Elliott Smith and the Big Nothing

by Nugent, Benjamin

  In the meantime, Smith was still moving in a more experimental, instrumental direction with his music than he’d ever gone before. “When I talked to him in February, he was pretty foggy—it was hard to kind of get to stuff,” says Swanson. “But he told me about these soundscapes he was making that sounded pretty great. It’s that kind of stuff we talked about that seemed so esoteric, but I remember in that conversation it kind of brought focus: There it was, he was there. I was talking about doing this project, this installation, and I was trying to build it up and almost understand and then break it down again and build it up again, and he said, ‘That’s one of the things I’m trying to do with these soundscapes.’ I think Elliott was always trying to do a lot of things with his music, and it often would be like, ‘That’s great, that’s what I’m trying to do.’ A lot of times I’d be really struggling with something and there wasn’t a lot of people I could talk about it with and I would talk about it with him and he would get it exactly. And that was really important.”

  Ramona Clifton remembers a Smith from that time who seemed both to be surviving and still not fully restored. Smith performed at Maxwell’s and at the botched Field Day festival, which was supposed to take place in a field in Long Island but had to switch to Giants Stadium at the last minute because of local resistance. “I didn’t talk to him that day because it was a big-stadium crappy show. I saw him at Northsix, the last show, I think—he did four or five shows in the course of five or six days—and I saw him then. At the Maxwell’s show we talked some, we went downstairs, and he told me he was doing pretty good, he said he was clean. He was drinking a lot; he was not his perky self. He was still very sweet. Kim Deal was around that night. He had some really good friends there, and then the last night I saw him was the Northsix show. I think that was all in June. He looked really exhausted, and I felt kind of bad. Jen helped get me into that show, and afterwards I said hello to him and there was a bunch of people and I think there was some good old friends he was talking with and he just looked so exhausted, he just looked totally wiped out. That was the last night, and he had spent the whole time in New York playing shows and seeing so many people, and he was just full, it was like, ‘I can’t talk to a single ’nother person, I’m going back inside, good bye.’ I was always sad that that was that. It was kind of a bad note to end on; nothing bad happened, but he just looked so exhausted, and I don’t really know how he was doing. When I said, ‘Hey, how you doing?’ He said, ‘Oh, pretty good. Not on narcotics.’ But he didn’t see the same. There was kind of a distance. Sort of a spark missing or something.”

  Smith’s earlier New York visit had left Dorien Garry irritated with the Blues Explosion and their coterie. Smith’s health was so fragile, it seemed wrong that the band should party around him as if they didn’t know his history. And their two days of shows turned into an ongoing party, with the Explosion’s posse swelling to include Russell Simmons, she remembers. “I hung out with Elliott after the shows but I didn’t like what was going on. When he lived in New York he didn’t really hang out so much with the New York rocker people. He actually kind of made fun of them when he’d see them at Max Fish and stuff, and then somewhere down the line they became embracing of him, and he of them. But he didn’t really seem like himself and he didn’t seem like he was necessarily sober. I’m sure that the Blues Explosion people knew more than anybody that he was not always okay. And I sort of think you have a responsibility, morally, toward somebody if you do really care about them. When Elliott came to town it wasn’t my idea to go to a bar, it was like, ‘Let’s go to a movie or go get some food or go get some tea or something, I don’t want to sit in a bar and sit with you and be an enabler,’ for lack of a better stupid term for it. Everybody was going out to the bar after the show and buying drinks and shot after shot and it was like, ‘Fuck them for thinking this was a good idea, you’re supposed to be getting your shit together. You’ve been trying to get your shit together and everybody knows you’ve been down some rough roads, and fuck the people who live some stupid rock and roll party lifestyle and think that it’s okay.’ I know that’s maybe just what their lives are like but if you really care about somebody then you sort of leave your own shit behind for a couple of days when they’re here and have some real fun with them instead of doing shots of whiskey in some shitty bar in the East Village.”

