Paring it down to beer and whiskey

“Paring it down to beer and whiskey is not a hard-and-fast rule. I went to a mushroom museum in Amsterdam the other day… and I’ll just leave it at that. I don’t want to sound like I’m flying the flag for substance abuse, not because I think I’m influential, but if some guy in a car commercial came out and said ’do drugs’, somebody would. And I wouldn’t want to encourage anyone to change their reality. I think over time, I became more interested in the rest of the world and less interior about things. You know I’m glad there’s a world…I wouldn’t like to live in it alone.”

 

Elliott Smith

Lots of, well, lots of people who heard “Needle In the Hay”

“Lots of, well, lots of people who heard “Needle In the Hay” thought it was about drugs, which was sort of the vehicle, but it wasn’t supposed to be about that in particular. People were like, “Oh that second record is all about drugs! It’s like, no, it’s not. It’s about the same things that people write about all the time, you know – they write about their dependence on things: another person or a situation or drugs or even a city. Sometimes they’re happy songs because it’s going good, sometimes they’re upsetting songs because they don’t wanna be dependent on whatever it is.”

Elliott Smith

The only interesting thing about drugs

©Martin Benjamin

“The only interesting thing about drugs is why do people do them. In and of themselves, they’re very boring. As for drugs in books or in songs, usually they’re a vehicle to talk about dependency or possibility… But the less that I try and put songs in situations that they don’t belong in, the easier it is for me to make them up. To me the point, if there’s a point, is just to make a mood or a feeling or at the most specific to create a mental picture. I just kinda write stuff, and then I look at it and go, ‘Oh, I see what I’m going on about’ or, ‘I don’t know what I’m going on about, but I like how it feels.’ It’s not like there’s any shortage of material in any given person. All you have to do is live a day in order to make record after record after record.”

Elliott Smith

He was very into quitting drugs

 

“He was very into quitting drugs. I don’t think he liked being on drugs, and I don’t think he liked people knowing he was on drugs, necessarily. He was always lying to people about it. It was almost humorous to me. It was almost kind of a joke, ‘Yeah, I know. I’ve been straight for two weeks. I’m doing great.’ And then after he’d say something like that to his manager or whoever, he’d come inside and smoke some heroin and some crack. It was kind of a joke after a while – ‘Oh, yeah, guess who’s sober?'”

David McConnell

I read a review that said that the material from disc one

©Josh Phillips

“I read a review that said that the material from disc one was recorded from Elliott Smith and disc two was Either/Or. It said a song was acoustic that had drums on it. It said that he was a drug addict at the time, which is definitely not true. I mean, I was fucking there. I can tell you that in 1996 and ’97, I was not dealing with an addled drug addict. I was dealing with a person who, at the most, would go out and have some beers with me. The review made so many assumptions that it was just a bummer to read.
To the point where the writer said that the major label let him have a steady stream of drugs . Oh my God.”

Larry Crane