Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith (39 page)

The next day it was MTV Live with Carson Daly, in a glass studio over Times Square. Here it was pure showbiz glibness in the face of raw
authenticity, the chasm between the two widening as a prefatory interview proceeds, although Elliott clearly does his best to sound polite and appreciative. He wears the same outfit as the night before, an attempt by handlers, no doubt, to present a consistent “indie” image. Daly begins oddly, asking Elliott “You feeling alright?,” a strange question to put to a “star” supposed to be born alright, always at the ready. Most likely Daly sensed nervousness, and Elliott definitely appears uptight, his eye contact sporadic at best. Immediately Daly asks about the Ferdinand tattoo, which Elliott obligingly, and revealingly, interprets as a “bull who doesn’t want to go to the bullfight but he does”—a clear reference to his present situation. “That’s awesome,” Daly replies lamely. Later Elliott can be heard to say, softly, “whoops,” as his fidgeting leads him to slide off the stool he’s sitting on. The interview gives way to yet another performance of “Miss Misery.” There’s brief discussion of Elliott recording with an eighty-piece orchestra alongside Danny Elfman, who scored the film. The song then was “Between the Bars,” and Elliott recalls the experience as “really fun.” It was done live, and “the whole thing only took five minutes,” he says. “It was really easy.”

Perhaps the biggest change of all to Elliott’s life coming out of the suddenly oversized attention had to do with his label situation. There had arisen, as Barney Hoskyns put it in a radio interview with Elliott, a potentially “fairytale” development. Elliott transitioned from Kill Rock Stars to the impossibly gaudy DreamWorks, developed in 1994 by Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffen. DreamWorks Records was the music arm of the enterprise, its initial project George Michael’s
Older
album. The first band signed was Eels, who recorded
Beautiful Freak
under the imprint in 1997. Elliott’s take on the switch was circumspect, omitting deeper specifics relating to Slim Moon and the deterioration of that relationship in the wake of the intervention just months before. “I was happy on Kill Rock Stars,” Elliott tells Hoskyns, “but I couldn’t stay … I sort of had to be on a major label because of contractual things.”
²
In other words, someone with the necessary resources needed to buy him out of the old Virgin deal he’d signed years back as a member of Heatmiser. But he’d already been recording with Kill Rock Stars. He could have chosen to stay on, or he could simply have spoken with Virgin about his desire to end their relationship. Instead he took a different tack, succumbing to the interest
DreamWorks had been expressing even before the big Oscars-driven push. As he explained, the deal “had been getting wrapped up when the Oscars came along.” He was not signed because of the Oscars. The move was in motion months prior. At any rate, whatever exactly went down, whatever convoluted financial and contractual chaos needed sorting out, Elliott was, at least initially, happy in his new home. “I like DreamWorks,” he said simply. “They are very nice.” For one thing, they didn’t seem particularly concerned with generating hits. He didn’t feel as if he were getting groomed for some sort of improbable stardom. Also, for the very first time, he had mind-bending resources at his disposal. Now he’d record “in a real studio,” with no limit on the number of tracks available. The days of forced austerity, by-products of make-do recording situations in friends’ homes or basements, were over forever. Anything was possible. And as Elliott explained, this opened up his process. He could try any and all instruments, even the “vibes” his grandfather played, to see what worked and what didn’t. “For me,” he said, “it’s always better to try the most preposterous thing because—who knows?—happy accident.”
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It all might sound more polished, or maybe not, maybe much the same as before. But the possibilities were endless—strings perhaps, piano for sure, even suspended orchestral bass drums. As he’d slept those months on Dorien’s floor and stayed home alone all day while everyone else went to work—sometimes drinking, sometimes not—he wrote songs continuously, his usual method of unconscious noodling. Many new tunes already existed in at least nascent form. In the studio environment made possible by DreamWorks, they’d take on texture.

