The Moon Is A Lightbulb Breaking: In Memory Of Elliott Smith

This week, I have felt this bond more strongly then at any time during my decade-long relationship with Elliott’s music. There are moments I’ve shared with him that I will never be able to forget as long as I live, and I’ve relived a number of them lately.

Some of his songs are just too hard to listen to right now. I put on “The White Lady Loves You More” yesterday and skipped ahead as soon as I heard him whisper/sing “keep your things in a place meant to hide.” I was never a particularly big fan of “Miss Misery” when he was alive, and now it’s one of my favorite songs—but one that’s too damn fragile to listen to. And “Say Yes”—perhaps my most revered Elliott Smith composition—is part of an entire record (Either/Or) that is the emotional equivalent of putting your hand in the fire just to see if it will hurt. Shit was always breaking in Elliott’s songs—hearts, lightbulbs, promises, relationships—and just as surely as a window shatters when a brick is thrown through it, listening to Either/Or is like the inevitable end of that film we all watched in high-school driver’s ed class: When the car runs full speed through the railway stop, it always implodes against the train in a shower of glass, metal and human fragments. This is the sum of what remains after listening to Either/Or. And I’m just not up to it right now.

Years ago, I attended one of Elliott’s many shows at La Luna, a long-since-defunct club that was previously known as the Pine Street Theatre (site of a particularly nasty incident involving the Replacements and a couch thrown through a window to the ground floor; the shambolic show that followed is what inspired the group to write “Sorry Portland” on the outgroove of Don’t Tell A Soul). He came out late, the rather smallish environs packed with as many as could be seated on the floor and proceeded to play one of the most amazing sets I’d seen from anyone at any time. A friend of mine from Chicago who’d never seen him before was stunned into near-complete silence by the brilliance of that night’s performance, with Elliott taking requests from the floor and flying through flawless covers of Big Star’s “Thirteen,” the Kinks’ “Set Me Free” and Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” (the latter of which he dedicated to his father, who attended the show and stood around afterward hugging his son like any dad would; a proud and awkward, but nevertheless genuinely affectionate, embrace).

Elliott could be as cynical and cutting as Dylan, possessed an ear for melody and an eye for detail on par with Paul Simon (but without any of the latter’s maudlin, sentimental tendencies) and could craft a three-minute story equal to that of the masters of the form (Lennon/McCartney, Brian Wilson, Alex Chilton). He took a previously braindead genre—the clichéd terrain of the singer/songwriter—and made it entirely his own. Relevant. Alive. “Punk” (if that’s at all possible).

As I write this, I’m going through a pile of bootleg tapes on my floor and thumbing through another stack of seven-inch singles, smiling at some of the memories they bring, cringing at others. One split release recorded with Pete Krebs features some playful insert photography of Elliott and Pete trying on comically giant animal masks. A tape features a cover of the Beatles’ “I’m So Tired” that is as world-weary and final as anything Lennon himself could have mustered. As ever with Elliott, each memento brings with it a flood of both happiness and sorrow.

I’m remembering one particular Satyricon show (sold out, with a huge line around the corner of a club that was located in what can only be described as one of Portland's more active sites for drug dealing and prostitution) in which an extremely sloppy Elliott came out and stumbled through versions of “Chelsea Girls” and Jackson Browne’s “These Days.” I saw him later that night with local friends who were buying him round after round of drinks, and this is possibly the first time I can consciously remember thinking that his chosen musical persona and real-time experience were flying too close together for comfort; when I started thinking that a guy who wrote lines such as “I’m a junkyard full of false starts” or “I’m damaged bad at best” might not be built to survive the rigors of an industry that knowingly puts its workforce directly in the path of multiple oncoming trains.

A friend e-mailed me this week with the news, referencing the piece I wrote about Elliott in the last issue of MAGNET as her wake-up call about Elliott’s struggle to quell his demons. She called it “the truth no one else was writing,” but I was much less sanguine about the story; I fretted all week about how candid I’d been about Elliott’s struggle with drugs, his fragile mental state and generally regretted that I’d ever written it to begin with. It’s the kind of story that no one wants to be right about, for there is no reward in being an accurate forecaster of ill. Most of all, over the 10 years that have elapsed since I first saw Elliott at a tiny local club called Umbra Penumbra, I’ve been privately willing him (as I suspect many were, friends and fans alike) to pull out of his self-imposed death spiral and swim like hell for shore. That he didn’t make it is both heartbreaking and in some ways inevitable.

Elliott once sang of the search for meaning as trying “to go to where it led, but it didn’t lead to anything,” and ultimately this line captures where the rest of us are left now: with a bag full of clues that don’t particularly add up to anything. He had a new (reportedly, double-length) album—From A Basement On The Hill—that was nearly mixed and ready to go. He had granted a recent interview indicating a newfound willingness to tackle his addiction problems head-on (indeed, he said he had completed a somewhat radical form of rehab in order to try to rid his blood of the toxins associated with alcoholism). He was in a relationship. His career, after a nearly two-year timeout due to drug abuse, was tilting once again in a positive direction. But none of this was enough to ward off the self-destructive urges that plagued him.

I wish ... I wish ... I wish.

I wish to hell Elliott was still here. I wish I could tell him how much his music meant to me, to others I had shared it with. I wish that he had picked up the phone and called someone, anyone, before he did what he did. I wish he could’ve seen the kid tonight who haltingly sang “Happiness” through tears. I’m pissed as hell there’s nothing any of us can do about it now. I’m angry. I’m heartbroken. I’m struck dumb whenever I hear “Tomorrow Tomorrow.” I don’t know how the fuck to feel or what to do with the monsoon of emotions I’m processing.

Elliott was a sweet, vulnerable soul who possessed gifts that are seldom seen and even more rarely realized. I am at a loss to even begin to describe the importance of Elliott’s music and how it made me feel to hear it.

And now, he’s gone.

I rue the cruel fact that no more Elliott Smith music will ever be created. As Johnny Rotten once spat, I feel like I’ve been cheated. But—like everyone else who drew comfort or ease or some kind of relief from hearing Elliott touch on the same sort of emotional entanglements they were feeling during a low moment—I need to move on somehow.

So I guess this is goodbye, Elliott. I better be quiet now.