Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith (8 page)

7th grade yearbook photo with Elliott wearing a T-shirt from a 5K/10K run in Cleburne. (Photograph courtesy of Steve Pickering.)

Elliott told a comic tale about football in particular (he wore jersey number 64). He was “a little on the small side in height and weight,” so coaches started him out at wide receiver, despite the fact that “in junior high nobody can throw the football.” Every play he’d run about ten yards or so, then collide into his defender. “You hit kind of hard for about the first ten plays then the rest of the game you’re just kind of running out there and bumping up against the guy. He doesn’t want to hit you very hard either.” Unlike other kids on the team, he caught with his hands instead of his chest, but still nobody passed to him. So he was moved to defensive line. “You’re down there like inches away from somebody’s head,” he recalls, “and some guy is going, ‘I’m going to fuck you up!’ ” Looking back, he can’t quite believe he played so many sports. “I can tell you it doesn’t build character,” he informed an interviewer in 2003. “Except maybe the character to not play sports because you were forced to.”
¹⁹
Pickering had a different take. “The concept, to me, of ‘I play football and I don’t like it,’ didn’t make sense to my
twelve-year-old brain.” He figures Elliott liked the sport more than he ever let on. After all, it’s not as if he ever had a problem resisting Charlie’s demands, Pickle says. If he truly didn’t want to play, likely he could have opted out.

It was as if, in his imagination at least, if not in reality, these defensive linemen roamed Elliott’s neighborhood in face-masked packs, hungry for more contact, looking to fuck him up again, as he suggested at times to interviewers. There was a feeling he had of spreading menace, mostly internal, but engulfing the outside world as well. In Cedar Hill, except for stalwart friends like Pickle, Merritt, and Denbow, Elliott as a sixth grader rarely met anyone at all like him, anyone he felt simpatico with. Plus he was just plain bored. But he also had to do all he could to sidestep confrontations: he kept quiet, he sometimes avoided the outdoors, an arena of fear. Some of this was overworked imagination, no doubt, excess sensitivity. But fights weren’t uncommon; certain kids around at the time lived for fisticuffs, needing little excuse for action. When a new family moved in next door, one with an older fourteen-year-old boy from the football team, Elliott looked up to the new kid, mainly because he feared he’d kick his ass, he told a journalist years later. They had a pool table, so Elliott was over there all the time. On occasion there were sleepovers too. Yet the overall family strategy, according to Elliott, was to not make waves. So long as you weren’t black or gay, so long as you kept a nice, low profile, “they left you in peace.”
²⁰
The fact that the Berrymans were amateur musicians also caused trouble. They were thought of as a “family of freaks” and looked down on accordingly. Why, the thinking apparently ran, would anyone spend so much time doing anything as useless as music? Especially when it didn’t bring in any money?

Pickering recalls just one full-fledged fight, Elliott versus a much bigger kid. “I don’t think I’d have fought the guy,” says Pickering. Both wound up in the principal’s office, where, while waiting to be seen, they shook hands and resolved their differences.

“Interviewers write about Elliott being completely miserable in Dallas,” Pickering notes. “I thought we were having a great time.” Denbow agrees, figuring that childhood misery made for “a better backstory” than goofy escapades and suburban Texas boredom.