  But when Smith came to New York that June—the last time he would ever play New York—for Garry it was a quiet, pleasant occasion and he and Garry mostly goofed around, barely drinking at all. He was still intent on moving back to New York, as he’d been consistently the whole last year of his life. “I was like, ‘Do you want to live in Manhattan?’ And he was like, ‘I don’t know.’ I was like, ‘Do you want to live in Brooklyn?’ And he was like, ‘Oh, I don’t know . . . maybe I’ll move to Jersey City.’” He and Garry were cracking jokes again—“I was like, ‘In that case I’m moving to LA.’”

  Morgan kept in touch with Smith via Jennifer Chiba, and he recalls talking to her on the phone shortly before Smith’s death. “Aside from the police incident it’d be, ‘Oh yeah, the studio’s finally in order.’ Or right before last October: ‘Elliott is so healthy, Elliott is doing so great, he’s getting done and he’s so healthy.’ It leapt out of Jen’s voice. So aside from that police incident, it was always like, songs are getting done, studio’s in better order, Elliott’s healthy, great stuff.

  “Two weeks before it happened, that’s when she was like, ‘Elliott’s doing great, he’s so happy. We just went and saw Supergrass and that’s Elliott’s favorite band. We loved them, we left before Radiohead.’ I was like, ‘You left before Radiohead?’ . . . Anyway, it sounded like he was really sticking to rehabilitating himself, just being good to himself. I was so happy he was . . . restored to form. . . . That’s why I felt so fine about leaving. I didn’t check in that often anymore, and I heard that just two weeks before from Jen: ‘Yeah, Elliott’s great, his new record’s done,’ and for me as a fan it was like, ‘Oh my god.’”

  Chiba had a band, Happy Ending, that had been readying its first release. Smith had invited himself to help produce it, remembers Morgan. “I don’t know if he was actually doing it, but was talking like, ‘C’mon, let me mix your record.’”

  Happy Ending was a distinctly un–Elliott Smith kind of production. Rene Risque, a satirical rock act who shared a bill with Happy Ending at the Derby in Los Angeles, remembers “that Elliott Smith was at the show we played with them, and that they were all squeezed into what appeared to be tiny vinyl go-go dresses.”

  Sean Worrell, the head of Organart, an English indie label that purported to be working with Happy Ending on their release, later told The Guardian that Smith’s involvement in the record was creating problems because of his tendency to mix and remix until he was perfectly satisfied, and that a member of the band had stolen the tape reels from Smith. After Smith’s death, he said, the record was shelved. He added that the band’s Web site had to be taken down because of death threats directed at Chiba.

  Two weeks before October 21, Sam Coomes and Janet Weiss toured through Los Angeles as Quasi, accompanied by Marc Swanson. Swanson got Smith’s number from Ashley Welch, but never found the time to call him. He never managed to make contact with Smith again.

  Garry visited Smith and Chiba three times in LA between the Northsix show and Smith’s death on October 21, and found a Smith looking toward the future—and making room for domesticity. Smith wanted to start a family and Chiba did too, Garry recalls. “They definitely wanted to have children. It was something they both talked to me about. In my first year of knowing him, we had this really funny conversation about having kids, because I took care of kids off and on, and he was like, ‘If I have a kid it’ll be the most important thing ever, and I want to have a kid but it’ll be the thing that makes me want to kick my ass into shape more than anything else, ever.’ And it was like, ‘Well, yeah, you don’t have a choice, because when you have a kid it’s yours fore
ver,’ and I remember we both laughed and were like, ‘We can’t have kids.’ He wanted to have kids and that was something they were both trying to do. I think that was what a lot of the cleaning up and trying to be healthy was about and I know the last time he spoke to me about just quitting smoking it was kind of like, ‘I’d rather have a baby knowing that I wasn’t smoking while I was having a baby.’ That was a big one.”

