| Roman Candle | ||
| —This
piece originally appeared in Last Plane to Jakarta #2, published in Colo,
Iowa in Spring, 1998— Do the English love Elliott Smith? If not, why not? It seems to me that a country where Nick Drake records have actually seen chart action would be ready for Smith’s oddly formal take on the sad singer-songwriter schtick, and that the contrast between his publicly near-invisible band Heatmiser (their final album, Mic City Sons, is one of the most unjustly ignored albums of the decade) and his solo work would be the sort of thing that’d give the NME the automatic spin they insist on before setting pen to paper. I’d think, too, that his Lennon-McCartneyisms (more Abbey Road than Sergeant Pepper) would be worth at least a little of that Oasis billion. To me, at any rate, the question “What if the Beatles had been one guy from Portland courting a puzzling and alcoholic muse?” seems like a good one, one that I’d think Melody Maker would be able to milk for a season or two. Do the French love Elliott Smith? They should; they’ve always liked their poets stinking slightly of piss, and part of the charm of an Elliott Smith record (at least until he inked the major label deal) has always been the feeling that it was thrown together quickly so that whoever’d agreed to release it would cough up enough money for a fifth of vodka before anybody got wise. His love songs seethe with self-doubt, and their human objects of adoration get more pity than praise from his whispery, monochromatic voice. As often as not, though, his love songs seem directed specifically at alcohol, which puts me in the mind of Antonin Artaud, consciously trying to drink enough to bore a hole through the wall of his stomach so as not to have to go on writing. In this, though, Artaud is nearly American, so focused is his hatred of God and his contempt for intellectuals. Smith, really, would have made a better Frenchman than Artaud, because his self-absorption is more beautiful, and has the languid quality one associates with a country that will allow five letter words to have four vowels. In a row. You’d guess from listening to Elliott Smith that he’s got a soft face with watery eyes, but there you’d be going a little too far, pal. You can’t drink the hard stuff that long and still hold on to the Luke Perry look. Do the Germans love Elliott Smith? Who cares? Does East L.A. love Elliott Smith? Something about the waltzes on this new album, XO, makes me think that’d he’d fit in at a Chicano wedding, singing songs whose words meant nothing to the crowd but whose tempos were familiar not only to the ears but to the blood; songs that were disguised as letters from the counterculture when they were, in fact, post-cards from the old regime, the one that your grandparents got all misty remembering. Smith wears his love of structure on his sleeve, but he’s not a pedant; he just doesn’t think any of the other options are tenable. In an alternate universe I could see him selling his songs to Vicente Fernandez (the most popular Mexican singer in the world no matter what you’ve heard about Luis Miguel), who’d give them his standard run through the accordion and small oom-pah band set-up, and when you heard the mariachis at your favorite Mexican restaurant playing them to the lovestruck couple two tables over you’d think they sounded so sweet and so sad and that they were what the poets mean by “timeless,” and you’d be right to think so. Does Hollywood love Elliott Smith? Yes and no. They were ready to love Elliott Smith. They’ve been ready to love him for years. A guy who can spin a melody that makes people think of what life might’ve been like if they hadn’t screwed things up at exactly the wrong point is a precious commodity, and everybody knows it; Smith’s ear for the things that lull people into such melancholy places is golden, and he could be very rich if he wanted to be. Gus Van Sant, who in all likelihood has gotten blind drunk with Elliott Smith under the Burnside bridge at least once in his life, gave Smith the job of writing the song for his movie Good Will Hunting and Smith gave him back “Miss Misery,” which went and got itself nominated for an Academy award. Maybe you saw the broadcast. Elliott Smith’s appearance on it seems to have been accepted, in the community from which he sprung, as one of those chuckle-chuckle anomalous cultural moments where those of us who’ve been in the know for a while get to imagine that the rest of the population cares that we knew about it first, but I think it was worth a harder and less obvious look than that. The event’s coordinators, in their wisdom, had decided that the most expedient way to get the “Best Songs” nastiness taken care of was to string three songs together and have them done in medley. The feel that resulted from this strategy was tres grade-school-auditorium on a rainy day. Under a spotlight at stage right you had Tricia Yearwood, giving the quite-hip-right-now fake twang to every syllable; at center there was Celine Dion, radiating how unimaginably famous she is, and on a riser toward the back there was Elliott Smith, backed by a full orchestra, plucking out “Miss Misery” in his quiet, crushed voice. The performance order, to give Dion and her number from Titanic the highest profile, went Yearwood-Smith-Dion, and the staging was choreographed so