When Elliott Smith played Los Angeles in the fall of 2002, after more than a year of semi-seclusion, he didn’t look so good. His hands scrabbled across the guitar strings like they were strangers to his arms. He appeared grubby and unshaven and wore a watch cap pulled low over his skull. He stumbled on a Beatles song -- his beloved Beatles! -- and seemed only partially acquainted with his own work. He looked in pain, and it was painful to hear.

 

Smith was playing a Latin nightclub that had been remodeled for hipsters in Echo Park, the neighborhood where he resided until his death on October 21, 2003. He lived on a nearby hill and could have walked to the gig. Echo Park is like L.A.'s new Laurel Canyon (the '60s Hollywood scene that spawned the so-called beautiful-people rock of Jackson Browne, the Mamas and the Papas, et al.). It's full of bohemians, drifters, and houses tucked behind other houses. Build an ark in your backyard -- you can do whatever you want in Echo Park and find someone to get you whatever you want. A little kid was recently mauled by a pit bull close to Smith's house. Dogs were often running loose in the streets. Musicians, Latino families, and, more recently, middle-class whites were also out and about. It was a good place to hide, and Smith liked to hide.

The last Elliott Smith concert in Los Angeles was a tribute show, thrown together a week after he killed himself by putting a knife through his heart. A whole lot of folks played his songs well during the sold-out memorial at the Henry Fonda Theatre. Rilo Kiley performed "I Didn't Understand" (from Smith's fourth album, XO); singer Jenny Lewis' sweet voice made the lost-love lyrics even more unbearable than they were already. Beck played three songs, and his delicately labored picking reminded you what a terrific guitar player Smith was. Another product of the neighborhood, Beck came as an admirer, but he couldn't help symbolizing something else as well -- he is nearly Smith's total opposite. Where Smith was paralyzingly conflicted about success, Beck's got all that figured out. Where Smith was tortured about representing himself -- about having an image he had to live up to -- Beck has an army of images. While Smith could drink all night and had been a heroin addict, Beck thanks you for not smoking.

The benefit (to help abused children) ended with a performance by Beth Orton, a casual acquaintance of Smith's. She mentioned Gram Parsons and Johnny Cash, opening the set by saying "Just think -- Elliott is probably with a lot better company than he was with before."

Hello, Echo Park -- and good-bye.

Smith's songs were melancholic, brooding, constantly flipping between hopefulness and disappointment. He was a brilliant songwriter who hadn't peaked yet, as suggested by the song "A Distorted Reality Is Now a Necessity to Be Free" (the B-side of a limited-edition 2003 single). In 1998, as XO was released, I spent a few days with Smith in his former Portland, Oregon, home and followed him to London for some shows. His songs had been featured in Good Will Hunting (director Gus Van Sant was a fan), and he had performed "Miss Misery" at the Oscars. This was his breakthrough year, and the story was possibly going to be a Spin cover. In person, Smith was much that his songs suggested he would not be: direct, relaxed, easy to talk to. In fact, he talked for hours and even let me interview his father, Gary, backstage in Portland. There was only one thing he would not do, and it was instructive. According to Smith, for the Spin photo shoot, he was asked to wear a tight, white T-shirt artily spattered with fake blood. (Former Spin staffers deny that this happened.)

Smith felt that he was being asked to play the role of the tortured artist, marketing his pain. He walked out of the shoot, though he later returned and offered to pose in less theatrical ways. (For a variety of reasons, he ultimately did not appear on the cover.) At the time, I thought such stubbornness was an example of someone taking a principled stand about controlling his own image. Now, I wonder whether it was a case of an acutely conflicted artist finding a brand-new way of sabotaging his success.

This was a man who occasionally also craved connection. Another afternoon, at the same bar, Smith didn't remember my friend, his tormentor, and my friend didn't repeat the mistake. He continued his conversation about horse racing with the waitress, but Smith came over and was suddenly eager to participate. An evaluation of a thoroughbred he could endure. An evaluation of Elliott Smith he could not.

For all his shyness, Smith made people want to enter his orbit. His melancholy resonated, drew people close. Then they'd get close enough to see how he was living and how he was damaging himself -- with heroin in Portland, then booze when he moved to New York, and then heroin and other drugs when he moved to Los Angeles. Friends would try to get him to stop destroying himself, and that's when he'd cut some of them out of his life. It was really that simple.

His favorite form of public execution was the intervention. There were at least two. The first came after the release of his third album, Either/Or, in 1997. He was on the road in Chicago when friends surprised him, accompanied by a counselor. He eventually agreed to go into an Arizona hospital to detox, but left shortly thereafter. This scene played out again as he was working on XO, and many of that album's songs are, on some level, about leaving behind all the people who'd been in that Chicago room. He left the Olympia, Washington, punk label Kill Rock Stars -- its head Slim Moon helped instigate the intervention -- and moved to Brooklyn.

"A lot of the songs on this record [XO] had to do with being really amazed at how quickly people will totally invade your space just because you're not like them and you don't deal with things just like they do," Smith told me. "They think that you drink too much, or they think that you're too -- they just don't like how you live or something. It kind of blows my mind, the nerve people have to go parading around as if they know what somebody else ought to do with themselves. To the point where they'll confront you and tell you what you ought to do."

XO was ambitious and sad and turned a cult artist into a modest commercial success (having sold around 200,000 copies to date). The moral of the Chicago intervention was that Smith didn't need Portland or his self-righteous punk-rock friends, that he was right to bail on the intervention and get drunk. The album's success was his proof of that.

Another intervention occurred in 2001, reportedly bankrolled by DreamWorks, the major label that signed him after he left Kill Rock Stars. Doubtless there were people at the label who cared deeply about Smith's health. Even so, it's tragicomic when you think of what must have been going through this stubborn man's head when his new label funded another showdown. Yet again, a record company had become symbolic of all the prying people in his life. After that, he suspected a new set of betrayals, and soon the double CD he was working on was not going to be released on DreamWorks.

One day, we were talking about religion and how Smith went to church a lot as a kid (first in Dallas, then in Portland after he moved there at the age of 14). "Mainly, church just made me really scared of hell," he said. "It still just scares the shit out of me. If you grew up being threatened with that, it's really hard to be like, 'Oh, it probably doesn't exist.' Even if everyone you meet tells you there's no place like that."

"Do you think you'll go to hell?"

"I guess," Smith replied, "although I try to arrange my affairs otherwise. I don't want to. But I guess I would have to go to hell on a technicality -- because there's some things that you're not supposed to do that I can't see, not to do."