Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith (2 page)

The myth, or reality, is that Cobain met Courtney Love at Satyricon (relevant memories are hazy). Not particularly personable and introverted by nature, Cobain, says Touhouliotis, never said anything. He was “in the back with most of his face covered with hair.” Nirvana bass player Krist Novoselic did all the talking; Touhouliotis in fact initially pegged Krist as the band’s frontman. Locating the birth of the so-called grunge movement is tricky, to say the least, but many point to 1989, when then unheard-of Nirvana opened at Satyricon for the up-and-coming Dharma Bums (in time, the relative statuses of the bands would be reversed).
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Another “local-locus” for grunge-minded units was Belmont’s Inn on Portland’s east side. The sound there was more acoustic-tinged, however, a style “borne out of bands practicing in basements across the area,” necessitated also by strict club rules concerning volume levels in residential areas.
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Neither Elliott nor Cobain had the slightest interest in minimizing their punk roots. Elliott described his first successful band, Heatmiser, as “fist in the air, post-punk.” He went on to say, “The thing I liked about punk in the first place is still alive in my head, that kind of angle on things, that you have to keep changing, and not get stuck in a little box. And not become, like, a connoisseur of yourself.”
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Punk’s air of revolt and protest, its condemnation of conformity and mediocrity, also informed Elliott’s earliest songwriting. He recalls, in an interview from 1998: “When I first started to make up lyrics, they were bad high school poetry about, you know, complaining about all the emphasis on money and power, and how people don’t care about creativity, or all the guys on the bus in suits, and everybody’s got the same overcoat, and everybody looks the same. I had green hair, and I just couldn’t understand how everybody shopped in the same stores and worked in the bank. It just seemed totally boring.”
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In one sense, boredom
created
punk. Punk was an antidote, a DIY eruption, a sometimes only ostensibly musical version of Ginsberg’s “Howl.” Of course, once Elliott went solo, it wouldn’t be long before his gently sad songs were categorized as folk, a comparison Elliott detested. Near the end of his life Cobain, too, was headed in an “ethereal, acoustic” direction. He’d been punk, he’d been a
rock ‘n’ roll god. Both left him dissatisfied. He was particularly disturbed by fame, temperamentally unsuited for it. Plus, his music was an attack on the mind-set most of his fans embodied. They were the very people he excoriated in songs. This put him in a catch-22. “He talked a lot about what direction he was heading in,” R.E.M. singer Michael Stipe said. “I know what the next Nirvana record was going to sound like. It was going to be very quiet, with lots of stringed instruments.”
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Cobain had a plane ticket and a car to pick him up. He and Stipe planned on recording a trial run. But at the last minute Kurt called to say he wasn’t going to make it. Soon after, he was dead.

As for Satyricon’s era, Coomes offers this summary: “People used to come to those shows to get loose and lose their shit. Now the motivations are different—they come to make YouTube videos on their iPhones. I don’t know what the fuck is going on … The older people today are complaining that the kids are too well-behaved and clean and commercialized. It’s a strange turn of events.”
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Kitty Diggins adds, “[We] weren’t trying to be cool, [bands] didn’t care about being signed or anything like that. They were just a bunch of fucking weirdos and dorks and geeks that were creating strange music and strange performances. I don’t see that happening at this point.”
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So there are sociological explanations for the similarities of style and attitude between Elliott and Cobain. But there are psychological factors at work, too. Early divorce, remarriage, abuse, a native shyness, a sensitivity and perceptiveness, emerging depression, anger—these elements required, for both, the construction of a specific sort of armor. The armor included thoughts of suicide, acts of self-harm, and the use of drugs as a means of dulling emotional pain. What saved Elliott and Cobain, what allowed them to stay alive as long as they did, was the gift. These were two exceptionally talented people. They put biography to use. It was a source of pain, but it was raw data. It was malleable, it could be reworked, it was at once actual and metaphorical. And it spoke powerfully to others with similar life histories who saw Elliott and Cobain as interpreters. The art was a revision of a damaged personal past, a release of pent-up feeling that fans vicariously shared. It almost made the suffering worth it.

