Misery' Revisited, Years After The Singer- Songwriter's Controversial Death. In the December 2. SPIN, we published Los Angeles journalist/musician Liam Gowing’s detailed, empathetic look at the last years of Elliott Smith’s life and the circumstances that led up to the Grammy- nominated singer- songwriter’s apparent suicide. Misery” was difficult to read, a tremendous challenge to edit and fact- check, and one of the most remarkably intimate pieces in the magazine’s history. In honor of SPIN’s 3. Years, 3. 0 Stories” series. Things did not look good for Elliott Smith in August 2. If you were in the crowd the night that the acclaimed singer/songwriter headlined Los Angeles’ Sunset Junction Street Fair and didn’t know any better, you might have thought he was an indigent blind man who had wandered up the steps to the stage. He was pale and thin and so stooped over, it looked as though he’d just landed on some distant planet where the gravity was so intense that it required a Herculean effort to simply stand erect. As he sat down and cradled his guitar in his lap, Smith raised his right hand to strike the strings, then dropped it onto the instrument as if he had, at that very moment, fallen asleep.“I’m sorry,” he called out after train- wrecking most of the first half of his set. I’m so f**ked up.”The scene that warm summer evening was not an unusual one. The entire year had been a train wreck for Smith. The previous December, after returning — strung- out on heroin — from a tour supporting his Figure 8 album, he had abandoned plans to record a follow- up to the 2. Additional Science Software. Water Rocket Fun A Water Rocket Simulator for Fun & Science Studies (software extensively reworked and enhanced by Seeds Software July. Only for private using. A game evening around bottles and drink cans. Sometimes the bottles also play along, but that is not the case here. Why you should get a reusable water bottle; The best steel bottle; The best plastic bottle; The best glass bottle; The best insulated bottle. Rob Schnapf. He’d begun distancing himself from Schnapf’s wife, Margaret Mittleman, his manager since 1. And although he’d started recording again with Aimee Mann producer Jon Brion (who played on Smith’s 1. XO), those sessions had ground to a halt. Several weeks of labor produced reels of false starts and Smith repeatedly saying, “That sucked.”After Brion submitted a bill for the fruitless sessions to Dream. Works Records (an amount recoupable from Smith’s account), executives Lenny Waronker and Luke Wood called a meeting to figure out what had gone wrong. Long unhappy with the major- label world, where record- company expenditures offset his typically moderate sales, Smith informed Wood and Waronker that their arrangement was unworkable and that the label’s intrusions into his privacy were unacceptable. And he was dealing with the promotion department, interviews, radio- station visits, people he couldn’t relate to: disc jockeys, club promoters. I’m not putting all the blame on Dream. Works. They just couldn’t get the record on the radio.”“. He was the John Lennon and Bob Dylan of my generation, but unlike those two, he was fighting a cultural tidal wave that always seemed to be going in the opposite direction.”Smith, who by then had progressed from heroin to crack, was not interested in discussing market trends or corporate finance. He demanded to be released from the label; and then, in a message relayed by his lawyer to Waronker and Wood, Smith said that if they refused to break his contract, he would opt out of his obligations to Dream. Works by taking his own life. At Smith’s home in Los Angeles’ Los Feliz neighborhood, above a floor littered with crack pipes and heroin- scalded tinfoil, he had hung a noose, just in case. But Smith did not commit suicide while in the throes of addiction. Instead, in the months that followed, he threw himself into recording with renewed vigor, first at a friend’s home studio and later at his own New Monkey Studio in nearby Van Nuys. And after successfully kicking his addictions to both heroin and crack in fall 2. Elliott Smith Foundation, which he had established with drug counselor Jerry Schoenkopf and then- girlfriend Valerie Deerin to benefit abused children. After an optimistic birthday celebration in August 2. Smith even got sober, giving up alcohol as well as red meat, refined sugar, and caffeine. He also began to phase out most of his prescription medications. Then, on October 2. After a frantic 9. Jennifer Chiba, an ambulance was dispatched to her home in Echo Park, where Smith lay bleeding to death from two stab wounds to the chest. Was it a suicide? Nobody seemed to know what had happened. Then came the bombshell. Phones like the Gionee Elife S5.5 have come a long way. Well, they're coming from China but this is not stating the obvious as a figure of speech. It appears that man has always been fascinated with the top. He has the power to spin it and somehow defy gravity by its ability to stand upright on its point. Two girls pull off a jaw-dropping double bottle flip with one landing ON TOP of the other after trying the popular online trick. On January 6, the Los Angeles County Department of the Coroner completed its report on Smith’s death. First, toxicology tests confirmed that Smith, widely assumed to be using street drugs again, was clean at the time of his death; all prescribed medications present in his system were