Customer Reviews

Elliott Smith And The Big Nothing

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

The first known (or at least well-publicized) biography of Elliott Smith is something of a curiosity in that it takes pains to demonstrate an appreciation for the artist's work while simultaneously embracing the sort of crass commercialism that, essentially, sells books. Author Benjamin Nugent clearly has a soft spot for his subject, going as far as to justify Smith's more erratic moments as the inevitable collision between genius and so-called "normal" behavior, but there remains a vast disparity between what may be construed as a demonstration of admiration as opposed to one of respect.

Make no mistake about it: "Elliott Smith and the Big Nothing" was meant to capitalize on the one-year anniversary of Smith's death. The book has all the hallmarks of a rush-job: brevity (at 230 pages - index included - it's no "War and Peace"), inexcusable grammatical errors (copy editor, anyone?) and an unwieldy use of interview excerpts (glacier-sized chunks, really) from a scant handful of Smith's friends and acquaintances. While Nugent does get a break on this last point due to the fact that Smith's family and closest collaborators declined to comment for the book, the narrative still suffers from what can only be described as a mind-numbing overreliance on "talking heads" to tell Smith's story. Anyone familiar with Smith's work or his public persona(s) will tell you that an Elliott Smith biography couldn't possibly be boring, but this one is. "Big Nothing" offers shockingly few "revelations" about Smith's life that can't already be found on the Internet.

It's hard to imagine what sort of audience "Elliott Smith and the Big Nothing" is shooting for. Die-hard Smith fans will likely bristle at the regurgitation of previously known "facts," and the disjointed quality of the narrative - that it fails to illustrate how truly great Smith's work is while repeatedly acknowledging his genius - hardly seems capable of turning newbies onto his music. It's one thing to be told how good something is, and a completely different thing to experience it and know firsthand.

That said, the best introduction to Elliott Smith will always be his music. "Elliott Smith," "Either/Or," "XO," "Figure 8" - all of these are classic albums that demonstrate an astonishing range of talent and musical growth over the five or six years in which they were produced. Smith was an artist whose innate sensibilities and seeming candor in dealing with life's difficulties - failed romances, abuse, addiction - allowed his work to transcend what we've come to know as popular music. It's no mistake that Elliott Smith is so often compared to The Beatles; this guy was the real deal.

All things considered, I can't honestly say that "Big Nothing" is a bad book, per se, just a bit underwhelming from a fan's perspective. This may not be entirely fair to Nugent, of course, but it is my contention that the Elliott Smith fans who gobble up "Big Nothing" first will take away little more insight than they brought to it. If nothing else, Nugent's book seems premature. If you're reading this, Ben, I hope you have an opportunity to speak with those closest to Smith somewhere down the line and make "Big Nothing" the great book everyone wants it to be.

Katherine Curry

Reviewing: Elliott Smith and the Big Nothing

With an apologetic afterward by the author of the book Elliott Smith and the Big Nothing, Benjamin Nugent explains the reasons for the widely perceived shortcomings while retracing the life of songwriter Elliott Smith. He explains that although the things reported in his book are widely known by avid Smith fans, most of his closest friends and family refuse to talk about the deceased musician. Aside from this apparent "flaw" in this biography, Nugent poignantly captures the life, art and death of the academy award nominee Elliott Smith. Although this book seems to reek of "typical biography" when Nugent beings with, "Steven Paul Smith was born at 12:59 a.m..."(9) it quickly shatters any notion of a normal biography when the author delves into Smith's songwriting and lyrics. Each chapter is named after each album Smith put out during his career. And, not only does Nugent provide the reader with a chronological account of his life during the making of these albums, but he also intimately uncovers the importance of individual songs by providing context and possible meanings. Nugent's analysis of Smith's lyrics and instrumentals not only exemplify the purity of Smith's music that he was so known for, but it also approaches the art with a similar ear to that of the readers. Through Nugent's research and thoughtful analysis it is apparent that he did the best he or any other free-lance writer could do with such a reclusive person like Elliott Smith. Although, I can see why people may think that this book does not do the justice that Smith deserves on the one-year anniversary of his apparent suicide, but with an artist like Elliott Smith, what can?

The first biography is, of course, going to be weak. Who could resist the release of a bio. and a post-mortem album in the same season? Anyway, the book is, as has been said, rushed, fragmented, and contains nothing that most of Smith's fans who took it upon themselves to learn something about the artist didn't know already.

For me, it was just great to see Smith getting some form of real, lasting recognition. Hopefully this book is only the first of several.

It was helpful to me in the respect of tying together the fragments I'd read of Smith's life and putting them in something of an order.

For my friends who know his music only through my intervention and know very little about Smith himself, this book was very helpful. I just passed it to them and said "read." After all, not every music fan is obsessive enough (as I am) to go hunting for biographies and stories on the internet. So, to me, this book is for those people.

