Musicians That Changed Sound: Profiles of Four Musicians That Changed the Industry

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Elliott Smith

By Lora Greene

Introduction

Elliott Smith, the critically-acclaimed singer-songwriter behind classic songs like Miss Misery and Needle in the Hay, was a legend long before his untimely passing in late 2003. Famous as much for his tortured life and death as his hauntingly beautiful songs, Smith has become a voice for a generation without a name.

This book traces Smith’s history, from his early days in Texas through his time in Heatmiser, to his final solo recordings and controversial last days, revealing a complex artist in search of his own truth.

I didn’t have a hard time making it, I had a hard time letting it go, Smith once said of his music. His many fans across the world agree.

Chapter 1: Memory Lane - Texas Childhood and Portland Beginnings

Elliott Smith began his life as Steven Paul Smith on August 6th, 1969. His parents, Gary and Bunny Kay, separated by the time he was six months old, and Smith moved with mother from Omaha, Nebraska to Duncanville, Texas, a white flight suburb of Dallas.

My first memory is of breaking the TV by repeatedly flicking the volume and turning the set on and off. I was three, Smith said. It was the first piece of electronic equipment I was ever allowed to operate. The first day I was, I broke it.

Although he moved from the city (and the state) by the time he was 14, the early years he spent in Duncanville were significant enough to him that he later adorned himself with a large tattoo of the outline of Texas on his upper arm.

I didn’t get it because I like Texas, kind of the opposite, he said. But I won’t forget about it, although I’m tempted to because I don’t like it there.

While the facts of his Texas childhood remain a little murky, it was by all accounts a relatively unhappy one. His mother soon remarried, and Smith had a difficult relationship with his stepfather, Charlie Welch. He alluded to this several times in his music, notably on Some Song, released on the Needle in the Hay single.

Charlie beat you up week after week, and when you grow up you’re going to be a freak, he sings on the track.

Later in his life, Smith began to reveal the abuse he allegedly suffered at the hands of his stepfather. He came to believe that Welch had molested him at some point, though no charges were ever filed.

While it’s pretty easy to paint a picture of an abused and neglected Smith, there are, of course, some bright spots along the way. At age nine, Smith took up the piano. At age ten, he composed a piano piece titled Fantasy that garnered him an award from a local art festival. His family paid for piano lessons from a local avant-garde musician for a time but discontinued them after around a year.

Also around age ten, Smith first discovered what would become a nearly lifelong problem for him: alcohol. A new family moved in next door to his house in Duncanville, including their fourteen-year-old football player son. Wanting to impress the bigger kid (and avoid any potential bullying), Smith drank the clear liquid that was offered to him.

By the time he was twelve, Smith was first chair clarinet in his middle school’s band. During a visit to his father in Portland, Oregon, the elder Smith purchased him his first guitar. He quickly became obsessed with the fingerpicking style of playing. It sounded impressive, he reasoned, and it was easier than learning Stairway to Heaven.

When he was fourteen, he moved to Portland to live with his father permanently. Initially a gigantic fan of hard rock bands like KISS and Led Zeppelin, he quickly became immersed in the thriving Portland punk rock scene, particularly The Clash.

Elvis Costello got me through high school, he said. Elvis Costello and the Clash.

Already a regular drinker (and occasional marijuana user), around this time, Smith would discover his other life-long obsession: the four-track tape recorder. He began regularly recording on a borrowed Tascam machine. One of the earliest affordable home-recording devices, the Tascam four-track would allow for stereo recording on standard blank cassette tapes. It was a revelation for countless budding young musicians, Smith included.  

It was a friend of mine’s brother-in-law’s, and he didn’t really need it, Smith revealed. I was really taken with the prospect of being able to record one thing and then another thing at a different time that would play at the same time.

Shortly after enrolling in Portland’s Lincoln High School, Smith teamed up with a few classmates to form his first band. Stranger Than Fiction included Smith’s friends Garrick Duckler, Jason Hornick and Adam Koval. Smith was not yet using the name Elliott, so he was billed as either Steven Smith or (somewhat hilariously) Johnny Panic.

The group apparently didn’t perform many (if any) concerts, but they did make a series of four-track recordings, including a 1985 cassette titled Any Kind of Mudher.  Only one track has surfaced from these recordings, a song called The Machine. (It’s a mighty rough recording. While the music mostly sounds like an amateur Stevie Wonder tribute, traces of the vocal style that made Smith famous can be glimpsed in certain parts.)

