Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
In 1998 I was working the door at Brownies, a music club in New York’s East Village. One of our regulars was a mousey indie rocker with bad acne scars, perpetually dirty hair, and a knit cap that never left his head. Nice guy. Didn’t say much. One night my friend and co-worker Lou said, “Hey you know, that guy that always comes in here? I turned on the Oscars the other night and he was up there on stage!” I had seen the same famous performance, as Elliott Smith, looking small and out of place in his white suit, plaintively strummed his acoustic guitar, singing the song “Miss Misery” in front of a crowd of A-List Hollywood celebrities.
Heaven Adores You, Nickolas Rossi’s tender-hearted 2014 bio-doc, begins with Smith discussing his “weird” Oscars appearance, which pulled him from the indie underground and thrust him into the mainstream. “Pretty fun…for a day,” he says in an audio interview. “I’m the wrong kind of person to be really big and famous,” he says at another point. Friend and recording engineer Larry Crane agrees, saying “I think in a way it was the worst thing that could have happened.”
Like his music, with its hushed vocals, gently picked guitars and happy sad melodies, Smith seemed too sensitive for this world. This, however, is an oversimplification. His music could also be loud and joyous and behind the scenes footage shows someone who enjoyed friendship and good times navigating adulthood while trying to hold onto the best parts of youth. Tragically, he would never be able to reconcile his past and present, his longing for anonymity and the pressures of fame, dying in 2003 at the age of 34.
He was born Steven Paul Smith in 1969 and childhood photos of him smiling with strawberry blonde hair are a shocking contrast to the dyed black hair and dark demeanor of his later years. His half-sister Ashley Welch says there was tension at home in Texas between him and his stepfather and he moved to Portland, Oregon, in his early teens to live with his birth father. A radio interview finds him unwilling to discuss the reasons for his relocation.
Smith began playing music and writing songs as a teenager, learning different instruments in order to record home demos. He formed the band Heatmiser in 1991 with friends from high school and college and they soon became local scene favorites. Located between San Francisco and Seattle, Portland was a regular tour stop for the new generation of bands that would form the first wave of the ‘90s alternative rock explosion.
While Heatmiser featured the ubiquitous loud guitars and shouted vocals of the era, privately, Smith recorded quieter material, which often featured just him and an acoustic guitar. His vocals were reserved and the songwriting was delicate, with beautiful melodies which unravelled as they sang of depression, disappointment, dysfunction and addiction. The intimacy of the music drew listeners in, as if they were eavesdropping on their roommate through the bedroom wall.
Smith’s first album under his own name was released in 1994, and by 1996 Heatmiser was no more. Subsequent releases made him a local star and in 1997 fellow Portland resident and movie director Gus Van Sant featured his music in the film Good Will Hunting, resulting in the song “Miss Misery” being nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song. It lost to Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On” from Titanic. Friends held viewing parties to watch Smith’s Oscar performance, but he had already left them behind, moving to Brooklyn and later Los Angeles.
Though friends say Smith initially sang about drugs more than he used them, by the early 2000s he was battling addiction to alcohol, heroin, and crack cocaine. He was also using multiple prescription drugs to battle anxiety and depression. He rejected friends’ attempts at an intervention and ceased relations with management and musical collaborators. He had allegedly kicked drugs and stopped drinking by the summer of 2003 and was working on his first album of new material in four years.
On October 21, 2003, Elliott Smith died from two stab wounds to the chest. Text tells us, “The coroner could not confirm if the injury was self-inflicted. The report remains undetermined.” While not detailed in the film, Smith had attempted suicide several times before and frequently told friends about his struggles with depression and desire to kill himself. While questions do remain about Smith’s death, the way it is presented seems to unfairly cast suspicion on his live-in girlfriend, Jennifer Chiba, who does not appear in the film. Besides prescription drugs, no other substances were found in his system at the time of his death.
Like other musicians who died too young, we mourn not only the tragedy of their death but also their artistic loss. Elliott Smith produced six full-length albums during his life, yet there’s still the sense that he had more to give — that speaks to the quality of his work, as well as his fans’ connection to it. In the end, though, all that’s left are the personal memories of those who knew him and his music. While Heaven Adores You delivers no easy answers on the how or why of his tragic end, it ably and affectionately celebrates Smith’s music and reminds us of his genius.
Benjamin H. Smith is a New York based writer, producer and musician.Follow him on Twitter:@BHSmithNYC.
