One of the last videos taken of Elliott Smith shows him at the Fonda Theatre, in Los Angeles. He’s sitting in a metal stacking chair, wearing faded dark pants and a T-shirt that says “I ? METAL.” He’s slumped over his guitar, and his hair is falling in his face, like it always did. His voice is weak and drowsy, like he might be on something, or coming off it. About forty-five minutes in, after he finishes up “Pretty (Ugly Before),” someone shouts from the audience, and Smith doesn’t quite catch the words. “Get a what?” he asks. “A backbone?” He tousles his hair as the comment starts to sink in. “Get a backbone?” he repeats. “What the fuck? I could tell you a dream I had last night, otherwise I can’t be more fuckin’ for real.”
He seems upset, in disbelief, and then, fingering the neck of his guitar, he starts to turn the phrase over in his head, assimilating it. The anger in his voice dissolves. He apologizes. “I’m not trying to pick on you,” he says. “Maybe I didn’t understand what you were saying.” He doesn’t want to be mean. Who knows what the heckler is really thinking? Maybe that person is just having a rough night. “I’m very healthy now,” he says, to whistles and cheers. “So don’t get bummed out.” He’s been gentle with the audience—“I want to play new songs,” he announced earlier, turning down a request for “The Biggest Lie”—and, heckler aside, the audience has been gentle with him.
Then he starts playing “Plainclothes Man”:
You’re everybody’s second home
Always trying to get me alone
An easy way to lose it all . . .
But I don’t really need that now
I never really did anyhow
I only really needed alcohol
It’s a song about addiction, probably heroin, but, like most of his songs about addiction, it’s not really about the drugs. “Plainclothes Man” is also a story of transformation, written at a time, in the mid-nineties, when Smith was on his way out of an early band, toward his solo career. It was one of the first songs that displayed his mature voice as a songwriter—easy rhymes, a sly use of common turns of phrase, a vocabulary that feels unfussy—but also, literally, his vocal style. The chesty metal voice was gone, replaced by something soft and assured, authoritative.
On the stage in Los Angeles, Smith is singing about someone who is half caught in a moment when he seems to be on the verge of escape himself. His concert that night marked the beginning of a fragile comeback tour and a promising sobriety. His voice becomes stronger than it was at the start of the show—a rebuttal to the heckler. Then he descends into a wavering sob, proof that the heckler was right. Or maybe Smith is being both strong and weak. He was always good at being both.
Made for each other, that you paid me any mind
Just goes to show my continual decline
They say that I’ll recover my love of her once in a while
But I don’t know
I don’t think so
He strokes the last chord and frowns. “That one was too sad to stop on,” he says.
It’s been twenty years since the recording of that concert—one of the more famous videos of Smith because there’s so much in it, and so much around it. It was taken in January of 2003; by late October he’ll be gone. The video is a conflicting document of his recovery, for people who like to argue about that. Mostly, it’s a snapshot of his artistry and his empathy, which were fully intertwined.
Twenty years after his death, Smith still isn’t particularly well known, or well understood, but he is terribly loved. The task of understanding and preserving his legacy has become a collective project. There are YouTube accounts such as I Remember Elliott; the old fan site Sweet Adeline, defiantly mired in Web 1.0; oral-history blogs, including So Flawed and Drunk and Perfect Still; and Smiling at Confusion, a site for posting guitar tabs and guidance on fingerings and chords. Fans share bootleg recordings and unreleased songs, reflections on his lyrics or entreaties for help understanding them, and they speculate darkly on his death. (He was stabbed in the heart in October of 2003, in a case that the L.A.P.D. declines to close; it is often assumed to have been suicide.) In YouTube comments, people marvel over his live finger-picking, argue about whether he’s on something at this concert or just tired but clean, and thank Smith for accompanying them through depression or addiction, for making them feel less alone. “He’s been saving me for over twenty years,” one reads.
Smith lived in a liminal time, late enough for audio bootlegs and portable video cameras, early enough that we don’t have much. A lot of this archival material has degraded—tapes rotted to a spooky fuzz, videos with shaggy images and overexposed faces. It makes you feel his fragility. The fan community enthuses over warm, clear concerts where you can see Smith bouncing his leg, hear his shy “thanks” after songs as though he’s sitting next to you. We enthuse, more or less, over anything that suggests his presence. On the subreddit r/elliottsmith, people post pictures of themselves in Elliott Smith shirts purchased on Etsy, or images of the “Figure 8” cover painted on bedroom walls. They share memes about depression and make heartfelt comments about the songs they can’t listen to without crying—comments that get downvoted immediately by redditors who are there to talk about Smith’s technical prowess and musical genius, not to share a platform with a bunch of emo teen-agers, or people who act like them. We are as contentious and affectionate as a family reunion. I posted a recording of Smith at the Black Cat in February, 2000, playing a tricky, Moorish-sounding improvisation before diving into “L.A.”—a little motif that I wasn’t sure if anyone had ever noticed before, and within minutes someone was asking desperately if I had the tabs. Of course I don’t have the tabs, I thought. No one has the tabs.
When Elliott Smith fans argue, we’re arguing about competing versions of him. There are people who see him as unflappably morose. There are people who see his lyrics as a codex to his relationships and life experiences, almost everything mapping one-to-one. As Smith explained once, almost apologetically, “There are pieces of me in other people and I don’t really always know how much of a song is really me and how much is other people.” Listening to “Christian Brothers,” the second track of his début album, for the first time, I wondered the same thing: there was the inexorable climb of the guitar melody, pressing toward a fight; the high hiss of Smith’s voice in the chorus; the soft threat of his curses. “Christian Brothers” is a song about confronting a father figure, but the song instantly became about my own relationship with my father. It was like looking in a mirror that Smith offered up and seeing a familiar face.
