Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith (50 page)

Apart from a Fairchild compressor, which Elliott also really loved, his overriding fixation, one that dominated the last year of his life and became, indeed, a new monkey, was a Trident A-Range mixing board, one of eleven made, the same sort of range the Beatles had used at Abbey Road. Initially the board was a piece of shit, according to Nelson Gary. When it arrived it failed to function properly, and Elliott concluded he’d been ripped off. But he tore into it with total absorption, dedicating every free moment to getting it up and running again. Gary calls the board Elliott’s “second most impairing obsession,” the first being DreamWorks. He still was not able to shake the notion that the company was bugging his home, tapping his phone, hiding listening devices in plants in his lawyer’s offices. As a sort of accidental treatment, he trained all his attentions on the Trident. In Gary’s estimation, “it was the place he would go as an escape from mad thoughts about DreamWorks,” yet it led to “circular ruins of despair.” There was nothing Elliott failed to comprehend about the board in terms of how it
could or could not function. But he wasn’t exactly a techie, so no matter how hard he worked to get it repaired, it remained unyielding. The board, Gary believed, was Elliott’s new “speedball.” In his fantasies he’d picture it by his side as he took a stand “against the evil leviathan of the corporate record label.” In short, the device made him crazier, he couldn’t get his mind off it, but as a symptom it more or less worked. He’d stopped heroin for good, crack too, and their place in his psyche was taken by the Trident. He lived and breathed the maddening thing, but it was a better drug, less destructive if still bizarrely consuming.

The Trident was a means to an end, even if Elliott sometimes treated it as an end in itself. The truer focus was the music he’d make with it, the activity it was supposed to serve. Handfuls of songs were scattered about, some old, rejects from prior efforts, some relatively new, performed but previously unrecorded. It’s not clear how much actual recording Elliott got around to at New Monkey. Most people feel very little was laid down on tape there. Not exactly nothing, but not a lot. Yet despite the condition he was in—still physically ravaged, paranoid, now and then secretly abusing Schloss’s prescription drugs, intensely fearful of imaginary spying by DreamWorks—he got to the point where he envisioned a double album, a sort of concept album, looser than, say,
The Wall
, more like
Sergeant Pepper’s
or the Beatles’
White Album
. By now he’d cut off McConnell, possibly out of more paranoia, but his intent was unchanged. He wanted something adventurous, edgy, dirty, with songs spiraling off in many directions at once, messy but with an underlying unity, a whole exceeding the sum of its parts. Chiba hired Fritz Michaud as a studio assistant, the person heard at the start of “King’s Crossing.” And like a well-meaning taskmaster, she sent Elliott and Fritz off to work; she pushed and prodded. Some days Elliott got almost nothing done; other days he’d return with tapes and play back what he’d come up with. It was decidedly slow going, but it seemed to be working. In between trips to the studio Elliott and Chiba indulged in what she called “retail therapy.” They headed off to Home Depot, Fry’s Electronics, the Bodhi Tree Bookstore where they bought baskets full of self-help titles. Now and then, on rare occasions, Elliott donned “the green goggles,” slang for getting stoned. He smoked, Chiba says, to combat Adderall addiction
(the stimulant ADHD drug), a remedy he felt worked. She didn’t like it, but it seemed at the time like a harmless enough irregularity, and it never led to anything harder.

In terms of the music, a total of something like fifty-eight songs awaited refinishing, Chiba recalls. Of those, twenty-eight to thirty were to be culled. Some were frankly experimental, “Melodic Noise,” “Blind Alley,” and “Yay”; some were layered, wall of sound concoctions like “Stickman” and “Coast to Coast”; some were meant to slowly explode after gentle beginnings, like “Abused”; some featured “insane amounts of guitar tracks,” Chiba says, along with Motown vocals and drums arrived at by happy accident, such as “Shooting Star,” a song Chiba says Elliott wanted as an opening track. To be expected, certain numbers were also acoustic—“Let’s Get Lost” and the comparatively old “Memory Lane,” about Elliott’s Sierra Tucson experience. It was all slowly coalescing. This was to be Elliott’s epic, a Homeric statement to exceed all others. The list of tunes expanded almost daily—there were, in addition to those named above, the instrumental “See You in Heaven,” “Mr. Goodmorning,” “From a Poison Well,” “Here If You Want Me,” with lyrics added to an instrumental riff from
Figure 8
, “True Love,” “Taking a Fall,” “Go By,” “Talking to Mary,” “Sons and Daughters,” “Going Nowhere,” and the insouciant but ominous sounding “Suicide Machine” (once titled “Tiny Time Machine”), the tune in which Elliott imagines making a “happy home out of hellish things” (in draft lyrics). He rides a pony on a neon night, saying everything will be all right. Chiba says Elliott “worked tirelessly on the mixes to get them just the way he wanted”; he pushed the limits of the recording equipment, using unorthodox setups. He “ran the sonic gamut,” intrigued by any potential new direction. Even Neil Gust rematerialized, showing up for a short visit at a time when Elliott’s paranoia was on the increase, Chiba recalls. The two recorded a song, just like back in the Heatmiser days in Portland. “I spent a week and a half with him,” Gust says. Elliott brought up the band’s demise again, apologizing once more for what had happened. “He said he wanted to make another Heatmiser record, go on tour. Kind of crazy. But he was a mess. I was like, You need to get healthy first.”
¹⁰
As for the recorded song, Chiba can’t remember its title, or if it ever had one; she later gave the master to Gust.

