Elliott Smith and the Big Nothing (14 page)

Smith could get caught up in impulsive, quirky ideas about moving once he’d made the move to New York. His stay in France was not his only discarded plan to live somewhere far away. One day when they were both New Yorkers, Swanson decided he was going to move to Hawaii, and Smith was game. “It was funny because I had to broach this subject with Elliott because we were still in talks of looking for an apartment together . . . and he got
really excited about the idea of moving to Hawaii. Because it was like, ‘Oh, we can be in the country but you’re really far away from everything.’ And it was really funny because I really thought this is a drunken night thing, thinking we’re going to move to Hawaii. Probably nobody remembers it because it lasted all of about five days. But I remember he played a show at Irving Plaza, and I heard him tell somebody—I remember thinking it was really weird because it was a business person—and he was like, ‘I think I’m moving to Hawaii.’ It was like, ‘Omigod he thought about it three days later.’ And then we talked about it three days later kind of seriously, and our friend was going to get us a place to stay—she knew somebody who had a house there—and I was going to fly there, and they were going to play there, and it was this whole plan, we’re going to move to Hawaii. And then I came back after that tour and being in all these other cities, and I really loved it here. And then it was pretty much a non-conversation. Three months later I was like, ‘Hey, I think I like New York,’ and he was like, ‘Yeah, me too.’”

No matter how finished with Portland Smith was, one of the toughest facts of his move to New York was its coinciding with the nearly simultaneous break-ups of Heatmiser and his relationship with Joanna Bolme. Smith said in interviews—and in still later interviews apologized for saying it—that he’d stayed in Heatmiser for the sake of his friends in the band, specifically Gust. The knowledge that in the process of becoming successful he had left his struggling friend in the lurch probably weighed on him a great deal. Worse, he had hurt Gust’s reputation—albeit most likely out of reckless candor rather than malice—by insulting Heatmiser publicly. “He was always very concerned with hierarchies and the little guy,” says Swanson. “Elliott was just like fiercely, fiercely upset about injustice in any form. It’s almost like, he made some weird decisions sometimes and stuff, but on the surface he definitely would, after he had money, some guy would try to bum some change off him and he’d give him twenty bucks. Or like a tip at a restaurant or at a birthday party when the check
comes up short, he wouldn’t just make it up, he’d leave an extra hundred bucks because he wouldn’t want the person to be embarrassed. That whole idea, anything he would do that would embarrass someone, cause someone else some sort of pain, was ultimately what was so upsetting to him all the time.”

“The hardest thing about it was him not wanting to lose his friends,” says Garry. “He spoke mostly about that and not really about the demise of the band. Sam and Neil are brothers to him.”

When Smith toured with Santen in 1997, Smith seemed to be trying to pull out of Portland emotionally. In his tradition of including the names of real people in his songs, he would record the song “Amity” for
XO
after getting involved with a young, pretty woman of the same name who appears in photographs taken during his 1997 tour. In the photos, he wanders around Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her, to-go coffee cups in their hands. She has twin barrettes holding her hair back from her forehead in the schoolgirl-ish style popular among indie rockers and ravers at the time. In one photo she leans against Smith, who is smiling and has his arm around her waist, so that the bottom of her fitted sweater lifts to reveal what appears to be a tattoo around her navel. She looks young and conventionally attractive. Another photo attests to the playfulness she contributed to Smith’s life. In a hotel room, Smith sits on the bed with the phone to his ear and his hair bound in tinfoil. Amity was giving him a dye job, reports Santen, who was on the tour, and the fruits of her labor are evident in the photo where Smith holds aloft a cassette, a coiffed and smiling young man with yellow streaks in his hair. Smith’s expression in most of these photos makes him look unusually young.

Amity might have inspired a song, but in the wake of his break-ups with Heatmiser and Bolme, Smith’s dearest wish was to find a more stable existence on his new coast. He envisioned buying an honest-to-god home for himself with the new money he was earning—for the first time in his life he was making a good living, thanks largely to Mittleman. He and Garry would drive upstate to Nyack, Woodstock, and Saugerties to look at houses
where he might have enough room for his own studio and be able to take a train into the city. “He loved a lot of the neighborhoods, but he had little qualms about not wanting to have neighbors nearby,” says Garry. “There was somebody who was living up in Woodstock at the time who made records who had a studio, and I mentioned it to him once when we were up there, and he was like, ‘I don’t want to live in the town where the other dude who makes records has a studio.’”

There was one house in particular Smith set his sights on: Big Pink, where The Band and Bob Dylan had cut legendary records. By coincidence it was actually for sale, and Smith, new to the strata of renown in which a musician has financial managers and lawyers, started to make the necessary phone calls to figure out if he could buy it. Then, says Garry, a Japanese collector swooped in and took it off the market.