that Yearwood and Smith were ushered to Celine Dion’s sides just as her song was swelling to its inevitable brash climax. When she finished her last obligatorily gigantic high note, she dropped her wireless microphone into the waiting hands of an anonymous stagehand , and she grabbed hold of Tricia Yearwood’s left hand with her right and of Elliott Smith’s right with her left. She raised their hands high into the air as the applause crashed against the back curtain. She was beaming. It was theatrical, and it was Hollywood and Broadway and Las Vegas all rolled up into one big unholy ball, and it was huge. Tricia Yearwood had that look on her face that people get when they’ve been waiting all their lives for something and then they finally get it. Elliott Smith looked like he was afraid there was somebody he’d borrowed money from in the audience who was going to ask him later who’d sprung for his nice tuxedo. It is fair to say that he looked as uncomfortable as a human being can look. Watching him, seeing the wheels behind his eyes spinning, gears clicking rustily, one could almost see supertitles above his head spelling out his thoughts for all the world to see: “Do I look dignified? Do I belong here? Is somebody about to yank the rug out from under me or something? Can I get out of this suit and into a martini so dry that it’s actually just a bottle of gin, please?” It was only a brief moment, but it spoke volumes about what will probably be another story where a writer gets offered a whole bunch of money to do what he’d been doing more or less for free, and he thinks about it for a long time and concludes that anybody who doesn’t want him to have enough money to buy nice things is a total asshole, and so he signs the contract which immediately bursts into flames, and his work gets, unbelievably, better, but the whole thing ends in tears and does so in such quiet circumstances that it’s almost like somebody was trying to keep the whole thing a secret or something. It was something to see, really, and it occasioned a few moments’ reflection. Because, friends, the reason that Hollywood wants so badly to love Elliott Smith and to embrace him as one of its own is that he has got the goods. On his new album, XO, he does with wit and focus and an enviable work-ethic exactly what they’ve said they’re going to pay him to do. Those of us who court the bitter muse should be especially impressed by the song “Bottle Up and Explode!” with its expansive, minor-key structures bringing to mind a severely bummed-out Beach Boys fronted by an undermedicated Brian Wilson, maybe performing on the Donny and Marie Hour in 1978, everyone involved wanting badly to imagine that the song’s incredible sadness wasn’t going to get smoothed over by its own seamlessness. I imagine Elliott Smith replacing Mike Love in that scenario, which I do mainly so that I can see Donny Osmond greeting Smith backstage after the show, and saying tearfully to him: “God, that was great. You wrote that yourself? God, God, God that was great,” staring at Smith the way you’d stare at somebody who’d performed emergency kidney surgery at a construction-site accident using only his bare hands and an X-acto, shaking his hand, the smile frozen on his face. I pick “Bottle Up and Explode!” not only for its terrible beauty, but for the way its lyrics exemplify what’s so odd about Elliott Smith getting the nod from the Academy. One of my favorite lines in the song goes: “You look at him like you’ve never known him/ But I know for a fact that you have.” It’s the line that leads off the song’s second verse, coming out of nowhere at all. The first verse had been a solitary affair uncluttered by second parties. You and I both know the sentiment behind such a line; it requires no explication. The acrid taste it leaves in your mouth speaks for itself. What’s unusual here is that since the feeling behind such a line is self-evident, its author offers no narrative detail of any kind to flesh it out for you. The song is a laundry list of words and phrases that prick at very specific emotional centers, but which add up to virtually nothing -- they are like a dream of a song rather than an actual song. It works beautifully, but it’s not the sort of thing you’d expect anybody to bank their winter quarter earnings on. To find such painterly writing framed by the pleasant, palatable music that we find here is nothing short of alarming. The string section, the ranchero-style downward-strumming-only nylon-strung acoustic guitar, the way that Elliott Smith isn’t going to raise his voice for you or for anybody else -- this is all the arrogance of an artist at work, and if there’s one thing we know, it’s that they don’t like artists in Hollywood. They like company men, and Elliott Smith doesn’t come off, in “Bottle Up and Explode!,” like much of a company man at all. He comes off like a Big Artist, one so sure of himself that he doesn’t feel any need at all for the listener to understand what’s going on in his songs. You wouldn’t expect the company to let this guy get past the second round of interviews. It’s just that he’s got the exact musical skills that the company’s always looking for, so they’ve decided to give him a year or two to settle into his new job. I wonder, though, how many of the people who signed off on his contract had spent an hour or so