Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith (9 page)

Like Elliott, Kim played clarinet. She’d also taught herself guitar, and “always chose to learn popular songs with lyrics I liked.” She got to the point where she could manage almost any Eagles song, and others by Linda Ronstadt and Willie Nelson. She played and sang in talent shows between fourth and seventh grades, and spent a lot of time more or less “singing in the shower.” Elliott she got to know during band rehearsals. “It was a huge deal,” she says. “Band was bigger than football, even. The concerts were huge. The class was around seventy students, in junior high.” By high school, that number reached upwards of three hundred.

To Kim, Elliott was always happy, always cracking jokes—“witty, funny, smart, charming.” “He was just always so entertaining,” says Kim. “He wasn’t just book smart, but commonsense smart too. And if he made a joke, he’d do things like throw in some obscure algebraic term to make it even funnier.”

In school, Elliott was a “hot commodity.” Everyone liked him, everyone wanted to be around him. Kim recalls, “He was a Leo. A sort of bigger than life personality.” Slowly the two discovered the different things they had in common. Both were long-distance runners—Elliott always wore his cherished runner’s wristband. Both also went to the same church—where the performance took place—along with Merritt. It was small, in relative terms, fewer than a hundred in the congregation, nothing close to a megachurch, far more modest and humble. During sermons kids sat in back pews, doing their best to keep quiet. Sunday school classes formed part of the curriculum too, and Kim recalls Elliott attending, yet not regularly. It wasn’t a matter of serious religiosity or devotion; church was just something you did in suburban Dallas. It was taken for granted, a form of socializing, a means of creating community.

At long last, in November 1982, love came knocking, in the fragile, suddenly fervid way it does for preadolescents, replete with drama and whispers, as well as abject terror. Kim, a self-described “typical 80s cheerleader type,” noticed another popular girl giving Elliott threateningly close attention—flipping her hair, flirting. As fate would have it, this was the same girl who had stolen Kim’s boyfriend back in fourth grade. She vowed,
“Oh no! Not this time. Not again!” And in fact, there was no repeat, no second theft. It would be Kim and Elliott who got together. In the delicate argot of Junior High, they became officially “boyfriend–girlfriend.” Soon enough they were holding hands on their way to class, in effect proclaiming their exclusivity. “All the other girls kept asking me, ‘Has he kissed you yet? When is he going to do it?’ ” Kim recalls. The decisive moment arrived on the way home one day, as they strolled together after school. “Suddenly he just stopped,” Kim says, “and planted one on me.” They had a necklace made. She wore one half, he wore the other. It symbolized their “steady” union.

Kim noticed Elliott’s basic difference, how he stood out from others in the class. He was more mature, deeper when discussing his inner life, reflective and sometimes strangely calm. He also simply looked different. He liked to wear black parachute pants with “a million zippers and pockets.” He rarely washed his hair, and he always wore tight T-shirts. Then, most conspicuously of all, there was his virtuosic musicality, so obvious to everyone. He could play “piano like nobody’s business,” and he’d taught himself guitar virtually overnight. “He loved playing fast, so fast, over and over, like classic Van Halen–type stuff. It was chord-slide, chord-slide. And then when the riffs came, he really tore into them, never a wrong note.”

They didn’t exactly date; they were too young for that at twelve and thirteen. Their contacts occurred primarily in band or at church. Youth activities were often on the agenda. Sometimes the kids went on overnights, staying in motels with chaperones. On one such occasion, either Elliott or his friend brought along a small bottle of Black Velvet. Kids rendezvoused in a room and traded nasty-tasting swigs. But leaders busted them. Many got grounded “for months” in the aftermath. At times Elliott and Kim met up at night too. They sat on the trampoline in Elliott’s large backyard and talked for hours. “One night he was very distraught,” Kim remembers. “Very upset about Charlie. He never got into what the problems were, exactly. He talked in generalities. But it was beyond anything I could comprehend. He wasn’t just worried about himself; he was concerned for Ashley too.” Kim had noticed Bunny and Charlie at church. To her, Bunny was sweet, Charlie a “big, quiet, ominous man”—ominous not in the sense of frightening, but more because he was a dad and difficult to know or feel entirely comfortable with. He was tall, with dark hair, and “he didn’t smile a lot.” “In my
opinion—and I was just twelve, you know—it was an absolute disconnect. I did not see how they were a couple at all.”

