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Needle In The Hay: Elliott Smith

Last spring, the kind folks at Kill Rock Stars asked if I would do a bit of freelance work and write a one-sheet to set the context for the two-disc retrospective, of Elliott Smith roughs and demos, New Moon. As sometimes happens, it didn't end up being used. It wasn't what was wanted, by somebody, or they were too kind to tell me it wasn't very good. (This is why I don't have much of a freelance career, and so it goes.)

Quite possibly KRS expected me to have less distance and more intimacy with the subject, but I was trained not to become close to artists, and still think that to be a good and sensible rule. And, this morning, I wonder how much damage we do by knowing too much about the singer's private demons, anyhow. Art refracts through the experiences of its recipients, and I think it's meant to be an active process in which we (listeners, readers, viewers) add layers of meaning, and not a passive ingestion of the artist's pure intent, as impurely contextualized by experts.

Which is not to disavow the art of criticism -- not at all -- but which is to suggest that the biography of celebrity is a peculiar and suspect lens through which to view an artist's work. I cannot listen to Nirvana because I know, even not having read the several biographies, how much it cost Kurdt Cobain to write and sing those songs. I think I was richer not knowing and being able to hear, to imprint my own personal text on that experience.

Back when Peter and I were both driving $1,000 cars (his had been set on fire, but ran fine anyhow) and starting to talk about publishing a magazine together, we went to see Elliott Smith and Mary Lou Lord at RKCNDY, the short-lived post-industrial playground where Eddie Vedder revealed his penchant for climbing the rigging to a batch of suits from Epic. It was not a well-attended show, even though Mary Lou Lord had not yet chosen to extinguish the buzz surrounding her career. Smith, who I remember seeing only that once, was a diffident, closed performer, hunched over his guitar and soft at the microphone. I believe there was a bottle of cheap wine at work, or perhaps Robitussen.

He did not seem easy in the spotlight, nor like someone who would ever seek the big stages his songs would soon make available to him.

For no good reason I was reminded of the following bundle of words in the haze of today's awakening, and thought to dig it out, to revise and extend my remarks. Which is cheating, eh? Well. I'll strip out some of the glad-handing that goes with trying to write promotional material (for the record: I'm terrible at that kind of writing, but every once in a while need to remind myself of that fact, apparently).

The temptation, I wrote and still believe, given the lurid and unresolved details of his passing on October 21, 2003, is to force our impressions of Elliott Smith’s entire life and creative output through the hazy lens of his disintegration. New Moon offers a different story, a happier story, a much fuller and more realized story. Not from the beginning — he’d been writing songs on a four-track since he was 14 — but from the beginning of Smith’s emergence as a formidable songwriter in Portland, Oregon.

Portland (even more than Seattle) had a reputation as a hard, blue-collar town those days. One didn't fear the police in Seattle. Portland, we were warned, wasn't like that. And its music community was legendary for its creativity and its eccentricity, and its almost willful embrace of obscurity. Local and international cult legends included Greg Sage and the Wipers (art punk with a flying saucer bent), Poison Idea (anarcho punk featuring a brilliantly nihilist 400-pound guitarist, the late Pig Champion), and Dead Moon (the legendary garage rock trio, recently retired, I believe).

Smith had been born in Omaha, Nebraska, and raised by his mother and an abusive stepfather in the suburbs of Dallas until his father brought him to Portland to attend high school. Right on schedule he finished studies in philosophy and political science at Hampshire College in Amherst, MA, and returned to Portland in 1991 to do…what?

To work in a bakery and write more songs, as it turned out. The band he ended up forming, Heatmiser, were part of a small punk-pop community (which more or less included Pond, Hazel, and the Spinanes) that stood in oddly sunny contrast to the ironic, iconic fury of grunge breaking three hours to the north.

He wrote a lot of songs. From 1993-96 Smith contributed significantly to Heatmiser’s three albums, released three solo efforts of his own, and left piles of material unreleased or on very obscure b-sides and compilations. It is a striking body of work.

Heatmiser were better than good, though in the end they managed only those three albums and an EP. Smith’s first solo release, 1994’s Roman Candle, was little more than a quiet set of demos, a private experiment somewhat reluctantly released. His eponymous 1995 album, which began his relationship with Kill Rock Stars (then, I think, the emerging Riot Grrrl label, among other good things), was another matter entirely, opening with the startling beautiful pop confession, “Needle In The Hay.” By 1996’s either/or (originally to have been another self-titled album, but Smith relented -- relented! -- and settled for a nod to the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard), Smith’s career had eclipsed that of Heatmiser, or Heatmiser had gone the way of all bands. Regardless, after a final and obligatory two-week tour, he was on his own.

