Many singer-songwriters have a reputation for making introverted, melancholy music, but few have done it quite like Elliott Smith. To some critics he was “Mr. Misery” – a borrowing from “Miss Misery”, the song from the Good Will Hunting soundtrack, for which he received an Oscar nomination in 1998. A musician who was not so much listened to as felt with him.
According to his friend Mary Lou Lord, Smith was something of a heir to Kurt Cobain’s tragic fate. Lord and Cobain were friends before Nirvana became the projection screen of an entire generation. Elliott Smith made records for “the sad children” and his gloom was more than a dour demeanor. When Smith sang about heroin addiction, alcoholism, or depression, he sang about things he had experienced himself.
The cover of his second album Elliot Smith from 1995 shows a blurred image of bodies falling from a tall building. The follow-up, 1996’s “Either/Or”, was named after a book by Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard in which the author believes it is inevitable that the esthete will eventually find himself in a state of despair.
“Ether/Or”
ROLLING STONE editor Arne Willander wrote of “Either/Or”:
“Either/Or” is also the question of the good Will Hunting in the film by Gus Van Sant, for which Smith wrote some songs in 1996. In retrospect, these gentle, almost whispering, dreamlike sung pieces are the most beautiful thing about the overstretched drama about the poor, evil child prodigy who can’t help it. It’s only when Matt Damon leaves town in the old car and sings Smith again that you feel a truth in the film, the truth of Ben Affleck, who always hoped that one morning he wouldn’t find his friend in the barracks anymore.
Smith’s music anticipates the loss and the pain and the need for this moment. There is a quiet depression on “Either/Or” that almost surpasses Cobain’s fatalism because nothing here is anger. Nothing loud. Nothing aggressive. “Do what you want to whenever you wan to though it doesn’t mean a thing, big nothing.” And again and again the line “Everybody’s dying just to get the disease”, unforgettable: “Pictures Of Me”. In the final track of the enigmatic, truly poetic record, Smith whispers, “I’m in love with the world through the eyes of the girl/ Who’s still around the morning after.” Happiness is there for that one moment. The song ends with the words “They want you or they don’t/ Say yes”. Rarely has one heard such a longing in simple songs.
Elliott Smith commits suicide
At noon on October 21, 2003, Smith got into an argument with his girlfriend and fellow musician Jennifer Chiba. As the altercation at her Los Angeles home grew worse, Smith threatened suicide. Such a statement was nothing new to those around Elliott Smith. When he moved to New York from Portland in the late ’90s, he let his friends in Oregon know they would probably never see him again as he was going to take his own life.
On that October day, words finally became deeds. Chiba ignored her boyfriend and locked herself in the bathroom. A little later she heard a scream. When she returned to the living room, he had his back to her. He turned, a kitchen knife sticking out of his chest. Despite an emergency operation, he was pronounced dead 20 minutes after arriving at the hospital. Elliott Smith was 34 years old.
A musician who didn’t want to be famous
Never at a loss for an opinion, Courtney Love called the act “the best suicide I’ve ever heard of.” Earlier, producer Larry Crane spotted a large scar on Smith’s chest. Meanwhile, the musician told acquaintances that he likes to walk the empty subway tracks in New York at night.
A former member of the hardcore punk band Heatmiser, Elliott Smith was deeply suspicious of the modest commercial success that came after his Oscar nomination. He performed at the awards ceremony between Celine Dion and Michael Bolton, and his follow-up album, 1998’s XO, sold 400,000 copies. Smith was unfazed: “I jumped into it because it seemed to make my friends happy,” he said. “I don’t particularly like hanging out with famous people because their lives are too weird.” Another similarity between Elliott Smith and Kurt Cobain.
upwind
Smith became addicted to drugs while in Portland. Mainly heroin, but also alcohol. Whenever his friends had anything to say about it, Elliott Smith got upset. Many of the songs on “XO” dealt with “the gall of people walking around like they know what someone else should be doing with themselves.” After a short time in New York, he moved to Los Angeles, now as a crack junkie. He forgot his own lyrics on stage and collapsed in front of an audience.
Shortly before his death, however, improvement seemed to be in sight. A treatment called Neurotransmitter Restoration was designed to heal his drug-ravaged nervous system, which has shown signs of success. Elliott Smith was working on a new album, From a Basement on a Hill, which was later released posthumously. With his new girlfriend, Jennifer Chiba, he set up a foundation for the benefit of abused children, to which he would donate the proceeds from the album. Quite a few saw the origin of Smith’s own depression in traumatic experiences in his childhood.
Like Sid and Nancy
Chiba played in the punk band Happy Endings, whose debut single Smith produced. Sean Organ, owner of the label Org Records that was set to release the single, described the sessions as “tense”. “Without wanting to badmouth a dead person, that was [Smith] not the easiest person to work with because of his problems,” Organ said. “It was tense, unpredictable, paranoid. The band on one side, Elliot on the other, Jennifer in the middle. I got calls in the morning and in the evening and the mood was completely different: ‘This is the best thing we’ve ever done!’; ‘This is a bunch of junk and you must under no circumstances play it on anyone.’”
After Elliott Smith’s death, a statement appeared on the label’s website comparing the volatile relationship to that of Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen. You could call it macabre – Vicious had stabbed Spungen to death while on drugs in 1978 in New York. “It’s been said before,” Organ said. “People described them as a Sid and Nancy couple who constantly argue, break up and get back together.”
open questions
After Smith’s death, numerous voices arose on internet forums and in the public sphere, claiming that the musician did not take his own life. Club owner Mark Flannigan, who frequently hosted Smith’s concerts in Los Angeles, was very sure of himself: “I don’t think the guy stabbed himself in the chest,” he said. “It just doesn’t add up. It wouldn’t surprise me if someone else did. He did drugs with scum. He was with a lot of scary people – some very negative, dangerous people.”
Others disagreed: “I know he was totally clean,” said filmmaker Steve Hanft, maker of the film Strange Parallel about Elliott Smith. “His death had nothing to do with drugs and that’s what pisses me off. He wasn’t some stupid junkie.” In fact, the coroner’s report found only legal antidepressants in safe amounts in Smith’s system. The course of events was officially stated as not ascertainable.
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