Elliott Smith Free

FREE ELLIOTT SMITH PDF Autumn De Wilde | 224 pages | 09 Nov 2007 | CHRONICLE BOOKS | 9780811857994 | English | California, United States Either/Or (album) - Wikipedia N o one could honestly claim to be surprised when they heard Elliott Smith had committed suicide. Plenty of folky singer-songwriters have a reputation for making introspective, melancholy music, but none quite like Smith's. He was the "unhappiest man in the land", a singer you didn't so much Elliott Smith to as commiserate with. According to his friend, singer Mary Lou Lord, Smith was the heir to the tragic mantle of her former boyfriend, Kurt Cobain: he was making records for "the sad kids". His gloom was more than sulky posturing: when Smith sang about heroin addiction or alcoholism or depression, he was singing about things he had experienced first-hand. The cover of his second, eponymous solo album, released in Elliott Smith, features a grainy image of bodies Elliott Smith from a high building. As one tribute article wryly noted, you couldn't say that Smith didn't warn you. That is Elliott Smith to say the circumstances of his death were not shocking. Last year, just before lunchtime on Tuesday, October 21, Elliott Smith apparently had an argument with his girlfriend, fellow musician Jennifer Chiba, at their home in Silverlake, Los Angeles. As the row got worse, Smith threatened to commit suicide. Like most of Smith's close friends, Chiba was used to him making melodramatic threats about ending his life. After all, this was a man who, when he decided to relocate from Portland to Brooklyn in the late s, bade farewell to his Oregon friends by informing them that it was likely he would never see them again because he was "probably going to kill himself". Chiba Elliott Smith him and Elliott Smith herself in the bathroom. She then heard a scream. Returning to the living room, she found Smith standing with his back Elliott Smith her. When he turned around, she saw a kitchen knife sticking out of his chest. Smith had stabbed himself in Elliott Smith heart. Despite emergency surgery, he was pronounced dead 20 minutes after arriving at hospital. He was 34 years old. Never lost for an opinion, Courtney Love called it "the best suicide I ever heard of". You turn the knife sideways and plunge it Elliott Smith the ribs. It is an extremely painful way to die, a last resort for people so low they no longer care about themselves. According to some of Smith's friends, that description fits. Indeed, he may have tried to kill himself in this way before, possibly in his producer Larry Crane remembers Smith showing him "a pretty bad scar on his chest". When he moved to New York, he told another Elliott Smith that he spent his nights walking along the empty subway tracks. But, although few rock artists had ever courted the idea of suicide so regularly and openly as Smith, the most astonishing thing about his death is an ongoing and pervasive rumour that he was, in fact, murdered. Most people believed Smith's depression stemmed from being abused as a child, while living with his mother and stepfather in Texas. He once told a journalist from the US magazine Elliott Smith that if he had not had music to lean on, he might have "gone after" his stepfather. Certainly, nothing seemed capable of lifting his depression. A former member of a hardcore punk Elliott Smith called Heatmiser, he was deeply suspicious of commercial success, a modicum of which came after his Oscar nomination. He performed at the awards ceremony, between Celine Dion and Michael Bolton, and his subsequent album, 's XO, soldcopies, but he Elliott Smith unimpressed: "I threw myself into it because it seemed to make my friends happy," he said. He had become a heroin addict and a "bad alcoholic" while living in Portland, but when his friends tried to intervene he was furious. Many of the songs on XO concerned themselves with "the nerve people have to go parading around as if they know what somebody else ought to do with themselves". His drug problems deepened. By the time Elliott Smith left New York for Los Angeles at the end ofhe was also using crack. Rumours abounded that he was now incapable of performing, that he had Elliott Smith his own lyrics and nodded off onstage between songs, that he had been found passed out in a toilet in a club Elliott Smith a needle in his arm. Neighbours in Silverlake claimed they had seen him wandering the streets with a blanket Elliott Smith his shoulders, muttering to himself. And yet, in the last year of his life, Smith was alleged to have turned things around. He claimed to have finally kicked the drugs in