Elliott Smith and the Big Nothing

by Nugent, Benjamin

  The oft-repeated tale that Smith changed his name at fourteen from Steve to Elliott is false. “He was always Steve Smith,” writes Julie Doyle. “It was news to anyone he’d gone to early school with.” He was Steve Smith all through high school.

  Pickering was able to track Smith’s musical progress in Portland. He was now in what was by high-school standards a real band: Stranger Than Fiction, with fellow teenagers Tony Lash, Jason Hornick, and Garrick Duckler. There were actual recordings. “I have two Stranger Than Fiction tapes—he was hanging out with those guys at the time—which I brought back to Texas and listened to excessively,” he says. “But he was still Steve at that point as far as I knew. He ran me off a dub and slapped a label on it. I remember coming back in ’86 with a really well produced Stranger Than Fiction cassette and being amazed at the sound quality of it. And I do have an earlier cassette. I think that must have been when he came back summer of ’84 or ’85. That was more with a drum machine. One of the things I remember being impressed by the most was a guy playing upright bass. The drums sounded really good. I remember him coming back in summer of ’85 or summer of ’86. Mark Merritt had come into a drum set somehow, and I remember Steve, he could play the drums. That’s when I realized this guy could play anything, it was just not difficult for him.”

  Smith started some of his best work during high school in Portland. “Condor Ave.,” the second song on Roman Candle, Smith’s first album, “was definitely written in high school—or begun,” writes JJ Gonson, Smith’s girlfriend in the early ’90s, in an e-mail. “‘Kiwi Maddog 20/20’ was not only written, but also recorded, then. He took the old tape and reworked it, but just a little bit. The title comes from a bottle he and our housemate, Chris Herring, polished off one night.” It was “bought for the color—like antifreeze—and choked down on a dare.”

  Early in his senior year at Lincoln High School in southwest Portland, Smith went to a meeting for prospective applicants to Hampshire College. At the meeting he found an acquaintance from Lincoln: Shannon Wight. They started dating, and after she got an early-decision acceptance to Hampshire, he decided to apply—he hadn’t gotten around to applying anywhere else, says Wight, and he wanted to follow her. She sensed that this might be “a terrible idea” as far as their relationship was concerned. In her Hampshire College freshman photo, Wight looks like an all-American girl, perfectly unremarkable in appearance. She has long straight brown hair, a dark sweater and no visible streak of rebelliousness.

  Smith’s relationship with Wight didn’t survive long once they got to college, but it was there that he met some of the people who became central characters in the rest of his life. Hampshire was the first place where he could present himself as a person set against the upbringing he felt had been thrust upon him in Texas: a sensitive, feminist musician of philosophical bent named Elliott Smith. Steve Smith—the boy on a bike in the Dallas suburbs who wore the clothes his parents bought him and lived on classic rock—ceased to be a person you could meet and shake hands with. He became a specter haunting Elliott Smith, cropping up over and over again in song.

  * * *

  *A mall in southeast Portland.

  Three

  ELLIOTT

  STEVE SMITH WAS christened Elliott Smith shortly after he and Shannon Wight landed at Hampshire College, in Amherst, Massachusetts—a good time to change names, it seemed to Wight. They came up with the name Elliott Stillwater-Rotter as a joke, which Smith shared with other students occasionally. Wight and Smith broke up soon afterward, but “Elliott” Smith was permanent.

  Elliott is spelled with two t’s, like a surname, because Wight was inspired by the middle name of her previous boyfriend. When she mentioned this to Smith later on, she recalls, he was surprised, although she remembers telling him where she came up with the spelling at the time. Smith later explained his name change by saying that Steve sounded too “jockish” or “sporty” for him and Steven “too bookish,” and indeed that may have been what made him keep “Elliot.” It’s another instance of Smith slightly adjusting or spinning his early personal history, probably by accident. Others would speculate that perhaps the name came from Elliott Avenue, which was near Smith’s high-school home in southeast Portland. But originally the catchy, delicate appellation Elliott Smith had nothing to do with Smith’s hometown or his character. He never changed his name legally.

