Elliott Smith And The Big Nothing

Rating:
Summary: Big Nothing
Review: Brian Hayes (the reviewer below) got it right: this was a rush job done to cash in. Nugent writes like a tenth grader. His analyses of the music are obvious, he often misquotes lyrics, and he adds a great deal of unnecessary context that distracts from the main story (nugent often goes off on what could eventually be worthwhile tangents, but then leaves it up to the reader to make whatever conclusion he's trying to get at (at several points it seems like he adds details about the state of "indie" music just so he can mention his other favorite artists.)) Hayes has got it right: if you wanna know who Elliott Smith was (what he meant, what he means) turn to the music.

Rating:
Summary: Elliott Deserves Far Better
Review: Elliott Smith and the Big Nothing is a sadly hollow, scattered read. Benjamin Nugent loads this biography with countless, rambling, incoherent anecdotes from Elliott's acquaintances. The best bits come from a frequently quoted Los Angeles Times interview with Elliott's final girlfriend, Jennifer Chiba, and Elliott's last interview with Under the Radar magazine. The other highlight comes from Nugent's interviews with David McConnell who recorded a good deal of Elliott's final material at McConnell's Malibu home studio, Satellite Park, the studio after which From a Basement on the Hill is named. For a far more inspired read of Elliott's life, check out the December 2004 Spin magazine feature article by Liam Gowing or the ten-page biography by S. R. Shutt on the sweetadeline website.

Rating:
Summary: I should have said "Getting to know Benjamin Nugent"
Review: I've realized I was wrong with my review I wrote previously on this guy's book, giving him a 5 of 5 stars. Not because I don't like the book, but because Nugent truly is a poor writer. I still enjoy the book because I do learn things from it and I do realize what Nugent tries to say in some parts (which is why I talked about hidden meanings), but that is what a good writer is supposed to do; they're supposed to show their reader exactly what they are trying to say, not hint to it. I still respect what Nugent tried to do, and I'm sure I'll read the book again, but it is poorly written. In my last review I gave him 5 stars because I was mainly reviewing him; I liked the effort he went through to complete the book. But I was only reviewing the person and not the actual book! Sorry to mess with everyone's heads!

Rating:
Summary: a cinema verite look at the work of a stellar artist
Review: If you're fond of the overweening, solipsistic prose that characterizes much of music reviewing today, you won't like this book. Nugent is economical but fair in his account of Smith's life, and his descriptions of the artist's life in Texas and Portland, especially, ring true and clear.

This was a swiftly written book, yes; the author had only a few months in which to chronicle a man's life. But it's worth noting that a quick publication enables us to see a current snapshot of the genius at work; by eschewing the sentimental, self-centered tone of many music biographies, Nugent lets Smith's music shine first and foremost. What with the controversy surrounding the beautiful new album, the book also illuminates the "making of" scenario-- and it's a bizarre one, riddled with drug and alcohol abuse. But Nugent lets Smith's fans do the work of eulogizing, which I appreciate. Parts of this are truly gripping, and "quickie bio" simply doesn't do it justice.

Rating:
Summary: Getting to know Elliott Smith
Review: Like his music may tell us, Elliott Smith is not a man who is easily understood. Elliott Smith is not a man that a stranger can walk up to, have a powerful and understanding chat with and walk off with more knowledge than they previously had. Elliott Smith is someone who is misunderstood, he is someone who takes more than just an hour to understand. Before I read this book, I noticed his pain, whether it be sorrow for people or himself, or whether it was his guilt that always seemed to be looming over him in his songs. The problem was that I didn't completely understand why Smith had these feelings. Why did the man blame himself, why did he feel so sorry for others that he spun himself in such a downward spiral? The book is a useful guide into the dark cave of Elliott's life. And yes, the book is a "guide," much like a tour guide.... but the author does not use this to help cover his material, he simply takes an intelligent course to get his book on the shelves of big stores such as Barnes and Noble or Border's book store. Elliott Smith and the Big Nothing would not be on the shelf if the book had come out before all the tragic newspaper articles. It simply would have been dismissed by the popularity and not as many people would have been able to enjoy it. Nugent uses the Artist's death near one-year-anniversary to help the reader understand the man that so many people do not understand. The book is powerful, and if it is uncovered by the reader (if the sometimes hidden messages in the book are uncovered) than they will surely be satisfied with their purchase.

