Elliott Smith and the Big Nothing

by Nugent, Benjamin

  Eventually, Smith was bought out of the Virgin contract by the music division of DreamWorks. DreamWorks SKG was a new alliance between Steven Spielberg, David Geffen, and Jeffrey Katzenberg, the former head of Disney. Geffen was walking away from the enormously important record label that bore his name. A subsidiary of that label, DGC, or David Geffen Company, had lured Nirvana away from the Seattle indie label Sub Pop and taken them big-time with Nevermind, the album that brought indie and alternative rock ideas to the mainstream. He’d also given Sonic Youth their first major-label record deal. But the man the trio put in charge of their new label was Lenny Waronker, and it bore his stamp even more than it bore Geffen’s.

  In the early ’70s, Waronker had been a producer at Warner Bros. working with a number of artists similar to Smith in outlook and sound. He had mingled with the heroes of an age was to singer-songwriters what the Ming Dynasty was to vases. Randy Newman, Neil Young, and James Taylor were his circle. Young’s Harvest, Mitchell’s Blue, and The Grateful Dead’s Workingman’s Dead were all released by Warner Bros. during his ascendancy; back in the dawn of the hippie era, Waronker had wanted badly to sign Buffalo Springfield. These artists were songwriters who’d developed a new way of blending rock with folk after rock had climbed to the top of the pop charts in the ’60s.

  Not only did that make DreamWorks Records sound like a good place for Smith; the buzz was that the fledgling label was going to be a good place for just about anybody. “Everybody wanted to be on that shit,” says Doughty. “I bumped into Lenny at a show, and he was like, ‘Hey we missed you guys,’ and I was like, ‘Oh god, take me with you, please.’ Hanging out with that guy was like hanging out with Desmond Tutu or something, he just had the presence of, ‘I am the great benevolent figure of the music business.’ [DreamWorks] was totally the place to be.” The label would sign critically championed, commercially ambiguous acts like Rufus Wainwright, EELS, Rye Coalition, and Sparta, as well as hit-producing acts like Nelly Furtado, Papa Roach, Toby Keith, AFI, Saves the Day, and Alien Ant Farm.

  Throughout Smith’s entry into the music business, he remained, in Santen’s eyes, an altruistic soul. Touring with Santen in support of Either/Or, he encountered an unusual audience request. “We were playing at Sudsy’s in Cincinnati. It was pretty funny because there wasn’t really anybody there. I had my friends from Lexington. Really, no one came to see him. This guy sat in the front row with this kid. Elliott played for twenty minutes, and this guy said, ‘Play the fucking hit,’ or something. And everybody heard him. And then after a while Elliott stopped and said, ‘Excuse me, there’s a lot of dead soldiers on your table there.’ The guy had it completely covered in Rolling Rock bottles. This guy said he had six months to live and the paperwork to prove it. And he had the papers in his hand. And he wanted the ‘hit’—he meant ‘Speed Trials’ [The first song on Either/Or]. He walks up to the stage, sits there, and looks at [Elliott], and hands Elliott the papers.” Still on stage, Smith perused the documents, handed them back, and played the song.

  There are few better examples of one of the most consistent tendencies in Smith’s life, one that runs from Portland through Los Angeles: He sided with the downtrodden. Jen Chiba told the LA Times that Smith considered himself “a champion of the underdog.” She cited his tendency to hand out large bills to the homeless, a habit his sister Ashley brought up at an Elliott Smith tribute at the 2003 All Tomorrow’s Parties festival in LA, a festival Smith was scheduled to play before he died.