  Elliott Smith turned out to have a puritanical streak. At Hampshire in the late ’80s, second-wave feminist scholars like Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin were frequently under discussion. Smith was later quoted in interviews as looking back on this time in his intellectual development as a detour. “I was reading all this heavy-duty feminist theory—Catherine MacKinnon, in particular. I really took it to heart, and it just kind of drained all my energy away,” he told a reporter for Spin. “I didn’t want to do anything. If you’re a straight, white man, she made it seem impossible to live your life without constantly doing something shitty, whether you knew it or not. So I was convinced that I was just constantly making an ass out of myself and bothering someone just by being me. So I narrowed my future down to ‘fireman,’ because my occupation would be useful, without a doubt. Someone really has to put out fires, while it’s not particularly essential for me to play songs. It’s important that somebody should play songs to people, but I don’t know, I got all turned around by reading all this stuff, and I failed to notice that apparently the point of it was more to spit it back out in a paper than to take it all to heart [chuckles].”

  Smith seems not to have befriended many other straight men in college, choosing several gay men as his closest friends. First there was Neil Gust, who Smith credited with persuading him to drop the fireman plan for a life on the stage. “Neil is telling me, ‘We are going to form a band.’ I was like, ‘Yeah, right. That’s probably one of the most sexist areas I could possibly wander into,’” he told Spin. “‘I’m gonna jump up on stage and pretend like everybody ought to pay attention to me? I’d feel like a fucking peacock.’ And he was like, ‘Man, you’re talking yourself out of all the things that you really want to do.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah!’ Eventually I caved in and I’m glad.”

  MacKinnon’s stance was that the First Amendment, with its protection of free speech, and the Fourteenth Amendment, with its promise of equal rights to all races and ethnicities, were on a collision course. And she didn’t much question which had to give way. Certain forms of misogynistic expression, MacKinnon argued, specifically pornography, were damaging to women—therefore, they should be made illegal.

  It’s perhaps not a philosophy that jibes well with a career in naked self-expression, saying as it does that free speech is a problematic pillar on which to found a society. It’s easy to see why a career in a less personally expressive occupation—like firefighting—would seem an elegant solution to the dilemma of someone like Smith, who believed that by dint of his race and gender he could accidentally do harm to others.

  It wasn’t just MacKinnon contributing to Smith’s budding sense of guilt. Portions of Hampshire’s student body were loyal to the identity politics that characterized the intellectual life of the late ’80s. On February 23, 1988, Smith’s sophomore year, members of Students of Under-Represented Cultures (SOURCe) took over a quad on campus called Dakin House. The action took place while much of the administration, faculty, and student body was engaged in one of the college’s “all-community meetings.” According to Hampshire’s student newspaper, Permanent Press, the meeting was “cut short at 4:00 when SOURCe representatives announced they would appreciate a show of support at Dakin Quad. The RCC quickly emptied and students reassembled outside the site of the SOURCe occupation. Food and sleeping bags were provided by various members of the community. . . . A 9:00 p.m. vigil was planned and groups of students fanned out to inform the community.”

  Among SOURCe’s demands were “institutionalized funding for SOURCe,” a “search for a full-time salaried staff person for SOURCe,” and
that “the living room of Dakin Master’s House be dedicated as a permanent cultural space for students of color.” SOURCe issued a statement to the “Hampshire Community.” It opened, “We, as students of color, experience Hampshire as a racist institution,” and further explained, “the demands we have requested are essential for the continued well-being of all the members of this community. Multicultural diversity, the learning about all peoples, should be desired by everyone. It is beneficial to everyone.” The administration met with SOURCe and complied with most of their demands.

  Hampshire in the late ’80s was a place where, for some, a “culture” was something that could take possession of a living room, and that was entitled to a living room in which it could properly flourish. The danger of racism is something that one can perpetuate without knowing it because it doesn’t depend on any concrete action on the part of single individuals. To quote Smith on his own youthful understanding of MacKinnon and multiculturalism, if you were a “straight white man,” it could be “impossible to live your life without constantly doing something shitty, whether you knew it or not.” In this way of thinking, a club in which the performers and audience are largely white might be thought of as a white “cultural space,” just as the living room at Dakin was supposed to be a “Third World” cultural space. In this context, Smith’s fears about the sociopolitical dimensions of being a musician—in his own words, a “peacock on stage”—begin to make more sense. To a lot of nineteen-year-olds studying liberal arts at a time when “PC” was still a cresting wave and not yet the butt of jokes, the logic of SOURCe might carry water.

