Elliott Smith and the Big Nothing by Nugent Benjamin

Author:Nugent, Benjamin [Nugent, Benjamin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 2009-04-27T00:00:00+00:00

Seven

GOOD WILL

EARLY ONE MORNING in the last days of 1997, Smith was in Los Angeles recording XO when he got a call from Margaret Mittleman informing him that “Miss Misery,” the song he’d written for Good Will Hunting, had snagged him a nomination for an Academy Award for Best Original Song. He was up against Celine Dion for “My Heart Will Go On” from Titanic, and Trisha Yearwood for “How Do I Live” from Con Air among others. It was the proverbial single stroke that indelibly changes the course of a life. Smith didn’t particularly care; an Academy Award was no big deal to him. But it was a big deal in that, for the people who don’t live in one of the constellations of indie rockers scattered throughout the western world, it put Smith on the map.

Smith thought the Oscar thing was overrated on principle. “He was like, ‘The Oscars are just a bunch of people deciding that someone’s worth something, and it has to do with commerce and I don’t know who these people are and they shouldn’t be deciding and I don’t know why everybody puts so much credit into it,’” says Swanson. “I remember calling him the morning I heard about it in LA. From minute one he was weirded out by the whole thing, he was never really excited, or felt like he had gotten somewhere. He always looked at things analytically: ‘What does this really mean? This doesn’t mean anything.’ But of course to the rest of the world it meant something.”

The practical effects of the rest of the world’s caring about the nomination were immediate and profound. “We had just started [XO] and then [the nomination] happened,” says Schnapf. “It was like, ‘Oh Christ,’ and the next six weeks he was deluged. It was like ‘Elliott who?’ and then hours of press every morning.” That necessitated a semi-nocturnal daily schedule for making the album: “Noon until we couldn’t take it anymore,” remembers Schnapf. “Usually twelve hours.”

Worse, the personal consequences for Smith were huge. The most damaging rift to develop between Smith and his friends was the gap between his level of fame and theirs, as much as Smith didn’t care about being famous. “He often spoke about how come he was getting all this attention when there were are all these other good bands,” E. V. Day remembers. “How come his friends’ bands aren’t getting attention?” He felt it didn’t make sense that Sam and Janet’s music wasn’t as popular as his. “Quasi would never get as big, get the kind of thing he was getting. And he just couldn’t handle it, he felt so shitty about it. And it started all kinds of conflicts in their friendships and basically dissolved [them]. It killed the relationships, as opposed to the opposite, which I think he wanted, which was to stay friends. . . . One night when we were in this hotel on tour and Sam was staying on the bus, and he

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