A Question Mark by Alyson Camus
An Investigation into the Mysterious Death of Elliott Smith. First Chapter Preview
“A Question Mark” tells the story of the alleged suicide of Elliot Smith, and dives into the circumstances of the case to reveal the truth.
Back in the early 2000s, Elliott Smith was a rising star in the Indie music scene. He was a talented musician, but he carried a heavy burden—a drug addiction and a bleak view of life. His music expressed both his pain and his hopes. Then, in 2003, tragedy struck. Elliott Smith was found dead, and it looked like suicide. The media and his fans were quick to accept this explanation.
However, as more details emerged, things got murkier. His girlfriend claimed they had a heated argument, and while she was locked in the bathroom, Elliott allegedly stabbed himself twice in the chest. Hours later, he passed away in the hospital from his injuries. The Los Angeles County Coroner, after examining the evidence, couldn't definitively say it was suicide. Fast forward eighteen years, and the case is still unresolved.
Alyson Camus, a dedicated Elliott Smith fan, couldn't let it rest. She wanted to uncover the truth. "A Question Mark" chronicles her relentless investigation into the alleged suicide of this Oscar-nominated singer. What she discovered reveals that the truth about his death might be an even bigger mystery than anyone could have imagined. This is a story that will keep you guessing until the very end.
Chapter 1: Memories, this is all we have
I read the news today, oh boy
On Tuesday, October 21, 2003, Alyson was having a brief lunch break as she often did at that time, a short trip to the grocery store to grab a salad and a cold drink, and to sit for a few minutes alone in her car, eating quickly while listening to the radio. It was a very hot day for October, and the Santa Ana winds were blowing dry. She can still recall plenty of details of that day.
Alyson didn’t learn about the terrible news until she went home and checked the internet. It was a pre-iPhone, pre-Facebook, pre-Twitter era, which is a bit difficult to imagine in these days of instant information. If Elliott’s death had happened today, everyone would have learned about it instantaneously, but back then, it took a while for the news to hit, but then it rapidly spread all over her favorite music-related sites. Alyson remembers being in total disbelief. Singer-songwriter Elliott Smith had been found dead in the house he was sharing with his girlfriend, Jennifer Chiba. Dead? How? What had happened? The Elliott Smith message board, where fans were exchanging concert photos and analyzing the meaning of his songs, was exploding. It was even down for a while, when nothing was working, then it reappeared. Alyson became frustrated because she could not get more information. She thought it was some stupid hoax for a while, but hoax it was not. It became official, and she could not think about anything else for the entire night.
Eighteen years later, Alyson still clearly remembers this sad day. Memory is strange, but some events make indelible tattoos when strong emotions are attached to them. This is why she still sees herself lying on her bed, grinding her brain over what could have happened. Elliott Smith was by no means what we can call famous; he wasn’t the voice of his generation, he wasn’t really in the mainstream radio circuit, he wasn’t even a celebrity, but he had some exposure in 1998 with an Academy Awards nomination for his song “Miss Misery” in the movie Good Will Hunting, followed by a few MTV appearances. However, his music had been a part of Alyson’s life’s soundtrack since August 2001, when she had seen him play at a street fair on Sunset Boulevard. The strangest thing was that that concert was far from being his best. She even had heard rumors that he was going through a really bad time during this period, that drugs were ruling his life. Watching him, it was obvious; he couldn’t remember his songs during this 2001 performance, and he did look broken, strung out, and almost ashamed of himself, constantly apologizing and aborting songs. He had his Willie Nelson braids and his Shiva T-shirt to protect him, but he struggled terribly throughout his set. Alyson still remembers the scene: a girl in the crowd had kneeled to reemerge with a similar hairdo. In five minutes, she had managed to braid her hair to look like him and she was singing the lyrics that he couldn’t remember. But it was that night when, despite the drug haze and Elliott looking so out of it, the magic had operated. People were asking for their favorite songs, and he couldn’t play any of them, but people loved him no matter what.
All these concert memories are fading away
Since that day in August 2001, Alyson had been on a quest. She had been determined to know more about Elliott Smith and his music, and eventually bought all of his albums, one by one, attended many of his concerts, and even traveled to just outside San Diego to see him on a weeknight. She saw him nine times altogether and had a ticket to see him again on November 9, 2003, when Elliott was on the bill of All Tomorrow’s Parties curated by the famous cartoonist Matt Groening, a music festival headlined by some of Elliott’s idols, including Iggy and the Stooges. Tragically, Elliott died a few days before the performance. At the show, Iggy dedicated “Dirt” to him, and everyone was crying.
Ten years later, the mythology had started its devastating warpath that Elliott had become this cursed poet haunted by death and suicide, destined to kill himself, a myth slowly built by many people with the help of his last girlfriend, Jennifer Chiba, but also from professor W. T. Schultz, a psychobiographer and personality psychologist, who published an Elliott Smith biography in 2013.
