Twenty years after his death, Smith still isn’t particularly well known, or well understood, but he is terribly loved. Mostly, it’s a snapshot of his artistry and his empathy, which were fully intertwined. The video is a conflicting document of his recovery, for people who like to argue about that. It was taken in January of 2003 by late October he’ll be gone. It’s been twenty years since the recording of that concert-one of the more famous videos of Smith because there’s so much in it, and so much around it. “That one was too sad to stop on,” he says. Made for each other, that you paid me any mind Just goes to show my continual decline They say that I’ll recover my love of her once in a while But I don’t know I don’t think so
Or maybe Smith is being both strong and weak. Then he descends into a wavering sob, proof that the heckler was right.
His voice becomes stronger than it was at the start of the show-a rebuttal to the heckler. His concert that night marked the beginning of a fragile comeback tour and a promising sobriety. On the stage in Los Angeles, Smith is singing about someone who is half caught in a moment when he seems to be on the verge of escape himself. The chesty metal voice was gone, replaced by something soft and assured, authoritative. It was one of the first songs that displayed his mature voice as a songwriter-easy rhymes, a sly use of common turns of phrase, a vocabulary that feels unfussy-but also, literally, his vocal style. “Plainclothes Man” is also a story of transformation, written at a time, in the mid-nineties, when Smith was on his way out of an early band, toward his solo career. It’s a song about addiction, probably heroin, but, like most of his songs about addiction, it’s not really about the drugs. But I don’t really need that now I never really did anyhow I only really needed alcohol You’re everybody’s second home Always trying to get me alone An easy way to lose it all . . . Then he starts playing “Plainclothes Man”:
“So don’t get bummed out.” He’s been gentle with the audience-“I want to play new songs,” he announced earlier, turning down a request for “The Biggest Lie”-and, heckler aside, the audience has been gentle with him. “I’m very healthy now,” he says, to whistles and cheers. Who knows what the heckler is really thinking? Maybe that person is just having a rough night. “Maybe I didn’t understand what you were saying.” He doesn’t want to be mean. “I’m not trying to pick on you,” he says. He seems upset, in disbelief, and then, fingering the neck of his guitar, he starts to turn the phrase over in his head, assimilating it. “What the fuck? I could tell you a dream I had last night, otherwise I can’t be more fuckin’ for real.” “A backbone?” He tousles his hair as the comment starts to sink in. About forty-five minutes in, after he finishes up “Pretty (Ugly Before),” someone shouts from the audience, and Smith doesn’t quite catch the words. His voice is weak and drowsy, like he might be on something, or coming off it. He’s sitting in a metal stacking chair, wearing faded dark pants and a T-shirt that says “I 💔 METAL.” He’s slumped over his guitar, and his hair is falling in his face, like it always did. One of the last videos taken of Elliott Smith shows him at the Fonda Theatre, in Los Angeles.
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