Experiencing Disney Hall

—Gus Van Sant

“Did you hear, elliott smith suicide 10:56AM 10/21/2003.” The terse text message, received via cell phone, was the first of many calls and e-mails I received from friends last week about the singer’s death. My first reaction was an audible gasp — a brief, ‰ sharp exhalation of breath. Like many who loved his five solo albums of melancholia, it struck me more like a death in the family than the death of a pop star.

I can imagine Elliott, sitting in the kitchen of his Echo Park apartment early last week, enmeshed in dark and romantic thoughts. How impossible it was to be gentle in this world. All the cruelties and failures and self-hatred this world bestows on those who just want to be kind. There’s one snatch of lyrics, from his first album, that roil in my mind:

Go home and live with your pain
Leave alone
Leave alone ’cause you know you don’t belong
You don’t belong here
And when I go
Don’t you follow

Because his songs implied so much love for musicians that had come before, it’s hard not to think he considered his predecessors. John Lennon shot dead on his front doorstep. Nick Drake overdosing on antidepressants. And poets, too: the French decadents — Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud. Thoughts long teetering in his mind lock in. He takes up a kitchen knife and plunges it into his own heart. Because that’s where the pain lies, and he wants us to remember his life as something of a piece with his music; to remember that few ever make art so fragile, lucid and clear of purpose.

Was it a surprise? Puzzle over his legacy all you want, but any interpretation would be bleak. Recent, unreleased songs included “Let’s Get Lost,” “A Distorted Reality Is Now a Necessity To Be Free,” “Strung Out Again,” “Shooting Star” and “Fond Farewell.” His most popular early record, Either/Or, was named after a book by the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, in which Kierkegaard posited that the aesthete would eventually find himself in a state of despair, brought on by a recognition of the limits of an aesthetic approach to life. It was a despair Elliott could not get past.

I met Elliott Smith once, over two days’ time, for a profile in this newspaper. It was my first cover story, my big break. We met one night at Largo, where he played joyful Ringo-style drums with Jon Brion. The next day we played croquet in the Silver Lake back yard of his then-manager, and ate pizza at an unpretentious Italian restaurant on Vermont Street.

We talked a bit about the word melancholy. He had his own definition. To him it didn’t mean depression. “That word has a huge stigma,” he said. “It is essentially used to mean dark, when I think what it’s actually supposed to mean is a combination of happy and sad.” Over the next few years, I’d spot him in crowds at various bars and shows in Silver Lake and Los Feliz, but he wore an intense shyness, a cloud of privacy I thought it’d be mean to interrupt.

But now I wish I’d said some things. That our cruelties are ours to pay for, not yours. That the existentialists are a bad source of romantic notions. And that while you thought you had to die for our sins and errors and fumblings, all we wanted was for you to sing about them a thousand more times.

And when I go
Don’t you follow

—Alec Hanley Bemis

A memorial benefit for Elliott Smith will be held at the Henry Fonda Theater on Monday, November 3; doors open at 6 p.m. Beck, Conor Oberst (Bright Eyes), Grandaddy, Beth Orton and others are confirmed to perform, and Steve Hanft will premiere his filmStrange Parallel, which features Elliott Smith. All proceeds benefit the Elliott Smith Foundation for Abused Children; $20; tickets available at www.ticketweb.com. Info: (323) 464-0808.