There was a war on Thursday afternoon as far as I can tell by checking Facebook when I was at work. There was a vendetta directed against Mike Doughty because of these Elliott Smith’s EDM tracks he recently released. Among many others, Mary Lou Lord was launching this battle, with about six threads started on facebook, and she was followed by a herd of fans determined to assassinate the guy. Don’t look for them, she has now deleted all of them. Now, let’s be clear, I can’t say I like these tracks, I can’t stand EDM in general and I don’t think I will listen to them again, but honestly, these people should cool down!
What were their arguments? Basically they were all terribly offended and outraged by the three tracks, saying that Doughty was selling this as a collaboration whereas it was not one, accusing him of stealing, lying, and wrongly claiming that this was what Elliott wanted whereas it wasn’t possible to know and check this. ‘But there is NO WAY I will fucking believe that Elliott would have given full rights for Doughty to use it any way he wanted-especially if it was going to end up sounding like it does,’ wrote Mary Lou Lord… Long comments were accusing Doughty of being a liar, arguing that ‘Elliott was not there to defend himself’, that he gave ‘100% of a shit about the final outcome of his songs on recordings that he had something to do with’, that the new songs were ‘garbage and doing a huge disservice to Elliott’s enduring legacy’. So is Mike Doughty dishonest? Is he a hypocrite, an opportunist, an attention seeker, a phoney, a liar and a thief? I got their argument, I never took these tracks as Elliott’s, they were finished a long time after he died, but was it a reason to burn Doughty on the facebook public place?
All this focus on the respect of the music has always made me laugh a bit when so little respect is accorded to Elliott the person… Aren’t there other people using Elliott persona to sell books and movies, molding him according to their preconceived ideas of the Elliott Smith myth? Yes there are! And for me it’s really more shocking than these tracks, I save my outrage for a biographer writing to have figure out Elliott by saying that he ‘romanticized and envied Cobain’s suicide’! This is where lays the betray and the dishonesty! I have tried to comment on this, but everyone was focused on the untouchable nature of his music – never mind that people swallow any lies say about him whereas we we still don’t know the truth about his unresolved death.
The Willamette Weekly has published an interview of Mike Doughty following the controversy. In the article, Doughty stands on what he has said before, he released these tracks ‘just to put art out into the world’. He explained: ‘Elliott and I began this, but I lost the tape for years. When I found it, I thought it was right to fulfill a long-delayed collaboration’… ‘ They’re just tracks. Very sadly, if he was alive, this would just be a weird curiosity in his body of work, which, at this point, would have many more astonishing songs in it.’
For people who were wondering, he contacted Larry Crane the archivist of Elliott’s music, wrote him ‘a long apology for the weirdness and suddenness of this, and sent him a file of the full, unedited session.’ Of course, Elliott was signed on Dreamworks at that time of the recordings, so Crane had nothing to do with all this, but nobody else has contacted him.
And this is what he had to say about Elliott’s so-called intentions regarding these tracks: ‘I just don’t know what he would’ve thought about the final tracks. I wanted people to understand that he was into the process, so I put a snippet of him speaking in the studio on the top of one of the UUL tracks, “Dogs.” It’s after he finished one song, and was about to sing another. He says: “Yeah, that one’s kind of like…it might be kind of..it might be kind of hard to put things under it. Let me play you this other one, you can tell me if it’s too long.” I think it was an adventurous lark for him, and it was a simple thing to participate in. The entire session—and I do mean the entire session, all songs, all takes, even the talking between takes—is under 14 minutes.’
As a matter of fact, Ben Nugent writes about this session in his book ‘Elliott Smith and the Big Nothing’. It’s not clear whether the recordings were actually intended as samples to be used on a Soul Coughing album or on these UUL songs, but Doughty explains that ‘the idea was to sample the vocal. He didn’t give me any complete songs—he gave me a few individual verses.’
But the best part of the article were the reaction from a few close friends of Elliott. Heatmiser bandmate Tony Lash, said the songs ‘harmed his ears’, producer Rob Schnapf called them ‘pretty awful’, and Larry Crane hasn’t listened to them. But my favorite reaction belongs to Heatmiser/Quasi Sam Coomes:
‘wow, people are so upset about the mike doughty/elliott recordings! I remember when Elliott did em – I didn’t think anything about it at the time – I thought they were making an album or something – this is what musicians do! If you don’t like em, don’t listen (I don’t like em). They don’t hurt Elliott by coming out – he’s long dead. Weird people take shit like this so personal. Who does it harm? It’s not like it’s Paul Simon’
I couldn’t agree with him more, …..not on the Paul Simon part, this is a whole different can of worms that I won’t discuss with him!