  In New York, Smith developed the capacity to bar-fight on behalf of the underdog, something his Portland friends never seemed to observe. Fighting ran contrary to everything people knew of him; he presented himself as a gentle, good-humored soul. On one hand it was a sign he was drinking too much, but on the other hand his willingness to brawl was sometimes justified as a sign of courage and righteousness. “I remember one time we’re at a bar and we’re there with some mutual friends and we’re introduced to this guy who’s like a friend of a friend, and we were chatting,” remembers Swanson. “And then like forty minutes, half an hour into it, this guy got into a fight. It was one guy against a group of people. It was really weird, at a bar, at Luna in the Lower East Side, I’m pretty sure. [Elliott] kind of immediately jumped into action. He was like, ‘We’ve got to help Jez’s friend,’ and I was like, ‘Look, we don’t know that guy, he’s not our friend and I don’t want to get in a bar fight, and he’s fighting with a bunch of people’—I’m assuming he started the fight if there’s a group of people. . . . And he was kind of like, ‘Well don’t you think we should help him out? That’s his friend,’ and I was like, ‘I don’t think we need to get involved, you know?’ And he was really like—he would kind of jump at that chance, and sometimes he’d get in a fight, which was weird, because he was a tiny guy. But then it totally turned out that this guy ended up being Jake Chapman, who’s like this pretty famous artist in England, and . . . these young art students had come in and just started giving him shit, because, I don’t know, that’s what they do in England or something. . . . So in other words it was totally justified, we totally should’ve helped this guy. [Elliott would] always jump into action for ‘a friend of yours is a friend of mine.’”

  This side of Smith is the link between the rebellious kid in suburban Texas and the second-wave feminist he became at Hampshire, the characters that turn up in his songs and the charity causes he embraced. It’s even reflected in his choices around who to let into his life as close friends and who to stay away from.

  Of course, punk and indie rock had from the beginning tried to cast themselves as companions of the underdog—that’s essentially where the name “punk” comes from. The same is true of folk music, and whether or not Smith approved of the label “folkpunk” for his music (he preferred to think of himself as a pop musician), there’s no arguing that at the very least his first three albums drew heavily from the minimalism of punk and the acoustic guitar stylings of folk. But by the time Smith’s solo recordings hit in 1994, neither punk nor folk nor indie rock could be thought of as music for the downtrodden. After Nevermind blew up the charts in 1991, alternative music could no longer claim the outsider status it once had, and the indie bands that came after, like Pavement or Neutral Milk Hotel, used indie as a way of making art too sophisticated for popular tastes. The days when punk bands like Black Flag and Minor Threat—bands that were simpler and more forthright than the mainstream—dominated the indie landscape were over. Indie rock had become a forum for rock that was more complicated, in every respect, than what could now be found on the radio (radio having changed to accommodate the increasing popularity of hip-hop as well as grunge). Pavement was the embodiment of all that was new about indie rock in the post-Nirvana world. Their frontman, Steven Malkmus, was a University of Virginia graduate with golden-boy cheekbones and a sunny, whimsical disposition. To listen to Pavement was to confess allegiance to a collegiate, middle-class subculture so flooded with irony that the moments of true romance that bobbed to the top were all the more remarkable. The camp poses of bands like the Make-Up and The Monorchid made for an atmosphere in which Spin magazine saw fit to remark that “more and more, the sort of empathic rush alt-rock once delivered with howling Marshall stacks is being conjured by boys and girls brandishing acoustic guitars. . . . It all seems to indicate that as the alt-national consensus turns to party-time ska-core, mindless pop, wordless electro-beats, swing revivalism, and other gestures of high and low irony, alt-rock’s bleeding heart is still beating. Its audience may have fled the corporate doppelganger known as modern rock, but they still hunger for an empathetic connection with non-cyborg, non-smarmy wordsmiths.”

  The dimension this fair assessment leaves out is class. The rock world had divided into grunge or post-grunge bands that appealed to blue-collar and middle-class audiences—for instance, Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam, and Rage Against the Machine—and indie bands who sang to college kids. In his 2001 book about indie rock, Our Band Could Be Your Life,
Michael Azerrad theorized that when it was no longer underground to be a blue-collar rock band, indie rock became more and more an activity for privileged kids hooked on Liz Phair, Pavement, and the Palace Brothers. “Perhaps to make up for the seeming elitism, such musicians placed even less of a premium on musical technique than ever. But maybe that was just a flip of the bird to the traditionally working-class emphasis on artisanal values like chops, speed, and power.”

