Elliott Smith and the Big Nothing

by Nugent, Benjamin

  Day’s explanation for Smith’s decline is simple: “He didn’t like himself. He was turning into a person that he would hate. Which was not being some kind of misogynist jerk . . . But he turned into a person who didn’t have the—I think he sort of lost the ability to fight to be the individual that he wanted to be. And I think he was just like, fuck it, just take me on the bus. He let go of something—he felt very strong about his individuality, that he had this vision in the world. I think that he just couldn’t deal. And so he just would be around people that would make life easier than being the person I think he really wanted to be. Just to be a great artist. The whole time I hung out with him, he was never doing drugs, he just drank. I think that he did start doing drugs again really soon after that time. I guess I could just feel it coming on, that he was just numbing out.”

  Margaret Mittleman and Smith would part ways soon after his Figure 8 tour, and shortly thereafter Smith passed into the worst period of his adulthood. “The whole after-Margaret [time] and all that stuff is all very much involved with heavy drug use: crack and whatever,” says Swanson. “I don’t know how many extreme drug addicts you’ve been friends with, but you don’t really know them anymore. They turn into weird people, and I didn’t talk to him much at that time, and a couple times I did talk to him and he sounded really crazy, and I was really worried. Really worried.

  “We all knew that there was bad stuff going on. That he was not doing well. He was stubborn; he would do what he wanted. Somebody would be out in LA and someone would tell someone they saw him at a show, and we were definitely worried. Neil would go down there or Sam would go down there, and maybe they’d play. There were always trickles, someone keeping track of things and stuff like that, but you know, that’s when it got really hard, that’s always when it gets really hard, when somebody’s doing that. I don’t think anybody knew this or that, but I think we all knew something was amiss.”

  * * *

  *A Portland pub where Krebs performs regularly.

  Ten

  A BASEMENT ON THE HILL

  OF ANY PERIOD in Smith’s his life, Smith’s last three years in Los Angeles have remained the most mysterious, since it was a time when both old friends from Portland and colleagues from the music industry lost touch with him. In Smith’s own words to Under the Radar, he “dropped out of just about everything” for a while.

  Without Margaret Mittleman and the Schnapf-Rothrock producing team, Smith became far more vulnerable to diving into situations from which he couldn’t easily extricate himself. One such example is the album he named From A Basement on the Hill. Smith first started to record the album with Jon Brion, but after Smith and Brion decided not to work together anymore, Smith spent a long time recording the album with David Mc-Connell, who runs the B-Girl record label and Satellite Park recording studio in Malibu. McConnell had recorded Shon Sullivan in Goldenboy, and his label was also home to Josie Cotton, singer of the ’80s hit “Johnny Are You Queer?” and Mc-Connell’s cohabitant. Smith and McConnell, Smith recalled, jointly developed the term “California Frown” to describe the sound they pursued. (Smith explained “California Smile” as a music-industry term that usually connotes high highs, low lows, and extreme slickness.)

  Smith ruefully recalled his preceding recording experience to Under the Radar: “There was even a little more than half of a record done before this new one that I just scrapped because of a blown friendship with someone that made me so depressed I didn’t want to hear any of those songs. . . . He was just helping me record the songs and stuff, and then the friendship kind of fell apart all of a sudden one day.” That was probably a description of Smith’s falling out with Jon Brion, the producer famous for his work with Aimee Mann and Fiona Apple. Brion, who made his name with avant-garde composition and brought analog keyboards back into style, would have no doubt helped Smith make the melodious, critically acclaimed album that was expected of him. McConnell says Smith and Brion parted ways just before Smith came to him to record. In a way, the end of the working relationship with Brion wasn’t so different from the end of Smith’s romance with DreamWorks. Smith told McConnell that he fired Brion because Brion didn’t want to put up with his drug use and the work habits that attended it.

