Elliott Smith and the Big Nothing Read Online Free Page A

average in the way he approached music. According to Pickering, “In sixth grade it wasn’t a huge part of what we did, but it was in the summer between sixth and seventh grade that I noticed that he was musically inclined beyond other people I knew.”
    Smith cast his junior-high experience in bleaker terms. He recalled a scrappy, redneck upbringing much grittier than what Merritt and Pickering remember of the childhood they shared. “Igot into a lot of fights in Dallas and was just sort of a hostile person,” he said in a 2003 interview with Under the Radar magazine. “I’d get into fights about once a week or two. I don’t think I ever really picked a fight, but I would totally fly off the handle if somebody said word one. You had to be like that or you’d get more shit. But I didn’t have to be as much like that as I was. I was pissed off about other things—at home—so if anybody said anything at school, I’d just [shakes his head] . . . And I didn’t even win most of the fights. I wasn’t that big, but sometimes it’s the little guys who’ve been beat on enough who figure out how to hurt somebody, even though they’re not going to win. You have to fight harder and faster.”
    As far as Doyle recalls, Smith wasn’t one of the little guys who was picked on. While he grew into a diminutive, five-foot-nine man, he wasn’t small enough by junior-high standards for it to be a stand-out characteristic: “I have no memories of him being bullied,” writes Doyle. “Steve was a big guy in those days.”
    Merritt and Pickering don’t remember him as particularly big or small for his size; it was only later that he would come to be smaller than most boys. Nor do they remember him getting into fights with any kind of regularity at Byrd or during his one semester at Duncanville High; the two of them remember just one bout. “I didn’t see it personally,” says Pickering. “I remember that he had to go the principal’s office, which was a big deal at the time. The kid he got in a fight with was a substantially larger kid. I wouldn’t have called him a bully, but I remember thinking, ‘Wow, I would not have fought that guy.’ He was a big stocky guy. While they were waiting to see the principal they worked out whatever difference they had.”
    The differences between Smith’s memories of Duncanville and those of his Texan friends suggest that Duncanville acquired a special symbolic quality for Smith after he left for Portland. He would sing in “Southern Belle” of a “southern town/where all you can do is grit your teeth.” It was a Southern town that represented for Smith an attitude to define himself against—one oftraditional, redneck masculinity. Much of his day-to-day life there might have been standard-issue suburban leisure time, and it might have been a place where he was able to work at his music the way most kids in garage bands do. But elements of a rougher existence found their way to the forefront of Smith’s descriptions of Texas.
    Smith had an older, female friend who drove a muscle car with a grim reaper painted on the hood. In Pickering’s recollection, she wasn’t so much Smith’s girlfriend as an older student at Duncanville who took the small group of freshman boys under her wing. “It was a big, fat-ass muscle car,” says Pickering. “She played clarinet and he played the clarinet. It would have been summer ’83, at marching band rehearsal,” that she and Smith met, he says. “She wasn’t a metal head. She did buy us tickets to go see The Police in the fall of ’83 at Reunion Arena. She invited Steve and he invited me. It was the Synchronicity tour. Steve was into it; he knew a bunch of Police songs—he knew all the words to ‘Roxanne.’ That was the first concert I can remember him deliberately going to with people of our age group. The girl with the car had to get [tickets] for us, because our parents wouldn’t let us camp out all night in front of the