  In business matters, Smith was returning to the ethic of early ’90ss indie rock. He wanted a label like Dischord or Kill Rock Stars or K to release his record. “He was getting really interested in the mentality and punk and indie and DIY ethics of ten years ago,” says Garry. “He wanted to be on a label he could call up and be like, ‘hey,’ instead of, ‘I’ll have my manager call this person in this department and see what’s going on in my life.’ He was becoming really super-obsessed with Built to Spill and Fugazi again, and I know he admired Ian [MacKaye, of Fugazi] and Doug [Martsch, of Built to Spill] like crazy. It was like, ‘Wow, this is just so ten years ago. But fucking go for it man.’ Those guys know how to do it and they’re honest and they’re sincere and they’re successful in their own hearts. He wanted that thing that guys like that had, which is, ‘I’m just going to do this my way and I’m going to do it for me.’” It was a return to the puritanical Smith. The independent-minded, anti-commercial, mildly ascetic code of behavior that Martsch and MacKaye represented was the kind of thing Smith needed—the strict feminist philosophy he’d adopted at Hampshire was also an ethical code. His flight into fame and real money had been accompanied by desperate and self-destructive behavior. The change of attitude didn’t save Smith, but he spent his last days in some degree of contentment.

  According to the coroner’s report, this is what happened on the day of Smith’s death: In response to a 911 call placed by Chiba at 12:18 p.m. on October 21, 2003, an ambulance came and found Smith, still alive, lying on the floor with two stab wounds in the chest from a kitchen knife. They took him to the hospital at the University of Southern California, a short drive to the south, near downtown LA, where he died an hour later, despite a successful emergency surgery in which some of the perforations in his heart were mended. The investigation that followed ruled the death an apparent suicide. But the autopsy report left room for the possibility of homicide for three reasons: the absence of hesitation wounds on Smith’s body (stabbing suicides typically hurt themselves non-fatally before they deliver the serious wounds, out of uncertainty); the fact that Smith was stabbed through his clothing, also out of keeping with the typical details of a suicide by stabbing; and what the report describes as Chiba’s initial refusal to speak to the police. The report mentions no evidence of breaking and entering or participation of a third party. It describes Chiba’s testimony that she was in the bathroom at the time of the stabbing and emerged only after hearing a scream to find Smith walking with a knife protruding from his chest. Speaking to the Los Angeles Times after Smith’s death, Chiba said that during the days leading up to October 21 Smith’s general happiness was undercut by “traumatic memories from childhood” as well as “biochemical imbalances . . . due to the gradual discontinuation of psychotropic medications.” Her story matches Garry’s recollection of Smith’s comments about cleaning himself of all dependencies, great and small. Garry remembers Smith and Chiba getting into health food and taking pains to be clean, in the ordinary sense of the word, by taking baths. It’s sad to think of the simplicity of the life Smith envisioned for himself after From a Basement on the Hill: raising kids somewhere in the New York area, just another liberal creative professional in his thirties, coming back from tour to push a stroller alongside the organic-baby-food shelf at Whole Foods.

  There are other feasible reasons Smith might have killed himself besides traumatic memories, if his death was indeed a suicide. “I think he had such conviction about quality and music and art, and I feel he gave up what his gift was,” speculates E. V. Day. “And I think he emotionally couldn’t face that he was losing it—he couldn’t deal with it—and I think he just decided to drown himself. And so the thing is, unfortunately, I always expected he would overdose on something and be kind of passive like that. So the fact that he stabbed himself—it’s like he got the final word. He got to say, ‘No, I mean it. I am choosing to do this. I really mean it. I really feel this much. I am so broken-hearted in this life, I am so broken hearted.’ It’s like the artist who’s just too sensitive. And that sensitivity can be heroic the way that vulnerability can be strength. He decided to go out like that to prove it. He wore his heart on his sleeve. He’s so sensitive no one understands.”