  McConnell is an amiable thirty-something with red curls and an accent that betrays a childhood spent partially in Missouri and partially in Fresno. Somehow, he or Josie Cotton seems to have come into a lot of money. McConnell is one of those doubly blessed Malibu residents who has managed to get rich enough to live on an edenic spread of land and yet remain chill enough to properly enjoy it. He’s somebody who’d have a soothing influence on you if you spent a long time living and working with him; if you had a problem he’d give you friendly advice and do his best to help, but he wouldn’t throttle you over it.

  McConnell’s Satellite Park studio is in his house, which sits in the hills above the Pacific Coast Highway (PCH). The spot is just east of the of Malibu bluffs, which, together with the beach on the other side of PCH, constitute one of the most tranquil landscapes confronting the American driver. The place is on the opposite side of the greater Los Angeles area from Silver Lake, where Smith was living, and it is economically and aesthetically on a different continent from LA’s east side, let alone Portland. This was indie recording in the sense that it was a studio with no major-label affiliation, but it was also upscale, a far cry from the kind of environment many people in Silver Lake or Portland envisioned as the source of anything truly indie rock.

  To get to McConnell’s place, you snake up a series of back roads, finally arriving at a rectangular metal gate. When it opens you can see mist-teased hills from the driveway. There is a bounding, flawless green lawn and the house sits squarely upon one of the hills. A black BMW SUV was parked in front the day I visited.

  The décor is relatively unobtrusive on the top floor, where McConnell recorded many tracks with Smith, running cords up from the recording devices on the bottom floor. The bottom floor consists of McConnell’s bedroom, the guest bedroom where Smith lived during his recording sessions there, and a bathroom off of Smith’s chamber. A wall separates McConnell’s bed from a mass of vintage recording equipment set up on racks. Across from the equipment is a Chamberlain organ, a favorite keyboard of Smith’s. There is wall-to-wall leopard-print carpeting, and ’50s Chinese kitsch art on the walls. In the bedroom that once housed Smith, there is a giant Warholian portrait of Mao. The huge windows look out on exquisite Californian natural bliss, with nary a woodshed in sight. This is a place the Rolling Stones would have recorded.

  Smith came to a decision quickly about McConnell’s facilities. “Elliott was looking around for a studio, and asking around, for somebody to record with and work with, and Shon [Sullivan] recommended me,” McConnell says. “He and Valerie were calling me to set up a time and come up here and look at the place, and see if he wanted to work with me up here. So one day he said, ‘Can I come up tonight at look at the studio around ten?’ He was in Big Bear, so they were going to drive down from Big Bear and check it out. So ten o’clock rolled around and they didn’t show up. And it was like twelve o’clock and I was getting tired, almost ready to go to sleep, and then finally after a few more phone calls they said they were almost here. It was like 2:00 a.m., and they finally got here around 3:00 a.m., maybe even later. And Elliott was basically in my driveway and he hopped out of the car, and I said, ‘Come on in.’ He looked at the gear that I have and the mics and stuff and the instruments and whatnot and he just liked the vibe of the place so he said, ‘Great, let’s start, right now.’ So basically he had all his instruments in his car. Generally when you do these things it’s like, ‘Okay, great, so next Tuesday let’s start,’ but it was like, ‘Okay, great, can we start?’ And I was like, ‘Uh, sure, I guess so, if you want. I guess we could start.’ So all of a sudden, he and his girlfriend and a friend of theirs all just started loading in all this stuff: clothes, and guitars, and all this equipment and books and sleeping
bags.

  “He basically just moved in, in the course of like thirty minutes, that night, right on the spot. It all happened within an hour, him looking around and deciding he wanted to work here. I guess I passed his little interview. He was real into the vintage old gear and Beatles techniques of recording, so I guess I passed that test. Within an hour he was like, ‘Let’s go,’ so I guess he didn’t have to think about it too long. And that began the first six weeks of recordings.”