  Smith’s background as a child of a family of working-class musicians is evident in his musicianship. That musicianship didn’t emerge clearly in Heatmiser, especially not on Dead Air, but it was there from an extremely early stage. Mary Lou Lord cites a song by the ’60s pop band Left Banke (famous for “Don’t Walk Away Renee”) as a likely progenitor for Smith’s style. Smith had “gone on about Left Banke” when they were discussing influences, and she identified Smith’s vocal styles in the short-lived New York City pop band’s only hit single besides “Don’t Walk Away Renee”: “Pretty Ballerina.” “The vocals were very similar to Elliott’s,” she notes. Sure enough, the singer’s mannerisms are startlingly like Smith’s, and the melody and string arrangements would have fit in perfectly on XO. The voice sounds almost the same, half-plummy, half-nasal, slightly tremulous. The piano line is catchy but betrays a certain sadness. “It’s pretty weird and kind of dark and so was Elliott,” Lord told Harvard radio, which is true. Along with “Renee,” “Pretty Ballerina” is about the extent of the Left Banke oeuvre, but hearing it is like a bit like discovering The Pixies after years of listening to Pixies-loving Nirvana. It’s a ‘that’s where he got it’ moment.

  In an interview for TapeOp magazine, Smith detailed the lengths he went to create a decent recording in high school to an aghast Larry Crane. The story reveals an early commitment to the mechanics of making music, not just the art. Smith would borrow four-track home recorders for a year at a time, he said, and stretch their capabilities. “Sometimes I would sync up two of them by cueing them up and hitting play at the same time and constantly adjust the speed on one of them to catch up with the other,” Smith explained. “The cymbal went ‘chhhhhhh’. . . So we’d play that and something else at the same time onto a track. We did a lot of bouncing or ping pong-ing, whatever you want to call it. We’d try not to put more than a couple of things on the same track. Everything was totally dead. We didn’t have any effects at all. The next year after that, we had a real drummer and two four-tracks and we were syncing them up like I was taking about. We’d do the drums to two tracks in stereo because that was of the utmost importance, to have the drums in stereo, ’cause they could be . . . ”

  Smith’s adult approach was grounded in an equally deep involvement in the technical side of recording music. He observed to Mary Lou Lord in a discussion for Spin that “. . . I can’t dress up my songs so that they’ll fit in on the radio, because they wouldn’t be the same songs anymore—whereas your songs would be, you know? . . . Because for me, the sound of the song is the same thing as the song itself, you know? Both ways are cool, totally . . . but when I make up stuff, I can’t imagine it in a lot of different settings.” Smith made these remarks after the recording of XO, when he had expanded into songs with many layers of tricks and wall-of-sound production, courtesy of Schnapf and Rothrock, so it wasn’t an avowal of loyalty to the spare sound of his first three records. It was a description of a way of looking at recording that was almost the opposite of punk rock recording, in the sense of banging out track after track in the studio as quickly as possible and trusting the tunes to break through whatever poverty of recording quality got in the way. As strong as Smith’s melodies and chord changes might have been, he demanded that the production fit them, at least approximately (he had to be at least somewhat flexible about it in the early days). Later on, when Under the Radar magazine came to Smith’s house in Echo Park for one of the last interviews of his life, he discussed his ongoing fascination with his newly purchased studio equipment, recalling how he’d mended a broken mixing board himself with a “soldering party.”

  Smith could get caught up in impulsive, quirky ideas about moving once he’d made the move to New York. His stay in France was not his only discarded plan to live somewhere far away. One day when they were both New Yorkers, Swanson decided he was going to move to Hawaii, and Smith was game. “It was funny because I had to broach this subject with Elliott because we were still in talks of looking for an apartment together . . . and he got really excited about the idea of moving to Hawaii. Because it was like, ‘Oh, we can be in the country but you’re really far away from everything.’ And it was really funny because I really thought this is a drunken night thing, thinking we’re going to move to Hawaii. Probably nobody remembers it because it lasted all of about five days. But I remember he played a show at Irving Plaza, and I heard him tell somebody—I remember thinking it was really weird because it was a business person—and he was like, ‘I think I’m moving to Hawaii.’ It was like, ‘Omigod he thought about it three days later.’ And then we talked about it three days later kind of seriously, and our friend was going to get us a place to stay—she knew somebody who had a house there—and I was going to fly there, and they were going to play there, and it was this whole plan, we’re going to move to Hawaii. And then I came back after that tour and being in all these other cities, and I really loved it here. And then it was pretty much a non-conversation. Three months later I was like, ‘Hey, I think I like New York,’ and he was like, ‘Yeah, me too.’”

