Elliott Smith and the Big Nothing

by Nugent, Benjamin

  It was the first of many times Doughty went to an Elliott Smith show. “[Smith and The Magnetic Fields] were both not particularly notable to anybody at the time, but my A&R guy took me and he totally snobbed out on me for my never having heard of either one of them,” he says. “It had to have been early in the week, not very crowded, and clearly with an incompetent sound guy because both acts spent the evening scowling at the guy. . . . Stephin Merritt was so in angry-Stephin-Merritt mode, about the sound guy, about the subway that rumbles past that venue, about the shittiness of the crowd, he was just basically glaring. Whereas Elliott was just looking woeful, he was openly looking like Charles Bronson out at the sound guy. . . . And it was incredible. I went and got the records of both acts, and it was Elliott Smith, and after that I went to every gig Elliott did in New York. If I was in New York and he was in New York, I was there.”

  Doughty’s A&R man at Slash Records, Randy Kay, took him to hang out with Smith and Mittleman after one show. “I guess after the fifth or sixth time I saw him, we met him after the show at the camp theme bar next door to Brownie’s, and we hung out, and we talked about drummers, and the old Sam Cooke records and the drum sounds on them and how basic they were. . . . I said, ‘Well, have you thought about making a record with Mitchell Froom? [And he said], ‘No, I haven’t heard of him.’ . . . ‘Oh, he’s really great, and blah blah blah,’ and Margaret Mittleman was just freaking out. When I said ‘Mitchell Froom,’ she was just completely aghast at the idea. She just totally got her back up, it was like super visible.” Froom is a frequently unconventional producer whose credits include Suzanne Vega and Los Lobos as well as weirder projects like Cibo Matto and the soundtrack for the cult movie Café Flesh. Of course, Smith ultimately picked Mittleman’s husband, Rob Schnapf, and his partner, Tom Rothrock, as his producers. “I remember him speaking almost apologetically about having someone from BMG hanging out, as was the custom of the time,” says Doughty, referring to the indie-cred issues of the mid-’90s that dogged musicians who in other periods might not have cared at all.

  Mittleman proved highly effective at negotiating contracts and making Smith money, and her skills were in dire need—Smith wanted to get out of a record deal. (It was unclear why Smith didn’t want to stay on Virgin after the break-up of Heatmiser, but he didn’t.) “There wasn’t a bidding war,” he told the English zine Comes with a Smile. “I didn’t want there to be one. They get really ugly and people’s feelings get hurt. No, I was in a band that broke up and we were on Virgin and they had a claim to me after that. So DreamWorks bought me out of that. I couldn’t stay on the label I was on either way.”

  Smith’s “couldn’t” might be understood to mean “couldn’t” in an emotional sense, except that it’s hard to imagine Kill Rock Stars could come up with the cash to buy Smith out of a deal with a major label like Virgin. Andy Factor, Heatmiser’s A&R man, gave Smith no reason to complain, by both Smith’s account and Santen’s: Smith described Factor as a “friend” in an interview, and Santen’s account indicates he wasn’t just looking for brownie points: “His A&R guy at Virgin [Factor] was wild about him, he loved Elliott Smith.”

  Swanson confirms Smith’s desire to leave the label: “I remember he talked quite a bit about how he didn’t want to be on Virgin, how he wanted to switch. I think after that he started to feel really uncomfortable about complaining about his situation at all to anyone—maybe he could to another musician on his level but not to a friend who was a struggling artist.”

  Santen recalls Smith’s story of what exactly went down when Heatmiser announced their break-up to Andy Factor: “Him and Tony [Lash], they weren’t getting along, [Elliott] didn’t like the way the record sounded, and the A&R [guy] came into town to say, ‘Let’s hear the record.’ And they sat down and had a meeting with him [and said], ‘We broke up.’ And he said, ‘Okay, Plan B.’ Just skipped a step. [Smith’s] point of view was, ‘Fuck these guys, they want my soul,’ but the other point of view is that there wasn’t anyone else interested at the time and they fucking loved him, and I think he decided he didn’t want anybody who had anything to do with [Heatmiser].