But it wasn’t all hard, all ominous feeling. Kim sometimes headed over to Elliott’s house to hang out or listen to music. One Christmas they snuggled under the tree for hours until Bunny gently suggested she had to go. There were also mini holiday concerts. It was the Welch family custom to open presents on Christmas Eve. But first, the kids were expected to put on a program. They wrapped towels around their heads—Elliott, Ashley, and Darren—and made like the Three Wise Men. Music featured too, as always—Elliott on piano or clarinet, Ashley on trombone, Darren on guitar. They wrote alternate lyrics to popular songs, recasting them in goofy musical formats. Bunny made personalized stockings with apples and oranges inside and chocolate-covered cherries.

“Kim was Elliott’s big crush,” Denbow says. Merritt remembers her as a very sweet kid, “definitely attractive,” and “very kind-hearted.” “Even with geeks like me,” Merritt says, “she was still ‘part of the family,’ if you will.” Just like Elliott, in other words, Kim had a native kindness and compassion. Denbow owned a motorized scooter, just barely secure enough to hold two people. Some nights during seventh and eighth grade, and even into the beginning of freshman year, he’d sneak out after midnight, then sputter over to Elliott’s. Elliott stealthily crept out the back door of his home, and the boys rode to the Byrd bleachers to “make out with our respective girls” (Kim had a friend named Nicole whom Denbow was involved with). Essentially the same routine was followed on different nights with Merritt, and sometimes marijuana got thrown into the mix, though neither Elliott nor Merritt felt comfortable confessing the fact that they smoked it. For a long time they kept the naughty secret to themselves. There were more hook-ups too, one with a girl named Michelle Schwartzott—a clarinet player, like Elliott, whom everybody called Zott. She and Smith scandalously “made out” in the back of a bus during a band road trip (Kim never got wind of this, and it may have occurred after she and Elliott had broken up). Zott was a senior with a cool muscle car, Elliott (by this time) a freshman. She was a big-sister type, as it turned out, not girlfriend material. Elliott used to mention her to Kim, and though she wondered whether the two had ever hooked up, it never came out in conversation.

No more gigs materialized, but it didn’t really matter. The band was far less interested in performing than they were in recording, although occasionally they jammed in Elliott’s oversized backyard, running extension cords from outlets in a nearby shed. Pickle’s father was an amateur musician himself—an incredible guitar player, according to Merritt—and he owned a four-track reel-to-reel with Radio Shack tapes. In his room Elliott kept a boom box and used a mic to record from it; he also, in time, picked up a Gibson SG solid-body electric guitar—his first, according to Denbow—plus a Sigma Japanese version of a Martin acoustic (given to him by his father, Gary, and which Denbow inherited and owns to this day), a yellow DOD overdrive valve for distortion, and a blue DOD stereo chorus supplying a sort of deep purple reverb sound. Most of the actual recording took place at Pickle’s home, since that is where the four-track lived. Mainly it was rock, late at night—arpeggio guitar, heavy metal, distortion. Elliott progressed quickly—“really quickly,” Pickle recalls—from merely learning his instruments to writing his own songs, the first of his life. Pickle says, “To me, that was out there, man. It was revolutionary. Not only figuring out other people’s songs but writing his own.” He goes on: “Elliott had a sense of possibility that made you excited to be there. It was like, ‘Of course I’m going to write a song.’ It opened the world to a lot of new things. He could envision and execute things totally out of the ordinary and make them seem perfectly natural. It just seemed like a lot of things were possible when you were around him … I got a lot of courage from him.”

A very early recording session, Elliott’s virginal effort, occurred in fall or winter of 1983, when he was thirteen or fourteen. He used his Gibson SG, although at times he also borrowed Pickering’s dad’s Gibson Les Paul, a guitar Elliott later bought from Pickering senior. “For most of the tracks,” Pickering says, “we recorded the guitar by simply running the cord directly from the guitar to the tape recorder”—with no amp or effects. For optimum flexibility Pickle checked out a Maxi-Korg synthesizer from school, also called a Korg 800DV. It was the property of the Duncanville High School band program. Two songs were Rush covers—“Closer to the Heart” and “Subdivisions”—with Pickle on synth and Elliott on guitar. There were also finger-picking tunes, mellow and happy and often quite beautiful, such as the folk song “Soul Cake,” later recorded by Peter, Paul, and Mary as
“A Soalin.” But the remaining five numbers were original compositions by Elliott, each exclusively instrumental. One of these, a tune the boys played a lot, was a heavy-metal exercise christened “#37.” Others were delicate, pretty, minor-key guitar phrasings that Elliott sometimes concluded with “happy” major chords, as Pickering recalls.

