Free Elliott Smith and the Big Nothing by Benjamin Nugent

remember him being so ‘raaah!’ He was pissed and it was obvious. And it was strong, it was there, his songwriting was really good, but he was obviously in it. I remember that one “Wake. * ” I remember it being super powerful and the kids in Portland just going crazy.” Smith had gotten a tattoo: the state of Texas, a reminder of a place where, as he described it, he’d endured hardships and acted like a tough kid.
    While Heatmiser was acquiring its local following of fist-pumping kids, privately Smith and Gust had stuck to their arty Hampshire ways. As Swanson remembers, “He and Neil had posters of art work in the house. They had Jasper Johns [posters] and stuff, they didn’t have the Renoirs they got from their parents.”
    About a year after they left Amherst for Portland, they sent Marc Swanson a tape recording of some of the songs that would end up on the first album, Dead Air . It had the sound of a disciplined band, with precise rhythms and clear melodies, despite the onslaught of electric-guitar power chords. It was nothing like the Elliott Smith sound the world would come to know.
    It was during this period, as Swanson came up from San Francisco to visit Gust, that Smith’s shyness finally cracked, and the two became confidantes. “I remember one day while I was there I was like, ‘Can we go have lunch together?’ And he was like, ‘Really?’” says Swanson. “And I was like, ‘Well, Neil’s not up for it and we can go have lunch together.’ Things like that with Elliott were kind of a big deal; that meant we were friends .”
    At this point, Smith was obliged to take the kinds of jobs that frequently turn budding rock stars into law-school applicants. He later recalled that he once got a bad sunburn installing solarpaneling—and bad sunburns are tough to come by in Portland. He was a skinny young man. The former Portland promoter Todd Patrick remembers Smith saying that in the early ’90s building contractors would give him illegal construction tasks that involved his ability to squirm into small spaces.
    “We were playing a lot, but it’s not like we were making any money,” says Pete Krebs. The two musicians hated their day jobs and were looking for a way to make money faster. “Finally it dawned on us we could be making twenty bucks an hour instead of ten bucks an hour [splitting the money with the carpenter who subcontracted to them], and so he and I got all the equipment to do drywall work and started doing sheet-rocking together as a little company. . . . We did a good eight or ten projects like that. . . . That was during the winter time and I remember it was always fucking freezing. . . . We drywalled, mudded, did all the plaster work on this houseboat up in Ridgefield, Washington, this tiny town on a river. It was the middle of winter and we’d drive up I–5 and get off at Ridgefield and drive though the fields to this little town, across the railroad tracks to where there was this community of houseboats, and we’d haul these big boxes of plaster shit out on these docks. It took us like twenty minutes to walk to it. It was freezing; it was right there on the river and it was just shitty work. It was a houseboat so everything was always moving. We had this portable propane heater that looks like a jet engine with flames coming out the back; that was the only way to heat this thing up, so it was super dangerous. So we did all this work, and got paid, didn’t do a very good job, and everybody hated it. About three or four weeks later there was some kind of storm, and it wrecked this houseboat. The houseboat sank or floated away or something. We were both happy about that and bummed out at the same time. Served him right, fucking rich guy.”
    As much as Smith may have hated day jobs, the assumption in Portland at that time, says Krebs, was that nobody would ever make any money off their music. Nirvana and Sonic Youth may have shown it was possible, but nobody considered it a