Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith Read Online Free Page A

exaggerated representation. This was intentional. Elliott feared cliché. He feared being labeled, stuck in a box. So what he did, purposely, was confuse. In some instances the songs amounted to “sonic fuck you’s,” as he put it once—grenades tossed at simplifiers and pigeonholers. 22
    The other thing unique about Elliott, at least in relation to other rock stars, was his personality. Brandt Peterson, who played with Elliott in Heat-miser, warned me against hagiography. He suggested I resist all idealizing depictions. This is sound advice. Hagiography is unsustainable (and worse yet, boring). Still, it’s hard not to be impressed by the single-mindedness of interviewees. Most people who knew Elliott—well or just slightly—say roughly the same thing. He was a “super sweet,” “incredibly generous,” “gentle,” and “well-intended” person. Scott Wagner interviewed Elliott for
The Rocket
in 1997. He also worked at 1201, a bar Elliott frequented on SW 12th Street in Portland (it’s no longer there). The interview occurred at My Father’s Place, a different bar still in operation across the river on the east side of town, where Elliott played video poker and drank “whiskey with a beer back.” “He was super fidgety,” Wagner recalls. “That was just his way.” The article’s focus was music—Elliott’s Heatmiser days and his newer solo work—but also up for analysis was what Wagner and co-writer John Chandler called, in a nifty turn of phrase, the “Smith myth.” To Wagner, who had followed Elliott for many years, he was a “can’t miss, amazingly gifted talent.” “We’d hear a record and say, ‘Yeah, he’s a genius!’ ” But there was also something else, an unassuming gentleness. “He was never putting on an air,” Wagner says. “He was, if anything, distracted by the circus around him. His smile was always sheepish. He could never trust his happiness. He was just one of those guys—a flawed character you root for,” sort of “beat-up looking.” “Everyone wondered what his secret was. It seemed like he needed to mask something.” 23 John Chandler, who interviewed Elliott on three occasions across his career, and ran into him in Portland frequently, zeroed in on the same attributes. “He was one of those people who lived with his filters open,” Chandler says. “He had a very low bullshit level. He’s the good part of Portland hipsterdom. He was never silly, loud, dumb, or buffoonish.” 24 There were times, too, when the Smith myth got tough for Elliott himself. He was all too aware of the image fans foisted on him. It was him, in some ineffable fashion, but he also mocked it, fled from it. In a final interview with Elliott in 2000, which took place in late October, Chandler asked him what he planned to be for Halloween. “Oh, a morose, gloomy, sorrowful songwriter,” Elliott deadpanned, “who always dresses in black and all these people want to know about him and who he really is.”
    To Jennifer Chiba, Elliott was a “weird mixture of confident and shy”; “more unsure than nervous,” in Wagner’s estimation. Always hoping the world was as well-intended as he tried to be, he displayed vulnerability openly. Even with total strangers he could be jarringly candid. In fact, according to another close friend, Smith was obsessed with telling the truth. It was virtually a family trait. Somehow truth always needed to come out, even when half-truths would have been a lot less discomforting. This candor wasone of the major elements of the myth—more real than legendary. Elliott spoke for the underdog. He was the outsider commenting lucidly from a distance, making fans feel less alone, their underdog pain beautiful. Always hyperaware of anyone being mistreated, Elliott was closely attuned to injustice and rejection. He spoke up, and he turned the other cheek. Even when he got shit on, according to another intimate, “he never shit on people back.” It was a matter of