Elliott Smith and the Big Nothing Read Online Free PDF Page A

he heard of them, but one of the songs he learned on guitar was ‘Should I Stay or Should I Go,’ which is in a pretty different musical category from The Beatles, so I think even then his tastes were expanding exponentially. He was always the one saying, ‘Hey, you should check these guys out.’ He always had a broader musical knowledge base than I did.”
    Smith was inclined toward musical leadership by the time he ordained his friend Mark Merritt a bassist. “The way I got voted a bass player is he’d went out and gotten himself a Gibson SG [electric guitar] and a couple of stomp boxes [effects pedals] and he was really getting heavy into the electric world, and the discussion came up that maybe we should think about starting a band. We were like, ‘Maybe we need a bass player and a drummer and somebody who can sing.’ And he was like, ‘Somebody should start playing the bass.’ He had better gear and was better than I was, so I went out and got a bass, and he introduced me to Rush. He was like, ‘Dude, here’s something to shoot for.’ He was responsible for making me the Rush head I was as a teenager; my goal became to play every Rush tune known to man.”
    It was also Smith who pushed the group into its first attempts at public performance, Merritt remembers. He was a miniatureJimmy Page figure, calling the shots and assuming the center of attention as lead guitarist. “One time when it was Pickering, Steve, and myself, and another guy playing drums, there was a contest being held at one of the churches. Steve said, ‘We ought to do something,’ and I’m like, ‘I’m game.’ And I was wondering about song selection, because it was at a church.” Smith took the reins and chose the tunes. “We were the very last act and we played two songs: Steve played guitar and I played ‘bass’ on a crappy electric guitar, on four strings with the treble turned off.” On this particular gig, Pickering was on keyboard. “The first song was ‘Tequila.’ It was a rousing success—among our parents, at least. Everybody knew that one. And that was my first public performance in a band.” The second song, which drew a response Merritt doesn’t recall as quite so enthusiastic, was “the instrumental of a long version of ‘Stairway to Heaven.’ None of us were brave enough to actually sing.
    “We were probably in the seventh or eighth grade because [Steve] had gotten the Gibson SG at that point. He knew every guitar part to ‘Stairway,’ right down to the solo. He was almost fanatical about playing these songs, even at fourteen years old. He was a really fucking good musician and he had a great ear. Out of all of us he was the first to learn a specific song. ‘Stairway’ or Rush, he was the first to play it.”
    In Merritt’s and Pickering’s recollections, Bunny Welch, who worked as a teacher, was a supportive mother and an aid to her son’s progress in music. “I thought he got along with her really well,” says Pickering. “She was really nice to us. You have three or four thirteen-year-old boys running through your house cranking up amps and she was remarkably tolerant.”
    “When they moved to a different house,” says Merritt, Bunny “moved a piano to his bedroom.”
    That house was on a larger piece of property on the border of Duncanville and the adjacent suburb of Cedar Hill. Smith didn’t live there very long: The move took place when he was in junior high, and one semester into high school Smith went to live withhis father and his stepmother, Marta Greenwald, a social worker, in Portland. In later interviews, Smith would cite family problems in Dallas as the reason he moved, but he was oblique about his reasons when he spoke to friends at the time.
    “He caught me by surprise,” says Pickering. “He didn’t dwell on it for months ahead, he didn’t have conversations where he said, ‘I gotta get out of this town.’ Just in the winter of ’83 I remember him saying, ‘So after