  No matter how finished with Portland Smith was, one of the toughest facts of his move to New York was its coinciding with the nearly simultaneous break-ups of Heatmiser and his relationship with Joanna Bolme. Smith said in interviews—and in still later interviews apologized for saying it—that he’d stayed in Heatmiser for the sake of his friends in the band, specifically Gust. The knowledge that in the process of becoming successful he had left his struggling friend in the lurch probably weighed on him a great deal. Worse, he had hurt Gust’s reputation—albeit most likely out of reckless candor rather than malice—by insulting Heatmiser publicly. “He was always very concerned with hierarchies and the little guy,” says Swanson. “Elliott was just like fiercely, fiercely upset about injustice in any form. It’s almost like, he made some weird decisions sometimes and stuff, but on the surface he definitely would, after he had money, some guy would try to bum some change off him and he’d give him twenty bucks. Or like a tip at a restaurant or at a birthday party when the check comes up short, he wouldn’t just make it up, he’d leave an extra hundred bucks because he wouldn’t want the person to be embarrassed. That whole idea, anything he would do that would embarrass someone, cause someone else some sort of pain, was ultimately what was so upsetting to him all the time.”

  “The hardest thing about it was him not wanting to lose his friends,” says Garry. “He spoke mostly about that and not really about the demise of the band. Sam and Neil are brothers to him.”

  When Smith toured with Santen in 1997, Smith seemed to be trying to pull out of Portland emotionally. In his tradition of including the names of real people in his songs, he would record the song “Amity” for XO after getting involved with a young, pretty woman of the same name who appears in photographs taken during his 1997 tour. In the photos, he wanders around Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her, to-go coffee cups in their hands. She has twin barrettes holding her hair back from her forehead in the schoolgirl-ish style popular among indie rockers and ravers at the time. In one photo she leans against Smith, who is smiling and has his arm around her waist, so that the bottom of her fitted sweater lifts to reveal what appears to be a tattoo around her navel. She looks young and conventionally attractive. Another photo attests to the playfulness she contributed to Smith’s life. In a hotel room, Smith sits on the bed with the phone to his ear and his hair bound in tinfoil. Amity was giving him a dye job, reports Santen, who was on the tour, and the fruits of her labor are evident in the photo where Smith holds aloft a cassette,
a coiffed and smiling young man with yellow streaks in his hair. Smith’s expression in most of these photos makes him look unusually young.

  Amity might have inspired a song, but in the wake of his break-ups with Heatmiser and Bolme, Smith’s dearest wish was to find a more stable existence on his new coast. He envisioned buying an honest-to-god home for himself with the new money he was earning—for the first time in his life he was making a good living, thanks largely to Mittleman. He and Garry would drive upstate to Nyack, Woodstock, and Saugerties to look at houses where he might have enough room for his own studio and be able to take a train into the city. “He loved a lot of the neighborhoods, but he had little qualms about not wanting to have neighbors nearby,” says Garry. “There was somebody who was living up in Woodstock at the time who made records who had a studio, and I mentioned it to him once when we were up there, and he was like, ‘I don’t want to live in the town where the other dude who makes records has a studio.’”

  There was one house in particular Smith set his sights on: Big Pink, where The Band and Bob Dylan had cut legendary records. By coincidence it was actually for sale, and Smith, new to the strata of renown in which a musician has financial managers and lawyers, started to make the necessary phone calls to figure out if he could buy it. Then, says Garry, a Japanese collector swooped in and took it off the market.

  But even then Smith would go and look at Big Pink, Garry remembers. “We still went up there a lot and took pictures in front of it and sat in the driveway and tried to figure out what went on in the garage. I wanted that to happen really badly because I thought it would have been good for him to get out of the city and get away from the ‘I can go to a bar any time of night’ accessibility of Manhattan and Brooklyn. None of those places were really suitable for having a studio or even a practice space. It was really a pain in the ass: He really didn’t get to play or write nearly as much as he wanted to and it just sort of seemed like it would have been a perfect—things weren’t all right then and I thought it might have been a perfect chance to get things a little bit better. He was really into it and then this need for him to be in LA just happened.”