Merritt was present for one unexpected songwriting session that took place during a summer trip to South Padre Island, and which set a sort of standard for Elliott’s deceptively haphazard creative process. Merritt’s family was on vacation and Elliott had been invited to tag along. The two sat around strumming in the motel room, wasting time as the rest of the Merritt clan wandered off exploring. At one point Elliott simply said, “Let’s write a song.” He kept picking, trying out different chords and variations, waiting to hear something interesting or fresh pop out. Bit by bit a structure came together—bridge and chorus—and now and then Elliott paused to scratch out lyrics. Merritt, like Pickle, was in a minor state of shock. It was one thing to learn songs others had written—the Rush tunes, Kansas tunes—but something else entirely to try composing an original piece. But “I’ll be damned if the kid didn’t do it,” Merritt says. And to his astonishment, “it didn’t suck! It completely blew me away. He’d just lean back and play.” The tune was in G, and to this day Merritt recalls one particular line: “See the poor man as he walks while the rich man takes the train.”

Virtually anyone who played with Elliott—Denbow, eventual high school and Heatmiser bandmate Tony Lash—notes his fascination with leading tones and passing chords, transitioning moments between major notes in a measure, movements from verse to chorus and back to verse. To Elliott, every moment in every song had potential; the subtleties often made the tune, amounting to an idiosyncratic signature. Part of this interest came from the Beatles, passing chord geniuses. Even their toss-off songs, such as “Your Mother Should Know,” feature gorgeous travelings from chorus to verse, or vice versa.

In a fascinating interview from 2000 Elliott talks in detail about his songwriting process. As he did frequently, he begins by saying he simply imagines things, makes things up “just during the day.”
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He calls imagination “the divine force”—“if you don’t block it up it will come out and surprise you.” It’s not about language, he says, but more about shapes, an interesting
fact to talk about but hard to describe usefully with words. “I’m really into chord changes, and that’s the thing I liked when I was a kid. I don’t make up a riff, really. It’s usually a sequence instead, that has some implied melody in it.” He says he’s drawn to chords in which the bass note is a fifth—a C with a G in the bass, for instance. He also used half chords—chords in which you don’t want all the strings to sound. His advice to would-be songwriters is to “just relax and stop thinking about what people want to hear. Put it in the blender and see what comes out.”

That’s what Pickle, Merritt, and Elliott were doing most of the time in Pickle’s home in Duncanville, Texas: throwing things in the blender and seeing how they came out. That Elliott was meticulously, diligently working on and trying out tonal and chordal variations in seventh and eighth grade describes an obvious musical gift. As Denbow said, he rose to the top. It came ridiculously easily and naturally. “He was the guy everything was centered around,” says Denbow.
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And just as revealingly, Elliott shared his oversized talent. He wasn’t stingy with it. All the boys took stabs at writing songs, but the band was basically Elliott. Everyone knew that. As Pickle put it, “Elliott was John, Paul, and George, and we were all Ringo.” But Elliott never made anyone
feel
like Ringo. What he gave Pickle, Merritt, and Denbow was an identity, an exciting one, and they have never forgotten that. Their gratitude, expressed with deep emotion, is palpable.

It wasn’t Elliott’s habit at this stage to name songs (in fact, even many of the songs on his first solo album are unnamed). The majority were repeat exercises, such as “#37,” with its driving electric guitar solo in the middle. Yet most were still enormously challenging for the teenagers to play, legitimate songs with characteristic ABABC pop structure. And Elliott pushed himself. He was aiming for “more advanced songs,” Pickle says (advanced, that is, in relation to peers). “He didn’t like to write songs with fewer than five chords.”

Over time lyrics entered the mix, straightforward scene-setting reflections, not open to interpretation, according to Pickle, in which Elliott simply described a visual picture. A song called “Ocean” amounted to a three-verse meditation on the sea at night, a kind of literal snapshot, “not distant or impressionistic,” Pickle says, “but more like a photo.” It’s a solemn, creamy, arpeggio-laced melody, sleepy and hypnotic. In recordings Elliott sometimes
sings it, but Kim does too in alternate takes. The tide is pictured coming in and out along a lonely, moonlit shore. In its solitary way it falls to rest on the beach as Elliott peers out at “the endless moon.” He’s struck by the water’s serenity, magic, and mystery. It floods his house and “takes control of me.”