Though they eventually recorded at least three cassettes for friends and fans, no copies have been found. Stranger Than Fiction cassettes remain the holy grail for Elliott Smith obsessives.

Though they weren’t together exceptionally long, at least two of the members (Duckler and Hornick) remained close to Smith. They both garnered particular mention in the acknowledgements section of the liner notes of all Smith’s solo albums. Stranger Than Fiction had dissolved before Smith finished high school.

Smith, always an impressive student, graduated Lincoln High School as a National Merit Scholar. He applied to Hampshire College, a Massachusetts liberal arts school.  He was enthusiastically accepted.

It was a place with no grades and no majors. It was like make your own program, and it was pretty hippie in a good way, he remarked. But the people going to school there were a real problem to me. I didn’t like it. I moved off campus as soon as I could.

Around this time, Smith composed the song Condor Avenue. The only track from this time in his life to make it to any of his albums, it appears on his first record, Roman Candle. The song itself is strikingly mature and unabashedly mournful.

They never get upset when a moth gets crushed, unless a light bulb really loved him very much, he sings. I’m lying down, blowing smoke from my cigarette, little whisper smoke signs you’ll never get.

An early version of Condor Avenue also appears on an album by another early Smith band, A Murder of Crows. The Greenhouse was released independently by Smith and Garrick Duckler in 1988, just after Smith’s first year at Hampshire College. By this time, he’d stopped using the name Steven entirely. He credited himself on the album as Elliott Stillwater-Rotter.

Chapter 2: Half Right - Hampshire and Heatmiser

In 1987, Elliott Smith met fellow Hampshire College student Neil Gust. They hit it off and quickly formed the earliest incarnation of Heatmiser, the band that would lead Smith on a whirlwind journey toward the acclaim he would later enjoy.

The pair performed shows around Northampton, Massachusetts, playing a combination of Elvis Costello covers and originals. At this early stage, Smith and Gust played in a guitar-heavy alternative rock style that sounds, to the uninitiated, like the absolute antithesis of Smith’s later work.  Lyrically, however, the roots of his later style are all over Heatmiser’s recorded output. Smith actually came into his own as a songwriter around this time.

Despite his later contempt for the hippie atmosphere of the school, Smith managed to graduate with a degree in philosophy and political science. After graduation, Smith and Gust moved back to Portland, solidifying a new Heatmiser lineup that included Tony Lash and Brandt Peterson. They recorded a demo tape in 1992 dubbed The Music of Heatmiser, which they sold via mail order and at local shows. Although well-received, Smith was later profoundly embarrassed by his voice on the six song album.

Heatmiser’s blend of cheerful, post-punk music and dark, often cathartic lyrics would garner them a dedicated local following over the next couple of years. Fans clamored to small club shows to hear songs like Lowlife, Bottle Rocket and Buick.

Four of the songs on The Music of Heatmiser would find their way to the group’s debut full length, Dead Air, released in 1993 on Frontier Records. One song, the frenetic Blackout, hints at Smith’s growing problem with drugs and alcohol.

Asking, permission denied, to self-medicate this way once in a while, the song begins.

Though not a massive commercial success upon release, Dead Air was acclaimed by the few who heard it as a concise rock statement.

The songs don’t waste time -- 14 in 37 minutes -- and steer away from easy singalong approaches in favor of slightly more complex headbanging with a brain and heart, reads the Allmusic review.

The Pacific Northwest music scene was, at the time, divided into two distinct camps: the grunge-inflected doom rock of bands like Nirvana, Pearl jam and mudhoney, and the rough-hewn indie-pop of bands like The Spinanes, Hazel and The Afghan Whigs. Heatmiser didn’t quite fit in either camp, and Smith himself even less so.

It was kinda weird – people that came to our shows, a majority of them were people I couldn’t relate to at all, said Smith. Why aren’t there more people like me coming to our shows? Well, it’s because I’m not even playing the kind of music that I really like.

By 1994, the group were gaining national attention on the heels of their sophomore release, Cop and Speeder. In the waning days of the early 90’s grunge boom, the band were suddenly a hot commodity. For most bands, this would be a triumph. The members of Heatmiser, however, didn’t exactly see it that way.

