A Distorted Reality With An Elliott Smith Soundtrack
Restaurant Work Liaisons, Depression in Your 20's & the Dissolution of Friendships
I know I’m in a weird place because I’ve been listening to A LOT of Elliott Smith.
And that is not a good sign. I guess I’ll come up out of it. Then I’ll slip right back. Everyone knows the routine. It’s a weird life. It’s as weird as it’s ever been. But I’m amazed at the consistency of my life at the moment. If I just don’t snap and fuck it up and keep going I think I can do something with this. It’s late, I understand that, but it’s always possible to start anew. And make something. But I’m just trying not to fuck it up. I reckon that’s what everyone I know thinks I’ll do.
He’s acting dumb but that’s what you’ve come to expect.
— Needle in the Hay
You gotta love Elliott Smith.
Bad skin, addiction, a voice and lyrics so ethereal and unreal, like a Percy Bysshe Shelley with a guitar. He had that look in his eyes that you see in the mirror when you catch your reflection off guard and see how you really feel. It’s a rattling moment, to understand you’re just not happy. When you have everything you need and things are going well and you’re still not good – what a trepidatious sensation. Because you’re innately aware that when the edges of this unpredictable life fray – and they will sooner or later – it’s not going to take much to push you into that cavern of despair. You can’t claw your way out. Your nails break off when you try. You can’t scream for help, because no one’s listening. You can’t do anything but sit in your cavern and hope it passes. Sometimes it goes in a day or so. But sometimes it doesn’t. It smashes you for days and weeks. And then there are the Elliott Smith fans who understand that sometimes this feeling of being isolated at a table for one, served a freezing dish of nothingness with strong hints of despair, never goes away.
I traded a smoke for a food stamp dollar / Ridiculous marching band started playing / Got me singing along with some half-hearted victory song.
— Rose Parade
It never lessens, only temporarily worsens. Either way it’s constant, an unrelenting grip of blackbelt jiu jitsu proportions. Flavors go out the window. Calendars seem infinite. The next moment their pages have flipped past like those of an engaging novel. Sex, if it’s even worth seeking out in these times, is either perfunctory just to expel the need or it’s life-threateningly dangerous, unprotected and weird just to give life a smidge of spice, if only for a regrettable (or not, hey!) moment. In the midst of one of his many drug binges, a longtime friend of mine recommended a track that jumpstarted my revisiting of Smith. My friend had moved to Appalachia after a stint in a mental institution to get away from drugs. After a highspeed chase with the police and being pronounced mentally incompetent, he escaped a jail sentence and earned himself a monthly stipend of $1800 thanks to a ‘crazy check’.
I’m floating in a black balloon / O.D. on Easter afternoon.
— A Distorted Reality is Now a Necessity to Be Free
Thus enriched, he rode out a lengthy stay at a halfway house filled with on the edge folks for six months and finally found a forever home in the backwoods nothingness of Eastern Kentucky. I went up there to visit him. I lost cell phone reception so completely that my phone had amnesia when I got back to civilization. I had to do a hard restart to get it working again. That place, though absurdly far away from cell towers and anything fun outside of bars and barns, was the ideal spot for my recovering friend to relapse like a fucking motherfucker and hunker down in his rural apartment doing nothing but ingesting the saddest of sad bastard music while watching muted MMA fights. That’s all he did. And not just sporadic, Spotify suggested shit but discographies at a time. Alphabetically. He kept me informed via FB messenger on his progress. When he got to E – his system evolved into using a solo artist’s first initial to determine their place in his listening queue – the moment arrived when he inevitably got to Elliott Smith. So somewhere between Death in June and The Flaming Lips, on the outskirts of the middle of absolutely nowhere, my pal sat on his couch in his apartment and pressed play.
I’m going out sleepwalking / Where mute memories start talking / The boss that couldn’t help but hurt you / And the pretty thing you made desert you.
— 2:45 AM
When we were teens, my friend had rad, long brown hair that I always admired compared to my Jew fro. Time had been an absolute motherfucker to my friend. He wasn’t so good to himself, either. All of his rad hair fell out, scalped by drugs and stress. He got fat, gorging on Denny’s pancakey-splattered-with-the-affiliated-color-of-whatever-holiday-lurked-around-the-corner carbs, sugar-water fountain drinks and processed garbage.
It’s okay. It’s all right. Nothing’s wrong.
