Elliott Smith and the Big Nothing (22 page)

The mix of the album that will end up being released is being worked on by Schnapf and Joanne Bolme as I write. “Passing Feeling” is more contained than “Shooting Star,” but still grittier and more flamboyant than the music on Smith’s other albums.

The piano that McConnell transformed into a tack piano, changing its sound to create ghostly reverberations, sits near the entrance to his home, and there’s a bandage taped to it with some of Smith’s dried blood still on it. Smith had cut his hand fixing up the instrument, and affixed the bandage to it afterwards as a humorous reminder of the battle he’d fought with it. The sound of the tack piano, like the guitars on “Shooting Star,” suggests entropy, the breakdown of order, flirtations with madness. In other words, the album aims for the same effects the darkest tunes on
The White Album
aimed for. This is Elliott Smith making his own “Glass Onion” and “Helter Skelter.”

Sometimes, the Smith-McConnell sessions slid into the creative bacchanalia associated with late ’60s rock and with California in general. About once a week, McConnell would join Smith in some form of drug use—usually it was coke (they mixed “Shooting Star” coked up, late one night) or inexpensive black tar heroin, both of which Smith could procure easily in downtown Los Angeles, but occasionally speed, which Smith found harder to come by. The songs are infused with the melancholy of somebody pursuing a version of rock and roll long abandoned by the people who first came up with it: the sun-kissed California of The Byrds and The Doors and
Harvest
-era Neil Young, a place and time and approach to music that aimed to express of states of mind that had never been adequately expressed before. It was a place and time before glam rock increased the distance between rock stars and fans and punk rock eliminated it, when musicians tinkering on beautiful secluded real estate in Malibu could feel isolated without feeling guilty about it. A discarded dream of the ’60s haunts
From a Basement on the Hill.
Those rough early sessions, with the drugs, the reverence for
The White Album,
and the rejection of anything like a regular work routine, produced music that was melodious but lawless. Smith felt he had to put himself through a maddening process to make the songs he wanted to make, and he was probably right.

It didn’t last. Like some of his brilliant ’60s progenitors, Smith started to lose it. “He felt like DreamWorks was following him for a while,” says McConnell, “that they were spying on him. There was one point he even thought the CIA was watching him. He was always seeing white vans everywhere.”

Smith—and maybe the drugs—even made McConnell wonder what was going on. “He talked like a crazy guy on drugs, and a crazy paranoiac. But it’s funny because I’d watch him, and actually he had a point. There were white vans everywhere following him. It was really bizarre. I was like, ‘No, this guy’s cuckoo,’ but then I’d go in the car with him and for like three days we’d be driving around, and he’d be like, ‘Look, dude, it’s a fucking white van.’ It was really strange. There was one point we went to go get a prescription pill one night, and this white van followed us to the fucking drugstore. We got out of the car, went into the drugstore, and these two guys got out of the white van and went into the drugstore and were watching us inside the drugstore. It was really bizarre. It could have been one of those crazy things, where maybe he was right and maybe DreamWorks wanted to get bad dirt on him, but in all probability he was just paranoid.”

Smith’s behavior got to be heartbreaking. “There were times he would come up to this house, up the hill,” says McConnell, pointing through the window at the soft green gumdrop hills. “Valerie would drive him as far as Los Flores Canyon right here, [and] he’d make her stop right down there, see where that car is driving? He’d make her stop right there, and then he’d come up the hill through the bushes. He’d walk through the bushes, sneak through, ’cause he didn’t want the CIA to see where he was going. And then he’d come up and tap on the door.” McConnell whispers: “‘Hey, it’s Elliott, let me in quick before they see me.’ And then Valerie would pull in the front gate. I’d be like, ‘Fuck dude, where’d you come from?’ And he’d be like, ‘I just came up through there.’”

Smith’s appearance during the LA years changed rapidly. Sometimes he looked as if he were in the midst of physical trauma, and sometimes he looked fine. But the moment when alarm bells went off about Smith’s health among his audience was the Sunset Junction Music Festival on August 18, 2001.

Sunset Junction is one of the two hearts of Silver Lake (the other is a district adjacent to the Silver Lake reservoir, where the club Spaceland sits). It’s just east of where Hollywood Boulevard shakes off its scuzzy Hollywood odor, turns southeast, and merges with Sunset Boulevard. Immediately after the two boulevards meet, Solutions, the audio-supplies store with the black-and-red swirls that made the backdrop for the
Figure 8
cover photo, emerges on the right. The stage where Smith performed on August 18 lay shortly west of that point. He came on solo with his acoustic guitar and proceeded to launch into a set that onlookers found painful, even as fans continued to sing his praises afterwards. His hair was bound into two braids, Willie Nelson–style.

One fan’s account of that show, posted on the fan site
www.sweetadeline.net
goes like this:

His fans might have been willing to quietly put up with the weirdness—“It’s been a while since Elliott played in front of anyone,” someone else writing on the site remarked sympathetically—but alarm bells went off around the music world. If people had wondered before if Smith was just singing about drugs without doing them, which was in fact the case at some points, they now couldn’t help but wonder if he’d been doing them the whole time. The way people looked at him as a musician and songwriter started to change.