I was being a total actor, acting out a role I didn’t even like, Smith said in 1998. I couldn’t come out and show where I was coming from. I was always disguised in this loud rock band.

It was at this point that Smith began home recording the songs that would become Roman Candle, his first solo album. Though he’d been recording acoustic music on a borrowed four track since his teens, It was his first public foray into the kind of music that would make him famous. More on that later.

Interestingly, when the mainstream music press began paying attention to Heatmiser, it wasn’t even about the band’s music. Instead of focusing on Smith’s increasingly poignant lyrics, the press put most of their attention on the sexual orientation of Heatmiser’s two frontmen. Neil Gust was openly homosexual and despite assurances that Smith himself was not, Heatmiser were quickly labeled a queercore band. The label stuck for years.

While Heatmiser’s cultural cache was certainly on the rise, Smith (and the rest of the band members) would continue to work a steady stream of low-paying jobs for a time. Smith reportedly worked as a ditch digger and as a chimney sweeper during Heatmiser’s early years. Eventually, he began training to become something a little more noble.

I wanted to be a fireman, he later said. I came around to fireman by the process of elimination, looking for something that was actually, definitely worthwhile to do.

While nothing much came of his brief flirtation with firefighting, it’s essential to note the impulse Smith had to do something a little more genuine with his life than he was at the time. This struggle for self-actualization and self-improvement would eventually lead Smith to abandon the rock pretense of Heatmiser entirely for a sound more closely attuned to his worldview.

[When] we all got together, everyone wanted to play in a band, and it was fun, then after a couple of years we realized that none of us really liked this kind of music and that we didn’t have to play this way, Smith would later say.

Heatmiser would continue to make records and perform live in the early days of Elliott Smith’s solo career, but it eventually became abundantly clear that Smith’s heart was no longer in it. Shortly after the 1996 release of Mic City Sons, Heatmiser’s leading label debut, the band dissolved.

While Mic City Sons captures the band at their most fractured, it remains a touchstone of 90’s indie rock. In 1999 Pitchfork Media named the record #48 on its list of the top albums of the 1990’s, ahead of intensely acclaimed records like Neutral Milk Hotel’s in the Aeroplane Over the Sea, If You’re Feeling Sinister by Belle and Sebastian and Siamese Dream by Smashing Pumpkins.

Oddly, Pitchfork recently altered the list, excising Mic City Sons entirely. This revisionist history seems to coincide with Smith’s highly public dismissal of the band’s artistic merit.

It’s probably pretty easy to put together why somebody who grew up in Texas getting in fights a lot would not want to get up on the stage and start belting out songs at the top of their lungs, said Smith. I’ve had enough of people yelling.

Chapter 3: My Head is Full of Flames - Roman Candle and Smith’s Early Solo Career

All through the Heatmiser days, Smith had been making solo recordings on borrowed four-track machines in basements all over the Pacific Northwest. Whether he’d ever planned to do anything with the material isn’t certain, but his girlfriend at the time, Heatmiser manager J.J. Gonson, certainly had some ideas. Initially, she told him that he might be able to get a deal to release a single on the independent label Cavity Search, but the songs soon took on a life of their own.

My girlfriend at the time convinced me to send these songs to Cavity Search, Smith said. When they wanted to put out my record I was totally shocked.

It’s easy to see why. The songs that make up Roman Candle are uniquely haunting. The title track is a largely acoustic affair, coupled with occasional moments of feedback-laden guitar. It makes for a scary listen, especially at the more angry moments, where Smith first uses the doubletracked vocal effect that would become his trademark.

I want to hurt him. I want to give him pain. I’m a roman candle. My head is full of flames, he sings.

Another track, No Name #1, the first of four untitled tracks on the album, seems to presage his eventual abandonment of his Heatmiser bandmates.

Leave alone ‘cause you know you don’t belong. You don’t belong here. Slip out quiet. Nobody’s looking. Leave alone. You don’t belong here, he sings on No Name #1.

Smith was hesitant to release the material, owing to the huge disparity between Heatmiser and this new sound. In 1994, distorted, heavy rock was the order of the day. Earnest, acoustic music was largely considered the sound of a long-forgotten generation. Eventually, he relented.

"I thought my head would be chopped off immediately when it came out because, at the time,