What is indisputable is that the record was set to explode a brand-new
Elliott Smith with a brand-new game. It was to be a colossal artistic departure. All the inimitably nuanced beauty of the prior efforts was retained, in songs like “Let’s Get Lost” and “Going Nowhere,” the lyrical weight and density, the intricacy, but the range of sound roamed heedlessly, numbers dropping like deliberately amateurish homemade explosives, creating a corrosiveness never before seen on any other of Elliott’s records. Gary believes some of the strain Elliott felt at the time had to do with this change of direction. He knew it wasn’t going to jibe; he knew it might unnerve or confuse fans to whom he always felt a degree of devotion. He understood that, on its face, it was a bit of a disorganized tangle, a lot like the
White Album
, in fact, with its jarring incongruities, from “Dear Prudence” to “Revolution 9.” But so be it. It was Elliott’s
Finnegans Wake
, his electrified Beckett. And if DreamWorks detested it, all the better. He was up for a total sonic rebuke, all paranoia aside.

The sad question, of course, was whether he could bring it off, did he still have it in him. His plan was to gather up the demons then throw them against the wall where they’d burst in messy melody, curlicues of scraping sound. But the demons had their own designs, as always. It’s not as if they were primed to cooperate; they never had been before. Projections onto DreamWorks notwithstanding, Elliott always understood the enemy was within. It went where he went, everywhere from Home Depot to New Monkey. With tenacity, and with every last iota of self-preservative feeling he could muster, he’d defeated heroin and crack. The struggle, now, was with legal drugs, with psychiatry, his father’s profession. Chiba recalls ninety-minute sessions with Schloss, sometimes as frequently as three times per week. They worked away at his issues, but they also got sidetracked, discussing abstract math theories, among other recondite topics. What came to alarm Chiba, she says, was that nearly every day Elliott emerged with new prescriptions, even for laughably dubious diagnoses like restless leg syndrome. Chiba wound up purchasing “the most complicated pill case you’ve ever seen,” about the size of a human arm, with extra-large compartments. Once, when Chiba came along for a session, she asked Schloss pointedly, “Why do you prescribe like this for someone with a drug habit?” By this time Elliott was spending upward of seven thousand dollars per month, Chiba estimates, just on medication. Gary Smith had seen Elliott’s man
purse of drugs, and it shocked him too, Chiba recalls. Some nights she called Elliott’s father in desperation. In many ways, as close friends had begun to realize over the span of several years, the psych meds were just as ruinous as the street variety. Elliott was chronically oversedated, his thinking soupy, his speech garbled. Several of his final 2003 performances were iffy affairs. He still seemed out of it. He was wobbly, his voice undependable, his playing imprecise. People speculated he was still on heroin, still a junkie. He wasn’t. It was the psychiatric drugs. They were making him look like someone chronically mentally ill—slowed, sluggish, emotionally deadened, carelessly medicated.

There were scant few performances in 2001 and 2002, the addiction years. They just weren’t very possible. As he took to telling crowds, “I’m too fucked up.” In 2003 his pace picked up some as he tried to power through, to get back on his feet. He played New York’s Bowery Ballroom in late January, again stopping a few tunes; there were the two consecutive gigs at Henry Ford Theatre in L.A., when Deerin showed up in disguise. In June he appeared at the Field Day Festival held in New York’s Giants’ Stadium. Dave Leto was there and spent time with Elliott backstage. As Leto recalls it, his mystique was still uniquely powerful. All the big stars and big bands, from Radiohead to Beck to Bright Eyes, watched him speechlessly from the wings, as if studying a master. The day poured rain; it was Portland weather, of a sort Elliott felt at home with. But to Leto, although Elliott soldiered through the set, he was not exactly on his game. He looked different, for one. More ravaged than usual, more blurry. Parts appeared to be missing somehow, as if his personality had been turned off. After the show Leto, Dorien, Chiba, and Elliott met up in his trailer. With Jennifer Elliott was “very touchy-feely, very PDA-ish.” They seemed close; they seemed clearly bonded. Chiba and Dorien left, and Elliott told Leto he wanted to play him a song, a Kinks tune called “Days.” Leto says, “It was really cool. I felt pretty special. It was like a concert for one.” This was a song Elliott had played many times for Chiba, telling her, “You can listen to this when I’m gone.” It’s a sort of summing up, a melancholic thank-you. “I’m not frightened of this world,” Davies writes. “I won’t forget a single day,” even though the night is dark and brings more sorrow.

