6, 1969, was a happy, creative, artistic, well-adjusted boy. There were no signs of any sort of mood problem, any emotional or behavioral difficulty at all. Family and friends called him Stevie. The switch to Elliott—a high school girlfriend’s nickname for him that finally just stuck, deriving, some believe, from the film E.T., whose alien-loving main character was also named Elliott—came years later, after the trying out of several pseudonyms. On certain early high school song credits he signed off as Johnny Panic, a name, according to friend Garrick Duckler, he never seriously considered being called in public. Later he contemplated Elliott Stillwater-Rotter, which Duckler felt was too “big and clunky … it didn’t suit his style.”
⁴
Whatever the case, over time “Steve” rankled. “He would often say things like, ‘Steve Smith. Yep. That’s the name they gave me. Good job, mom and dad. Real original,’ ” according to Duckler. “Yep, pretty flashy.”

His father’s leaving was a blow, but not one he had the ability to feel acutely or comprehend at the time. But a change he would register, one with fixed repercussions in his life and art, arrived when Elliott was four. Bunny remarried. The man, Elliott’s stepfather, was Charlie Welch.

Welch was a self-employed businessman who liked to move around. He wasn’t exactly nomadic, but he had the wandering mentality. He sold insurance for Farmers over several decades. For a time he owned an art gallery. He fished—catch-and-release fly and Texas bass. He played bridge, golf, and later in life, around 2004, was a contestant in the World Series of Poker at Binion’s Horseshoe in Las Vegas, where he shared a table with Johnny Chan.
⁵
In a photo taken in 2006, Welch wears a baseball cap and sunglasses. His beard and mustache are gray. Bunny stands beside him, smiling, her resemblance to Elliott striking.

As childhood friends of Elliott’s recall, Charlie grew up in East Texas. His father was honorable, pragmatic, strict, hardworking, never effusive or loving. He worked the oil fields, and lost some fingers in a job-related accident. The focus was on raising tough kids, on finding success the hard way, being your own person, paying your own way. In his stepfather role, Charlie, like his own father, was anything but easy to please. Any imperfection, trivial or not, was noticed and commented on, so the household atmosphere was tense. (In one version of the song “Junk Bond Trader,” Elliott describes a need to “execute every day with precision.”)

Information on Welch is hard to come by. Just like Elliott’s biological parents, he’s never spoken publicly about Elliott, and there is a sense that, even in private, his thoughts are closely guarded. In one of his last and by far most revealing interviews, Elliott says, in an odd turn of phrase, “I lived with my mom’s second marriage.”
⁶
“The domestic situation just wasn’t good,” he adds charitably, “but it’s not something I want to dredge up because that’s been worked out between me and the person and they don’t need to feel bad about it forever.” To a different interviewer in 2001 he treads a similar line: “Most of my recollections from that time I really wouldn’t want to share on the record.”
⁷
The obvious question is what, exactly,
did
happen? What was there for Charlie Welch to feel bad about?

On this subject Elliott’s friends are just as careful with their words as he was, partly because he usually discussed his personal history only when he’d been drinking, they say, so it was difficult to separate fact from boozy fabrications. Some refer to abuse outside the family. Some confide, reluctantly, that they know things they won’t ever tell (though it is impossible to say to what, exactly, they may be referring). In the documentary film
Searching for Elliott Smith
, released in 2011, close friend Sean Croghan fights off tears when the topic of Charlie is broached, and deflects direct questions. Tony Lash, Elliott’s high school friend and bandmate, refers obliquely to Smith’s discomfort around his stepfather, but stops short of supplying additional details.
⁸
Yet another bandmate, Shon Sullivan of Goldenboy, describes an encounter at Denver’s Orpheum, where Elliott was playing. It was a cold, snowy night. Charlie and Bunny met Elliott in a tiny backstage room. “It was definitely a moment,” Sullivan recalls. “I got the sense he didn’t want me to leave. They came with a birthday gift, the Beatles
Anthology
book.
He was definitely upset that night. His mom was really sweet, the total mom—‘Elliott, make sure you wear a jacket, honey it might get cold out there.’ It was trippy. Elliott was suddenly seven years old.”
⁹