  “I remember asking him, ‘Could it be then that [Virgin] puts out your records?’” recalls Dorien Garry. But Smith remained uncomfortable with the situation, not because of anything Virgin had done wrong, but because of the way he had come to be signed to the label. “He fought really hard,” says Garry.

  On the solo side, there were still modest tours with the likes of Mary Lou Lord. In the mid-’90s, Lord recalled in a Harvard radio interview, they both applied to perform at the music industry’s most important conference for indie rock bands: South by Southwest in Austin, a festival where hundreds of bands showcase themselves over the tequila-amplified buzz of journalists, radio programmers, and label executives. They were both rejected, Lord said. On tour, they were headed through Texas anyway, so they conspired to show up at the festival. It was St. Patrick’s Day, and they set up on the street with Mary Lou Lord’s amp and played in front of a Kinko’s. A few drinks later, they were dedicating Irish songs to Shane MacGowan of The Pogues, and Slim Moon and Calvin Johnson showed up. Neither Johnson’s Olympia-based K Records nor Moon’s Olympia-based Kill Rock Stars had showcases at South by Southwest, as ambitious indie labels generally do, so the site became an impromptu outsider outpost.

  Years later, when things started to go seriously awry for Smith in LA, one of the things his friends from this period missed most was his playful side. “He had the best kind of sideways conspiratorial glance,” says Ramona Clifton, who got to know Smith by introducing him to Lou Barlow at a show. “He’d be talking and make a little joke, and he’d look at you like, ‘Did you catch the joke?’ And he would do this little sideways grin. He always seemed sort of slightly awkward, not a dancer type of guy, but then he would just slide across the floor, straight moonwalk. He would do it onstage every once in a while with Heatmiser.”

  Even this early on, a relatively healthy time in Smith’s life when drug use and drinking didn’t get in his way and his career was ascendant, there was the apparent contradiction in his character that would stay with him: Smith and Lord had a good time on tour, even as Smith often appeared shy and closed-off to people who weren’t close to him. As Swanson puts it, “Elliott was hilarious; he was one of the funniest people I ever knew. When we hung out, most of the time we had a really good time. When I think about Elliott I think about him laughing. We would often get into these stupid characters, we’d goof around for hours on end, like he’d be the mad scientist and I or someone else would be Igor. And we’d play those characters out endlessly. And you’d tell him a joke and he’d tell the same joke over and over again and just be in stitches about it and tell it to everybody he’d be in contact with. It was definitely this running thing with him . . . saving up the new jokes you heard for Elliott, and the funniest ones, always in the typical Elliott way, were really funny without being mean to anybody.”

  On the other hand, says Swanson, “There’s also the other half of that guy that was crying a lot, too. To be honest, not to say this in a mean way, but I probably shouldn’t say it: By the time we were thinking about us living together, I didn’t know if I wanted to live with him. He was a tough person . . . to be friends with. He was very sad and had a lot of demons and problems to deal with.”

  Before you got to Smith’s sadness, you had to penetrate a lot of layers—layers of sweetness and shyness if you were an acquaintance, and layers of good humor, intellect, and esprit de corps if you were a friend. His songs were personal, and they offered clues to his concerns. But they were clues, not roadmaps, and he rejected the idea that people could assume they had the roadmap to his psyche because of psychology or twelve-step-program talks or because he had a business relationship with them.

  “It’s almost like the sadness came on stronger when he started to do better. This is obviously just a theory on my part too, but I was always really nervous for him because it seemed l
ike the better he was doing, the more he had to justify to other people that he wasn’t doing well,” says Swanson. “This idea that him being successful as a musician was hurting all of his other musician friends. It started to happen more and more, where it was like, ‘One, I can’t sing; I can’t do anything. But I’m also really sad.’ In one way, if you’re sad, and then you have everything that’s supposed to make your life good and you’re still sad—is that Kurt Cobain, is that what happened to him? If you’ve got the whole world at your feet and you’re still sad, what do you strive for after that? And Elliott’s sadness was deep and very sad. You could tell. I’m not going to go into specific conversations about that stuff, but I remember understanding that the sadness was probably a kind of sadness I had never even felt before, even though I had had pretty sad times in my life. And I think, in general, just like a lot of people, Elliott, to be frank, started to drink a lot and self-medicate through a lot of these things that had happened to him in the past or whatever it was making him sad. I think it was probably things that had happened in the past, and that he needed to deal with it. But the idea of therapy or anything like that, or when people would try to do the interventions and get him help . . . I think the writing was on the wall that he needed some outside help. But I think that’s tough to do with a fiercely intelligent person.”