— Waltz #2
He smoked like Blonde on Blonde era Bob Dylan, one after the other, until his two front teeth mirrored the cracker-lipped brown stained end of the cigarette butt he sucked on. Just a disgusting slobby blob my friend had rendered himself, but it was ideal shape for a guy dedicated to listening to music while watching mixed martial arts on a silent television. Why he got into that shit, I’ll never know. He never had a proclivity to violence. I’d never heard him express any interest in watching people fight. But he got a hankering for the sport out of nowhere and it helped him pass the melancholic, apocalyptic edge of nothingness nights.
Though the interest in combative sports came as a surprise, my friend’s intense depression didn’t.
He was always a half-sad fucker as far back as I can remember, a darkness stemming from his older brother being killed by a drunken driver. So he developed an intimate knowledge of music that leaned in the gloomy direction and Elliott Smith’s ballads of lost, complicated love were no exception. When he got to the Elliott Smith portion of his alphabetical listen-a-thon, a small light beamed through his messages. Sometimes, and it’s weird but it’s true, it’s nice to feel sad. Especially when a master can meld lyrics and melody like Elliott and provide your shit-feelings with an equally disquieting soundtrack.
His messages usually rolled in around 1:30 AM or so and I, the sporadic insomniac, typically responded to them promptly.
On the night that he rekindled my Smith interest, he sent a YouTube vid for the Beatles-esque track ‘A Distorted Reality is Now a Necessity to Be Free’. It electrocuted me. Acid, weed and the free-range thinking and serrated realizations that follow were all encapsulated into a somehow self-affirming song. The guitars, the vocals – it’s a psychedelic trip through disenchanted despondency. Back then, I had never bothered listening to much of From a Basement On the Hill. I’d given it a cursory spin, nipping at tracks here and there. I stopped my Smith explorations around Either/Or, having really dug The Royal Tenenbaums-recommended ‘Needle in the Hay’ off his self-titled release. So having overlooked the gem that is ‘Distorted Reality’, I re-listened to the tracks that I knew I loved like ‘Independence Day’ and gave Elliott a new whirl to see what other wonders I’d neglected.
Of course I wasn’t disappointed. But then again I was. But not in the music. But definitely disappointed in something. Because no one gravitates toward this music because they’re happy. Shit’s gotten weird, shit’s gotten sad, and shit’s getting shittier. Yet you persist.
I’ll fake it through the day with some help from Johnny Walker Red.
— Miss Misery
You put up the good fight, albeit by using drugs and alcohol as weapons. Another primary armament is the fucking of weird chicks – or dudes if that’s your penchant. And that’s the Elliott Smith fan. It’s that chick who seems sweet but her jeans are a little too distressed and her makeup a little too heavy and she keeps lighting cigarettes and her laughter never tapers off. It just stops and she resumes the hollowness. She schedules abortions and puts cigarettes out on herself. She fucks around with shit-dudes and does her shift at the chain dine-in restaurant and spends her tips on drinks, cigs and pills. And then there’re the dude fans who get DUI’s, fuck girls who aren’t that interesting or pretty but are willing to fuck. The dudes have court dates, have to move back in with their parents, and can usually be seen walking down the main drag in the rain when they can’t get a lift home after having a few pitchers of beer at the local pizzeria. Sometimes these dudes and chicks meet up and that shit’s fun for a while but it usually ends in tears or handcuffs or both. At the end of the day, as the song goes, it’s all a Ballad of Big Nothing.
All spit and spite / you’re up all night and down every day.
— Ballad of Big Nothing
In a track which he claimed he wrote while watching Xena: Warrior Princess on mute, Elliott says, “Drink up baby / Stay up all night / With the things you could do / You won’t but you might,” and it sums up the majority of underachieving and depressed people in their mid-twenties. I’m not lost on the similarities of my sad, fat friend in his late thirties sitting on a couch watching MMA warriors on mute while listening to music. But therein lies the difference between a genius songwriter and a drug addict music consumer. One’s self-constructing while the other’s self-destructing.
But ‘Between the Bars’ isn’t in any capacity relegated to chubby fight fans who’ve let their depression catch up with them.
