A tortured soul gives hope and light even after his candle burns out.
By Brent Russo
Staff Writer
I have a close friend who likes to listen to Elliott Smith whenever she’s down. It makes her, as she says, “feel good about being depressed.” I feel the same way; somehow sad music has the power to uplift me. Yet, since the singer-songwriter’s death at age 34, my friend cannot bring herself to listen to his music, whereas I cannot bring myself to listen to anything else. Each thinks the other’s a peculiar way of coping.
Smith stabbed himself in the chest last Wednesday with a steak knife and died in an L.A. hospital shortly after. Last year his lo-fi ballad “Needle in the Hay” was included in “The Royal Tenenbaums,” ironically during a scene of attempted suicide. His soundtrack successes also include a Beatles cover at the end of “American Beauty” and two tracks in “Good Will Hunting,” one of which, “Miss Misery,” was nominated for an Oscar in 1997.
But most, if they recognize Elliott Smith at all, know him beyond these Hollywood projects. They know how his voice flickers like a candle, how his solitary guitar can sound like a chorus, how he plays all his own instruments and has a tendency to break down pathetically at shows.
They know him at times romantic, at times loudly misanthropic, at others softly nihilistic, tragically insecure in one song and witty and self-righteous in the next. And most — even if all they have heard is “Needle in the Hay” — know of his struggles with alcohol and heroin addiction.
According to a recent interview in “Under the Radar,” Smith had completed a rehabilitation program at the Neurotransmitter Restoration Center in Beverly Hills. The program, in which amino acids are intravenously shot into the addict’s nerves, although not approved by the FDA and therefore uncovered by medical insurance, is still cheaper than most mainstream rehabilitation programs.
After a somewhat miraculous recovery, Smith created a foundation for abused children and participated in benefit concerts for the Needle Exchange Program, designed to reduce the spread of HIV among intravenous drug users.
Despite reports of his sobriety and rehabilitation, when I heard of his death, overdose was the first thought that came to mind. In fact, he died of a self-inflicted stab wound to the heart in his girlfriend’s apartment. Although his lyrics often contemplate suicide, the act did not appear premeditated. He left no letter, and his at-hand weapon of choice, a convenient steak knife, suggests the suicide was the result of a spontaneous fit.
Reflecting on the musician’s oeuvre, his death seems sadly predictable; his songs possess a latent lyrical morbidity, something once shadowed in musical grace but now illuminated by his suicide.
Yet it is surely too simplistic, too cheaply poetic, to suggest the knife was a kind of final instrument, tying his whole musical career together. I prefer to think that, rather than condescending to explain his suicide, Smith’s music rises away from it. Five excellent solo albums (“Roman Candle,” “Elliott Smith,” “Either/Or,” “XO,” “Figure 8”) have been recorded, disseminated and immortalized.
An artist as sincere as Elliott Smith becomes, to a real lover of music, a better friend than most people he sees on a day-to-day basis. It feels strange referring to him in this article as “Smith” and losing the personality and poetry of “Elliott.” I was always glad that he spelled his first name like that, with the coupled ls and ts, with aesthetic superfluity, art being superfluous beauty.
Some contend that no one’s life should mean any more than anyone else’s, but, to me, Elliott Smith’s was worth a hundred suicides. I would have rather heard that the President had been assassinated or the Pope had officially passed away. Most everything can be replaced; but the truly creative and original, which Smith certainly was, cannot.
His death, if nothing else, vouches for the sincerity of his art. The music industry is full of posed sentiment, and I once suspected that what I encountered in Smith’s music was, while certainly not contrived, just a slice of his personality. But Smith’s misery, it turns out, was not exaggerated for praise or profit but was terribly authentic. And if his songs are sad, it is because they are honest.
On the day of Kurt Cobain’s suicide, John Updike was asked in an interview to comment on the rock star’s death. “Rock stars?” the writer responded. “I don’t know where they come from. They probably come out of middle-class basements, don’t they? Where they have their guitars and their drum sets? They seem like middle-class kids whose dreams have come true too soon, and, maybe because they’re very reckless and self-infatuated, they’re trying to become angels.”
Incidentally, Elliott Smith’s sixth solo release was to be titled “From a Basement on the Hill.” Most of it was recorded in the basement of a friend’s Malibu mansion.
Updike continued: “I think all men operate in the shadow of a spiritual crisis. The rock stars, in a way, more than any of us. I don’t know quite what led to this man’s suicide, nor does every rock star commit suicide … What their insides, their spiritual state feels like, I don’t quite know, but modern man lives under a stress that people of the Middle Ages, the more credulous ages, didn’t have. You cope with it in varying ways. Some refine their faith, some turn to drink, some ignore the whole problem, and some shoot themselves in the head.”
Smith’s music reveals that he tried to “cope with it” in each of these ways and others. “I don’t think it’s important who I am,” Smith said in one of his last interviews before he died. “I really like playing music.”
At the end of the interview, after enthusiastically showcasing the songs-in-progress for “From a Basement on the Hill,” Smith said to the interviewer: “Thanks for coming around. You know, for a couple of years I dropped out of just about everything. But I feel better today. I think it will be a good record.”
October 30, 2003