  Smith spent his first Hampshire years in a student-housing complex known as Enfield, down a gentle slope from the library and the center of campus. Partially obscured by trees, Enfield is composed of grim yellow-to-beige rectangular buildings that generally house two “mods,” households shared by students. Although conditions are fairly wretched in the muddy season that follows winter in rural Massachusetts, the Hampshire campus offers a stark, clear view of Mount Monadnock. In October it’s an orange-and-crimson monolith, good compensation for living in hideous architecture.

  In one of the final interviews of his life, with Under the Radar magazine, Smith recalled the odd jobs he worked during college to help make ends meet, such as taking care of dogs that were used in laboratory experiments. “He had to clean the kennels,” says Myles Kennedy, Jr., who heard Smith tell stories about the job when he worked as his tour manager in the year 2000. “The dogs didn’t ever like [the cleaning], and every time he went to work he was almost dog bait, getting them out of the kennels. It sounded pretty horrendous.”

  Smith later said that he found the student body at Hampshire by and large “annoying,” but he did establish a few good relationships there. His college friend Carl Germann remembers the first version of Heatmiser, which consisted of Gust and Smith on acoustic guitars, performing at the coffee shop on campus, with a shy Smith hiding behind his hair. When he lived off campus, Smith lived with Gust and other Hampshire students—he was no recluse, nor did he have a social life apart from Hampshire students with the local townies.

  Carl Germann, who graduated from Hampshire one semester earlier than Smith in 1991, had befriended Smith through Gust, who was then a social force in his own right, at least on the Hampshire campus. Germann remembers Smith as a musical collaborator of Gust’s from freshman year on, and by far the shyer, more retiring of the pair. Both Gust and Smith had long hair at the time, but Smith’s was dyed orange, in Germann’s recollection, with brown roots. Gust was the striking figure, with straight brown hair and a long, thin face, “almost like a Jesus kind of look.” At first Smith, Gust, Germann, and two women, Mary Jane Weatherbee and Mandy Daramin, lived together in Enfield’s Mod 51. “We considered ourselves the coolest kids in the whole school,” laughs Germann. For all the talk about Smith being a perpetual outsider, Hampshire was one place where he stood squarely amongst the in-crowd. Because “Neil was good looking,” and “they were in a band,” Germann recalls, social acceptance was not a problem for the clique. They were known as the kids in Mod 51, and they would show up at parties in groups.

  In the late ’80s, Massachusetts had a thriving rock scene, albeit one centered more around Boston than Amherst. The Pixies, composed partially of onetime UMass Amherst students, were big at Hampshire, as were Dinosaur Jr., whose frontman, J Mascis, was an Amherst kid, and whose bass player, Lou Barlow—a future buddy of Smith’s—grew up in nearby Westfield. The rest of the world may have been more interested in Debbie Gibson, but in the Massachusetts college world alternative rock was already king. Gust, for example, was listening to some of the more prominent international alternative-rock bands of the day: The BoDeans, REM, and The Godfathers.

  While short on rock groups and rock venues in comparison with Boston, ninety miles to the east, the Pioneer Valley was a reasonably hospitable environment for a budding musician. Amherst was a small, quiet town where the only nightlife to speak of was centered around a few bars where University of Massachusetts frat boys gathered in Cossack-like hordes on weekend nights. But downtown one could find faint but distinct signs of rock-and-roll life. There was a clothing and knickknacks store called Faces that contained a record shop, at one point known as For the Record, which eventually became its own store. There and at the great but now vanquished Main Street Records in downtown Northampton, Smith pawed through records and CDs (the latter still a novelty) and looked at flyers with Gust, admiring or mocking band names, deciding which shows they wanted to see, and distributing flyers for his own shows.

