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

Author:William Todd Schultz [Schultz, William Todd]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2013-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

Heatmiser visits Disneyland, around the time of the Virgin signing. Gonson is with purse, Andy Factor is front right, Shelly Shaw far left. (Photograph courtesy of JJ Gonson.)

At this point Gonson was out. She’d found Heatmiser a booking agent (Shelly Shaw), she’d made the Virgin deal—a stellar accomplishment—but with the end of that negotiation came the end of her service to the band. (As a thank-you, Andy Factor sent her and Elliott a box set of Nick Drake records; an interesting choice, since it dovetailed more with Elliott’s solo work than his work with the band who’d just signed the deal.) Also at its end was Gonson’s relationship with Elliott. It was never a good idea to begin with, as they both acknowledged. But now the added stressor, one Gonson always felt a little vulnerable to herself, although she never tried it, was heroin. The drug was a new girl with whom Elliott had grown infatuated. He hadn’t indulged, but he hadn’t put the idea aside either. It was a crush. It was also a way out of pain, or so he had been told, and that made the lure irresistible. It was a new path of self-destruction too, and along with it a means of finding something Elliott always sought in one way or another, and wrote about relentlessly—oblivion. A feeling not only of painlessness, but of nothing, which amounted to the same thing. Gonson had no interest in dealing with the prospect of heroin. In no way did she want to abet it, even as a bystander. Yet by the day Elliott seemed more and more entranced. The danger was imminent. And it wasn’t only Gonson he talked with about the drug. The prospect surfaced even with people Elliott hardly knew. “We all had quite a few conversations,” Jason Mitchell recalls, about suicide, about depression and drug use. “More than we were even comfortable with.” Heroin wasn’t life, it was anti-life, it was death. And though everyone energetically warned Elliott against it, they also knew, deep down, the warnings only went so far. He listened, but he didn’t listen. As always, part of him wanted to live, part of him wanted to go on making music forever, but part of him also wanted it all to end. Mostly, as he said again and again in songs, he wanted to forget. Gonson’s drug years were mercifully behind her. They had to be if she wanted to stay alive. So she got together with a new man, and Elliott got together with the woman who’d broken up with Gonson’s new man, Joanna Bolme, who had also lived with Pete Krebs for a time. It was all comically incestuous. Everyone played together—Bolme an outstanding bassist—and everyone was hooking up. It had always been that way. The songs, after all, were secret communications among a very insular set of people, all of whom knew the subtext implicitly. But Bolme? The coincidental link with Gonson struck some as suspicious. Over time her relationship

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