On their website they had this other intriguing part: ’It’s a special tribute to Elliott Smith. With a new best of album out, we speak to his close friends to find out the truth about the life and death of this genius songwriter, and outsider icon.’
The truth? This is what we have pursued here since the beginning and Iman and I were wondering what they had we didn’t have. What was even more confusing was this sentence accompanying one of the pictures in their picture tribute on line: ’Elliott Smith tragically committed suicide in October 2003, seven years ago, but left a legacy of beautiful music.’
Well, it was yesterday, they have actually changed this sentence to ‘tragically died in October 2003’, and I don’t know if our letter to the editor has anything to do with it.
Beside summarizing Elliott’s life and career, the actual article is interesting because i
t focuses quite a lot on his death and it is one of the first time that facts are objectively presented with precious opinions from once close friend Autumn de Wilde and ex-girlfriend Joanna Bolme (I am just wondering whether they tried to contact Jennifer Chiba).When I got to talk to Autumn de Wilde at her book signing a few years ago, I asked her about Elliott’s death, she graciously signed my book with a ‘Don’t worry, just listen, that’s what I do’, just after saying that we did not know what happened, because there was only one person present and this person was not talking.
It was one thing to say that to a fan, and another to say it for NME to print it, and her declaration at the end of the article is telling:
‘The circumstances surrounding his death don’t sit well with me at all, but there was only other person there, so nobody will ever know. He wasn’t around the type of people where I could know for sure what would happen any more. He was surrounded by sycophants, so who knows what could have happened? He had talked about suicide for many years, but he was always such a chicken about getting hurt! And there had been times in the past where suicide seemed more likely. He didn’t have any drugs in his body that day – does that make him more or less likely to do something? I don’t know. I wasn’t there and we weren’t talking at that time, so, in a way, I felt like I had already said my goodbyes and I just hoped that may be he would be OK someday. It’s hard to mourn for a friend like Elliott Smith, because there are always 400 other people trying to prove how close they were to him, and you fell like an asshole talking about it. There are a lot of people out there who will talk about Elliott and how well they knew him in order to promote themselves, or to draw attention to their closeness to him.’
May be it took seven years for Autumn to say what she thinks, and it is understandable knowing how devastated she was by her friend’s death, but what she is saying shows how much she doubts he committed suicide.’ Surrounded by sycophants’? Some people may recognize themselves. ‘A chicken about getting hurt’? I had actually heard something even more troubling from someone who had once been very close to him (but who prefers to stay anonymous), a feeling he was really uncomfortable around… knives.
With the help of Joanna Bolme (who is saying that Elliott felt like he ‘needed to live up to his own mythology’, under the ‘pressure to be that guy that everybody thought he was’) the article is dissolving the cartoonish image that has been stuck to Elliott Smith for a long time, the image of a drunk-druggie-depressed-tortured songwriter.
But as Autumn alludes to, he had burnt many bridges of friendship at the end of his life, which makes it more difficult for his once close friends to talk about what may have happened. They should nevertheless do it.