Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith (26 page)

Instead it was Elliott taking the new direction, solo. Swofford had ditched his coffee shop job and rented that corner suite, studio apartment above Ozone. After Swofford made his intentions clear to Elliott, and Elliott expressed no strong opposition, he picked up a magnum of red wine, something decent to toast with. “Elliott knew we had the cassette,” Swofford says. “He knew we wanted to put it out. We’d been friends for a while. He trusted us. He knew how it was going to go. He knew what he would get. He knew what the program was going to be.” For reasons that likely had to do with sensitivity to his bandmates, a reluctance to turn the event into anything decisive or exceptional, Elliott asked for no paper, no official signed contract. It was to be a handshake deal, nothing more. “We were going to split everything 50/50,” Swofford recalls. “In Elliott’s mind, it was like ‘It’s just Denny and Chris. No big deal.’” Keeping it casual maintained the illusion that nothing meaningful was happening. A short, humble, inconsequential record was going to be released. No big push. No expectations. As Elliott explained self-consolingly, “They’re a really small label. They try to do national distribution but it doesn’t turn out to be that many places. It’s fine with me … And if it helps them out then that’s cool.”
⁴

What excited Swofford most of all was a fact others might have seen as a drawback: the songs were, as he liked to see it, never intended for release. They were pure, unaltered. The music “didn’t get to be fucked with. He never went in and tweaked it out, unlike a lot of his later records.” Cooper felt the same way. He called the record a “diary that went public.” It was, in
that framing, Elliott at his most intimate. “He was making the songs only for himself, not for anyone else. He had no idea, even, that it would be heard,” Cooper believed.

This idea—that Elliott never had any intention of releasing the songs—proved hard to resist, easy to imagine. There has always been uncertainty about whether Elliott did or did not know what Gonson had done with the tape, how involved he was in getting it to Cooper. The more romantic narrative would render him unaware, innocently making up songs with no foreknowledge, no future-orientation, no expectation at all that anyone would actually listen to what he was cooking up in Gonson’s house. But like most legends, it fits and it doesn’t, it’s true and it’s false. “He didn’t
not
know,” Gonson clarifies. “But on the other hand it wasn’t like a meeting or anything. I was just hanging out and constantly promoting, so I passed on the tape and from that point it was between Elliott and Chris and Denny. I just turned them on.” “Nothing made me start doing it,” Elliott explains, “because I’d been doing it for years. But it didn’t occur to me to put anything out. In fact, it occurred to me
not
to put anything out.” It was Gonson, he says, who suggested he make the songs available, and as they hashed it out she won him over. Friend Matt Schulte recalls Cooper telling him Elliott first shyly suggested the possibility of a single. Maybe, he said, one song, and one only, could be plucked from the mix and put out unpretentiously.

As for the diary notion, the belief that the lyrics were plucked from private writings and turned into songs, Elliott rejected that, most likely because it undervalued the work the writing required, the hours spent, often in bars, scribbling and revising and rethinking and sharpening, the effort required to get past hackneyed folksinger or singer-songwriter constructions, his long-standing remorseless war against cliché. “They’re songs,” Elliott said. “It’s not like a diary, and they’re not intended to be any sort of super-intimate singer-songwriterish thing. I like the Beatles. Dylan. All the good things about what they do or did is probably the same things that I’m trying to do.”
⁵
Diary aside, part of him knew what it all could mean, how it might be interpreted. Still, “I was totally shocked,” he says, when Cavity Search wanted to release the record. “I thought my head would be chopped off immediately … because it was so opposite to the grunge thing that was popular … [But] it immediately eclipsed my band unfortunately.”
⁶

Pre-show in L.A. (Photograph by JJ Gonson.)

It was the band then, and not a lot else, that gave Elliott pause. The band was the reason he contemplated holding off. But his unhappiness with how things were going kept intensifying. “I was depressing myself,” he says. “It started to get to be a drag.” For a time he convinced himself he needed to do it for Neil—Heatmiser was their idea, what they had set out to do. It wasn’t that Gust told him to stick with it, or even implied that he do so—“it was just my own trip.” The entire situation was a mess, the exact sort of thing Elliott hated to get himself into. For their part, Heatmiser expressed no misgivings. Tony Lash is clear on this point: “No one was put off by the fact he was doing it. No one was feeling insecure about it.” In fact, Lash helped with the mixing in his own basement.
⁷
“He always looked to Tony,” Swofford says. “Tony was a master. He always sought out Tony for support and guidance. They worked together to master it,” even deciding on song order. Gonson calls Lash “the money guy,” the one “who made everything happen.”