  During those six weeks, starting in the last week of April 2001, Smith lived at McConnell’s house; Valerie Deerin was a part-time resident. The Figure 8 tour had only recently concluded and there was still nothing irregular about the schedule on which Smith was approaching the new album. The one disaster so far had been the split with Jon Brion. There was still every reason to believe the album could be ready for release in 2002, two years being the standard amount of time between albums for an artist on a major label.

  But there were hints of trouble brewing. Weeks earlier, Smith had had another run-in with a flawed intervention, this time in a meeting with DreamWorks, according to McConnell. Smith apparently told McConnell that the “intervention was a meeting at DreamWorks with Lenny and Luke.” But the meeting didn’t end with Smith in a clinic; it ended with Smith storming off, refusing help, full of resentment. “I think that helped pave the way for him to be moving away from DreamWorks,” says McConnell. “I think that started him on his path to get off the label.” It was a path that wouldn’t lead to a formal split from DreamWorks, but to an agreement that Smith’s album-in-progress would be released on an indie label. That didn’t stop Smith from candidly expressing a desire to get off of DreamWorks to numerous friends—Swanson and McConnell among them—throughout the next few years. Lenny Waronker’s ship looked like the best the major-label world had to offer, and in Smith’s eyes it wasn’t all that appealing.

  Smith’s work habits during the McConnell recordings were exceptionally grueling—it was hard to keep up with someone whose state of mind was as medically pumped-up as Smith turned out to be. And Smith was dead set on making a great album at full speed, for the most part spurning rest. McConnell says he and Smith “pretty much worked around the clock. I would take catnaps constantly because I wasn’t able to stay up. I didn’t have help. So I pretty much stayed up as long as I could with catnaps and then I would crash every three days or something. [I crashed] for ten or twelve hours every three days, whereas he would crash every five days. A lot of that was because he didn’t want to go to sleep without finishing each song; he wanted to complete each song before he got into bed. The whole song: Drums, guitars, bass, keyboards, vocals, everything, he wanted it all done, and then he’d go to bed and have me mix.”

  Smith had always been the kind of songwriter who explored the most idiosyncratic parts of himself. That process involved a risk: If you spend day after day reaching into the innermost darkness of your own psyche, aided by whatever substances you think will help you get there, you might not find it easy to return to a state that other people would call normal. In Portland and New York he’d walked the streets and subway tunnels at night, and sat on church steps talking to god. In LA, he holed up behind a gate in the hills and drove himself downward, into himself and into a form of madness, with legal and illegal drugs and hard work. In doing so he built the foundation of a great album, at the cost of his ability to function out in the rest of the world.

  “He’d end up either passing out on the floor here,” says Mc-Connell, indicating the leopard-print carpet, “or falling asleep up on the couch. He’d be trying to stay awake, so there was a lot of that for the first six-week period.” In the end, the creative results were incomplete, as excellent as the songs might have been. Because of the breakneck schedule Smith imposed on himself, Mc-Connell says, “basically what happened is it didn’t get finished.”

  Smith’s defense of such behavior was an aesthete’s defense: “We talked a lot about ‘we’re not going to do that, that’s what normal people do,’” says McConnell. “That was a big thing for him, to take the artistic road instead of the high road or whatever. It’s definitely, ‘I’m going to do my record and I’m going to do as many drugs as I want, because art is not about being sober and it’s not about being some society figure, it’s about art.’ And he’s right, you know?”

  E. V. Day sees this as a sure sign of Smith’s not thinking like his former, wiser self—the one his closest friends had known and loved for years. “A lot of artists do that, they take drugs in order to make music—and I don’t really think he needed it. I don’t think he needed it at all. I think he needed it to deal with the people and his conflicts with the relationships, which do come into the music. I think he could have gone a separate way and not have turned to drugs. I think that was a cop-out. That’s what I mean about him turning into a person he didn’t want to be. I don’t think it was like, ‘I’m going to make better music because I’m going to do drugs.’ That’s just an addict talking.”