* * *

As sixth grade faded, so did all interest in ten-speeds, basketball, movies at the Red Bird Mall, and games of Dungeons & Dragons. Seventh grade brought with it an intense focus on music—any kind of music, any time, from “Carry on My Wayward Son” to Hank Williams. And it was the beginning, the origin, of Elliott’s obsession with recording in whatever way he could, with whatever technology happened to be available. Pickle played keyboards, and Denbow was learning guitar. Merritt had started on guitar, but bass slowly grew on him. At first it was all about listening, and the big crush, one all Elliott’s friends shared, was the ornate, prog-rock Rush. “We were heavy-duty Rush freaks,” Denbow says. “We slept and breathed Rush from sunup to sundown.” Elliott got his hands on a Rush music book, and according to Denbow, he was “very meticulous” about analyzing the music—he was “
into it
into it.” “Broon’s Bane,” from the album
Exit Stage Left
, was a song with extra-special fascinations. As a means of challenging himself musically, something he did often, Elliott worked to learn the song’s intro, sounding it out by ear. “He had that drive,” Merritt says. “He was by far the best musician of all of us. He wanted to see where it would take him.” For months he would “veg out,” Denbow recalls, on one particular album, just as he had many years later with
Magical Mystery Tour
. It was U2’s
October
, then the Clash’s
London Calling
or the Police’s
Synchronicity
. AC/DC was in the mix, along with Led Zeppelin, Kiss’s
Kiss Alive
, Pink Floyd’s
Animals
, Kansas, and the Who’s
Who’s Next
, which Elliott gave to Pickering. Pickering always saw Elliott’s tastes as exceptionally “advanced and diverse for a thirteen-year-old.” There was nothing unusual, of course, about liking Kiss and U2, but Elliott always searched out a group’s “more obscure material,” the tunes no one knew about or listened to. One birthday Elliott asked for R.E.M.’s
Fables of the Reconstruction
, and Pickering got it for him as a gift. Quirky, new-wave stuff struck his fancy too, for instance the band Madness, whose video was getting heavy play. Occasionally Elliott would do the “Madness walk,” preceded by the shout out “One step beyond!”

Like countless sensitive, introspective teenagers with tinges of melancholy and an ear for poetry, Elliott was also a Jackson Browne fan. He owned the album
Late for the Sky
, which Bruce Springsteen called Browne’s masterpiece, with its Magritte-inspired cover of a car on a street at twilight. The songs dealt with love loss, apocalypse, and death, which Browne compares
to a song he can’t sing but also can’t stop hearing. Once while Pickering and Elliott were hanging out the song “The Pretender” came on the radio. That set Elliott off on a long analysis of Browne’s lyrical content. In Pickering’s view, Browne was a “big early influence.”

Far more than anything else, however, it was the Beatles that Elliott looked to for inspiration. Countless evenings and weekends he and Pickle talked, played chess, and listened to
The White Album
and
Abbey Road
. But they liked the older stuff too. Pickering owned
Beatles ’65
, so when the boys were over there instead of at Elliott’s home, they would put it on—that or
Sgt
.
Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
, which Pickle also owned. Denbow recalls a deep exchange on the subject of singing and singing style. Elliott had played John Lennon’s surrealistic anti-lullaby “Cry Baby Cry” from
The White Album
, one of Lennon’s nonsense songs, as he liked to call them (others include “I Am the Walrus” and “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”). Most rock singers they listened to were screamers—a problem for Elliott, who never felt comfortable barking out vocals. At this point in his musical development he agreed to sing only under duress, after every other alternative had been excluded. “Cry Baby Cry” features a softly lilting melody, sung by Lennon, with a falsetto finish, sung by McCartney. “I told Elliott that he ought to just whisper when he sang,” Denbow remembers. “That way no one even knows if you’re not in tune. I also said it was easier to hit high notes if you had that airier, whispery sound.” Elliott tried it out, and lo and behold it worked. In later years a hushed fragile tone became Elliott’s signature vocal delivery. It may have originated in his back bedroom in Cedar Hill, Texas, at Denbow’s instigation.

But more than just listening to songs, the boys worked hard to learn them as flawlessly as possible, no matter how long it took or how many repetitions. Here again, Elliott was “way ahead of most people,” Denbow says. If you ever wanted to know how to play a particular tune, Elliott was the guy you went to for help. “If it was musical and he was involved, he would rise to the top,” says Denbow. In Elliott’s room sat an old upright piano. He and Merritt had pushed it there painfully across heavy carpet, after getting Elliott’s parents’ permission to relocate it. He played it endlessly, as Denbow recalls. The Lennon album
Shaved Fish
was a fixation then, with its compilation of singles including “Imagine,” “Mother,” “Mind Games,” and others.
Elliott learned these songs on piano, playing the same piece over and over till he got it exactly right, his innate perfectionism urging him on. Around the same time he perfected the rapidly fingered synthesizer solo from Led Zeppelin’s “All of My Love,” plus the solo from George Harrison’s “Old Brown Shoe,” another song Elliott especially loved.