Years after his death, everyone wanted a piece of him, but the Elliott Smith myth, like any myth, has always suffered from a lot of misinformation, misconceptions, and misinterpretations:
“Elliott was a sweet, sweet human,” said Flaming Lips’ Steven Drozd to Alyson several years after Elliott’s death, and Elliott certainly sounded like a kind and humble person when she had the chance to talk to him in 2003. In describing Elliott, musician and friend Jon Brion said:
“He was also very talented as everyone knows, and he knew that. It’s possible to be humble but know at the same time that your art is not crap, right? He was quite uncomfortable in his own skin but confident with his art; he was this intense combination of heaps of self-doubt and self-assurance.”
Elliott didn’t care about fame, because of the deceptive way fame affects people’s lives, and he didn’t consider himself famous, so you could talk to him after a show, ask him anything, and he would pay attention to you. He didn’t want to perform at the Oscars, but he begrudgingly accepted when the Academy Awards producers threatened to use someone else instead—pop star Richard Marx. Elliott wanted his music to reach a lot of people, and he admired giant rock stars like Paul McCartney, so, in a way, he wanted to be famous. That was the paradox, the Elliott paradox.
Elliott hated the “fucking” Eagles, but he loved the Beatles, Big Star, the Kinks—and Supergrass too. The British invasion. He covered many songs, from many artists he revered, from Neil Young to George Harrison, who was one of his favorites. One of his friends said that Elton John’s “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” and Phil Collins’ “Against All Odds” made him cry. He had Stevie Wonder, Willie Nelson, and Hank Williams T-shirts. He met Celine Dion and found her nice, but he once refused to meet Paul McCartney, who was visiting the small club Largo, because it was just “too much” for him.
Elliott used to ask at concerts, “Do you want to hear a sad song or a happy song?” and people would scream “happy!”… “sad!” and he would laugh, and any song he played would always end with both of these feelings, happy and sad at the same time. His songs were about nuances of feelings, sad and happy impressionistic touches in the same song, encapsulated best by the word melancholy. Elliott liked the dark because it made us see the light. He despised boring performances, aborted songs when he was not in the mood to sing them, and apologized plenty of times.
He also joked a lot during shows. He wove in stories of wigs and basketball games, pirate hats, and eye patches, both during concerts and in recording sessions.
Elliott was often changing his mind. He was such a complex human being that he almost became a different character depending on who was describing him to Alyson. He didn’t want to hurt others, although he probably hurt many. But who didn’t? He didn’t always make the right decisions. But who did? He was often caught between please-everybody and fuck-everybody. He could be abused and abusive. But he was also very generous. He had a great sense of justice too, like the time he tried to intervene with security when he saw a kid being harassed at a Beck/Flaming Lips show. He also had a good bullshit detector, a good people radar. Unfortunately, he may not have used it all the time.
After his death, casual fans often pigeonholed him as a “sad sack troubadour,” a cartoonish tortured/tormented artist that the media adored. It was the perfect marketing for someone who wrote self-deprecating and self-destructive lyrics, but he made it clear before his death that he hated that idea. One of the last songs he recorded gave part of the answer. In the song “Suicide Machine,” Elliott explained through his lyrics that the rough patches had a tendency to be better documented than the bright ones, and that this is how we build the myths of doom. He had taken the habit to draw “Kali the Destroyer/More Kicks Than Pricks” tattoos on his arm with a Sharpie to hide some of his bad reminders with more cryptic thoughts.
Elliott was often intense. He was a stay-up-all-night character, doing his punk-rock thing, finding the courage to share these intricate tales of depression, drug addiction, and cursed relationships through beautiful and profound metaphors wrapped in rawness and pain. A fearless freak, taking all the risks and playing with the idea to refine his Figure 8—what was to become his next album.
“Perfection is not my ideal. It’s an insult to the gods,”1 he once wrote while signing (h)hhelliott on Sweet Adeline’s fan message board.
Elliott often participated in his own mythmaking, a romantic myth of self-destruction. This may have effectively been written all over his lyrics before he actively practiced it. On the other hand, he was offended at the idea of adding another layer to the doomed Elliott Smith story, refusing to wear a white T-shirt artistically spattered with fake blood for a photoshoot.
His songs were not autobiographical. That is a misconception because they were sung in the confessional and intimate tone that they should have been, and it was an idea that Elliott found insulting and repulsive. He said it would have been the equivalent of self-pity, something he hated. He probably would have also hated the suicide as self-prophecy theory that came after his death.
Elliott’s dream-inspired songs were complex, multi-faceted, layered with meaning, and always brilliant and intelligent. Plenty of people find them sad and depressing, but he often described them as “abstract movies” or “moods,” in a way of using sadness-to-bring-joy kind of way. His songs went to hell and back, providing an invitation to travel without a precise destination. They were proof of his resilient survival. And they were surely heartbreaking… in a good way. “I am way more robust and resistant than my songs,”2 he once said in an interview.