  This was the beginning of making an album, but it was also the beginning of a descent into a psychological crisis. The recording of Smith’s wildest, most independently created album since Either/Or, if not his wildest ever, went hand in hand with a series of personal break-ups and crises. Mittleman and Smith seemed to have ended their professional relationship weeks before Smith came to McConnell’s studio, McConnell recalls. Mittleman and Smith “communicated once or twice” on banal matters, and then she was out of the picture.

  Schnapf may have been linked to Mittleman, but Smith’s differences with Schnapf seemed to McConnell to be creative, while Smith’s differences with Mittleman seemed more personal. “He complained a lot about Rob, [but] kind of more about his production than him as a person. Whereas with Margaret he complained about her as a person—‘Oh she really pisses me off.’ It seemed like he had falling-outs with people all the time. It was really weird. It was almost like he sought out relationships on purpose so that he could have a falling out.”

  Smith knew exactly how he wanted the post-Schnapf album to sound. “He wanted to get away from his last two albums,” says McConnell. “He was proud of the albums, he liked them, but he felt like they were a little too polished for what he wanted to portray. For his next album he would say things like, ‘Oh, listen to Fun House, by the Stooges, that’s not polished, that’s one of the best albums ever made. Listen to the Saints.’ Or whatever, ‘Listen to the Beatles; the Beatles aren’t polished, their guitars are out of tune, they sing out of pitch every now and then, and it’s okay, it sounds great. That’s good, let’s do that.’ And I think that’s why he hired me: He knew I had studied the sounds of the Beatles, and how they got them, and I think that’s what he wanted, and he would refer constantly to The White Album and stuff like that. And I think he was going to pretty much emulate The White Album in many respects. At one point, he was talking about having thirty tracks. He definitely did have thirty tracks, a preliminary set list of thirty tracks. Basically he really liked the era of his second and third albums [Elliott Smith and Either/Or]. He really liked that style of recording because it was more raw than the DreamWorks records.”

  In many ways, the creation of an unpolished record was a more exacting process than the creation of a polished one. “Basically we’d be sitting here recording, and if anything ever sounded too polished, we’d fucking redo it. ‘That’s not right, let’s redo it to make it sound more human, less robotic,’ [he’d say]. And even to the extent of detuning the guitars slightly. On most of the songs we ended up doing that, we were kind of forced to do that. One guitar would be sharp, one guitar would be flat—just a little bit, just enough that they could be distinct. We used lots of strange mic techniques. We did a lot of bouncing, like The Beatles did. You might start off with the drums on six or seven tracks, but bounce them down to one or two tracks.

  “The idea was to slowly degrade the sound. But in a way that we liked, in a way that was unique. We didn’t want to degrade it and have i
t be like, ‘Oh yeah, it sounds like every other lo-fi band.’ Instead we wanted it to have a lo-fi sound that was something that somebody couldn’t duplicate right off the bat. So we spent a lot of time doing that, which is also why the record took a lot of time that first year. It was just because of a lot of meticulous deconstruction of the songs. The song might start off [with him] playing acoustic guitar and singing, and sure enough it sounded like a pretty standard song. By the time we got the rest of the instruments on there, it’s like a whole different song, a whole different world, in a very extreme range. It was deconstruction of the song. We would always use the less obvious approach. If it was like, ‘Oh, for this next guitar track we should use this mic on that amp,’ instead we’d go, ‘Okay, if that’s what it should be let’s not do that. Let’s do this other mic, this other guitar.’

  “He would say things like, ‘Whatever happens to me, don’t let anybody clean this up. Don’t let them put it through Pro Tools. Make sure it’s released like this.’ In fact, we did a lot of mixes together, and he would say, ‘If anything happens to me, make sure these are the mixes that end up on the album. Don’t let anybody else remix them.’ He would even threaten to erase the masters, so that they had to use those mixes. And I stopped him. There was a number of times he tried to erase the master tapes, because he liked the mixes that we had and he knew that if the label got a hold of it they would try to clean it up. And so I would stop him from erasing the masters.” Of course, whether DreamWorks would have actually remixed them is anybody’s guess.