  Robin Peringer, who befriended Smith in the summer of ‘94 and started to recognize his greatness watching him compose “Some Song” on tour, became Smith’s drummer at shows during the last year of his life. Now he’s Chiba’s roomate. He remembers hanging out with Smith either one or two days before he died, talking on his porch. Smith talked about marrying Chiba and having children, and expressed a desire to move somewhere less expensive than Los Angeles, where he could buy a nice house. Peringer reminded him this would be expensive. “Why does everything have to be about money?” Smith lamented—they weren’t playing as many west coast shows as they would have liked, Peringer says, because club owners were concerned about Smith’s history with performances. But Smith, while concerned about what he might have done to his brain with drugs, was still upbeat about releasing a double album’s worth of songs, says Peringer, possibly putting out a single album, touring for six months, and then putting out another. He had enough material, Peringer estimates. A couple songs Peringer remembers Smith recording in this last phase of his life were called “Suicide Machine” and “Abused”—those titles aren’t listed on the album coming out this fall.

  There was a memorial service in Portland, and a tribute concert featuring Beck, Bright Eyes, and Beth Orton at the Henry Fonda Theater in Los Angeles.

  Smith’s friends have continued to hang out together since his death. Garry had Chiba over for Thanksgiving in Jersey City, continuing a tradition she’d started with Smith seven years before of celebrating the holiday with friends instead of going home to their families. The first Thanksgiving dinner they’d shared, Smith had invited his half-sister Ashley to eat with them and Garry had been touched at how affectionate an older brother he’d been. She upheld the tradition through the years at her place.

  “He and Jennifer had been talking about coming out. I’d been in LA about a month before he died and it was like, ‘Okay, see you at Thanksgiving.’” Chiba and some of Smith’s New York friends came over and Garry found it made her feel better.

  There’s something deeply Elliott Smith about Thanksgiving with friends. If we assume Smith committed suicide, then the story of Smith’s life reveals someone who needed camaraderie, and who lost his way, never to recover his old self, when the artificial warmth of narcotics replaced real friendship. If we assume Smith was murdered, the story, oddly, changes only a little—it would be the story of someone who lost his old friends, picked up bad habits and fell in with the wrong company. Either way, Smith ultimately looks like a brilliant man in dire need of guidance. He needed guidance to pursue his calling, he needed guidance to let the public see his best work, and he needed guidance to survive. Unsure of how to come to terms with a childhood that remained painful and mysterious to him, he needed friends even more than most people do.

  * * *

  *Smith’s bass player on tour.

  EPILOGUE

  Even toward the very end, Smith held on to his nervousness about snatching attention from anyone. “His last idea, which is sad,” says Swanson, came in 2003: Smith suggested that at a show of Swanson’s in 2003, he could “play music from behind a curtain in the gallery, so that no one would know that he was [Elliott Smith]. It was kind of this nonsensical attempt to be like, ‘I want to play your show but I don’t want to take away from’. . . It’s really sweet when I think about it now, but at the time I was like, �
��You’re going to play behind a curtain?’ and he was like, ‘Yeah, I think that’s a good idea.’”

  That reminds me so much of the guy I saw on stage in Portland in 1999 that it breaks my heart. He played as if he was behind a curtain, and each member of the audience seemed to indulge the illusion that she was the only soul behind it with him. The picture of Smith behind a curtain also reminds me of the Smith that recorded Roman Candle in a Portland basement, alone with his art and with no public to embrace him and tell him what a genius he was.

  The Smith I want most to memorialize is the one who played Pete Krebs a tape he’d made in his bedroom on a scaffold in a Portland construction site. It was a Smith who could do heavy physical labor and endure work he hated and finish a collection of astonishing songs with one piece of recording equipment, then play them live before a tiny crowd. Or the Smith that cleared out a portion of the cluttered basement below JJ Gonson’s house on Southeast Taylor Street to work over his songs without any intention of releasing them to the public.

  By accident, that Smith was eroded, by the coddling and isolation that become a financial necessity in the music business and then, suddenly, by serious drug habits. But while it lasted, that version of Smith epitomized a work ethic, a code not unlike a religion, a relentless self-criticism, a need to get something done, that I perceived in some of the friends of his I interviewed. It would be stupid and elitist to expect every musician to think this way, but it’s a good thing a few of them do. I believe some of that discipline might have come back to Smith toward the end, as his studio finally came together and albums started to slide out of it.