So, registering his dissatisfactions with the band’s sound, knowing it couldn’t represent anything like a long-term occupation, and pushing aside his fears and hesitations, his worries about hurting other people who had been counting on him to advance different collective agendas, Elliott moved ahead, encouraged by Cooper and Swofford. The record never meant to be a record became one despite itself. What is fascinating about the disc that came to be called
Roman Candle
—released July 14, 1994, on Cavity Search—is not only the songs on it but the sound that first made Swofford wince. On one hand it’s a smooth continuation of all the recording Elliott had done on his own constantly, in Texas, in high school with Stranger Than Fiction, but it’s also an obvious anomaly. The catchy countrified or prog-rock juvenilia of Texas and the virtually orchestral complexity of Stranger Than Fiction gave way to a simplified, audibly tape-hissy aesthetic befitting the cliché “soft is the new loud” that Elliott helped install (although as usual, any cliché drove him bananas).
⁸
It’s not that Elliott set out to define a sound or a style. Such arcane, intellectualized goals were never part of his mind-set. In fact, he didn’t like so-called “lo-fi” any more than he liked punk or jazz or flamenco. It was more a matter of expedience, perhaps also a need for secrecy, combined with incredibly honed, refined instinct years in the making. “Sometimes lo-fi is great,” he would say later, but “most
of the time it’s not. I never liked lo-fi bands when I was growing up,” he recalls. “I liked the Beatles. I liked George Martin. You have to use your ears, not your head. So, there’s no style that’s really worth anything, to me anyways.”
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A nice example of a style-averse song is the record’s last number, a sort of throwaway, “Kiwi Maddog 20/20.” The tune is a veering drunken instrumental named for the cheap, close to undrinkable wine that broke, incipient hipsters bought at places like Plaid Pantry. It features snare and cymbal by “Kid Tulsa” (aka Pete Krebs of Hazel). At the time Krebs was playing a lot of gigs on snare. “I probably had my kit in the back of my truck,” he guesses. “It was a very informal thing.” But it worked. And it was easy. The casualness and disinterest in making the whole thing sound perfect, or sound any way at all, runs through the entire record. Elliott’s fingers scrape guitar strings as he skids from one chord to another; his S’s leap out like he’s in your ear, whispering sharply. In all, as critic Barnaby Smith put it, the album evokes a voyeuristic sense of having “walked in on the middle of something.” Such was its appeal, its “rough charm.”
¹⁰
It was a guy jamming with himself (and the very occasional friend) in a basement—literally. But the guy just happened to be a savant, so it lifted to a different height. It soared.

The record is dedicated to Elliott’s father Gary, the person who got him one of those first guitars, played him Beatles and Dylan records, jammed with him, sent him recorded radio programs of Dylan’s folk roots, and saved him from the swirling agonies of life in Cedar Hill. But it begins darkly with the restless stepdad, the frozen shadow father who wouldn’t let him alone, who lurked interminably. In the title track rapidly strummed guitar defines the mood, the sound a swarm of yellow jackets circling nearby. If Elliott at this time was full of fury, as Gonson says he was, those feelings find direct expression. It’s a letting out of what was normally walled off. “I want to hurt him,” Elliott repeats, “I want to give him pain,” spread this “pretty burn.” But he backs off a little, suggesting he’s “hallucinating.” The equivocation implies two different possibilities. Either it’s an attempt to distance himself from the song’s flammable content—an insinuation that what he’s saying is illusory, a figment of his imagination—or it’s a reference to the madness Texas engendered, Charlie’s crazy-making effects on Elliott
as a small boy. At any rate what’s in store, the song makes plain, is explosion. It’s an inevitability. There is going to be, or there will need to be, at some point, a laying waste to the memory of the anguish or of the relationship itself. The image of the firework Elliott used repeatedly, a bottling up and exploding.
Dead Air
’s “Cannibal” has him on the roof, his head erupting like the Fourth of July. There again he says he’s got to get these things “off my head.” “Idler,” from
Yellow No. 5
, imagines some mysterious stalker pulling up in a car on Independence Day. Then in “Bottle Up and Explode!” with its tell-tale exclamation mark, the habit of keeping “troublemakers” below—a reference to the repression of feeling—fails. It’s a short term, nonviable solution. The prescribed explosion always comes, leaving Elliott seeing stars of red, white, and blue.