As the year dragged on, the psych meds continued their destructive
arc. There were far too many, for one, at least six or seven—a newer antipsychotic, Zyprexa, now known to cause metabolic disorders, the Adderall, the Klonopin, Serzone, a serotonin reuptake inhibitor that worsens, in rare instances, suicidal thinking. There were days when Elliott took the proper dosages, abiding by his doctor’s orders. Other times he manipulated the system, taking more than he should, hoping to disconnect himself, dampen the always intense emotional pain, hiding information from different prescribers, some he would see on his own at all hours of the night, on mysterious errands.

Back in 2002 he’d told McConnell about overdosing, how he’d been deliberately reckless, not caring what the effect might be. One night in 2003 he tried it again. This was to be the first in a handful of crisis evenings. Chiba discovered Elliott had taken twenty-two Klonopin. His frighteningly blithe attitude seemed to be, “Let’s just see if I die.” Jennifer immediately called Ashley, who raced over, Chiba says, to find Elliott still conscious and propped up, but looking very slowed and sedated. The idea, reasonably, was to call 911. But Elliott was adamantly opposed; they knew if they made the call, he’d find it unforgivable, more a betrayal than an honest attempt to get him the help he needed. Again, he feared cops, and in his paranoia expected the worst from any contact with authorities, even ambulance personnel. Essentially, his stance was to “prevent us from preventing him from dying,” Chiba recalls. So no call was made. But Elliott rose up awkwardly, with the intent of getting his car keys and driving away. Chiba and Ashley ordered him to lie back down, yet he kept totteringly trying to escape, insisting he was taking off. Chiba finally needed to physically block his path, and the two crashed to the floor on top of each other. Elliott was not trying to hurt her, but Chiba was hurt—she had hit her head—and Elliott bolted to the door. At this point he had his car keys, and Ashley chased after him, determined not to let him get behind the wheel, apparently. As Chiba recalls it, Elliott finally agreed, after much discussion, to hand the keys over. Ashley wound up driving, the two staying in the car for several hours until, slowly, Elliott calmed down, became more lucid, the sedation clearing. Chiba was traumatized, concerned about possible injury. What remained was a feeling of helplessness. No one wanted to guess how much longer this could go on, or what the final result might be. Once more Chiba
wondered whether she could take it. How was she going to make it through months, years, even, of virtually uninterrupted emergency? Suicide had become a daily topic. “Like the boy who cried wolf,” Chiba says, “it was almost a joke.” Elliott might tell her, for instance, “Today is the day they are going to put me down,” using, almost comically, a veterinary analogy. Chiba took it all in, feeling alone and spent, as did Ashley, who was nearby and on constant call. In one way, at least, all the suicide talk seemed geared to “take the charge out of the subject,” Chiba believed. She felt it was better, in a sense, for Elliott to be open about it, although the openness hardly diminished the fear everyone had.

By August 2003, several developments merged, adding layers of complication to an already vexing situation. Around his thirty-fourth birthday, on August 6, Elliott came to a monumental decision. He elected, impulsively, and not entirely advisedly, from a medical or detox perspective, to go off everything, to try an immediate, total cold turkey. He stopped the psychiatric drugs, including a newer one, Strattera, for ADHD (it had been prescribed as an alternative to the more “speedy” Adderall). He also stopped smoking, drinking, caffeine—all of it. There was no tapering, no slow cessation of usage. He just plain hit the brakes. Therapeutically, he began pounding kava, a drink with sedative properties, and a green concoction Chiba prepared, a foul-tasting nutritional elixir. This seemed like a direction no one could argue with. He was getting clean, purging his system of every last toxin. But there was fallout, especially from the psychiatric drugs. His brain had become sensitized from years of usage; sudden cessation therefore came with added anxiety, moodiness, irritability, agitation. And the paranoia lingered around the edges, a renegade variable he now confronted with zero chemical assistance. He and Chiba took long walks in a canyon, to promote activity and mindfulness. Elliott kept at the music, recording the Cat Stevens tune “Trouble” in their bedroom on a twenty-four-track—it left him weeping—and the Bob Marley song “Concrete Jungle.” He was ragged, his nerves shot, walking on a wire, but he kept fighting.