This book reads like an overlong and not particularly good college paper. Getting no help from any of his family or closest friends/girlfriends (or even people who worked with him musically), Benjamin Nugent is forced to interview aquaintances, review Elliott's magazine interviews and examine his song lyrics for insight into his psyche. It is a quick read, and not very compelling at that. You learn very little about his relationship with his parents or step-father, and almost no time is devoted to his untimely and gruesome death. And what of the death? Was it a desperate suicide or a grizzly murder? Nugent does not examine the case, or present the reader with the facts. He doesn't even speculate. He simply devotes a few pages to generalities that one could find by Googleing "Elliott Smith death." It also ends abruptly, with nothing at all written about the wake, aftermath, or effect of his death on his friends, family, fans, the music world, etc. Only a small paragraph about a benefit concert is mentioned. This is quite simply a fluffy book written by someone who is obviously a big fan of Elliott Smith and his work, but had no business writing a biography on the man. Perhaps it is simply too soon.

I don't understand why people are complaing on this book. For those of you who say he has no internal access to smiths life you are right. He doesn't have interview with his family. I don't believe we deserve it. In this life we have friends, we have family. These are the people that we share are inner thoughts and feelings with. They are for those people we choose to share them with and to pressure these people to spill there closest secrets with smith would be wrong. We should feel honored that that close nit circle allowed what we have to be revealed.

If i could shake benjamin nugents hand right now and thank him for what he did i would. Some things are not meant for everyone, smiths life and secrets were one of them.

October 20 - 26, 2004

Distorted Reality

Trying to make sense of Elliott Smith's final album.

by Laura Cassidy

CONSIDERING ELLIOTT Smith's talent for layering each release with something

new, Songs From a Basement on the Hill (Epitaph) feels like the natural

progression of a gifted and obsessed musical mind with more and more

resources at its disposal-and more and more time to fiddle with them, and

more and more drugs to fuel the fiddling. Even given the jumbled, psychotic,

fire-and-brimstone street speech tacked on to the end of "Coast to Coast"

and the hyper-Sgt. Pepper vibe that casts an ambitious if happily disjointed

yellow haze over the entire flow of the record, the most unnatural aspect of

Basement isn't found in any of the songs. What's anomalous about the record

is what we, as fans, now know.

Smith was guarded; you thought you knew him because his songs felt so

personal, but he continually said they weren't. Were it not for Da Capo

Press' Elliott Smith and the Big Nothing, by Benjamin Nugent, the deluge of

Web-based murmurings after Smith's suicide on Oct. 21, 2003, would still be

enough to color the way we hear the record. Hell, anyone who had been to any

of Smith's last dozen or so shows probably knew he was using more and

slipping. And reading Big Nothing in tandem with listening to Basement feels

medicinal, but also incredibly invasive-not unlike the conflicted reactions

to Journals, Kurt Cobain's notebook ramblings compiled and released by

Riverhead Books just a few weeks after Smith's death. To steal a sentiment

of Smith's from XO, when people start talking-or even speculating-and the

private becomes public, everybody cares, everybody understands.

Nugent, for his part, is quite confident in his grasp of Smith's psyche.

Although much of Big Nothing is essentially an oral history, Nugent, a

former music and film reporter for Time magazine who shares many of Smith's

former ZIP codes, indulges in a lot of lyric interpretation. He reads the

line "I'm floating in a black balloon," from the Basement single "A

Distorted Reality Is Now a Necessity to Be Free," as "a picture of somebody

in a state of unhappy isolation that has as its compensation a sense of

freedom." Fair enough, but any music's sweetest, most sublime gift is that

it is completely singular once inside the ear. What a song means to me has

nothing to do with what it means to you. Sure, with a songwriter like Smith,

whose giant talent-aside from his intricate, inventive guitar style-was

pinpointing the most evasive, slippery truth in a roundabout yet succinct

manner, chances are we'll arrive at the same conclusions. And presumably, if

you pick up Big Nothing, it's because you're hungry for whatever information

you can get.

But what happens when artists die and others are left to disseminate their

material is that editorializing can sometimes be mistaken for the truth. As

Nugent reports, Smith told David McConnell, with whom he produced and

recorded much of what wound up on Basement, "Whatever happens to me, don't

let anybody clean this up. Don't let them put it through ProTools." Clearly,

this was someone thinking about leaving; any doubts about that evaporate in

"King's Crossing" when Smith sings, "I can't prepare for death any more than

I already have." It's also clearly someone who was concerned with what could

happen to his work-his essence-once he was gone. You can't accept that and

have a completely clear mind as you continue to read, or even as you

continue to listen.

Also uncomfortable are assertions like the one McConnell makes about Smith's

take on drugs and art: "That was a big thing for him, to take the artistic

road instead of the high road or whatever. It's definitely, 'I'm going to do

my record and I'm going to do as many drugs as I want, because art is not

about being sober and it's not about being some society figure, it's about

art.'"