In these months Chris Cooper spent hours—as everyone close to Elliott did—trying desperately to “talk him out of thinking he wanted to kill himself.” The anger went outward, but it also returned to its source. Says Cooper, “I kept telling him that he was a brilliant man, and that life was worth living, and that people loved him.”
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Krebs adds, “In Portland we got the brunt of Elliott’s initial depression. Lots of people have their own experiences of staying up with him until five in the morning, holding his hand, telling him not to kill himself … I think he always had that kind of [self-destruct] button in there.” When the subject of his despair or of its origins surfaced, the most Elliott usually felt comfortable doing was, according to Cooper, “implying abuse.”
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But it was clear to everyone he “battled a lot of inner torment, a lot of stuff that was traumatic.” What to do with it all, how to work through and dispatch it, was a daily, urgent, life-and-death question. Songs like “Roman Candle” helped. Just as damaging as the fact that some sort of trauma had occurred was the duty Elliott felt to keep it concealed, at least so far as the details went. The songs were the letting go of blocked feeling, to the degree possible. Elliott read Freud, so the idea of the destructive potential of the suppression of affect was not lost on him. If one could let it out, it might stop banging loudly on the door of consciousness.

Other tunes from
Roman Candle
had looser, sweeter origins. Elliott had seen the Tim Burton animated film
The Nightmare Before Christmas
. In it, as the character Jack flies off in his sleigh, his gal Sally bereftly sings her song—“Sally’s Song” in the credits. It tells of disconnection, of impending
doom, of relationship loss. The last two lines from “Drive All Over Town” exactly sample musically the last two lines from “Sally’s Song.” She sings: “It’s never to become/For I am not the one.” Elliott sings, “Until he tracks her down/He’ll drive all over town.” And in Elliott’s tune the basic theme, although opaque as usual, has to do with relationship threat. An unnamed girl drives off at three A.M., much like Jack flew off. He wonders where she’s gone; he’ll drive all over town until he finds her.

Most of the
Roman Candle
songs, in fact—several missing names in the record version—chart relationship concerns. In “No Name #1” he’s at a party, looking “spooky and withdrawn.” He sees someone but he leaves alone quietly. He doesn’t belong. He tells her not to follow. “No Name #3” pictures some other event he arrives at late. So he just takes off, “home to oblivion.” It’s a bifurcation Elliott never stopped inscribing dynamically: the risk and fear of getting close. The lure of intimacy, and the safety of numbed isolation.

Two songs are standouts. “Condor Avenue,” a recycled tune written when Elliott was 17, and “Last Call,” a jarringly electrified stunner, one of Elliott’s best. The first is lyrically dense and indecipherable, probably meaningless. A girl takes off for the fairgrounds, rumbling along in an Oldsmobile past Condor Avenue, a Portland street dead-ending at the Terwilliger curves near Oregon Health Sciences University. The sound of the car in the distance leaves Elliott feeling “diseased.” He’s lying down, blowing smoke from a cigarette, not sure what to do with her clothes or her letters. She will never receive, never understand the meaning of the smoke signals whispering forth. So now he’s leaving her alone, “you can do whatever the hell you want to.” Na, na, na, na, na, na, he includes as a sort of childish taunt at the end. “Last Call” is a grenade, by far the most musically sophisticated song on the record, singularly intense, its sorrows complex. It fits and it doesn’t. It shifts out of under-produced gear, pointing toward a sound more heterogeneous, one to be found on later records, the whispers of the other
Roman Candle
tunes replaced—gradually, as the song progresses—by barely suppressed shouting. Again, Elliott mixes up the point of reference. It’s third person at the start, then second person, then finally, in the last section, entirely first person. Possibly parts of the song were written separately then melded together in the end. Elliott channels a cranky, bitter snarl pushed
through corrosively. At first he’s asleep at home, just plain sick of it all; so the song sets up as a dream, especially since he later wakes to the sound of church bells. Acoustic guitar opens it, but as Elliott harmonizes with himself a sixth above the main melody, electric guitar runs up then down a scale in caustic counterpoint. The section climaxes, then it’s back to the verse, and an “endless stream” of sickening reminders he can’t escape. “I’m all done,” Elliott says, “you can switch me off safely.” Last call is a final drink before closing but it’s also a last act before the lights go off. He waits at the end for sleep to wash it away, a different version of oblivion. Before that he repeats eight times “I wanted her to tell me that she would never wake me.”