The effect on Smith’s reputation was particularly acute because his sets had so recently been near-perfect. From Portland to Stockholm his hallmark had been competence. It had been the clean page on which his lyrics and melodies could be understood in all their subtlety.

Part of the problem during this time was that Smith—notwithstanding any falling-outs he might have had with old colleagues—just wasn’t particularly good at correspondence. People who might have rushed to his aid had lost track of how to reach him. “Elliott was a person who lived very much in the moment,” says Swanson. “When you were there you were everything. When you were gone I think you could feel pretty insecure about how he was always terrible about staying in touch. Always. Even before anything happened, I remember calling him three or four times threatening, ‘I’m going to punch you next time I see you,’ and he would always call me being like, ‘Okay, sorry.’ But he was always so sweet, every time I would see him he’d start babbling right away about how he meant to call, and thought about it a million times.”

Swanson had once given Smith a bracelet. “He’d often bring up that bracelet, to let me know he thought of it every day,” he says. His annoyance with Smith for losing touch would “melt away so quickly because he was always so sweet and would bring up this very personal thing. It was nice, because after that when I hadn’t heard from him in a few months I would see a picture of a show and there would be the bracelet. And he made that known, that’s what it was, but he couldn’t, no matter what, he couldn’t [keep in touch]. And I don’t think I ever really took it that personally, which I think made it more okay for me than other people.”

Smith was somebody who quickly attracted new friends, a likely reason why the move to LA stretched from temporary to permanent. Smith would eventually express frustration that he felt stuck there because of relationships that were important to him. “There was a sense that people wanted to take care of him, wanted to help him.” Swanson says. “There was a general sense that no one understood him, but then he would connect to people really easily so people could think
they
really understood him. Increasingly, that’s what made you more insecure as his friend, because you would think you were
the one
and then all of a sudden it was somebody else and you read it in a magazine. After [hearing] his music it was kind of undeniable why people wanted to be friends with him: He was a genius, and people like to be close to geniuses if possible. And even if they don’t think he’s a genius they’re willing to be close to someone who’s a celebrity.”

But Smith was still discriminating in his choice of friends: “I think even celebrities wanted to be close to him and he would blow them off. He never had any sort of care of whether there was someone he should know, or anything like that, it was whether he connected with someone and whether they were nice.”

McConnell came up with a plan to protect Smith from some of the effects of his problems. He met with mixed results, but it was a decision that profoundly affected the making of the album. “After about six months of working together, maybe it was less than that, we started buying equipment for his studio, and there’s a whole story about why he bought his studio—basically he was spending a lot of his money very quickly on things that weren’t going to be around, things that he was consuming. Drugs, alcohol, prescription drugs. Frivolous things: ice cream, just because he wanted to come home and eat the flavors. . . . He was just spending so much money, and I would even get messages on the machine from his financial manager. She’d be like, ‘Hey, I’m calling for Elliott, I’m real worried about his balance.’ He was spending thousands of dollars a week. Anyway, I sat him down on the couch, and I said, ‘Look, man, what do you think about buying your own studio? You could have all the gear you would want at your fingertips, and all the gear I have here at your fingertips. [It’s] kind of an investment, but [it’s] also so that you can have all the cool stuff that you love.’ And after talking for about two hours, he was like, ‘Yeah, let’s do it.’ So my whole plan was to save him from financial ruin. Basically, I just wanted him to have something as an investment, so that if he did hit rock bottom—he was on the street, homeless, all that shit—at least he would have $100,000 worth of equipment. And we bought particular pieces, carefully chose the pieces. We chose the ones that would escalate in value—the ones that he liked, but also vintage pieces that would go up in value. It was quite an investment. Pretty much the next day we started looking for gear. That’s when we found his studio.”

That studio was near a vast stretch of car dealerships on Van Nuys Boulevard, in the heart of the San Fernando Valley. Part of the storefront-sized Valley Center Studios complex, the entrance was next to a dumpster, adjacent to the rear parking lot. Outside, heavy-metal guitar solos were often clearly audible. There was nothing secluded or ’60s or glamorous about it. For a long time, it was a far less productive place for Smith than McConnell’s house had been.

“We did some work there [at the new studio], just trying to get the studio set up, and we quickly learned that all the gear was so old. We kept coming back here, eventually. That was when he decided, ‘I want to name the record after your place. That’s the only place the music can continuously get done, is here.’ . . . But somehow he thought the record was coming from the energy of this place or something. He’d be talking about the sound of the crickets here late at night, he would record the crickets. He’d take mics outside—they’re really frogs down by the creek, but they sound like crickets—trippy things like that, and he also just felt safe here, just private, felt kind of like it was an escape from, you know, a lot of the . . . he had some paranoia about people following him and stuff like that. But he also just liked being alone. He just liked that he could come here inside the gate, and be here. He would wander around the property with his headphones on listening to the mixes, on the trails and stuff, he really got off on that.”