If your lines or your syringes are in the next room waiting for you, you'll

find any reason to defend them. That's AA 101. In the throes of junk, you

come to believe that the junk makes you good. But if what Smith's friends

reported to Nugent is also true, if his earlier records were the products of

a relatively clean guy who was just attracted to the paradoxically romantic

culture of addiction, then he knew, somewhere inside himself, that his music

was due to something far more significant than heroin or coke. To let an

idea like McConnell's stand for what Smith believed about his talent is

damaging both to fans who might be struggling with their own use, and to

Smith's legacy as an artist.

E.V. Day, the N.Y.C. sculptor who was once Smith's girlfriend, agrees. "I

don't think he needed [drugs] at all. I think he needed [them] to deal with

the people and his conflicts with the relationships," she told Nugent.

ELLIOTT SMITH wasn't built with a strong outer shell. This much we always

knew. Fragility and delicacy were, ironically enough, the backbones of every

song he wrote-even when he moved into those Beatles-esque pop/rock tunes

with bright tones. He was self- effacing and humble to a fault. And in the

end, living a public life was simply too much for him. Too conflicting, too

confusing, and too exhausting. Check this lyric, "I took my own insides

out."

Listening to From a Basement on the Hill, you expect the minor notes, the

melancholy lyrics. What you don't expect is the street scene that prefaces

the song "King's Crossing." Before the keyboards come in, hard voices trade

slang and the whirl of a white buzz comes off like ambient noise from Boyz N

the Hood. The sadness in Elliott Smith is implicit; a soundscape like this

one isn't, even considering his habit of taking you down dark streets and

into lonely bars, and his ever-increasing ease around fancy studio tricks.

As you listen, the song becomes a sour reminder of how Smith's fundamental

style never changed, but the details often did-sour, because he won't be

around to surprise us anymore.

lcassidy@seattleweekly.com

Just read the paperback edition which contains an afterward by the author. For those of you who come down hard on this dude, you really should pick up this edition (couldn't find the afterward on the web anywhere). There's some truly original writing (clear, level headed, fair, but passionate) on Elliott and the process of writing a book about him. He address a lot of the controversy around the book and even addresses amazon reviewers in a particularly funny moment. I wasn't prepared to like this book as much as I did and I hope he writes more music related stuff. Nugent's book lacks so much of the pretentious, tired writing that poses for music criticism and bio these days.

I hold this book to high standards because it's a bio of somebody whose songs I love and the fact is that this is very thorough and sympathetic (but balanced) portrait, with really long interviews with Elliott Smith's friends (just not all of his most famous friends). And where the hell else are you going to get a description of how he recorded Roman Candle from his girlfriend? And how he got in fights with frat boys? And his rehab treatments? And how he didn't tune his guitars quite right all the time (on purpose)? As a musician I learned a lot from this book.

And, yeah, the best writing per se is in the afterword. But it's pretty good throughout the whole thing, and sometimes lovely, like in the descriptions of where he grew up.

Though this was not the best biography I have ever read, it still wasn't that bad. I came away feeling that all I knew about Elliott Smith was what others had to say about him, and those people drifted in and out of his life, and were never constant. I do not blame the author for this though, because it wasn't his fault that so many people who were close to Elliott chose not to participate. I think his legwork and determination to finish the project, alongside his desire to portray Elliott Smith with integrity were excellent. I think the author took what he had to work with and did the best he could. I don't see anyone else stepping up to the plate to try to write a bio on Smith, and I don't think you will for some years to come. For those who want documentation about every time Smith had a bowel movement, I think you're going to be waiting a long time! Smith was simply not that popular. Also, if anyone does want a more detailed bio on Smith, someone is going to have to start opening their dang mouths, books don't write themselves. Internet hounds who have read every article on Smith, may not find this book very interesting, but it's hard to satisfy an elitist! I enjoyed it and hope more on the subject comes out soon.

I don't really understand what all the complaints on this book are for. Yes, there are typos in the book and he gets lyrics wrong sometimes when quoting them. With that said, he was rushing to get the book done. He didn't want it to be released on the one year anniversary of Smiths death, but upon the release of Basement on a Hill (which just happened to be the same date).

This book has a lot of funny stories and a couple of dark ones. Nugent chose to show the Elliott that was working and funny, a side that many of us listeners don't get to see too often. Towards the end we learn of how much the drugs truly changed him. I found that part of the book the most interesting because I had no idea what had gone on towards the end of Smiths life.

Nugent cares about Elliott and it is obvious in his writing. Yes, he skims over the death but who cares? I for one do not want to hear a play by play of his death. It was something tragic and something that should be left for his friends and family. Honestly, I think it's disgusting that his autospy is even admitted online. Either way he does go into other suicide attempts if that's the only reason you are looking to read.

And the complaints about his sources? His interviews are really good I thought. They aren't just Smiths barely-there-acquaintances ... they are previous girlfriends, producers, etc. that truly knew him.

I would recommend this book to any Elliott Smith fan. It definitely lets you in to different parts of his life that you would otherwise not have known about. The author did a great job and I commend his hard work that he put into the book, as well as those that agreed to be interviewed.