  In this time, the mid-’90s, one of the better periods in Smith’s life, it was hard to worry about him while his career was so clearly picking up steam. Lou Barlow was one of indie rock’s most popular artists, and he first saw Smith play on a Kill Rock Stars tour on his birthday, July 17, in 1996. “He was playing to a pretty large room, kind of sparsely attended, and the seats were maybe half full,” recalls Ramona Clifton, a friend of Barlow’s. “There were maybe fifty people there or something. We started playing and Lou and I couldn’t move. We were rooted to the spot. I remember Lou saying after a song or two, ‘Fuck. He’s really good.’”

  Soon, Smith was on the road with Sebadoh, a band with one of the biggest draws in indie rock and fans disposed to like Smith’s contemplative, lyrics-centered guitar music. After the July 17 show, says Clifton, “Elliott was just walking around and I went and introduced myself and talked for a minute and said, ‘I’m here with Lou Barlow but he’s too embarrassed to come over with me.’ He wouldn’t do it. But Elliott was like, ‘Whoa, no way.’ I was like, ‘Do you want to meet him?’ He was like, ‘Yeah, of course.’ And then they started talking and it was really easy and they got along—it was sort of mutual appreciation, and I think Lou invited him to open for them.”

  That night the three of them went out to a bar together, and Clifton remembers Smith being smitten with Joanna Bolme. When Pete Krebs and Smith started working together, Krebs was dating Smith’s future girlfriend, Joanna Bolme. Throughout Smith’s long, slow drift away from his old Northwestern indie gang, Bolme remained a constant in his life. She spent some of the mid-’90s working at the Portland club La Luna, where Smith and other Heatmiser members were often found playing pool. Eventually, she began to work as an engineer at Larry Crane’s Jackpot! recording studio, and later joined The Minders as a bassist. Since 2001, she’s been the bassist for ex-Pavement frontman Stephen Malkmus’s Portland-based band The Jicks.

  Bolme and Smith moved in together during his later years in Portland, and at one point the couple actually went so far as to move to France together, a failed experiment. Swanson remembers there being no pressing reason for the move: “I remember him and Joanna just being like they wanted to live in France. I think you hear that a lot when people are younger, ‘I just want to get out of the U.S., I just don’t like it here, and it’s not my thing,’ and I think they were both really enamored of Paris, and gave it a shot. It didn’t work out very well.” The couple soon moved back to Portland.

  Smith and Clifton played pool, she remembers, “and we started talking and he sort of had a heart-to-heart with me about his girlfriend at the time, and how much he cared about her but he didn’t believe—he was afraid she wouldn’t stay with him. He was really anxious about that but really sweet about it. He just talked about her to me. I guess he just thought he was kind of a pain in the ass and that she would get fed up with him. It was more general angst. He was missing her, and he was getting uncertain about what was going to happen.”

  Smith’s attitude toward his songwriting was a blend of ambition and self-criticism. He played an opening of Swanson’s in San Francisco in 1997, and they didn’t tell anybody ahead of time. They talked about how they were both looking to achieve a blend of sadness and optimism in their art. But when Swanson invited him, he spent a day and a half apologizing for wanting to do it, saying he didn’t want to ruin his show and talking about how he couldn’t sing.

  The last album by Heatmiser sounds less like Heatmiser than like a new indie rock band influenced by Elliott Smith. Smith’s solo career had taken off to the point that Smith himself was singing less in the loud, Fugazi-like style he’d adopted for Dead Air. Instead, he was singing the same way he did on his solo albums. Also, there was a crucial line-up change: Brandt, who Smith later called the “most punk” of all the Heatmiser boys, was replaced by Sam Coomes, a veteran from San Francisco band The Donner Party.