Pickle has a similar memory, from around the time he and Smith first met. They were in the Cedar Hill home discussing piano. Elliott had one year of lessons under his belt, Pickering six. Even so, in Pickering’s estimation “he was still way better than I was.” Elliott casually offered to play something that struck Pickle as a bit surprising: Dan Fogelberg’s “Auld Lang Syne” tune, the Christmastime staple. “He just knocked it out of the park. All arpeggios. All over the keyboard. Hitting it with a lot of flourish. I was stunned and flabbergasted.” Pickering humbly reciprocated, trying out the ’70s instrumental “Music Box Dancer,” or perhaps, as he remembers it, the theme from
Chariots of Fire
. The feeling even then was that nothing measured up to what Elliott did, what he was capable of. His talent, the effortless way he learned and played, set him miles apart from all other practicing young musicians, even a trio as capable in their own right as Pickle, Denbow, and Merritt.

In the short span of a year or two, music grew utterly self-defining. Nothing else came close to comparing. It was most of what Elliott wanted to talk about, most of what he wanted to do. So, inevitably, a band was formed. Denbow, one year older, played guitar, Pickering keyboards (a Lowrey Micro Genie with sixteen different preprogrammed sounds and twelve drum rhythms), Elliott guitar and piano, and Merritt, guitar and bass. In the Red Bird Mall there was a hybrid record and instrument store called the Melody Shop, where Elliott bought his picks and strings. A drummer from Lancaster had tacked up a note saying he was looking for a band, and the boys piled into Pickering’s dad’s gray work van to audition the kid. It didn’t go anywhere. Pickering’s not sure why. But later a different prospect named Tim Hunt was found. Hunt possessed the one transcendent prerequisite for teen band drummer work: he owned his own kit.

This makeshift unit was never officially christened, although for a short time Elliott thought about proposing Deviation. Occasionally the group discussed other “deadly serious names,” as Pickle recalls, but more often
they tossed around potential joke names like The Used Carburetors. Yet, although fated to remain nameless, the band put on one public performance, likely the first of Elliott’s musical career (he would have been around thirteen). The occasion was a talent show at Trinity Methodist on Clark Road in Duncanville, a church Elliott’s and Merritt’s families attended semi-regularly (Merritt places Elliott’s family’s religiosity at 4 on a scale of 1 to 10). “This was a big deal for us,” Pickle emphasizes, the preparation and lead-up heavy with several practice sessions devoted to getting as ready as possible. In all, wearing suits and clip-on ties, the band performed two numbers: the goofy “Tequila” and, next, the mischievously pagan “Stairway to Heaven,” with Pickering handling Stairway’s flute sounds on his Lowrey. It would be Elliott, however, tearing into the song’s long concluding guitar solo which, per usual, he worked at and worked at until it was note perfect. Miraculously, a rehearsal tape exists in which Elliott, Merritt, and Pickering go over the two tunes. Elliott sings “Stairway” atop the musical accompaniment. The sound is faint because his voice was not amplified. He manages the guitar intro flawlessly, Pickle tackling the synth. “Tequila” features Elliott on guitar, Merritt on bass. It ends haphazardly in the practice tape, with a stray bass note. Merritt exclaims, “I can’t hear!” then Elliott answers, “You have to watch!” for cues signaling the song’s end. Merritt recalls the performance being greeted warmly, despite the fact that the song choices clashed comically with church ideology. The attitude of all involved was, Did we really just play “Stairway” and “Tequila” at Trinity Methodist!?

All along, the question of singers for the band was a vexation. The very last thing any of the boys wanted to do, Elliott included, was sing “Stairway,” or anything else, for that matter. Vocals were therefore usually handled by a pretty girl named Kim, one year younger than Elliott, a band officer whose mom was a sixth-grade math teacher at Byrd Junior High, and who lived four houses down the street from Denbow.
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In the middle of the night Elliott snuck out to deliver a set of handwritten “Stairway” lyrics so Kim could work at learning them by heart (although she never quite did, setting the lyrics in front of her on a music stand for the real performance). Her father was awakened by a rapping at the window—“What’s going on?” he thundered. Then he swung open the front door and took off after Elliott
down the street. He never did corral the prowler. When Kim’s dad returned home he said, jokingly, “Whoever that kid was, he sure can run fast!”