There’s one last shared detail. It has its own convoluted sociological
and psychological derivations. Elliott and Cobain both died violently. For ardent fans, or even mild ones, the shock was brutal, yet also, in the weeks and months following, untenable. Either because they didn’t believe it, or didn’t want to believe it, they constructed, with extraordinary zeal and industriousness, alternate scenarios. These weren’t suicides, fans claimed, but murders. Chiba killed Elliott, Love killed Cobain, according to subsets of followers. Heroes don’t die, especially not shamefully, weakly. They are called to adventure, which they accept humbly, reluctantly; some magical helper, in this case genius, propels them into dangerous, unknown worlds; there they are tested, transformed; they resurface, finally, to share wisdom with the world, reborn, made whole, stronger, visionary. In most formulations of the hero journey, a particularly apposite obstacle presents itself: female temptation. A seductress must be pushed aside. This is where hurt and angry fans bore down. With remarkably durable hatred, expressed daily on message boards, blogs, and websites, the evil harpy is made to pay. She did it. She’s the destroyer. The hero is a blameless victim of wrongdoing. The hero stays pure. The hero is martyred.

Cobain’s one approximate doppelganger. But another name comes up too, a more oblique referent, the English singer-songwriter Nick Drake, who died in November 1974, when Elliott was just five. Elliott recalled hearing a little of Drake and liking him, but he felt Drake was softer lyrically, less focused on hard, painful realities, despite the fact that, on most days, Drake’s life was exactly that—frequently hard, frequently painful. With a phrase some have applied to Elliott, who was routinely asked about his “depressing” songs or what it felt like to be such a “sad sack,” one of Drake’s orchestral arrangers, Robert Kirby, calls Drake “the patron saint of the depressed.” Others say he came to represent a certain type of “doomed romantic” musician in the U.K. music press, a “shadowy tragic figure who nobody ever knew.” He was an enigma, not so much by choice, but by necessity.

Performing was traumatic for Drake (as it was for Smith, who would sometimes throw up before going on stage). There were occasions when he simply walked off in the middle of gigs, unable to overcome feelings of vulnerability. “The folkies did not take to him,” a friend says. “They wanted songs with choruses. They completely missed the point. He didn’t say a
word the entire evening. It was actually quite painful to watch. They must have known they weren’t going to get sea-chanties and sing-alongs at a Nick Drake gig!”

By the time of
Pink Moon
, his final album, Drake was smoking massive amounts of marijuana. Soft signs of psychosis appeared, connected either to the drug use, his depression (which can sometimes include psychotic features), or, according to some, an incipient schizophrenia. Drake wanted the record to be “him more than anything.” Producer John Wood says it is “probably more like Nick than the other two records. He was very determined to make this very stark, bare record.”

The release was a disappointment, sales poor. By this time Drake had grown markedly asocial. Out of necessity he returned to his parents’ home, and life there revolved around his moods and needs. He rarely slept; his parents would wake to hear him shuffling around the house at all hours of the night. Then in 1972 he broke down completely and had to be hospitalized for five weeks.

Anger emerged shortly thereafter, a somehow liberated demon. “I had told him he was a genius, he said,” Wood wrote in an autobiography. “[Then] why wasn’t he famous or rich? The rage must have festered beneath this inexpressive exterior for years.” Either because of an inability to form and keep them or a sexuality many have wondered about, Drake’s relationships with women were tentative, few, and entirely chaste. A week before his death a woman who identifies herself as a “best (girl) friend” tried ending the relationship. “I couldn’t cope with it,” she says. “And I never saw him again.” Drake died, according to a coroner’s inquest, of “acute amitriptyline poisoning—self-administered.” The drug is a so-called tricyclic antidepressant, dangerous in overdose because of its cardiac-related side effects. As with Elliott, it’s not entirely clear what happened. The parents were asleep at the time. In light of the serious, ongoing psychological difficulties and the loss of relationship, suicide seemed likely. On the other hand, some believe the overdose was unintentional, an attempt to defeat a ferocious, depression-related insomnia. “I’d rather he died because he wanted to end it,” his sister says, “[rather] than it [being] the result of a tragic mistake … a plea for help that nobody hears.”

Just as Cobain’s did, Drake’s life and art links up with Elliott’s. There’s
the music—unadorned, melancholic, personal, not folk by any means, but not exactly rock ‘n’ roll either, a difficult-to-categorize, idiosyncratic self-expression.
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Then there’s the life, beset by emotional difficulties and relationship unsuccess. Drugs were a way out; they worked for short periods. The music worked too. It was a way of saying in art what was unsayable in life, a truth that was almost too true, a declaration the life wasn’t always strong enough to absorb. At the end, no one knows for sure what actually happened. Drake was alone in a sleeping house.

