The Long, Slow Death of Elliott Smith

It has been one week since Elliott Smith, the singer-songwriter and cult hero to the melancholy, died from a single stab wound to his chest. At the place where Sunset Boulevard curves into the Silverlake neighborhood of Los Angeles, a shrine has been set up in front of the swirly blue-and-red mural where Smith posed for the cover of his fifth album, 2000’s Figure 8. There are flowers and candles, a loaf of bread, elaborate collages of Smith’s picture, empty bottles of beer and laminated letters that quote from his lyrics: “Drink up, baby, look at the stars.” Fans have scrawled their own epitaphs on the painted wall, too: IT WASN’T MUSIC AS MUCH AS MEDICINE.

In his 34 years, Smith made five revered albums of wounded folk-punk, achieving the kind of religiously devoted following specifically reserved for doomed, tragic/romantic musicians such as Nick Drake, Jeff Buckley and Kurt Cobain. With his bad skin, greasy hair, apologetic slouch and dark eyes, Smith was a poster boy for lovelorn bohemians. The musician Mary Lou Lord, Smith’s friend and a onetime girlfriend of Cobain’s, says, “I think when Kurt died, Elliott kind of picked up the torch. He put the cool back in folk. He adored punk music, and he was attracted to that darker element. The fans were so adoring — the sad kids.”

Now there is another, more sinister kind of admiration out there for Smith: Above a wilting bouquet of chrysanthemums, someone has written on the painted wall: I THOUGHT IT WAS VERY COOL THE WAY YOU STABBED YOURSELF WITH A STEAK KNIFE. VERY COOL INDEED.

“The best suicide I ever heard of,” an emotional Courtney Love told Blender.

Smith often said in interviews that he resented being reduced to “the depressed guy.” What happened on October 21 is not going to change that reputation. According to the Los Angeles county coroner’s office, Smith was found bleeding and barely coherent by his girlfriend, Jennifer Chiba, at around noon in their one-story house on Lemoyne Street in the city’s Echo Park neighborhood. He was taken by ambulance to the County-USC Medical Center, where he died an hour later.

It has been widely reported that Smith committed suicide, but the LAPD still has an investigation pending, and the coroner’s office will not offer a cause of death until it has the results of toxicology tests. But no evidence of forced entry was found, and according to experts, stabbing yourself in the heart, as gothic as it sounds, is neither uncommon nor difficult: “You just turn the knife sideways and get between the ribs,” says Howard Zonana, professor of psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine. It seems a horrifying way to go — more brutally murdering yourself than simply killing yourself — but “people who commit suicide in this manner may not be interested in the most painless way to kill themselves,” Dr. Zonana says. “The dominant motive is to die.”

In a week spent talking to dozens of Smith’s friends and peers in order to retrace the trail of despair that led to his gruesome death, many of those closest to him tell Blender that they’re devastated by his suicide but not shocked; some say they expected to get a call about Smith’s suicide long ago. But others are not so sure. “I don’t believe the guy stabbed himself in the chest; it just doesn’t add up,” says Mark Flanagan, a friend of Smith’s and the owner of Largo, a popular music club in West Hollywood where he frequently performed. “I wouldn’t be surprised if someone else did this. He was doing drugs with lowlife scum. He was around a lot of creepy people — some very negative, dangerous people.

“He told me many times that he would never commit suicide,” Flanagan continues. “But then, he told me he wouldn’t do crack. And then he did.”


Smith had been struggling for many years with a heroin addiction, and for his entire life with depression. He had admitted to being a “bad alcoholic,” and friends say he had become an expert on psychpharmacology from negotiating so many different antidepressants. He was a gypsy — “I guess I’ve pared down my stuff over time to things I can easily move,” he told a journalist in 2000 — and left in his wake friends and bartenders across Portland, Oregon; Brooklyn, New York; and most recently Los Angeles.

For the last few years of his life, Smith had been moving back and forth between a Silverlake cabin and Jennifer Chiba’s home in Echo Park. He had been with Chiba, a former member of the indie band Happy Ending, for about a year, and among the sad aftershocks of his death are rumblings among his friends and fellow musicians about her culpability. Was she the noble, long-suffering caretaker or the evil enabler? Was she Courtney to his Kurt, as some inevitably put it? (Chiba declined to be interviewed for this story.)

In any event, these were extremely difficult times for Smith. His Silverlake neighbors told Blender that they would spot him from time to time walking the streets with a blanket over his shoulders, muttering. He was performing less and less; when he did play, the results were frequently disastrous. “It was just so sad to see a guy who couldn’t remember his own lyrics,” said one fan.

