Free Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith by William Todd Schultz Page B

(XO)” kicks off with a hard, blunt beat, followed by vaguely ominous-sounding, A-minor guitar chords. Piano enters—that saloon vibe Elliott always enjoyed, even from the Cedar Hill days (“It almost sounds out of tune,” as Denbow said, “but still it works somehow”). The setting is a karaoke bar. Bunny sings the Everly Brothers tune “Cathy’s Clown” (“He’s not a man at all … Dontcha think it’s kinda sad/that you’re treating me so bad/or don’t you even care?”), a possible allusion to Charlie, whom Elliott had seemed to link with clowns in other songs too. He can’t read her expression. She just stares off into space. What Elliott notices—the Charlie subcurrent—she does not. But his feelings for her are obviously positive. He vows, “I’m never going to know you now/but I’m going to love you anyhow.” (An earlier song, “Dirt,” foreshadows the China doll reference: “You’re a China doll/You don’t feel nothing at all … You can’t get over him/Because you know what’s in there.”)
    Then the next singer’s name is announced. To Elliott it’s remote, but somehow familiar. He’s doing fine now, he says, the forgotten name some sort of painful stimulus; he’s glad it fails to register. The implication is that the second singer is Charlie, and his message—the song he covers—is “You’re No Good,” made popular by Linda Ronstadt. Elliott characterizes “You’re No Good” as an act of revenge for the message of the first tune. It’s also the reaction Elliott often got from his stepfather—a habitually fault-finding perfectionist, a fact Charlie refers to in the letter he sent.
    The third verse revisits the “You’re No Good” theme. Elliott asks “Mr. Man” to leave him alone: “In the place where I make no mistakes/In the place where I have what it takes.” If living with Charlie could sometimes be toxic, an atmosphere of never-ending close scrutiny and summary judgments resulting in feelings of worthlessness, then the mistake-free place Elliott imagines is one emptied of Charlies, a place he can just be who he is without fear and anger. Live, Elliott sometimes heightened the song’s contrast between Bunny and Charlie. Instead of “XO Mom,” which he sings inthe recorded version, he said, plainly, “I love you, mom.” It’s the kind of bald declaration Elliott was not usually inclined to make, preferring instead to keep the autobiography a lot more scrambled. On one hand, he seems to be telling Bunny he does not blame her for Charlie, and what he did; on the other, he allows himself a small amount of disappointment, finding her emotionlessness (in the first verse), neglectful, as if he wanted more feeling from her, as if he wanted her to stand up for him more than she did (a fact confirmed to me by several of Elliott’s very close friends).
    On balance, it’s hard to arrive at any certain position about what, exactly, happened with Charlie. What presents itself is the usual clotted, messy biographical chaos of competing vectors. Judging from the letters he wrote, Charlie regretted his parenting. It was too strict, too unforgiving. He acknowledged that, and he tried apologizing. But friends like Pickle and Denbow, both of whom spent large amounts of time in the Welch household, noticed nothing conspicuously harmful. The sense, however, shared by Merritt, for one, and by later friends to whom Elliott had confided, supplying varying degrees of detail, is that he had lived through several damaging scenes, events that went beyond insults and other personal attacks. Some friends, after all, can’t talk about Charlie without becoming visibly emotional. They had heard too much; they had seen the effects of Elliott’s time in Texas, through Elliott’s eyes, at least. As later bandmate Brandt Peterson said, “The basic understanding was that he had been physically hit,” despite the fact that Elliott never provided (to Peterson) any details. “But he wasn’t