Elliott Smith and the Big Nothing Read Online Free

had been giving him informal lessons for a couple of years. “The only [guitar] I had at that point was my dad’s Gibson classical,and eventually Gary [Smith] got him a Martin Sigma acoustic guitar, and acoustic pickups and a Peavey Backstage amplifier.” Sigma is a cheaper division of Martin, the premiere brand in acoustic folk guitars. A Peavey Backstage is a small, modestly priced amp, and pickups are the devices that electrify an acoustic guitar in order to generate volume and texture. “I showed up at his house one time, and he was like, ‘Look what my dad got me.’ That would have to be not too long after we first met, I would have to say ’81, in sixth grade. That was the guitar I remember him owning; from time to time he would borrow one of mine.” If Smith owned a guitar before the gift from Gary, Merritt doesn’t remember it. Smith’s equipment wasn’t top of the line, but it was better than Merritt’s.
    “Shortly after we met was when he had his guitar and his Peavey amp,” remembers Merritt, “and I got hold of this piece-of-shit electric guitar and spent ten dollars of my allowance on an amp. I would bring over this shit guitar and this shit amp, and we were thirteen years old, and we put my cheap-ass little amp on top of his Peavey and we thought we had our first stack. It was pretty cool. My amp was made out of plastic, but we thought it was so cool to stack one on top of the other—it was like two feet tall and it gained a little more prominence if you put it on a chair in the acoustics of the garage—and play our little tunes. We just thought it was such hot shit.”
    There were no originals at this point, only exercises and covers. “Both of us being young and somewhat naïve to the whole process, we were still kind of teaching ourselves how to play—we started experimenting with finger styles and we were fooling around with open chord tunings, like experimenting with how high you could tune a high E string before it snapped. We would try Pink Floyd tunes, and Beatles tunes, and finger-picking and open chords. We would teach ourselves everything from ‘Amazing Grace’ to ‘Puff the Magic Dragon.’”
    The same school year Smith befriended Merritt, he found another musician and comic in Steve Pickering. “We met in Englishclass in sixth grade,” says Pickering. “I sat behind him and we were both trying to be the funny guy in class. The teacher would call on him and hand the paper back to him and he’d say something funny and it was my challenge to say something funny back. In sixth grade, humor was mostly insult humor.
    “I just wound up at his house on a Saturday. I was riding around that neighborhood on my bicycle, and I asked another kid riding his bicycle where his house was and knocked on the door,” Pickering recalls. By seventh grade, Pickering, who like Smith played clarinet in the school’s band (Merritt was a trombonist), had joined Merritt and Smith as a pianist, although by Pickering’s reckoning Smith played piano better than he did despite Pickering’s five years of lessons. What impressed Pickering most was the day Smith sat at the piano in the Welch living room and picked out a Dan Fogelberg song he’d heard on the radio.
    Their social lives were not entirely limited to playing music indoors. It’s a wholesome, unadventurous existence Pickering remembers sharing with Smith in Duncanville: “Everybody had a basketball hoop in their driveway; it was your dad’s obligation to install a hoop. We would ride our bikes around the neighborhood, ride to the library, ride to the 7-Eleven to play video games. The 7-Eleven had Ms. Pac-Man. I remember he was a lot better at basketball than I was, but he wasn’t a vicious competitor. He’d win about 75 percent of the time. I was friends with another guy in the clarinet section, and the three of us would tear around the neighborhood on our bikes. Occasionally we would go up to the bowling alley.”
    But Smith was not