But he had been trying to get it together. After several failed attempts at traditional rehab, Smith admitted himself in 2002 to a drug treatment program called the Neurotransmitter Restoration Center in Beverly Hills. The program involves administering an intravenous drip of amino acids to patients that “kick all the shit out of your nerve receptors,” as Smith put it to Under the Radar magazine in January 2003, the last interview he gave before his death.

Some friends say he had kicked drugs by the end of his life. “He was incredibly optimistic and healthy at the end, and I know he was clean,” says Luke Wood, who signed Smith to DreamWorks. Many others say he hadn’t. But most say it doesn’t matter either way: Elliott Smith’s demons were stronger than any chemical.


The song that made Elliott Smith famous was “Miss Misery,” a track from the film Good Will Hunting that was nominated for an Academy Award in 1998. Smith devotees relish the memory of his stark performance in a white suit at the Oscars ceremony that year: a shy and shaggy crooner alone under the lights with his guitar in the unlikely company of Céline Dion and Michael Bolton. “He said it was kind of fun,” says Larry Crane, who coproduced the song with Smith.

Crane is sitting by his mixing board at Jackpot! Recording Studio in Portland, Oregon, a place Smith helped him build in 1997. The used piano Smith bought for them still sits in the corner of the room; he played it on “Miss Misery” and on a few of the songs from 1998’s XO, his first album released by DreamWorks and his biggest seller, at 225,000 copies.

By unanimous account, Smith had a lifelong suspicion of all things mainstream. He was born Steven Paul Smith on August 6, 1969, but changed his name to Elliott when he was in high school because he found his alliterative given name too “jockish.” He moved to Portland when he was 14 after spending his childhood in Dallas with his mother, stepfather and two half-siblings. “He moved to Portland to live with his dad because he didn’t like his stepdad or Texas,” Crane says.

Smith was a National Merit Scholar at Portland’s Lincoln High School and went on to attend Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, a funky little liberal-arts school famous for its lack of course requirements. There, he met Neil Gust, with whom he moved back to Portland after graduation and formed the hardcore band Heatmiser along with bassist Sam Coomes, now in Quasi, and drummer Tony Lash. They made three albums before breaking up in 1996, but Smith had been recording his own material for some time. His first solo CD, Roman Candle, was released to critical acclaim in 1994.


“I really had the sense that Elliott was something special,” Crane says. The two became close, spending 12-hour days recording. Smith would usually play every instrument on every track. His girlfriend at the time, Joanna Bolme, who currently plays bass with Stephen Malkmus, worked as a coproducer on many songs.

“It got to the point where I’d be in here working with Joanna, and I wouldn’t know if she was dating him or not,” Crane says. “And I wouldn’t ask. He had a hard time with relationships. He had a hard time with depression. He had a hard time with, you know, remembering to take a fucking shower. One day we’re sitting here and I’m thinking, ‘God, he smells,’ and he’s like, ‘I’m sorry, man — I forgot to shower.’ He just got so focused on his music.”

Like many of Smith’s friends, Crane says he had lost contact of late. “He was really bad at staying in touch. I talked to him about a year and a half ago and he was real paranoid; he was talking about the deal with DreamWorks and saying people owed him money. Which could be true, but he seemed kind of …nutty.”

Recently, however, Crane had gotten a call from Jennifer Chiba asking if he’d come to L.A. to work on new material with Smith. “He had tried to kill himself before. He showed me a bad scar on his chest,” says Crane, who recently hosted a wake for Smith’s family and friends in his backyard. “But people told me he’d been doing better. His father said he’d been calling regularly. So I was really excited to spend time with him and Jennifer.” He pauses. “I still have the plane ticket.”

If Silverlake embodied the new Elliott Smith — full of hipsters and drug dealers, vintage clothing stores and pawn shops — Smith’s ghost is still a visceral presence in the laid-back, tightly knit, music-obsessed Portland community he left behind five years ago. Crane takes Blender to the Ash Street Saloon in downtown Portland to watch Smith’s former roommate Sean Crogan play a loud, raging indie-rock set for a crowd of about 50 people, most of them sporting hooded sweatshirts and smoking cigarettes.

After his set, Crogan heads for a table near the pinball machines and sits down next to his father, a tough, white-haired man with an earring and a black leather jacket. The Crogan men would often spend time with Smith and his father, Gary. “Gary and Elliott were a lot alike,” Crogan says. “They look the same, they talk the same, they have the same kind of humor, they’re both incredibly intelligent people. I wouldn’t be surprised if his dad has depression problems, too. He’s a psychiatrist. And he’s a mess right now.” (Gary Smith declined to be interviewed.)

