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 Elliott Smith Remembered Tim Molloy: In the second half of 1998 I was living in Arizona and mixed up with this girl who was just trouble: Running around between me and my friend and some other guy besides. Not taking her medication and getting drunk and attempting suicide a couple times. For some reason I felt like every song on XO could have been about her. I was a color reporter, just like the guy in "Bled White." And I had a mix of empathy for her depression and anger over how she was dealing with it, and I think the guy in "Everybody Cares, Everybody Understands" felt the same way. The friend she kept going back to lived by a lake, and I used to run over the bridge at night on one of the ridiculous 10-mile runs I used to take and sing along and feel sad but somehow resolved. The song that I think most represented things for me was "Waltz #2," and the scene I think it describes where everyone in your group is watching some kind of awful meltdown with a sense of gossipy acceptance. And to me what's described in the opening is a moment of bad, trashy karaoke, just the kind of thing the girl would have been into: First the mic then a half cigarette Singing cathy's clown That's the man that she's married to now That's the girl that he takes around town She appears composed, so she is, i suppose Who can really tell? She shows no emotion at all Stares into space like a dead china doll And then goes very abruptly from this matter-of-fact, neutral description to what the guy really feels, when he's finally drunk or mad or sad enough to admit it: I'm never gonna know you now, but i'm, gonna love, you anyhow This is the first time I can really understand what people mean when someone dies and they say "I feel like part of me is dying too." I could never have expressed the things Elliott Smith expressed for me, and I don't know what might go unexpressed or unexplained without him. Peter Von Pinnon: It isn't easy to come to work, sit down, and almost immediately discover that Elliott Smith is dead. I've been a huge fan of Elliott Smith for years now. I got into him in 1996 or 1997, right around the time I was working my first "real" job. I remember driving around dreary Fairfield in really dreary weather, and I'd have one of his first three albums playing on the messed up diskman in my leaky car. It isn't easy to write complicated, beautiful songs with depressing lyrics. It isn't easy to write depressing lyrics at all. Most of the time I try, they come out wrong or cheesy or reading like high school poetry. Just a few weeks ago I asked my friend Noah if Elliott had some notebooks somewhere filled with awful lyrics that he would never release. Our conclusion was that he probably doesn't. It isn't easy to have a drinking problem. I've gone through a few periods where I listened to Elliott Smith almost exclusively. Back when I was driving around Fairfield, part of my daily ritual was coming home and getting absolutely smashed and listening to more Elliott Smith. Baby Britain's lines about "floating over a sea of vodka" seemed particularly in line with the Absolut I'd frequently mix with cranberry juice. Sure, looking back it's pretty depressing. I don't do that sort of thing anymore, at least not every night, but it's hard to look back on the past and not feel a fondness for it, regardless of how unhappy I might have been at the time. It isn't easy to kill yourself. The only co-worker I know who has ever heard of Elliott Smith told me that Elliott died with a self-inflicted stab through his heart. It's ironic that even in suicide, his penchant for creativity, originality, brutal honesty and heart-breaking sadness all came through for him in one final expression. I've always hated the way people freak out when celebrities die. But I honestly feel freaked out by the fact that he's gone, and I don't know why. I never got to see him perform, I never got to meet him, I'm unaware if any of my friends knew him on any kind of personal level. I feel like I lost a friend this morning, and I didn't know him at all. It isn't easy to listen to Elliott Smith right now, but I'm not going to listen to anything else. I miss you, Elliott. I'm angry that you did this, but I also understand. I'm upset that I didn't get to hear any more music from you, but I'm sure some unreleased music will come out soon, regardless of the intentions of those who release it. I can't believe that I feel this way, I wish it were someone else, I wish it were all a mistake. But it isn't. It's final, and finally, I hope you're in a happier place. Pete Nicely: The first time I saw Elliott Smith live, I didn't want the show to end. I was at the No Life record shop that used to be on Santa Monica Boulevard. in Los Angeles. The small store was packed with emotional fans. Several of them already knew every word to the just released Either/Or, and their eyes filled with tears as they mouthed the words. Noah, my friend who had introduced to the Elliott Smith song "Christian Brothers" through one of his mix tapes, and I stood shoulder to shoulder watching the whole scene. It was as intense as almost any live show I'd been to since with just Elliott, his guitar and a room full of records and record fans. And when he ended, modestly, like he had pained us long enough, I needed more. I wanted it to go on so badly that I got the courage to do something that I had never done before. I asked him Elliott Smith for an interview. I did about as good of a job interviewing him on the sidewalk as he smoked as Louie Anderson used to do interviewing guests on the Family Feud. Short questions. Short, reaching answers. My questions were lame not because I, like Louie, was only vaguely interested in my subject's life. I wanted to know everything. I just didn't know how to ask. He was patient but uneasy with me. He looked around and saw everyone watching him. He started to smile a couple of times, I thought, and then reminded himself that he couldn't. I can't think of that night without thinking of a lyric from his song "LA" off of Figure 8, "Hey look at me, I'm talking to you." I wrote the interview up for MTV Online Local where I was interning at the time. I played up how lame I was with my questions like, "Do you have a name for your guitar?" I also played up how great his music was and how cool his answers were, "Yamaha." In the next year, Elliott's career changed drastically as his music played a central role in the hit movie, "Good Will Hunting." There were some new songs and people getting into his music, so I was thrilled. The press loved him and also loved the adulation he received from what they called "obsessive fanboys." Then when Noah called me and told me that he had been nominated for an Academy Award, I felt like my team had won the Fantasy Football championship. It was goofy and vicarious, but I was thrilled and imagined a world in which everyone understood how amazing Elliott Smith's songs were. That world never came. I saw him several times over the next years playing small bars, watching him take requests from fans and always pleased with some endearing cover song in his encore. I just realized this as I started writing but the last time I saw him he had a band. It wasn't just him alone on the guitar anymore and it made me sad. But even Dylan went electric and I loved his major label debut X/O. Like Tim, I was immediately grabbed by "Waltz #2." With DreamWorks behind him there were tons of interviews about the album; he always seemed cool to the idea of discussing the music too much. But he did reveal some interesting back-story about that song. To him it was about being out with his mother and her husband, about being a kid who ends up just being a witness to his family. I deeply related to the image. That something so beautiful could be created out of such awkwardness inspired me then and each time I have had the heart to focus on the words. XO and Figure 8, the follow-up, didn't do well enough for his label. When they signed him, they said things that insinuated that they saw him as a Neil Young for this generation. They promised patience. When he was to dawn on his third album for the label they suggested he release something independently to build up the audience before releasing an album that might ruin his commercial career. The album never came. He played a series of shows early in 2003 that I now feel like an idiot for missing. Like from now on I'll make every decision as if tragedy were around the corner. It's too much to imagine this guy gone and silenced. Now all his words mean too much. Too much horror in the way he did it. Too much potential wasted. Too much pain to make such a gifted life worth living. Life has to end, but it never needs to end. |
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