As expected, DreamWorks wanted a video. Elliott was, of course, no stranger to the medium. He’d done “Coming Up Roses,” as well as the small number of Heatmiser videos. And as far back as October 1996, he’d worked with independent filmmaker Jem Cohen on
Lucky Three
. For that, a roughly twelve-minute film featuring three complete songs, one a cover (“Thirteen,” which Cohen had specifically suggested), it was just Jem and Elliott, no crew. The two sought out locations in Portland important to Elliott, several near Gonson’s Undercover studio/work space. Cohen recalls the three-day process as simple and pleasant, never difficult, never convoluted or in any way troubled. He had very little in the way of resources but somehow, despite that fact, the project came together fabulously. The entire enterprise
was adamantly independent. Then the idea had been simply to depict a musician doing what he naturally did in an unpretentious, unmediated way.
Lucky Three
was decidedly not a video project, not a label-sponsored or label-driven product, but more a reaction against music videos with their often formulaic artificiality.
⁴

Lucky Three
was the result of a one-time-only partnership. So this time Elliott wound up working with Ross Spears again, who told him his preference was to not intersperse shots from
Good Will Hunting
—“which in the entertainment industry is close to impossible,” Spears maintained—but Elliott agreed, “and that was that,” Spears said. “I
thought
.”

Immediately people from DreamWorks and from
Good Will Hunting
checked out Spears’s other Elliott videos and found them to be “pretty lo-fi.” What they wanted, predictably, was more production value, more gloss and sheen. Spears’s response was that “if they gave us some decent money it would look good and everyone would be happy.”
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They did not, however, go for the notion of omitting clips. That idea was shot down, and according to Spears, Elliott didn’t really mind.

The movie’s producer told Spears to go out and watch the film, which he did, at a midnight showing he somehow managed to walk into for free. As he returned the next morning the same producer had a TV set up in his office. He began to play the film but Spears stopped him, saying “I saw it just a few hours ago in a theater.” “Sure you did,” the producer replied, and walked out, leaving Spears with the feeling he was back in high school in the principal’s office. They talked later about which segments of the movie might be useable; Spears felt the romantic scenes between Matt Damon and Minnie Driver could work, but he wasn’t so sure about “the stuff with Robin Williams because he’s always hugging Matt Damon and stuff and that might come out a bit homoerotic.” It was mostly a joke, Spears’s aside, but sure enough no clips of Damon and Williams were made available in the editing room.

For the outdoor shoot that followed Elliott as he walked through a Silver Lake neighborhood, in sunglasses, in his white suit with pink carnation, Spears recalls him “in good spirits,” his confidence “pretty high” on the heels of the nomination. A motorcycle cop happened to be on set controlling traffic. He looked so “typically cop” that Spears and Elliott both started
laughing. On the spot they decided to put him in the shoot; the idea, initially, was to have him follow Elliott down the sidewalk on his bike. He said that was impossible; to do so would be illegal. So the motorcycle was set aside, but the cop stalked Elliott on foot, still wearing his shades and helmet. “I would tell Elliott to look over his shoulder from time to time,” which he did, with decent acting chops. Spears said, “He nailed that look of annoyance and paranoia. Maybe from experience.” It’s true, cops unnerved him. And though, in the video, the lurking policeman comes off as comically feckless, watching bemusedly as Elliott sticks coins in expired parking meters, in reality the paranoia was all too real. As he told an interviewer for MuchMusic his habit was to steer clear of authorities at all times and to deliberately try not doing anything to draw their attention. Also, years later, toward the end of his life, in fact, the fear of being followed would reach extreme proportions. It wasn’t anything to laugh about. Other shots put Elliott at a bus stop with backup singers mouthing “Ahhh,” along with closeups in the doorway of the Smog Cutter, a famous L.A. dive bar.

In editing Spears was ambushed. Another editor had done his own cut, full of fast edits and much jumping back and forth between locations, the kind of ADHD aesthetic that prevailed at the time. He said he didn’t like it; the second editor asked where they ought to start, then. Spears answered, “By erasing everything.” In the end two edits were made, one with film clips and one—a director’s version—without (both can be seen online at YouTube.com). But before finishing up Spears was made to contend with tedious, self-canceling lists of notes from
Good Will Hunting
people, Capitol Records (which put out the soundtrack), DreamWorks people, Elliott’s management, and so on. His response was that he was only taking Elliott’s suggestions, “and that pretty much ended that.” Elliott himself was not totally pleased. He didn’t like the super close-ups. “I told him he was a handsome stud and to just deal with it,” Spears recalls.
⁶

To Spears, who had worked with Elliott closely on several very different projects and over several very different vibes of years, from anonymity to relative fame, he was “a real down-to-earth person” who liked, very dryly, and with no tip-off flavor of sarcasm, to poke fun at pretentious behavior of every stripe. There would always be absurd incongruities. He’d be recording in an expensive studio then slip outside for a “spastic skateboard session,”
everyone wearing wigs all day. Once Elliott stayed with Spears, at a time when Spears’s neighbor was living behind a big bush. Apparently his parents had insisted he move out; he did, but only so far as the front yard. Later Spears ran into Elliott, who told him to say hi to his family, and also to the guy “who lives in the bush.” For Spears, the remark epitomized Elliott’s brand of humor; “he would say things without a hint of irony.” Such remarks were often outrageously funny yet no one could explain exactly why.