But even then Smith would go and look at Big Pink, Garry remembers. “We still went up there a lot and took pictures in front of it and sat in the driveway and tried to figure out what went on in the garage. I wanted that to happen really badly because I thought it would have been good for him to get out of the city and get away from the ‘I can go to a bar any time of night’ accessibility of Manhattan and Brooklyn. None of those places were really suitable for having a studio or even a practice space. It was really a pain in the ass: He really didn’t get to play or write nearly as much as he wanted to and it just sort of seemed like it would have been a perfect—things weren’t all right then and I thought it might have been a perfect chance to get things a little bit better. He was really into it and then this need for him to be in LA just happened.”

That need started with the gig that would make Smith famous: writing a song for the
Good Will Hunting
soundtrack. Portland-based director Gus Van Sant decided that he wanted Smith’s music to play in the background during several crucial scenes of his most straightforward drama to date, based on a script by costars Ben Affleck and Matt Damon (then virtual unknowns). It was agreed Smith would contribute one original song.

It would take Smith places he didn’t ever think he’d go, and it was the first of a string of commitments that rendered him temporarily homeless and then kept him in Los Angeles, a place he never chose to live. The house in upstate New York never materialized. “It’s really hard when you’re on tour all the time to say it’s worth taking all this money I have and doing this thing, buying this thing that I’m not really going to be at. I think there was a really important need for it, but the urgency got wiped out by the fact that he was becoming really successful,” says Garry. “There were people and places that he needed to be at and near.”

By his friends’ standards, Smith was already remarkably successful, and he was already having episodes involving drinking and melancholic reflection that left them worried. In both departments, nobody had seen anything yet.

E
ARLY ONE MORNING in the last days of 1997, Smith was in Los Angeles recording
XO
when he got a call from Margaret Mittleman informing him that “Miss Misery,” the song he’d written for
Good Will Hunting
, had snagged him a nomination for an Academy Award for Best Original Song. He was up against Celine Dion for “My Heart Will Go On” from
Titanic,
and Trisha Yearwood for “How Do I Live” from
Con Air
among others. It was the proverbial single stroke that indelibly changes the course of a life. Smith didn’t particularly care; an Academy Award was no big deal to him. But it was a big deal in that, for the people who don’t live in one of the constellations of indie rockers scattered throughout the western world, it put Smith on the map.

Smith thought the Oscar thing was overrated on principle. “He was like, ‘The Oscars are just a bunch of people deciding that someone’s worth something, and it has to do with commerce and I don’t know who these people are and they shouldn’t be deciding and I don’t know why everybody puts so much credit into it,’” says Swanson. “I remember calling him the morning I heard about it in LA. From minute one he was weirded out by the whole thing, he was never really excited, or felt like he had gotten somewhere. He always looked at things analytically: ‘What does this really mean? This doesn’t mean anything.’ But of course to the rest of the world it meant something.”

The practical effects of the rest of the world’s caring about the nomination were immediate and profound. “We had just started [
XO
] and then [the nomination] happened,” says Schnapf. “It was like, ‘Oh Christ,’ and the next six weeks he was deluged. It was like ‘Elliott who?’ and then hours of press every morning.” That necessitated a semi-nocturnal daily schedule for making the album: “Noon until we couldn’t take it anymore,” remembers Schnapf. “Usually twelve hours.”

Worse, the personal consequences for Smith were huge. The most damaging rift to develop between Smith and his friends was the gap between his level of fame and theirs, as much as Smith didn’t care about being famous. “He often spoke about how come he was getting all this attention when there were are all these other good bands,” E. V. Day remembers. “How come his friends’ bands aren’t getting attention?” He felt it didn’t make sense that Sam and Janet’s music wasn’t as popular as his. “Quasi would never get as big, get the kind of thing he was getting. And he just couldn’t handle it, he felt so shitty about it. And it started all kinds of conflicts in their friendships and basically dissolved [them]. It killed the relationships, as opposed to the opposite, which I think he wanted, which was to stay friends. . . . One night when we were in this hotel on tour and Sam was staying on the bus, and he was like, ‘How come I have this room and Sam’s sleeping on the bus?’ And I was like, ‘Sam wants to be alone anyway, he did the job, he’s being paid, he wants to play with you, it’s okay, he’s doing it. And if you asked him to come stay in this room he’d do it anyway.’ And he’d be like, ‘But I feel so bad he’s on the bus and I’m in the hotel room.’ He just couldn’t deal with it. And you couldn’t then also say, ‘Well, you go sleep in the bus then.’ There were so many conflicts like that at every turn. And it was so painful.”