  Smith was open-minded about the pop of the day, says Germann, and all kinds of music played in the two houses into which the Mod 51 kids migrated midway through college. “Mary Jane was a punk rock kid: She had platinum blond hair. I was sort of a trendy, whatever was trendy I liked; I’d bounce from one thing to the next. For a while there Mandy and I went through a love of pop music, Top 40 pop music, and Elliott sort of got into that. Neil hated it. Janet Jackson and stuff like that made his ears bleed. There are a few songs of that era that make me think of Mandy and Elliott, 1990 pop-song one-hit wonders we all loved because they were so bad they were good. Elliott would listen to that, he didn’t mind. We’d listen to crappy pop music and he’d sort of get into it a little bit. I did challenge Elliott and Neil once to write a song like that, like Janet Jackson. ‘It’s so bad it’s good. Can you do this?’ They were like, ‘We could do that. It’d be very simple. But we don’t want to.’ They took their music very seriously, Neil especially. Neil knew what he wanted to do, and he wanted to be a musician. Elliott never really planned it out. I don’t think he was quite as serious about it, at least to us.”

  But he was serious enough about it that the songwriting he did during that time was a private process. During one summer he and Germann lived together, he played riffs from Television songs in plain sight but would retreat to his own room for real composition.

  Besides being the better-looking, more assertively ambitious musician, who was Neil Gust to Elliott Smith at this time during their lives? What made it such an enduring friendship?

  The friendship between Smith and Gust went beyond Heatmiser—it was Gust who appeared on the cover of Roman Candle, Smith’s first solo album, and it was Gust who took the photograph of Smith for the cover of Either/Or. Gust’s post-Heatmiser band, No. 2, toured with Smith even when Smith moved to New York and Gust remained in Portland.

  Gust had a confidence that Smith lacked. Smith’s high-school band, Stranger Than Fiction, had never played live, preferring to limit itself to four-track recordings. Gust seemed to be the more prominent singer and songwriter in their Hampshire days. But when Heatmiser’s actual recording career began, Smith seems to have received equal billing in the band, most prominently in the band photo on the flap of its first album, Dead Air. Of all the songs on Dead Air, however, the standout is Gust’s “Can’t Be Touched.” Gust’s vocals are stronger than Smith’s and blend bett
er with the band. While Smith may have been recording great songs on his four-track in high school, in Heatmiser he was initially the less promising of the two musicians. It would be unfair to say Smith rode Gust’s coattails, but he followed his lead and was able to become a successful indie rock musician in Portland largely because of Gust’s help.

  The Frog Book, the freshman photo book for Smith’s class at Hampshire, provides ample evidence of the contrast between Smith and Gust at the time. Smith’s hair is a wilder, shaggier version of the coif sported by Sean Penn’s Jeff Spicoli character in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Dyed a lighter color but with the brown roots heavily grown out, Smith’s bangs obscure his eyes almost completely; he looks like an amiable sheep dog. Gust, by contrast, looks like he could play the head of the poetry club on Beverly Hills, 90210. His long hair is swept back from his forehead into a graceful, leonine mane; his face is perfectly sculpted and his expression is gentle and proud. If anyone in the’87 Hampshire College Frog Book looks ready to become the next Michael Stipe, it’s him.

  After freshman year, Smith left the dorms and started to live in houses off-campus with friends. “We had three people in my apartment and three people in theirs, three men and three women,” says Germann, whose apartment was in a house on North Street in Northampton, a block from the house Smith and Gust lived in on Cherry Street. “And it ended up being very split: Neil and Mandy and I were all gay; Amy, Mary Jane, and Elliott were straight. So there was this sort of awareness. And it was as we were coming out. I was out, and Mandy was slowly coming out, and Neil was slowly coming out. It was very PC, very Northampton, very Hampshire College. It was this awareness of who you are as a gay person or a straight person and a man or a woman. And that was a lot of what we talked about—his [Elliott’s] identity as a straight white man. And he sort of had an issue with that, with falling into that category of straight white man, and not wanting to be part of that category. I think that’s sort of why he studied what he studied. Elliott talking about being a fireman—he wanted to go beyond being a straight white guy, he wanted to help people, he wanted to save people, to transcend that label.”