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

hours and go to record stores and go back and work some more. It was a drag. It was a dead-end shitty job, but that’s where we got to know one another, and that’s when I first heard his music. He was like, ‘Yeah, I recorded some of my own stuff, you know?’ He had a little cassette, and it was a lot of the stuff that ended up on Roman Candle , this cassette. It was me and him fifty feet in the air on a scaffold listening to Roman Candle before it came out.” Krebs knew how good it was, and from the way he looks back on this time in his life it’s clear he mourns for it.
    Gonson nurtured Heatmiser even as she helped plant the seeds for the solo career that would eventually help derail Heatmiser and take Smith places far beyond the Portland rock scene. If it wasn’t for Gonson, in fact, Elliott Smith’s solo work might have stayed stowed away on a series of tapes lying around Portland attics. According to her, Smith didn’t intend to put the songs on an album.
    Two of the songs on Roman Candle stand out as being concerned with Smith’s childhood. “‘Roman Candle’ was the song about Charlie. And ‘[No-Name] #4’ is as much about Bunny as his songs are about any one with thing,” writes Gonson. Both of those songs were written with a level of frankness Smith might not have permitted himself if he was recording an album with release in mind. “Cavity Search [Records] had just recently started up, and [the owners] Christopher and Denny were friends of ours, and had made a Heatmiser single. I just used to hang out there sometimes, and this time I happened to have a cassette of what Elliott was doing and put it in. I was Heatmiser’s manager, so I used to carry stuff around and play it for whoever would listen—it was a habit that carried over to his stuff, though I wasn’t his solo manager (we were too close for that; he didn’t have one until later). They were stunned and said, ‘We want to release this—just the way it is.’ It wasn’t even a demo, not even that official, just friends hanging out together one afternoon. Elliott didn’t even believe it until they had pestered him about it for a while. He never meant for his solo stuff to be heard or released. I don’t think he ever would have considered playing it for anyone at any kind of label and probably was a bit horrified that I had. (I don’t remember, but I was certainly never a shy manager, and sometimes it was a sticky point between us.) Those songs were just something he needed to get out of his system that he didn’t think there was a place for in Heatmiser, who were (as one reviewer so pointedly put it) ‘Chugga Chugga Boy Rock.’ Heatmiser were amazing , don’t get me wrong, but their whole thing was very guitar-heavy and intense. Elliott had all these songs all piled up in his head, and nowhere to use them, so he put them on cassette. I think he did things he wouldn’t have done had he thought they might be heard in a real way—like the soaring vocal on the song we wrote together [‘No Name #1,’ working title ‘Saint-Like’]—which made Neil laugh the first time he heard it. A good thing, no doubt, that he could be uninhibited by his own lack of expectation. . . . I don’t think he would have written so candidly about his childhood if he had thought Bunny might ever hear it, either. It surprised him completely when people responded positively to what he was doing. It was much later that he brought that energy, or lack of it, to Heatmiser, in songs like ‘Half Right.’ Too late, sadly.”
    Roman Candle stands alone among Smith’s releases for its unusual attention to physical description in the lyrics. A year later, on his first full-length album, Elliott Smith , he would find a new poetic resource in drug metaphors. The song “Roman Candle” uses incandescence as a metaphor for repressed anger, as Smith expresses feelings toward Charlie Welch that mirror the feelings of many children toward stepfathers: “He could be