Pete Krebs remembers one such conflict on Valentine’s Day, 1998, that nearly snuffed his friendship with Smith. “So we played this show at EJs
*
, and I opened up for him, and at the end of the night they were doing a Kinks cover band. He played with Neil and Sam, and Janet was on drums. They were doing ‘Sunny Afternoon’ or whatever. It was kind of like the Portland All-Stars playing Kinks tunes. And Elliott just had a mic, and I remember him walking around the stage like this [Krebs makes a ‘raising the roof’ hand gesture] singing Kinks stuff. It was really great and that was the night I heard he was going to be on the Academy Awards. And I didn’t really know what to say. I was just like, ‘Hey man, it’s really great you’re on the Academy Awards, you know? Congratulations. I really gotta go.’ And he took it really wrong. I think that he thought I was mad at him. He was drunk, so I think he thought his friend was saying ‘fuck you.’ I didn’t hear from him for a long time after that, and I think that had a lot to do with it.” Krebs’s congratulatory farewell was so brief because of a personal issue unrelated to Smith, but Smith took it as a rebuke. “I was really a mess that night when I heard [about the Oscars] and I had to go home. So it was really impossible for me to be genuinely happy for him, just because I was so mixed up with my own shit. I just remember him going, ‘Pete, wait, man, hey, be cool,’ and I was just like, ‘No man, it’s cool, I gotta go.’ That was before things really started to go topsy-turvy, and that’s when stories of Elliott just started coming.”

The misunderstanding with Krebs was just a prelude to the massive discombobulation that accompanied Smith’s performance at the Oscars and the scores of post-Oscar interviews in which Smith was asked how it felt to suddenly rise above his element. He generally replied that the awards ceremony was “surreal.”

A little more than halfway through the 70th Academy Awards ceremony on March 23, 1998, Madonna walked onstage to introduce the last three nominees for Best Achievement in Music, Original Song (the first two nominated tunes had been performed earlier in the evening). Against a purple-and-blue backdrop, between
symmetrical pillars, Trisha Yearwood sang “How Do I Live” from
Con Air
. Then the set turned from blue-and-purple to black, the pillars slid away, and Elliott Smith entered from stage left.

Smith wore a white suit with a maroon shirt and a darker tie. Prada, he told his friend Laura Vogel, “gave me shoes, and a belt, and a shirt, and socks. . . . I wore my own underwear.” Earlier in the evening, he’d had to bend his own rules to accommodate the Academy, he later recalled; a producer had offered him anything he wanted, and then informed him a chair would be impossible. So he performed standing, expressionless, launching into “Miss Misery” with just his voice and his guitar. At the place in the studio recording where the electric guitar usually chimes in, the Academy’s orchestra entered, following the chord progression with strings. After skipping from the first verse to the second bridge, there were no further edits to the song. The orchestra faithfully followed the chords, and descended into abject schmaltz only when it introduced a vaguely Celtic flute (or piccolo?) line during the final verse, an echo of a similar flute line from the movie’s incidental music that seemed designed to match the shamrock logo always placed beneath the movie’s title. At one point, the camera swooped in for an extreme close-up of Smith’s face, and it was composed, impassive. When the song was over, he took a bow, gave the audience a tiny smile, and exited stage right.

Next, Celine Dion arrived and delivered “My Heart Will Go On,” which everybody knew was going to win. Then, in a fluke moment of indie-mainstream collusion, Smith, Yearwood, and Dion walked back onstage and held hands, with Smith in the middle of the two women. They took a bow in unison, and walked off again.

When the smoke had cleared, the two middle-aged guys with beards and glasses who wrote “My Heart Will Go On” were victorious—it was the year
Titanic
won everything. When Madonna opened the envelope, she laughed: “Surprise!” Celine Dion became a huge star. On radio stations everywhere, “My Heart Will Go On” went on and on.

Elliott Smith and Neil Gust in their first house in Portland, 1991. Credit: Marc Swanson

Smith with Doug Martsch (short hair), Bill Santen (long hair), and an opening act, 1997. Courtesy of Bill Santen.

Smith poses as a deep singer-songwriter on tour with Santen, 1997. Credit: Bill Santen

Smith takes in a show with Jeff Buckley, Bolme, 1996. Credit: Ramona Clifton

Smith watches Lou Barlow's farewell-to-Boston performance, amidst '90s indie rock crowd, 1998. Credit: Ramona Clifton

Smith with Dorien Garry and Santen, on tour in Princeton, New Jersey, 1997. Credit: Courtesy of Bill Santen