with the help of a treatment called neurotransmitter restoration. He was working on a new album, provisionally entitled From a Basement Elliott Smith a Hill. Many friends claimed his new-found optimism was the result of his year-long relationship with Jennifer Chiba, a member of a local punk band, Happy Ending, who Smith had taken under his wing, touring Elliott Smith them as his support act, paying their expenses and producing their debut single. The two had established a foundation for abused children, to which Smith planned to donate all the profits from his next record. In his final interview, with Under the Radar magazine in JanuaryChiba was depicted sitting alongside Smith as he tinkered in his studio into the early hours of the morning, "looking over her shoulder at her boyfriend and shaking her head in loving dismay". His suicide was thought to be a horrifying aberration, an example of a depressive committing suicide while on the upswing. However, within weeks of Smith's death, rumours began to emerge that painted a markedly different picture of his final months. Smith, it was alleged, had not kicked drugs at all. Nor was his relationship with Chiba as idyllic as had been suggested. Sean Organ, the owner of Org Records, the British label that planned to release the Happy Ending single, described the sessions as "tense". Band on one side, Elliot on the other, her stuck in the middle. I'd get phone calls in the morning and phone calls in the evening and Elliott Smith mood would be Elliott Smith different: 'It's the best thing we've ever done! Then he kept remixing it. One of the girls in the band broke into his studio, took Elliott Smith tapes Elliott Smith sent them to me. Then it really went off. People started yelling. I was pretty much like, 'Let's just shelve it. The worst thing that ever happened to the Happy Ending was Elliott Smith getting involved, to be honest. At best, that seems Elliott Smith unfortunate wording, given that Vicious Elliott Smith Spungen to death in I Elliott Smith really comment on it because I'm in London, they were over there in LA and I've never met them. The stories that were coming back were yes, that it was a crazed, druggy Sid and Nancy situation. One friend, Mark Flannigan, who owned a Hollywood club where Smith regularly performed, went so far as to question whether Smith had committed suicide at all. I wouldn't be surprised if someone else did this. He was doing drugs with lowlife scum. He was around a lot of creepy people - some very negative, dangerous people. Others angrily dismissed the implication that Smith had been murdered by drug dealers. He wasn't some stupid junkie on the nod. Nevertheless, curious postings began appearing on Elliott Smith website message boards, purporting to be from people who knew him, and claiming that Smith did not take his own life. The internet is catnip to cranks and conspiracy theorists, and few areas of music attract them like a rock star's death. The claims about Elliott Smith might well have been filed alongside spurious notions that John Lennon was murdered Elliott Smith the CIA, or that Bob Marley had cancer injected into him by shadowy forces fearful of his power, had it not been for the results of the coroner's examination into Smith's body, published in January on The Smoking Gun, a website that specialises in what it describes as "cool, confidential, quirky documents that can't be found elsewhere on the web". While toxicological tests revealed that Smith was apparently clean of illegal drugs at the time of his death - only non-abusive amounts of anti- depressants and Elliott Smith for attention deficit disorder were found in his system - it returned an open verdict. The report said that Smith had been stabbed twice - Elliott Smith wounds Elliott Smith entered his chest cavity and one had perforated his heart. That in itself is Elliott Smith suspicious: gruesome as it sounds, suicides who choose to stab themselves to death frequently Elliott Smith the weapon into their chest a number of times. Smith, however, had no "hesitation wounds" - cuts made Elliott Smith the victim works up the nerve to force the weapon through - and had stabbed himself through his clothing. The autopsy also found small lacerations on both his hands and under his right arm, which it described as "possible defensive wounds". It claimed that Elliott Smith "reported removal of the knife" from Smith and "subsequent refusal to speak with detectives" were "all of concern". While an apparent suicide note Elliott Smith been found by Chiba - written on a Post It note, it read "I'm so sorry, love, Elliott.

Load more