“Even though I knew Elliott Smith outside of the industry, I feel lucky to have recorded one of our conversations for a feature that ran in Alternative Press and later appeared in my book. It’s a day that’s been etched into record, whose words I don’t need to paraphrase. There are pictures from that day for when my memory fails me, so I can actually tell you what Elliott was wearing: a black t-shirt, blue jeans, black socks, and a thick-soled brown shoe. (It was a humid day in Brooklyn, so no, he was not wearing a stocking cap.) There are even notes: he lived five flights up in a Park Slope tenement building, back when Fourth Avenue was where you went to change your tires, not change your life. It was considerably warm outside, so we sat in his living room — away from the windows — and drank from ice cold Coke cans. When the interview was over, we talked about Ry Cooder and Poison Idea and that time people started yelling for Elliott’s solo songs at a Heatmiser show I saw at the Mercury Lounge. He was mortified by that.
I don’t have anything like this for any of my other friends who have died. The memories of them, sooner or later, begin to fragment, blur, and blend into each other; a holistic picture emerges, but the singularity comes at the cost of specificity. I’ve written about some of my memories of Elliott before but today, I choose to think about the one day we spent together that’s been preserved and the words we recorded.
“I just don’t want to fuck up and get confused to the point where I’m not so close to the thing that made me play music in the first place,” he told me. “The less I think about this stuff, the happier I am.”
I remember that day the most because we both seemed genuinely happy.”
Norman Brannon
so flawed and drunk and perfect still 