Crogan lived with Smith for three years, during which time they played a lot of music, drank a lot of beer, read Russian novels and watched cable television. “We were both total depression junkies: We were addicted to being depressed. We were the doomsday brothers,” Crogan says, adjusting his wool ski cap and lighting a cigarette. “We would go out together and sit at the bar and cry. A lot. Young Man’s Disease — that’s what Elliott’s dad called it.”

Like Crane, Crogan says he tried hard to stay in touch with Smith after Smith moved to Brooklyn in the late ’90s, but he found it almost impossible. “The last couple of times he called me, he was strung out on all these antidepressants. I saw the medicine chest he was carrying around with him.” Crogan says that although they drank a lot together, Smith was not using hard drugs until after he moved out of Oregon. (Heroin, however, is easy to come by in Portland; Blender was offered it three times within an hour of arriving in town.)

Without the cocoon of his Portland friends as insulation, things got worse for Smith. “We tried an intervention,” says Mary Lou Lord. “It was ’98 or ’99, and we all met in Chicago and told Elliott we thought he had a problem. But we all had fucking problems, and who were we?” She laughs in a way that suggests little about this is funny to her.

Crogan says he’d been fearing and grieving Smith’s death for years before it actually occurred. “When he moved away, he said, ‘I’ll probably never, ever see you again. This might be the last time we talk, because I’m probably going to kill myself.’ He said that to everyone, to his family, his friends,” he says. “I last spoke to him a year ago. He was supersick and suffering from hallucinations. He wouldn’t know where he was, and he was scared all the time that people were following him. We did a tour with him in ’99, and pretty much every time after that he was strung out or in rehab or just bonkers. He was terrified of people coming to get him. I think he had some bad experiences growing up in Texas — I mean, I know he did — but I don’t feel I have the right to talk about any of that.”

Several of Smith’s friends told Blender that he had openly discussed being abused as a child. He revealed to Under the Radar that his upbringing “wasn’t good, but that’s been worked out between me and the person, and they don’t need to feel bad about it forever.” In 2000, he created the Elliott Smith Foundation for Abused Children, and he had planned to donate the profits from his new album-in-progress to it.

Smith had been working with engineer David McConnell on that double album, tentatively titled From a Basement on the Hill, a reference to McConnell’s hilltop studio in Malibu. “He wanted a certain sound for this record,” McConnell says. “We had a term for it — we called it the California Frown. A lot of these big-shot producers go for what they call the California Smile — high highs and low lows, and very slick. He was scared of slick. He’d had it on his past couple of records, and he wanted to get back to a raw sound.”

Did it appear that he was using drugs?

“I think drugs probably were still a problem for Elliott,” McConnell answers, “but music was his escape.”


Smith’s sister, Ashley Welch, stands onstage at the Henry Fonda Theater in L.A. in an orange T-shirt and baggy pants. Beck, Beth Orton, Rilo Kiley and others have gathered for a musical tribute to Smith 13 days after his suicide. Welch tells the audience how Smith used to slip $100 bills into homeless men’s shoes. With her shaggy brown hair and big, dark eyes, she looks very much like her brother, who she later describes to Blender as “the best brother I could have hoped for, the best person I ever met.” She turned 25 last week. Her sweet face twists as she says that it was “not a great birthday.”

Downstairs, Beck, who lives in Smith’s neighborhood, is sitting with his guitar in a tiny white dressing room. “We did a tour together once, and he’d come over sometimes,” he says. “He was very thoughtful and soft-spoken. It’s so weird he’s gone.” A few minutes later, Beck takes the stage and gives a beautiful performance of Smith’s “Alameda,” a song Smith couldn’t get through when he recently tried to perform it in this same theater.

“People told us he had it back: He could play! He could sing! So we went to the Fonda to hear him,” Largo’s Mark Flanagan says. “But he was doing ‘Alameda,’ and he couldn’t remember it. I just found myself crying.” He hadn’t spoken to Smith since Valentine’s Day 2001.

One by one, Smith seems to have pulled away from nearly everyone who was close to him, but they are all gathering around his memory now. The evening ends with Strange Parallel, a short film about Smith in which filmmaker Steve Hanft searches for him in Portland, New York and Los Angeles.

“Elliott was hard to find,” Hanft says later. “He kept telling us the wrong places to meet him.” There’s a shot of Smith’s favorite bartender at a dive on New York’s Lower East Side, and one of Larry Crane at Jackpot! saying, “They always call here looking for him — friends, management, the record company. But he isn’t here.”

Once Hanft finally got ahold of Smith, he filmed him sitting in the woods, playing his guitar and repeatedly singing the lines, “I’m never gonna know you now/But I’m gonna love you anyhow.”