Contrary to what many people think, he used drug metaphors in his lyrics long before taking hard drugs. Elliott had a particularly difficult time with drug abuse in 2001 and 2002, but he was resilient. Those drug-infused years were his worst times. He was aborting his tunes or not completing entire songs during shows. Mr. Misery was truly feeling miserable. When he took drugs, he burned many bridges, and many of his friends had made their goodbyes those two or three years before he died…. A few weeks before he died, he wanted to reconnect with his friends—at least this is what many have said.
Before he died, Elliott was hoping to release a double album; instead, we got the posthumous From a Basement on the Hill. He left us with many projects in the works. In addition to the double album, he was planning a tour and festival performance (a slot just before his idols Iggy and the Stooges), a movie soundtrack (Mike Mills’ Thumbsucker), a new recording studio, a charity for abused children—and this is only what we know of. After his death, Beck alluded to having a possible project in the works with Elliott: “We even talked a few times about getting together and making some music when I got off tour.”3
The last time Alyson saw him in concert, Elliott was performing at a tribute for the Kinks, and his smile seemed to say, “I still have some more work to do, I’m gonna hang around.” He was not done.
At the end of 2002, and until his death in October 2003, Alyson was certain Elliott got better and better, healthier and healthier, contrary to the myth or the vague idea that people now have of that last year. Memory has a tendency to compress time and the further we drift from specific periods, the closer together they seem to be. Who can, today, still distinguish between August 2001 and August 2003? This is unfortunate, but it is essential to the story.
In the late summer and fall of 2002, Elliott disappeared for a while to undergo a controversial detox treatment under the supervision of the enigmatic Dr. Hit, but he reemerged toward the end of 2002, still fragile and thin, even out of shape, but apparently clean. Alyson saw him on October 1, 2002 for the first time after his treatment. He still looked broken down, walking with his head down, looking at the sidewalk, like a character in one of his songs, while his new female companion, Jennifer Chiba, was following him like a loyal companion. At that moment, Alyson worried about his mental and physical condition. But then when she saw him on stage at the Echo, he played a great set and was in a good spirit, joking around, and finishing all his songs.
During the following months, Alyson saw him many times in several clubs around town, where he played many gigs. She felt he looked better and tougher each time. He sold out two consecutive nights at a larger Hollywood theater, the Henry Fonda (then called the Music Box). Despite people reporting that he was mumbling some incomprehensible monologue between songs, he was making sense if you had the chance to be close enough to hear him. Alyson was in the front row and she could see everything. She was not in denial. There were still problems, big ones, and his drug use and treatment had taken a toll on him physically, but those two January/February shows were far from the sad train wreck people had witnessed at the Sunset Junction Fair in 2001.
Alyson thought that Elliott looked really great at the two last shows she attended a few months later. They both took place at the same intimate venue, a small Los Feliz club called the Derby, now defunct. In May, he played a few new songs with friends and musicians, among them Robin Peringer, a bass/drum player who seemed to be always at Elliott’s side during his last year on earth. It was as if he had become Elliott’s best friend. Alyson had the pleasure of having the longest conversation she had ever had with Elliott that night, and asked him about his projects, about touring. He said he definitely wanted to tour, especially Europe. “Paris is my favorite city when I tour in Europe,” he said, his face lighting up. He also mentioned his charity for children, something he had put on hold during his detox treatment. He said he was ready to start it again. But before anything, he wanted to finish his latest album, which could be a double album. But, he said, he was not sure of anything. He was constantly changing his mind. Alyson wanted to know more but it was at that moment Jennifer Chiba decided to interrupt. “She wants to leave,” said Elliott with almost some regret in his eyes… or maybe that was Alyson’s imagination. She was so thrilled to have had this conversation backstage that she didn’t even pay attention to Jennifer Chiba’s alleged impatience.
A few weeks later, Alyson ran into Elliott, or rather he passed next to her when she was attending a concert at the Troubadour on the west side of town, where one of Elliott’s friends and ex-bandmates, Neil Gust, was playing with his band.
Alyson saw Elliott one last time at the Derby. That night several bands were playing a tribute to the famous band of the ‘60s, the Kinks. Alyson almost didn’t recognize him. He had changed for the better; he looked healthy and almost happy. He played a few hits from the great British band with a renewed energy, even going behind the drum set and jumping around, looking so far from the empty ghost he used to be.
That same night, Alyson also met a French guy, a super-über-fan of Elliott’s named François, who had traveled throughout Europe to follow him on tour back in the day. He told Alyson about a French woman that Elliott had met when he was on tour. Strangely, she was one of the first people Alyson heard from when Elliott died. François could not stop talking about the French girl and the big impression she had made on Elliott. He even told Alyson that Elliott had probably written an unreleased song, “Place Pigalle,” about her. It could even have been the working title of his last album, which ended up being renamed Figure 8 because Place Pigalle was judged to be too obscure or foreign by his label. François had met Elliott several times, but many years had passed, and a lot of things had happened since. Knowing about his struggle with addiction, François was not sure Elliott would recognize him after all this time. Nevertheless, “Hello François” was the first thing Elliott said when he did see him. François and Alyson didn’t know it was the last time they would see Elliott.
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