  The Donner Party was named after an 1846 pioneer expedition from Illinois to California that became trapped in an unusually brutal winter in the Sierra Nevada mountain range and resorted to cannibalism. The band, which formed in 1983 and recorded two albums between 1987 and 1989, has since gained some small recognition from the indie rock world for Coomes’s goofy pop-folk-punk songwriting. The Donner Party rocked hard and then soft, often with a macabre sense of humor. Although The Donner Party was hardly considered a great band, Coomes’s mischievous songwriting would play a major part in the bands he joined after moving to Portland.

  Five years Smith’s senior, Coomes was born in Sherman, Texas, and moved to California as a child. He moved to Portland from San Francisco and there formed the band Motorgoat with Janet Weiss and Brad Pedinov “circa 1990.” Motorgoat released two cassettes and a single on 7-inch vinyl, and after Pedinov left, Coomes and Weiss stuck together and dubbed the stripped-down outfit Quasi. They would become Smith’s touring band in the late ’90s.

  It’s hard to distinguish Coomes’s effect on Heatmiser’s music from the effects of the band’s having been given a large sum of money by Virgin Records, which it used to buy its own equipment and record an album in Heatmiser House. But what is certain is that the punk element of Heatmiser—in the loud, fast, distortion-soaked sense of the term—went into remission under the new circumstances. Melodies established themselves through clarity rather than pounding insistence and volume. Instead of power chords, the guitarists used finger-picking and slide techniques, and the beat deviated from the medium-fast tempo that set the tone on Dead Air. Most importantly, both Smith and Gust seem to have taken a hint from the success of Smith’s solo records. Instead of repeating the effortful shouting that Smith tried to make his own on Dead Air, he sings like the Elliott Smith audiences know from his solo albums.

  With the infusion of money from Virgin came the assistance of the two producers who would stay with Smith for his next three albums: Rob Schnapf and Tom Rothrock. Schnapf and Rothrock were young up-and-comers at that point, and the production of the record reflects the quiet “production” of Smith’s self-titled album.

  “We did it at the Heatmiser House,” Schnapf says of Mic City Sons. “They had rented this house and filled it with equipment and started the record on their own. And I think they couldn’t come to terms with one another and they needed outside help. So we recorded it up there and we mixed it at the shop. When we came in [the songs were] in varying degrees of [completion], some were pretty far along, some were barely along, some we started from scratch. It was a collaborative effort, as always. We recorded in the bottom floor of the house. The living room was where they had made the control room, and then the dining room was where the drums were cut, and the k
itchen was where a lot of guitars and vocals were done, so the dining room was more dead-sounding and the living room was more live-sounding. We were separated by this 8-inch wall.”

  Schnapf says part of his function during the recording was to mediate between Smith’s and Lash’s the differing visions for the album. It had always been an unusual trait of Heatmiser’s that the drummer exercised the most control over the band’s recorded sound. Heatmiser’s mixes had heretofore emphasized the band’s beat and capacity to rock more than making the melodies clear. With the melody half of the band suddenly flexing its muscles, there was bound to be some new disagreement. “Elliott and Tony had a difference of values,” says Schnapf. “I don’t know this to be factual but I sort of gleaned from the situation [that] Tony had been doing it, and those records had sounded a certain way, and [then] Elliott started spreading his wings. There just wasn’t room for the two of them. [Elliott] started getting an artistic vision himself, and they were just too close to one another and they needed a third party to say ‘here.’” Schnapf may not be certain that that assessment was “factual,” but Smith sounded pretty sure of himself when asked about Heatmiser’s transformation by Under the Radar: “Me and Neil kind of took over.”

  One of the goals with Mic City Sons was to achieve a more old-fashioned sound than would had been put down on any previous Heatmiser release. “With their equipment and the way we went about it we tried to make it a more analog recording, even though their equipment was digital,” says Schnapf. A less punk, more ethereal feel was also abetted by Coomes’s facility with slide guitar: “The harder [slide] stuff would be Sam, where finesse was required.”

  The irony of Heatmiser was that as soon as the band started to produce something like the music closest to Smith’s soul, it collapsed. The bandmates wanted to go in separate directions, and there was no longer a workable compromise. Smith later referred to the band as a “disaster” of sorts.