The scrutiny of press wouldn’t alter Elliott’s more entrenched and charming tendencies. He felt “pretty much the same,” he said, which was both good and bad, “in that I think a lot about the same things.” At the time he was working his way through Proust’s
Remembrance of Things Past
a few pages at a time. Before that he’d taken on Beckett’s fictional trilogy
Molloy
,
Malone Dies
, and
The Unnamable
. These were minimalist tales of vagrancy, death, inertia, and institutionalization made up, in some instances, of lengthy inner monologues. No doubt they spoke to Elliott’s sense of dread and of ennui. At the same time he did admit some differences in his life and world, mainly because “there’s quite a fuss made over people who are on TV for some reason,” adding: “Personally, I watch TV with the sound off.”

The other challenge, a sort of side effect of the general fuss—the new label and the demands made as industry types sought to capitalize on the potential of the new platform—was that time for making up songs, the leisure to settle in and let the sounds emerge, was getting harder and harder to find. It was all about serving the brouhaha. So, despite the fact that, pre-Oscar nomination, Elliott had been steadily at work on handfuls of new tunes, those written in Garry’s living room in New York when time was seemingly endlessly in supply, they lived in a state of incipience. They waited like impatient friends, understanding but eager. Meanwhile Elliott found himself dealing with the likes of
People
magazine, which had run a dismissive piece calling him a Beck impersonator for wearing, like Beck did once, a white suit. It was hard for him to ignore such opinion. A new thing to absorb, it tended to bum him out. So he decided, self-protectively, to stop reading press. It was easier, he figured, than having to deal with the insecurities unkind stories might provoke.

In time the pro and con judgments did at last slow to a trickle, the night came and went, Elliott survived, and he lost to the kind Dion, as expected—the dogs barked and the caravan moved on, in other words, as Truman Capote once put it. Then, with relief, it was back to the music. Many of the new songs he was trying out, in various degrees of completion, as early as 1997, but others emerged in 1998. Sometimes he’d play them as straight instrumentals before lyrics were written. This was the case for what would be called “Waltz #1.” Others were sung with first-draft lyrics that later would be jettisoned almost entirely. His habit was to ask the crowd whether they wanted to hear an old song or a new song. Usually they would call out some old number, something they knew and loved. But other times a request for something new broke through the din, and then he’d oblige, often apologetically, saying “This one isn’t finished yet, but …” One regular haunt which he played several times before Oscar night was L.A.’s Largo, a hive of accomplished, experimental musicianship and songwriting run like a cabaret. He was there twice in January 1998, then again in late March, four days after the Academy Awards ceremony. The place was bought in 1992 by Mark Flanagan, a “burly Belfast native,” and his wife, Aimee.
⁷
Regular performers included Aimee Mann, her husband, Michael Penn, Fiona Apple, Rickie Lee Jones, Neil Finn, Mr. E of the Eels, Jakob Dylan, and Ben Folds, among others. But it was known for the regular Friday night residency of savant Jon Brion, who championed what he charmingly called “unpopular pop.” Brion’s father was a band director at Yale, his mother a singer. At seventeen he’d dropped out of school, teaching himself to play several instruments and studying the “rudiments of orchestration.” At age seven or eight he recalls an epiphany. He had asked himself, What if I can’t spend my life making music? “And I remember rationally thinking, with no drama whatever, that I’d just have to commit suicide if it didn’t happen. I’ve never not known what I was going to do from that moment on.”
⁸
He formed a band, the Bats, which put out an album,
How Pop Can You Get
, in 1982. Another band, World’s Fair, followed but fizzled out quickly. He then toured with ’Til Tuesday, Aimee Mann’s new-wave outfit, whose song “Voices Carry” was an MTV staple. He went on from there to produce Mann’s first two solo albums,
Whatever
and
I’m With Stupid
, full of thoughtful, finely crafted, lyrically complex pop. He also worked on Fiona Apple’s
Extraordinary Machine
album, and Sean Lennon’s
Friendly Fire
. Lennon compared Brion to Prince. Working with him, he said, was like “having a weird alien prodigy in your room.”