Instead, it captures that moment in life, mid-twenties, stuck in this murky sadness where you keep a perpetual buzzed hungover and try to avoid lucidity at all costs because the reality of things turning out all wrong is just too goddamned prevalent in your every direction. I remember courting a waitress at a Steak n Shake in this phase of mine – hers as well. I remember her being so gorgeous and sad and lost. And you could tell as she stood in the breakroom smoking a menthol and rummaging through her purse for her anxiety meds that she’d never pull out of it. One day she’d have kids and her shit would drip all over them. On and on. I remember that time so well now because it was then that I first heard what I consider to be one of Elliott Smith’s finest songs, ‘Twilight’. I was drunk day and night, she was destroying herself, this track was in my mind constantly, and it was snowing. It’d been fitting to’ve heard ‘Angel in the Snow’ at that time, but I hadn’t. But ‘Twilight’ captured the scene well enough because I had an on and off again girl and the waitress had a guy who mistreated her.
She’s a pretty thing / And she knows everything / but I’m already somebody’s baby.
— Twilight
And as bleak as it all was she was pretty fucking gorgeous and those moments when the alcohol peaked and she leaned in and whispered something only for my ears in a crowded bar – damn it if that’s not a special kind of sadness. The kind you want to pull in close and hold, just like these sad songs.
The origin of this particular type of sadness can be traced back to rural places like Elliott’s birthplace of Nebraska.
You spring forth from these weird, little nothing landscapes and it just freezes your heart in a layer of granite-like ice. Very cold, very impenetrable. Nothing gets in, which is good, but the sadness can never break through the surface. It beats against your chest, suffocating day after day.
A love affair came and went in that dimly lit murkiness of twenty-something year-old inebriated lostness.
Part vacuum, part chrysalis, that era in a troubled addict’s life can can turn into a rabbit hole of mistakes or be a waystation for better days that are coming. That pretty chick lost her job and floated away on the wings of Counting Crows and abusive baby daddies. Fly away, sad waitress chick. Eventually I cleaned up myself. It was difficult, but hey, it only took a decade to emerge from my cocoon and hop a train out of that bullshit lifestyle.
My sad, fat friend’s fate worsened.
He stopped checking in with sanity. What was a distorted reality became a non-reality and that’s where he’s chosen to reside. On one of those sad-ass, middle of nowhere nights, some fissure of his mind cracked. He’s just gone. Just before that we finally got around to getting into the argument that severs friendships. That one where a line is crossed and that’s that. I kind of view him like I do the movie Good Will Hunting. It’s nothing I want anything to do with, but I appreciate it for allowing someone ethereal like Elliott Smith to metamorphose into this otherwise superficial and hollow reality.
Dead at 34.
Suicide, murder, who knows. Only Elliott and the woman he loved, I guess. But man, I killed myself every time I pressed play on one of his songs while I was drunk in the middle of the night. Or he murdered me out of nowhere when he’d come on a playlist I’d forgotten. It still happens now. Every time I hear Elliott I get sad. It’s a strange longing. It’s a sadness for a different type of sadness that you once had, but can never get back. A nostalgia for a solemn, lost pain. I can still feel those miserable days from the past. I can feel the mixed emotions of being so down on my luck with despair but stepping outside and feeling the first inkling of Spring ripple through my hair and clothes. Having that weird internal tug of war where you wouldn’t mind dying but also unable to fight the thought, “Goddamn, it’s a beautiful day.” Those long lost days and nights are made up of horror and beauty. I think of them when I hear these songs. I hear the songs and think of my friend when he was still a friend.
I see you’re leaving me / And taking up with the enemy / The cold comfort of the in-between / A little less than a human being / A little less than a happy high / A little less than a suicide.
— A Fond Farewell to a Friend
We’ll never speak again. Definitely not A Fond Farewell. But I can look back and appreciate him matching my appreciation for Elliott. No other friend I have now, few as they are, can understand that musical connection. They don’t even listen to Elliott. So, on nights like this, there’s no one to whom I can mention the part in an Elliott Smith song that sounds eerily like a George Harrison guitar construction. I used to be able to tell my pal about that sort of thing, but it just didn’t work out. Such a wasted luxury is a lost friendship. Nothing highlights that more than chancing upon a tidbit about a shared interest and watching it wither because the only person who would appreciate it is no longer there.
I’ve got a joke I’ve been dying to tell you.
— Pitseleh
Not a lot you can do but say, “Oh well. Okay.”
Church bells and now I’m awake and I guess it must be some kind of holiday /
I can’t seem to join in the celebration.
— Last Call