Rating:
Summary: From Seattle Weekly:
Review: October 20 - 26, 2004
Distorted Reality
Trying to make sense of Elliott Smith's final album.
by Laura Cassidy

CONSIDERING ELLIOTT Smith's talent for layering each release with something
new, Songs From a Basement on the Hill (Epitaph) feels like the natural
progression of a gifted and obsessed musical mind with more and more
resources at its disposal-and more and more time to fiddle with them, and
more and more drugs to fuel the fiddling. Even given the jumbled, psychotic,
fire-and-brimstone street speech tacked on to the end of "Coast to Coast"
and the hyper-Sgt. Pepper vibe that casts an ambitious if happily disjointed
yellow haze over the entire flow of the record, the most unnatural aspect of
Basement isn't found in any of the songs. What's anomalous about the record
is what we, as fans, now know.
Smith was guarded; you thought you knew him because his songs felt so
personal, but he continually said they weren't. Were it not for Da Capo
Press' Elliott Smith and the Big Nothing, by Benjamin Nugent, the deluge of
Web-based murmurings after Smith's suicide on Oct. 21, 2003, would still be
enough to color the way we hear the record. Hell, anyone who had been to any
of Smith's last dozen or so shows probably knew he was using more and
slipping. And reading Big Nothing in tandem with listening to Basement feels
medicinal, but also incredibly invasive-not unlike the conflicted reactions
to Journals, Kurt Cobain's notebook ramblings compiled and released by
Riverhead Books just a few weeks after Smith's death. To steal a sentiment
of Smith's from XO, when people start talking-or even speculating-and the
private becomes public, everybody cares, everybody understands.
Nugent, for his part, is quite confident in his grasp of Smith's psyche.
Although much of Big Nothing is essentially an oral history, Nugent, a
former music and film reporter for Time magazine who shares many of Smith's
former ZIP codes, indulges in a lot of lyric interpretation. He reads the
line "I'm floating in a black balloon," from the Basement single "A
Distorted Reality Is Now a Necessity to Be Free," as "a picture of somebody
in a state of unhappy isolation that has as its compensation a sense of
freedom." Fair enough, but any music's sweetest, most sublime gift is that
it is completely singular once inside the ear. What a song means to me has
nothing to do with what it means to you. Sure, with a songwriter like Smith,
whose giant talent-aside from his intricate, inventive guitar style-was
pinpointing the most evasive, slippery truth in a roundabout yet succinct
manner, chances are we'll arrive at the same conclusions. And presumably, if
you pick up Big Nothing, it's because you're hungry for whatever information
you can get.
But what happens when artists die and others are left to disseminate their
material is that editorializing can sometimes be mistaken for the truth. As
Nugent reports, Smith told David McConnell, with whom he produced and
recorded much of what wound up on Basement, "Whatever happens to me, don't
let anybody clean this up. Don't let them put it through ProTools." Clearly,
this was someone thinking about leaving; any doubts about that evaporate in
"King's Crossing" when Smith sings, "I can't prepare for death any more than
I already have." It's also clearly someone who was concerned with what could
happen to his work-his essence-once he was gone. You can't accept that and
have a completely clear mind as you continue to read, or even as you
continue to listen.
Also uncomfortable are assertions like the one McConnell makes about Smith's
take on drugs and art: "That was a big thing for him, to take the artistic
road instead of the high road or whatever. It's definitely, 'I'm going to do
my record and I'm going to do as many drugs as I want, because art is not
about being sober and it's not about being some society figure, it's about
art.'"
If your lines or your syringes are in the next room waiting for you, you'll
find any reason to defend them. That's AA 101. In the throes of junk, you
come to believe that the junk makes you good. But if what Smith's friends
reported to Nugent is also true, if his earlier records were the products of
a relatively clean guy who was just attracted to the paradoxically romantic
culture of addiction, then he knew, somewhere inside himself, that his music
was due to something far more significant than heroin or coke. To let an
idea like McConnell's stand for what Smith believed about his talent is
damaging both to fans who might be struggling with their own use, and to
Smith's legacy as an artist.
E.V. Day, the N.Y.C. sculptor who was once Smith's girlfriend, agrees. "I
don't think he needed [drugs] at all. I think he needed [them] to deal with
the people and his conflicts with the relationships," she told Nugent.
ELLIOTT SMITH wasn't built with a strong outer shell. This much we always
knew. Fragility and delicacy were, ironically enough, the backbones of every
song he wrote-even when he moved into those Beatles-esque pop/rock tunes
with bright tones. He was self- effacing and humble to a fault. And in the
end, living a public life was simply too much for him. Too conflicting, too
confusing, and too exhausting. Check this lyric, "I took my own insides
out."
Listening to From a Basement on the Hill, you expect the minor notes, the
melancholy lyrics. What you don't expect is the street scene that prefaces
the song "King's Crossing." Before the keyboards come in, hard voices trade
slang and the whirl of a white buzz comes off like ambient noise from Boyz N
the Hood. The sadness in Elliott Smith is implicit; a soundscape like this
one isn't, even considering his habit of taking you down dark streets and
into lonely bars, and his ever-increasing ease around fancy studio tricks.
As you listen, the song becomes a sour reminder of how Smith's fundamental
style never changed, but the details often did-sour, because he won't be
around to surprise us anymore.
[e-mail]

Rating:
Summary: Nothing Interesting
Review: Sorry, Benjamin, your book is a tremendous disappointment. It is impossible to follow, poorly written and just a plain bore. To write a biography about someone, you should at the VERY LEAST gain access to those who knew him best or know him well yourself. The only thing the book contains is scraps of information, obtained by some of Smith's most obscure and random acquaintances. I should have paid closer attention to my contemporary's reviews and not have wasted the money on this book. It will be up for resale on eBay, very soon.