sitting down with Roman Candle, an album Smith released in 1994 on Portland’s microscopic Cavity Search Records. Listening to it now, you get a sense of exactly where Smith was headed -- the shape of his growth as an artist, in hearing these two albums side by side, becomes clearer, and the artistic heights still ahead of him begin to shimmer like heat from the highway in Nevada. Roman Candle is a very little record, the kind of thing you’re always hoping you’ll be the first person to notice so that you can feel like you have it all to yourself. It was recorded, according to the liner notes, “on a 4-track in the basement fall 1993,” which in this case, surprisingly, doesn’t mean that no-one involved has any talent whatsoever, or that the songs are unrealized sketches awaiting development. With the exception of a stray traps kit here and there or an occasional harmonica, it’s an album made up entirely of acoustic guitar and voice, though no song has fewer than two guitars and the all of the vocals are double-tracked. Four of its nine songs have no names. Though the recording quality is quite good given its genesis, you have to turn it way up to hear it very well, because the songs are almost entirely devoid of dynamics. Such dynamics as there are occur at strategically placed moments throughout the album; there are perhaps two such moments, three at the outside. The songs are populated by characters who don’t need motivation because they’re not doing much of anything. They barely even have an interior life to speak of; despite the title track’s attempt at menace (“I want to hurt him/I want to give him pain/I’m a Roman candle/my head is full of flames”), you get the sense fairly quickly that Smith is more interested in fully sublimated anger than in the bubbling-under-the-surface rage which is the domain of lesser songwriters. Where the vast majority of singer-songwriter albums show off their authors’ abilities, real or imagined, to detail not only their own rich interior lives but also the secret desires and fears of all their characters, Elliott Smith sees only enigma written on a blank canvas, and sends most of Roman Candle’s characters away before they’ve had the chance to do much: Everyone is gone home to oblivion, runs the chorus of “No Name #3,” and even in the (relatively) turbulent scenes of “Condor Ave.,” the concluding lines are: So now I’m leaving you alone, you can do whatever the hell you want to. The whole album is over in thirty minutes and thirty-one seconds. There is plenty of action in the songs but none of it is very clear, and the narrator’s dulled anger is the very definition of impotence. The guitar-playing is quite impressive though not at all showy, and the music is full of interesting, mildly surprising major/minor shifts. I had listened to it five times before I could hum even one of its songs. Given the evidence of Smith’s other work, both earlier and later, I can say with certainty that if one of his songs’ melodies isn’t instantly memorable, it is by design, not accident. This is, after all, the guy who wrote “Needle in the Hay,” the catchiest song to romanticize heroin addiction since “Waiting for My Man.” On this album, though, there are dreamlike phrases in place of hooks, languid breaths of melody that exhaust themselves before they reach the end of the verse. The impression you get is that Roman Candle is a journeyman’s piece investigating a few ideas about songwriting, which is exactly what I suspect it is. The songs all stand on their own, and the album coheres as a whole, but it’s a deeply intellectual exercise, and not one you’d think of as particularly attractive to somebody looking to shell out a lot of money for a songwriter -- not, I mean, the sort of thing that you’d have thought the boys at DreamWorks would have found intriguing. It is utterly fascinating; I never tire of listening to it, wondering what its motivation is, trying to find the keys to its cryptic, quiet scenes of interpersonal boredom and frustration. The most I’ve been able to do is note that the theme of friendship crops up in more than one song, and that the narrator has fantasies of protecting his friends from harm. This is, to be sure, a cinematic sort of theme, but only if you’re talking about French cinema of the late 1950’s, which is why one can picture Elliott Smith going to meetings with music directors on various Hollywood projects over the next couple of years and doing his best to dumb down his work to make it accessible to the people who sign the checks. While XO doesn’t require the magnifying glass called for by Roman Candle, it’s hardly written in the universal language, either, and while those willing to meet a song halfway will find it heavy with poignant moments and a few truly breathtaking sequences, it’s easy to imagine Elliott Smith getting pink-slipped at the end of his contract. It’s a pity, because he should be loved and praised for his vision, and he should be well paid for his great originality. It usually doesn’t work that way, though, so in all probability Elliott Smith’s career will wind up as one more object-lesson in how unfair the world is. None of which makes any difference in the final analysis. XO is a great record, plain and simple. It doesn’t need your love, but it deserves it. |
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