Free Elliott Smith and the Big Nothing by Benjamin Nugent Page A

likely possibility for the members of the Portland indie coterie Krebs and Smith were part of. “You were really into music so you played in a band and everybody had a shitty day job, or two. If you had a bunch of Portland people around a table in 1991 or 1992, and said, ‘Well, this is going to happen to you: You’re going to be on a major label. You’re going to have a major drug addiction, which you’ll pull out of. You’re going to be on the Academy Awards. And you’re going to move to Chicago and become part of this culturally significant art rock scene. And you’re going to be a bar musician. And you’re going to buy a house,’—nobody would have believed that. It wasn’t even in the category of stuff you thought about. You played in bands because you grew up listening to cool bands and it was just natural.”
    Heatmiser’s manager was JJ Gonson, who has made a career as a photographer and a manager since she abandoned her plans to be a musician as a young woman. By the time Krebs and Smith were working construction jobs together, she and Smith were dating, and soon Smith sublet his room in the house he shared with Gust and moved in with Gonson on Southeast Taylor Street. It turned out to be a life-altering decision—it was in that house that Smith started to put down the songs that started his solo career, leading him in a direction radically different from Heatmiser.
    “The Taylor Street house was an old Victorian style, and it had a deeply set staircase with deep acoustics,” writes Gonson in an email. “Elliott did a lot of his writing and rehearsing in that staircase. He worked on those songs for a long time before he put them on tape, some of them for years. He recorded in the basement, which was not a pretty place. Lots of people had moved through that house, and the basement was piled high with abandoned stuff, so he sort of carved out a little niche, set up a stool and a mic stand, and meticulously recorded the whole thing, going back and punching in tiny changes, sometimes a single word or chord. The wonderful breathy sound on Roman Candle is largely due to the quality of the mic, or lack of it. It was a little Radio Shack thing—the kind you used to get bundled with a tape recorder. It had very little power and was very noisy. He also sang quietly, perhaps so as not to be heard by all the people always coming and going upstairs, so you can hear every breath and string squeak. The little powered studio monitors he used we got at Artichoke [Music, a store on Hawthorne Street]. The owner restored old bicycles as a hobby and I traded him an ancient, and very knackered, Schwinn I had found in an abandoned warehouse (doing a promo shoot for some bad metal band) for them. We had no money to get them. I don’t know what he would have done otherwise.”
    It was recorded on an eccentric instrument probably no more expensive than the first guitar Gary Smith bought Steven in junior high. “The Le Domino is a tiny acoustic guitar, I think probably made in the ’50s,” writes Gonson. “We saw it at Artichoke Music and fell in love with it. It is black with tiny domino decals on the frets and around the sound hole. More importantly, Elliott loved the sound. So, I bought it and he played it for a long time, recorded all of Roman Candle on it and used it for his solo shows and even his first solo tour, before it started to get worn out. I still have it.
    ” At first, Smith just played the tape to his friends. Krebs remembers the first time he heard it. The two of them were working at “this warehouse being converted into small loft spaces for business and artists and whatnot. Elliott and I were doing shit work, on top of scaffolds, scraping ceilings and shit like that. So at seven-thirty, eight in the morning I’d come by his house and pick him up or he’d pick me up, and we’d drive downtown and we’d work for a couple hours, drink coffee and talk about music, and then we’d split for a couple