Rating:
Summary: Firsts are always subpar.
Review: The first biography is, of course, going to be weak. Who could resist the release of a bio. and a post-mortem album in the same season? Anyway, the book is, as has been said, rushed, fragmented, and contains nothing that most of Smith's fans who took it upon themselves to learn something about the artist didn't know already.

For me, it was just great to see Smith getting some form of real, lasting recognition. Hopefully this book is only the first of several.

It was helpful to me in the respect of tying together the fragments I'd read of Smith's life and putting them in something of an order.

For my friends who know his music only through my intervention and know very little about Smith himself, this book was very helpful. I just passed it to them and said "read." After all, not every music fan is obsessive enough (as I am) to go hunting for biographies and stories on the internet. So, to me, this book is for those people.

Rating:
Summary: Little More than Nothing
Review: The first known (or at least well-publicized) biography of Elliott Smith is something of a curiosity in that it takes pains to demonstrate an appreciation for the artist's work while simultaneously embracing the sort of crass commercialism that, essentially, sells books. Author Benjamin Nugent clearly has a soft spot for his subject, going as far as to justify Smith's more erratic moments as the inevitable collision between genius and so-called "normal" behavior, but there remains a vast disparity between what may be construed as a demonstration of admiration as opposed to one of respect.

Make no mistake about it: "Elliott Smith and the Big Nothing" was meant to capitalize on the one-year anniversary of Smith's death. The book has all the hallmarks of a rush-job: brevity (at 230 pages - index included - it's no "War and Peace"), inexcusable grammatical errors (copy editor, anyone?) and an unwieldy use of interview excerpts (glacier-sized chunks, really) from a scant handful of Smith's friends and acquaintances. While Nugent does get a break on this last point due to the fact that Smith's family and closest collaborators declined to comment for the book, the narrative still suffers from what can only be described as a mind-numbing overreliance on "talking heads" to tell Smith's story. Anyone familiar with Smith's work or his public persona(s) will tell you that an Elliott Smith biography couldn't possibly be boring, but this one is. "Big Nothing" offers shockingly few "revelations" about Smith's life that can't already be found on the Internet.

It's hard to imagine what sort of audience "Elliott Smith and the Big Nothing" is shooting for. Die-hard Smith fans will likely bristle at the regurgitation of previously known "facts," and the disjointed quality of the narrative - that it fails to illustrate how truly great Smith's work is while repeatedly acknowledging his genius - hardly seems capable of turning newbies onto his music. It's one thing to be told how good something is, and a completely different thing to experience it and know firsthand.

That said, the best introduction to Elliott Smith will always be his music. "Elliott Smith," "Either/Or," "XO," "Figure 8" - all of these are classic albums that demonstrate an astonishing range of talent and musical growth over the five or six years in which they were produced. Smith was an artist whose innate sensibilities and seeming candor in dealing with life's difficulties - failed romances, abuse, addiction - allowed his work to transcend what we've come to know as popular music. It's no mistake that Elliott Smith is so often compared to The Beatles; this guy was the real deal.

All things considered, I can't honestly say that "Big Nothing" is a bad book, per se, just a bit underwhelming from a fan's perspective. This may not be entirely fair to Nugent, of course, but it is my contention that the Elliott Smith fans who gobble up "Big Nothing" first will take away little more insight than they brought to it. If nothing else, Nugent's book seems premature. If you're reading this, Ben, I hope you have an opportunity to speak with those closest to Smith somewhere down the line and make "Big Nothing" the great book everyone wants it to be.

Rating:
Summary: Big Nothing is right.
Review: This book reads like an overlong and not particularly good college paper. Getting no help from any of his family or closest friends/girlfriends (or even people who worked with him musically), Benjamin Nugent is forced to interview aquaintances, review Elliott's magazine interviews and examine his song lyrics for insight into his psyche. It is a quick read, and not very compelling at that. You learn very little about his relationship with his parents or step-father, and almost no time is devoted to his untimely and gruesome death. And what of the death? Was it a desperate suicide or a grizzly murder? Nugent does not examine the case, or present the reader with the facts. He doesn't even speculate. He simply devotes a few pages to generalities that one could find by Googleing "Elliott Smith death." It also ends abruptly, with nothing at all written about the wake, aftermath, or effect of his death on his friends, family, fans, the music world, etc. Only a small paragraph about a benefit concert is mentioned. This is quite simply a fluffy book written by someone who is obviously a big fan of Elliott Smith and his work, but had no business writing a biography on the man. Perhaps it is simply too soon.