at “therapeutic or sub- therapeutic” levels. Lemmy was born on Christmas Eve in the Burslem area of Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire. When Lemmy was three months old, his father, an ex-Royal Air Force.In her report, deputy medical examiner Lisa Scheinen concluded: “While his history of depression is compatible with suicide, and the location and direction of the stab wounds are consistent with self- infliction, several aspects of the circumstances (as are known at this time) are atypical of suicide and raise the possibility of homicide,” including “stabbing through clothing,” the presence of “incisive wounds. The report added, “The girlfriend’s reported removal of the knife and subsequent refusal to speak with detectives are all of concern.”Breaking the news to much of the world, LA Weekly writer Christine Pelisek related the full details of the coroner’s report on the paper’s website on January 7. Pelisek even reported that Smith and Chiba had argued just minutes before she called 9. Several of Smith’s friends were quick to support Chiba. Sound engineer Fritz Michaud addressed the clothing anomaly, saying that “Elliott literally wouldn’t have been caught dead with his shirt off”; and close friend Robin Peringer dismissed the “possible defensive wounds,” explaining that Smith was a “cutter” (a person with an emotional condition that causes them to cut their bodies with knives, razor blades, etc.). But in many courts of public opinion across the country, Jennifer Chiba was Professor Plum in the library with the candlestick. And then, nothing. Many of Smith’s closest friends at the time of his death say yes, and suggest that his depression, alienation, self- loathing, and drug use were merely symptoms of an underlying trauma. To this inner circle, the fact that Smith died sober was no surprise, because as their testimonials suggest, Smith was not suffering from a drug problem — he was searching for a drug solution. The drive up from the Pacific Coast Highway to David Mc. Connell’s Malibu home studio is one of those journeys that makes the exorbitantly expensive real estate, the earthquakes, and the landslides, all seem like small prices to pay for the glories of living in California. After cresting one particularly scenic overlook, I spontaneously gasp, “Oh my God.” Here, before an expanse of ocean so massive that the curvature of the earth starts to reveal itself, Smith began again to record what he intended to be his magnum opus, the proposed double album. He was in bad shape when he arrived here in May 2. In addition to drinking heavily, Smith had been smoking up to $1,5. He would say things like, ! The guy was immune to drugs. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life, where somebody could take that many drugs and walk away. He used to talk about it: ! I just did $8. 00 worth of drugs in an hour! What the f**k!'”But the regimen of tranquilizers and narcotics was something fairly new to Smith. Though he had been inextricably linked with heroin since he used the drug as a lyrical metaphor for all manner of dependency on his self- titled second album (released in 1. Los Angeles in 2. But if his method of execution was new, Smith’s appetite for self- destruction was certainly not.“Elliott told me about having a psychotic episode while he was . A lot of people from the label were telling him he needed to get it together. He was so sick of people talking about the future. So he carved the word . And he sat down at the piano and wrote . He’d been nominated for an Academy Award for “Miss Misery,” an original composition from the film Good Will Hunting. He was also preparing to release XO, his first big- budget, major- label record on Dream. Works. He should’ve been on top of the world, but in fact, he was descending into its dark recesses.“He always talked about suicide,” says Dorien Garry, a friend with whom Smith lived when he first moved to New York City in 1. He just talked about it as if it were going to happen.” Smith regularly walked along the city’s subway tracks, listening to his Walkman as trains passed. In 1. 99. 7, Smith was recording his last indie album, Either/Or, an intimate, lo- fi collection. Yet the process brought him little joy. Then three or four of them sucked. Then they all sucked and everything I did was terrible.” Instead of enjoying the buzz his new songs generated on tour, Smith ended up drinking heavily and jumping off a cliff in North Carolina, miraculously landing on a tree that broke his fall. After an unsuccessful intervention by friends at a Chicago hotel, he ended up in an Arizona psychiatric hospital. Director Steve Hanft — who tracked Smith from Portland to New York while shooting a short film on the singer, Strange Parallel — had met him for the first time on the set of the video for “Coming Up Roses,” a track from Smith’s second album. You couldn’t look him in the eye. I met Kurt Cobain — he didn’t have that much depression.”Back in 1. Christopher Cooper, owner of Portland- based indie label Cavity Search Records, was so excited by a tape of mostly untitled acoustic demos that he asked Smith if he could release the music as is. But even Cooper’s support of this first solo effort, Roman Candle, didn’t help. Something had obviously torn him apart well before he arrived at David Mc. Connell’s doorstep in Malibu. Yet he was not a hapless victim.
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