Long before Tuesday, October 21, the day Smith finally succeeded in killing himself, his friends and family had been all too aware of his predilection for self-abuse. Still, when the first reports of his suicide started appearing, I was incredulous, like it was too obvious a rumor to be true.
"I think he always had that button in there," Pete Krebs, a Portland, Oregon, singer/songwriter and long-time friend of Smith's, said last week after hearing of his death. "That kind of self-destruction definitely accounted for his alcoholism and his drug use and the way he treated himself, the way he thought of himself. I can't say that I've met anybody quite as fragile and almost comically freaked out as Elliott."
Krebs, formerly of the band Hazel, was on tour with Smith when I first interviewed the latter in 1997. But when I spoke with Krebs two days after Smith's death, he told me that like many of Smith's friends from the Pacific Northwest, he hadn't seen him in a few years.
"A lot of his really close old friends wouldn't hear from him for months, years at a time. It wasn't him being a rock star or being too busy -- Elliott kind of always had this aspect to him that was just crawling out of his own skin."
Smith launched his musical career in Portland in the early '90s, playing in the band Heatmiser before recording his first solo LP, Roman Candle, for the tiny Cavity Search label. Even back then, he suffered from major depression, which was manifested gracefully on his finger-picked soft melodies. "In Portland, we got the brunt of Elliott's initial depression," Krebs says. "We saw that a long time ago. Lots of people have stories of their own experiences of staying up with Elliott till 5 in the morning, holding his hand, telling him not to kill himself.
"I don't think that anybody was really surprised, to be honest, that knew him from around here. If there's anything that people are freaked out about or affected by, it's definitely the brutality of his act." Smith died at an L.A. hospital after committing a poet's version of seppuku, stabbing himself in the heart with a knife.
Smith's former bandmate from Heatmiser, Sam Coomes, sang on his group Quasi's 1998 album, Featuring "Birds": "I'm not trying to document my suicide/You won't live long, but you may write the perfect song/Please excuse those who choose not to play along" on "The Poisoned Well." It was a not-so-subtle barb directed at Smith, who Quasi would later tour with extensively, even playing as his backup band.
When I met Smith, he came across as gentle and fragile, speaking softly and slowly, pondering each question before he replied. After his in-store performance at Stinkweeds Records in Tempe, Arizona, he accepted an invitation to continue drinking beer at my house. There were six other people present, one who brought an acoustic guitar. He played our favorites from Either/Or, covers of Neil Young and Hank Williams songs, and obscurities like "I Figured You Out," a song he wrote but never recorded, though Boston busker Mary Lou Lord had released a version of it earlier that year. Off-handedly, he told us that Lord, who had unsuccessfully pursued a romance with him, had told him he was the next Kurt Cobain, another tragic musician with whom she had a fling. Though Smith laughed it off as ridiculous, the allusion seems prophetic now.
At the time, Portland director Gus Van Sant was incorporating songs from Either/Or into his new film, Good Will Hunting. Smith recorded one new song for the movie, "Miss Misery," which earned him an Academy Award nomination for best song, a category he shared with Titanic diva Celine Dion.
Smith appeared at the Academy Awards sporting a blinding white Prada tuxedo, as if to emphasize how out of place he was. His soft intense (though abridged for brevity by the academy) version of "Miss Misery" was one of the most elegant performances the show has ever hosted, his singing barely more than a whisper. Afterward, Smith returned to the stage with Dion, uncomfortably holding her hand while they took a bow.
Elliott Smith had moved to Brooklyn, New York, in mid-1997 to escape the hurtful memories of a broken relationship in Portland. In 1999, he relocated to Los Angeles, where he recorded his last full-length album, Figure 8. Speculation was rampant the past few years that Smith had sunk into a pit of despair, alcoholism, and drug abuse. His shows were erratic; he would forget or mumble lyrics, often stopping songs halfway through.
"While Elliott was living in Portland, [drugs] weren't a problem for him -- he just drank and stuff," Krebs says. "I think when he went to New York and Los Angeles, especially L.A., that's what kind of killed him in a manner of speaking. He was around people who knew him not as Elliott but as 'Elliott Smith the rock star.'"
Smith was involved in a fracas with L.A. County sheriffs at a Flaming Lips/Beck show last November that landed him in jail. The Flaming Lips' Wayne Coyne told Billboard Magazine last week that Smith had appeared "to have lost control of himself," describing him as "needy" and "grumpy."
Smith told Under the Radar Magazine in a March interview that he had been treated for drug and alcohol addiction at the Neurotransmitter Restoration Center in Beverly Hills, with a process in which the blood is infused with massive amounts of amino acids and proteins, ostensibly restoring neurotransmitters to their pre-abuse state.
"I think he genuinely wanted to stop feeling so bad," Krebs says.
Smith had been in the process of completing an album titled From a Basement on a Hill and in August had released two songs, "Pretty (Ugly Before)" and "A Distorted Reality Is Now a Necessity to Be Free," on a limited-edition seven-inch single on Seattle's Suicide Squeeze label. He had built a recording studio in the San Fernando Valley and was reportedly shopping the album to independent labels after coming to an agreement with Dreamworks that allowed him a hiatus from his contract.
Whether From a Basement on a Hill will see release is not yet known, although there is reportedly enough completed music for a full LP. On one track, "King's Crossing," he sings, "Give me one reason not to do it..." Other song titles from the album are disturbing as well -- "Strung Out Again," "Let's Get Lost," "Shooting Star," and "Fond Farewell."
"He was always one for a play on words," Krebs says of the noirish titles. "On a lot of his songs, the titles were really telling. A lot of those titles were a lot less metaphoric and more abrupt than I've come to expect."
Elliott Smith's abrupt suicide, as sadly predictable as it was, significantly lessens the pool of great songwriters putting out sublimely beautiful music. His fans, friends, and family are left only with memories and an incredible catalog of recordings by one of the greatest songwriters in recent history.
"I don't have a memory of him as a drug addict or as a crazy person or anything other than my friend," Krebs says, "a really funny, really supersmart, caring person."
