Elliott Smith and the Big Nothing Read Online Free PDF

Christmas I’m moving to Portland.’ I just remember being shocked because I do not remember him indicating in any way that he was desperate to move and had to get out. I couldn’t conceive of picking up and moving to a new town where none of your friends lived. I asked him why and he said, ‘Well, I want to go up and live in Portland with my dad.’”
    “It was pretty obvious that he and his step dad didn’t get along,” Pickering says. “I just attributed that, at the time, to that natural inherent resentment a lot of kids have toward their stepparents. The ‘you’re not my dad’ thing. Charlie did come off as an authority figure. Charlie would be like, ‘No you can’t go out and play this weekend, you have to stay and mow the yard.’ I remember it being a bone of contention more than it should be, and Steve just being ‘grrr’ about it. I think about that time I remember Steve becoming an anti-authoritarian. That was probably how a lot of kids felt about their stepparents. . . . I remember a couple of conversations where he specifically was angry at Charlie but it was nothing at the time I construed as exceptional.” Any issues between them seemed like “natural teenage resentment. . . . I don’t remember Steve ever saying, ‘I can’t stand him, because he’s not my dad.’”
    But Smith was clear on the point that leaving Dallas for Portland left him, in his own words, “really worried about my mom.” He would talk about his troubled relationship with Charlie to friends into the last years of his life. David McConnell, who knew Smith during a troubled time in his adulthood, recalls Smith’s complaints. “He had a lot of animosity toward his stepdad. Ithink he felt pretty hurt by him. The way he described it, he wasn’t a very good dad.”
    Smith’s mother and stepfather would be recurring figures in the songs Smith would go on to write. His most direct treatment of his life in Duncanville, and perhaps his most blatantly autobiographical work, is “Some Song,” performed live at his earliest solo acoustic performances and released on a compilation by one of his record labels, Olympia, Washington’s Kill Rock Stars, in 1997. One of the lines drops an important place name: “You went down to look at old Dallas town/where you must be sick just to hang around.”
    The place where Duncanville kids looking for an urban education would have likely gone in the early ’80s is Deep Ellum. Now it’s equal parts hipsters, tourists, and frat boys at night, but at the time it was a place where it could be dangerous to hang out. There were skinheads back then, and the neighborhood still retained the aroma of the wrong side of the tracks, which it had been until recently. It was and continues to be a place highly familiar to any Dallas police officer. If young Steve Smith met up with punk rock before he moved to Portland, Deep Ellum is likely where it happened. In many ways, it would have been the part of Dallas best able to prepare Smith for the bohemian music scene Portland had to offer. It had an active street life, dimly lit rock clubs, and a hint of danger.
    He also may have discovered edgier music at Bill’s Records. Dallas is not a city of many independent-minded record stores, but one opened when Smith was twelve, shortly before he left the city for good. Bill’s Records is still owned by Bill Wisener after twenty-two years of operation. Located in northern Dallas, across town from Duncanville, it was a place a boy could find some sign of musical life beyond the arena rock that dominated the ’80s.
    Pickering says that everyone from Duncanville referred to where they lived as “Dallas,” even though kids from Duncanville almost never actually had the opportunity to hang out anywhere in Dallas proper. So when Smith refers to “Dallas town” in “Some Song,” he’s probably talking about the town where he grew up rather than referring to the city as distinct from his suburban neighborhood.