The songs on New Moon come roughly from 1994-96, and were recorded for his second, self-titled album, or for what became either/or. Or they were taped just for the hell of it, as a kind of audio diary. (They were, to varying and comparatively minor degrees, cleaned up for this release.)

In the end I did meet Elliott Smith one afternoon, in an old man's bar somewhere in Hollywood, where we both lived. He had two minders who drifted to the background while we chatted into a tape recorder, and was scruffy enough and reticent enough to have no little difficulty ordering a beer, and my burnt coffee. He was a bigger man, and more substantial, than one might have thought from his photos, from his persona, from his voice. Not as raw-boned as Mark Lanegan, but sturdy. And smart. Very smart, and not pretending a bit.

“I was just recording a bunch of songs,” Smith said that November 1996 afternoon, just before the fuss and the Oscar nomination and all the rest began. “I wasn’t trying to make a record. I recorded some of it at my girlfriend’s house, on a four-track. I recorded some of it at one place I lived, and then another place I lived, and then another place where someone had a warehouse space, and I recorded some of it a real studio.”

Mostly alone and playing all the instruments, in the end Smith had 30 songs in various stages of completion for either/or, which left 18 unaccounted for. “A lot of them,” he said dryly, “had problems that, to me, were fatal.” (It is always endearing to find somebody else who speaks in dependent clauses.)

One of the problems was that people unexpectedly cared what his next record might sound like. “When I was a little kid I wanted to be in the Beatles,” he said, “but I’m totally not susceptible to the weird pressure of, well, you have to impress everybody all the time, and everything you do has to better than the last stuff. But I totally got derailed by it. I recorded a bunch of stuff that I was really happy with, if it had just been me, but then when it was time to put together a record, suddenly I didn’t want to put a lot of it out anymore.”

It is one thing to sing these songs alone in a studio of your own making, or to a room of 15 familiar faces. But to several hundred or more strangers, to hear them on the radio?

Yes, he was a confessional songwriter, but most of his released material arrived with shields of some sort, from the sweet delicacy of his voice to the deceptively simple pop sounds of the music which carried his vocals. Many of these songs are raw, and not because of their comparatively modest production: entreaties to girlfriends, friends, demons; celebrations of a simple, vibrant, artistic life far beneath the glare.

Would he have wanted to hear “Riot Coming” on the radio, with the couplet “a punch in the stomach/makes sons into daughters”? What if he had finished “Whatever (Folk Song In C)” with the elegantly simple admissions “If you’ll be straight with me/I’ll be straighter with you” and “If you’re all done/like you said you’d be/what are you doing/hanging out with me?”

He did, of course, finish the early version of “Miss Misery” here, for which he received an Academy Award nomination. That was a curious season in which both Smith and Allison Moorer appeared in full dress, singing on Hollywood's biggest stage. I cannot guess what that cost Smith to do, but perhaps it didn't. Perhaps his diffidence, his shyness, his uncertainty masked more drive than was polite to reveal. Perhaps he grew into his role, though it is not clear to me what his role was, nor what it has become after his passing. Certainly he is easier to understand dead than he ever was alive, but I suspect that could be said of all of us.

Other songs are experiments, moods of the moment, sketches. “High Times” ends up with atypically shouted vocals and no hidden fury, and “New Monkey” and “Fear City” rock more aggressively than most of his solo material did. “Thirteen” manages somehow to combine the guitar sounds of Mississippi John Hurt and a story that echoes both “Stagolee” and “Leader Of the Pack.” And “Big Decision” contains an unmistakable nod to the Violent Femmes’ “Blister In The Sun,” and, yes, no small amount of foreshadowing: “It’s a big decision/You can’t kick when you’re down.”

The big decisions, of course, were down the road. But the decision here was to plunge forward, to get it all down, to try to get it right; to play, to dabble. To do the work.

And he did the work. Despite whatever demons best him, and much like Steven Jesse Bernstein, the poet laureate of Seattle punk, Elliott Smith did the work. Both men died on the edge of a blade, nearly on the same day a dozen years apart. Which means nothing, of course.

But it does make the music harder to listen to, knowing.

Posted by grant on September 5, 2007 9:19 AM | Permalink

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