By now it is a ready-made cliché—the rock star dying young, whether by excess, by accident, or by suicide. For some, it’s part of the act, macabre performance art, a final song. This last mode, suicide, can be elusive. In fact, it almost always is. It might masquerade as excess—reckless, immoderate drug use. There is subintentioned suicide too. The person may simultaneously wish to live and die. No special effort is made to stay alive, but none is made to keep living, either outcome perfectly acceptable.
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In July 2011 another name was added to the ledger: Amy Winehouse. She was found dead in her London apartment, at the dreadful age of 27—just like Jim Morrison, Brian Jones, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain. Commentators now speak of a “27 Club,” as if these losses obey some hidden or avoidable calculus. They don’t. No one or no thing is reaching out from the beyond to pluck megastars. The commonality is youth, combined with talent, creativity, experimentation, and a gradually evolving tendency to numb emotional pain and vulnerability, of the sort many artists confront chronically, with drugs and alcohol. If there is any calculus at all, the formula describes addiction, a monstrous taskmaster. Elliott sang, in one song, of waiting for sedation to disconnect his head. The head to be disconnected was too turned on. Art has its relentless elements. It is an unending draw.

But whatever its proximate causes, the loss list is long and sad and hard to accept. There’s an impulse to start adding up all the masterpieces never recorded, works deleted by death. What would they all have become, how would the work have grown and changed, to what degree might they have overcome early conflicts, early weaknesses and insecurities, the baggage they’d been dragging uphill, had they managed, somehow, by effort or by chance, to live? We don’t know. Imagining possible futures only deepens the sadness, the sense of what could have been. Also, what they left behind
is finite. New songs turn up now and then, recordings thought lost or bootlegs of live performances, but what remains is exhaustible. It can’t be mined forever. At some future date the process of discovery will end, then it’s all rediscovery, which brings its own thrill and excitement, but not the sort that comes from freshness, newness, the next album.

Drake, Cobain, and Elliott Smith are part of the saddest of sad confederacies. All young, all shy, all fragile, all enormously gifted, all dead by apparent suicide, although Smith’s case is officially unresolved, and in Drake’s uncertainty remains about whether he intended to end his life. They were also in frequent emotional pain, and that reality, a baseline state, found its way into the music. Drugs equaled forgetting, but the art equaled remembering, so the cycle repeated itself. One other affinity is this—there was a feeling, shared by family, friends, and loved ones, that Cobain and Elliott, in particular, needed to be rescued from themselves. Death left a residue of guilt and failure among survivors. They share the blame. They could have done more. They let it happen. Or so they believe.

So affinities were plentiful and sometimes startling in their specificity. But this is a book about Elliott Smith. The question is, What set him apart? What’s different about him? In what ways was he
not
like anyone else?

An immediate impulse, one countless critics have a hard time setting aside tactfully, is to say he was just plain good, his songs different and ineffably
more than
those written and recorded by most others—more realized, more composed, more finely structured. It’s the same thing many of his friends, most of them extraordinarily gifted themselves—people like Tony Lash, for instance, and Sean Croghan—also say. Elliott was, in their estimation, the very best musician, the best songwriter, they ever knew. It is possible, though not easy, to identify the next Kurt Cobain, perhaps even the next Nick Drake, or for that matter the next Jim Morrison or Janis Joplin. There really is no next Elliott Smith.
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Elliott adored the Beatles from an early age. A quality he sometimes seemed to share with them was this: he could not write a bad song.
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It’s an overused phrase, but Elliott was the total package. He had an incredible melodic sensibility, a sophisticated musical sense—a taste—that is instantly arresting. Even when his subjects are ugly—drug use, suicide, worthlessness—they sound disarmingly gorgeous. An example is the song “Abused,” which tackles a topic obviously taboo in
pop, but cloaks it in pretty higher-register phrasings. Somehow a delicacy comes through; one sings along almost nervously, given the lyrics’ hideousness. But the impulse is irresistible. Smith was aware of his talent for beautiful sounds. It came too easy. It was unstoppable. So there were occasions when he undermined it. As noted before, he tried, especially in his later years, “fucking songs up.”
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The instinct at work was most likely boredom. The urge was to do something new, something different, to make sounds that did not come naturally or easily. Photographer Diane Arbus had a similarly gory aesthetic. To her, art had to be difficult to get, even physically. She had made up her mind about an almost naively simple equation: easy was bad art, difficult was good art. When it came easily, she found ways to muck it up.
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