Anything about his style that influenced you? I think his tone of voice was inspiring to a lot of people. He kind of gets thought of as an unnatural singer, but I think he had a great voice. He actually is phenomenal and hit the notes really well. I saw him live, and his voice sounded the same as it did on the records.
What was that like, seeing him live? It was just a three-piece box combo, but I remember thinking the set was really short, like, 45 minutes and they were out. The next time I saw him, he was opening for Wilco in, like, , right when Yankee Hotel Foxtrot came out. It was a show at Northwestern University.
It was an infamous show. I don't know if he was on drugs or something, but he kept talking about how his arm was asleep and he couldn't play. He avoided about two-thirds of the set and couldn't get through the songs, and it was kind of sad.
I remember turning to my wife—my girlfriend at the time—and saying, "I wouldn't be surprised if he's gone in a year. I think an interesting parallel between Elliott Smith's music and American Football is that it seems both get passed along from one teenage generation to the next. As one tribute article wryly noted, you couldn't say that Smith didn't warn you.
That is not to say the circumstances of his death were not shocking. Last year, just before lunchtime on Tuesday, October 21, Smith apparently had an argument with his girlfriend, fellow musician Jennifer Chiba, at their home in Silverlake, Los Angeles. As the row got worse, Smith threatened to commit suicide. Like most of Smith's close friends, Chiba was used to him making melodramatic threats about ending his life.
After all, this was a man who, when he decided to relocate from Portland to Brooklyn in the late s, bade farewell to his Oregon friends by informing them that it was likely he would never see them again because he was "probably going to kill himself". Chiba ignored him and locked herself in the bathroom. She then heard a scream. Returning to the living room, she found Smith standing with his back to her.
When he turned around, she saw a kitchen knife sticking out of his chest. Smith had stabbed himself in the heart. Despite emergency surgery, he was pronounced dead 20 minutes after arriving at hospital. He was 34 years old. Never lost for an opinion, Courtney Love called it "the best suicide I ever heard of". You turn the knife sideways and plunge it between the ribs.
It is an extremely painful way to die, a last resort for people so low they no longer care about themselves. According to some of Smith's friends, that description fits. Indeed, he may have tried to kill himself in this way before, possibly in his producer Larry Crane remembers Smith showing him "a pretty bad scar on his chest". When he moved to New York, he told another friend that he spent his nights walking along the empty subway tracks.
But, although few rock artists had ever courted the idea of suicide so regularly and openly as Smith, the most astonishing thing about his death is an ongoing and pervasive rumour that he was, in fact, murdered. Most people believed Smith's depression stemmed from being abused as a child, while living with his mother and stepfather in Texas. He once told a journalist from the US magazine Spin that if he had not had music to lean on, he might have "gone after" his stepfather.
Certainly, nothing seemed capable of lifting his depression. A former member of a hardcore punk band called Heatmiser, he was deeply suspicious of commercial success, a modicum of which came after his Oscar nomination. He performed at the awards ceremony, between Celine Dion and Michael Bolton, and his subsequent album, 's XO, sold , copies, but he was unimpressed: "I threw myself into it because it seemed to make my friends happy," he said.
He graciously excuses himself and waits until he's across the room before muttering, "The last thing I need right now is somebody telling me how fame can make you crazy. But morning has broken here in London, and nothing can bring Smith down. He heads back to the Columbia , the rock-star haunt that's the British version of the Chelsea Hotel, where friends and road crew and fellow traveling Northwesterners Sleater-Kinney are lining up at the bar, ordering drinks, and when the bartender of this private club room explains that they have to be staying at the hotel to order a drink, every one of them says the same thing: Their friend Elliott is the man, Elliott is coming soon, Elliott really, really is staying at the hotel.
Finally, Smith arrives, in his T-shirt from Value Village, his bargain-bin green suede shoes, his knit cap, and frayed, flared green pants. Smith flashes his room key, and confirms that all these people actually are his friends. Happier than someone who sings about the need to "bottle up and explode", and happier than someone who last year tried to kill himself. A pair of Dutch dowagers try chatting him up from their bar stools, and they have a conversation neither party understands before Smith repairs to his table.
I'd be really happy if I could write a song as universal and accessible as I Second That Emotion," he says. Elliott Smith just may prove up to the task. For everything it can mean this year, he is the songwriter to beat, a waltz-loving, George Harrison-quoting, profane craftsman who gets fan letters from Courtney Love and still beats up on himself.
He likes songs so much that, on his nights off, Smith rounds up friends and rocks the karaoke machine with versions of Scorpions and Don McLean hits. Maybe he likes songs too much: his keep gagging on pieces of the past. But no matter how much his songs reveal an urge to burn all the photo books, there's a bone-tired weariness in his singing that can't let go of old business.
However calm his songs sound, they still roar like a car crash echoing in a seashell. Some of the dark imagery came when Smith returned to Portland, Oregon, after graduating from Massachusetts's Hampshire College in It kind of drained all my energy away.
I didn't want to do anything. Casting about for a career, he settled on being a fireman, because a fireman is an indisputably essential guy, right? It's important that somebody play songs, but …". He signals for another round of double espressos in a London cafe overlooking a canal. On the band's full-length albums, Mangum played with a number of other musicians, notably Jerem… read more.
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