Elliott Smith and the Big Nothing Read Online Free Page B

Ticketmaster. We were in the first balcony and it was a huge-production arena rock show.” Smith told Under the Radar magazine about a separate occasion when he got drunk and played pool at a neighbor’s house; neither Merritt nor Pickering remembers this.
    The girl both Merritt and Pickering remember Smith getting involved with was a Byrd student named Kim. “She was in junior-high band. I considered her to be one of the more popular kids in her grade,” says Pickering. “When you’re dating a guy in junior high, you’re hanging out with his friends more than you probably want to, but she put up with us and was nice to us. I remember calling Steve once and saying, ‘There’s this new movie out called The Outsiders ,’ and he said, ‘I already saw it with my girlfriend.’ That was probably the kind of thing they did together. He would have been in eighth grade, she would have been in seventh. Thatwould be the first girl I remember him being interested in for a period of time.”
    Smith described his Duncanville self as a reluctant but rather successful jock. “I had to play sports in junior high in Texas because everybody in Texas has to,” he told Under the Radar . “I played football. I played defensive guard of all things. I was not any bigger and I was always very average. I was always a little on the small side in height and weight. First I was a wide receiver, which is great in junior high when nobody can throw the football. . . . You hit kind of hard for about the first ten plays, then the rest of the game you’re just kind of running out there and bumping up against the cornerback. I just became aggravated by people who were bigger than me and threatening me and saying some of the things that junior-high kids say. You know, when you’re down there like inches away from somebody’s head and some guy is going, ‘I’m going to fuck you up!’ So the play starts and I’d just sort of dart out and cut him off at the knees and that was that. They’d always put the big guys by me because I was the small guy on the defensive line, but I got my guy every time because I was smaller and quicker and I guess angrier in general or something. I just can’t believe I played so much sports. I can tell you it doesn’t build character by itself. Except maybe building the character to not play sports because you were forced to.” Pickering confirms that football didn’t seem to be important to Smith. “I recall him playing football, but I don’t remember it being something he was into.”
    David McConnell, who would be Smith’s musical collaborator on his last album, From a Basement on the Hill , recalls that Smith told him he experienced physical abuse as a child, and that Smith said he also suspected he might have been abused sexually, but couldn’t remember any incident clearly enough to say for sure. The theme of searching in oneself for some distant memory would become a theme in Smith’s lyrics, and the abuse memories are one more instance of Smith’s recollections of boyhood being darker than Smith’s childhood friends’ impressions of him.
    Smith’s stories about his musical taste during his formative years also diverge from the accounts of his friends. Smith often joked about how much he had liked Kiss and their makeup. “I saw that Kiss reference in interviews and laughed at it,” says Pickering. “I don’t remember him being into Kiss in junior high. It was classic rock—The Beatles, Sgt. Pepper’s and The White Album, The Who, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Rush. He came over to my house and played what sounded like a classical piece on acoustic guitar and he explained to me it was a traditional folk song that Peter, Paul & Mary had recorded. I remember in eighth or ninth grade he owned a Jackson Browne record, and his tastes started expanding somewhat. He was branching out and getting into a lot more and different stuff—by eighth and ninth grade it was The Clash and U2. I don’t know how