There are the fans who post pictures of Smith in a radiant blond wig, sporting a mustache made out of tape, or a picture of his tattoo of Ferdinand the Bull—an admonition against forgetting the goofy, sweet Elliott Smith. The Elliott Smith who wrote the soft, painfully resigned “Twilight” (“And if I went with you / I’d disappoint you, too”) is also the Elliott Smith who would confidently play Rachmaninoff from memory, blitzing up and down the piano; the Elliott Smith who loved the Kinks but also “Xena: Warrior Princess”; the Elliott Smith who kept cracking himself up trying to whistle “Jealous Guy,” who spent hours pretending to be a French hairdresser as he cut his sister’s hair, and who wrote his college thesis on post-structuralist feminist jurisprudence.
As I’ve worked on my biography of Smith, his friends and family have told me about a lanky teen-age boy who used to take his little sister on picnics and taught her what apartheid means; an anxious college student who couldn’t sleep one night until he had listened to Elvis Costello’s “Trust” all the way through; a musician who would catch your eye in the studio and then pretend to walk downstairs until the top of his head vanished under the recording-booth window. He was wry, thoughtful, infuriating, impossibly bad at keeping in touch. He could be a contrarian for the joy of it. He hated the Eagles but once got in a debate with a girlfriend, trying to convince her that the chord progression in “Hotel California” was interesting enough to be salvageable. Sometimes he was angry that he hadn’t written “Rocket Man.” “Literally angry,” his friend Garrick Duckler told me.
They talk, too, about Smith’s vulnerability to the world. He could be swamped by his feelings, like a kid wearing a shirt several sizes too big. He walked out of movies because he couldn’t bear to see children hurt, even in a fictional context. He drank in books, whether it was at home with Stendhal or on the tour bus with a textbook on quantum physics propped on his knees—Duckler said that Smith had always talked about books “like he had just had a long, exhausting conversation with them”—and he connected profoundly with Dostoyevsky, whose characters flicker helplessly through rage and misery and ecstatic love.
But mostly the public memory holds an image of a dark, brooding, melancholy Elliott Smith. Although he played hundreds of concerts throughout the mid-nineties, the year 2001 is a thin space in the shelf of bootlegs, and 2002 is an awful blank, like a row of knocked-out teeth; it’s this broken smile that has drawn journalists for many years. He was called “Mr Misery” by the Guardian, and chided by New York magazine for producing, in “Figure 8,” a “self-pitying” album toeing the line of “off-putting self-involvement.” After he died, Spin magazine congratulated itself for having produced a “detailed, empathetic look at the last years of Elliott Smith’s life,” in a piece that compared Smith to “an indigent blind man who had wandered up the steps to the stage.” In the online literary journal Hazlitt several years ago, a writer coronated Smith “the McCartney of Methadone,” a virtuoso who could write “melodies as irresistible as car commercial jingles about dreaming of a disappeared lover from a pool of drool in a dive bar.”
Smith is often understood, rightly and wrongly, as a kind of unfiltered confessional poet. That’s partly a misunderstanding borne of his productivity. There was a period in the nineties where his output—dozens and dozens of perfect songs—was so prodigious that it thwarts human understanding. The musician Neil Gust, Smith’s close friend for years, remembers being staggered by it. Gust told me that it reminded him of what Allen Ginsberg had said about Bob Dylan—how Dylan had become one with his breath, “a column of air.” “That’s where Elliott got,” Gust said. “He got to a place where it just lined up. He just couldn’t not nail it.” And yet Smith’s art was considered. In the years since his death, the demos and early drafts sung in concert have shown how deliberately he pared his lyrics back and adjusted phrases, how fully he threw himself into tinkering and recording. “He would write four or five different sets of lyrics for each song,” Luke Wood, his A. & R. rep at DreamWorks, recalled, “and revise a pronoun eight or nine times before he was satisfied.”
Smith was also mispegged as a folk singer during his lifetime, to his own bafflement; his music has a pop architecture that runs deep. Lyrically, his songs trace our own contradictions and inner arguments, the warring impulses that tip us over into people we never wanted to be or reel us back from the edge. In songs such as “Speed Trials,” “Needle in the Hay,” and “Between the Bars,” he documents, not unkindly, our capacities for self-destruction—the dumb, impatient kid who tries amphetamines “when the socket’s not a shock enough.” The joy of his songs, the counter-argument to their pain, lies within the melodies. “I wrote a lot of sweet, happy melodies this time,” Smith said, dryly, of his album “XO.” “The songs aren’t really happy. But you can pretend they’re happy.” At the Fonda Theatre, in 2003, where he promised not to end on a sad song, he was more earnest. “Some songs are sad, but they make you happy anyway,” he says in the concert’s recording, looking delicate, knees turned in, fiddling with the opening chords to “Strung Out Again.” The softness of his voice, the comfort of his hum in “Roman Candle,” the unearthly beauty of “Waltz #1,” the moment in “Pitseleh” when he reminds you that “no one deserves” the pain they’re put through, followed by a flood of piano that swallows you up with compassion and human understanding—that’s not just pretend happiness. That’s happiness. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
