Subtle strummer Elliott Smith stabbed himself in the chest with a steak knife on Oct. 21, 2003. He was barely 34; that night, friends found him face down in his Los Angeles home.
Official reports named it an ‘apparent suicide,’ but there was no doubt among Smith fans or in the underground music scene. Ask anyone vaguely familiar with his melancholy voice and fragile melodies about his death, and you’ll be met with quiet acceptance: I’m sad, man, but c’mon who’s really surprised?
Though Smith’s musical canon is sparse six full-length solo albums, three with his old band Heatmiser, and a smattering of seven-inch records and EP’s he will be remembered for his aching, intricate music, which spawned such unlikely singles as ‘Needle in the Hay’ (prophetically used during Luke Wilson’s suicide attempt in Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums) and the Grammy-winning ‘Miss Misery.’
But he never liked the spotlight much. Tormented, Smith turned away from fame and into a disjointed, drug-induced depression. Of course comparing him to Nick Drake, a folk forefather who produced three studio albums espousing the eerily beautiful, haunting regrets in life before popping a bottle of antidepressants in 1974, is warranted.
Smith’s and Drake’s suicides are not isolated anomalies in the star system. It is useful, however, to look at these two cases, nearly 30 years apart, as illustrative of the ‘tragic rock star’ archetype we have allowed to fester in our culture since the genre began. (The use of ‘tragic’ recalls another literary archetype, the ‘tragic hero,’ or the protagonist who appears flawless yet possesses one fault that ultimately leads to his demise; for our rocker, that fault is a destructive beast, assuming the forms of depression, addiction, insanity.)
Our relationship to rock stars is complex and rarely cause-and-effect. As fans and critics, we don’t shoot heroin into their weakened veins or siphon alcohol directly into their bloodstreams; we sure as hell don’t cock the revolvers. Yet by accepting deaths like Smith’s as part of the natural ebb and flow of music stardom thereby martyring and mythologizing dead rock stars we encourage our musicians to live in excess, and continue their self-destruction.
Rock equals sex and drugs, drugs and sex, and one only has to tune into VH1’s ‘Behind the Music’ to see just what we expect of our movers and shakers. Each episode of ‘Behind the Music’ follows a trusty trajectory: rock star fights to find gigs; once he gains a following, he can’t handle the pressure/fame/girl troubles and sinks into depression and chemical cures; he wallows at the bottom for a while (here we see Steven Tyler writhing onstage in a cocaine coma; there is Nikki Sixx from Motley Cru lying drunk beneath three naked women, nearing asphyxiation); but then overcomes and resurfaces.
The recovery segment is always the shortest in the hour-long program, and redemption comes only after a grueling fight with death. (Tamer, albeit seminal, stars like Van Morrison never appear on these specials. If an artist prefers to spend time with his family or say, golfing, he clearly isn’t sensational enough for prime time.)
Need further proof? Think of the 1970s, when rock stars died like flies on a psychedelic candy trip to mortality. Perhaps Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin, both casualties of the ’70s, best exemplify the sex, drugs and rock and roll creed. Morrison, a lanky lizard in tight leather pants with fiery eyes and a penchant for the perverse, drank and smoked, snorted and screwed, wrote songs about Oedipal complexes and deflowering children (‘Show me the way to the next little girl / Or we will die, or we will die’). Then he drank too much in a Paris bathtub and died in 1971.
The Doors were a tight and innovative band, but unfortunately Morrison’s example of live hard/die hard has become the norm. As early as 1981, Lester Bangs stated in Musician magazine: ‘If Jim Morrison cared so little about his life, was so willing to make it amount to one huge alcoholic exhibitionist joke, why should they or we or anybody finally care, except insofar as the seamy details provide trashy entertainment? Or do they … take exactly these rantings and pukings as evidence he was a god, or at least a lord?’
Also consider Janis Joplin, a seedy, Southern Comfort-swilling purveyor of musical sex. Her live performances with Big Brother and the Holding Company were inspired and sweaty. No one was surprised when she succumbed to her addictive personality in 1970. As Jon Landau stated in his 1970 reflection, ‘It Hurts Me Too,’ in the Boston Phoenix: ‘The star is supposed to be what we think he is. Janis Joplin was admired and loved for her capacity to drink. Drinking became an important part of her person. It is not surprising that people find it hard to believe she died of a heroin overdose just because she wasn’t supposed to do that … It wasn’t part of our Janis.’
Society the young and impressionable, those Baby Boomers that now control our entertainment industry accepted Morrison’s and Joplin’s transgressions, making their behavior cool, sexy, desirable. ‘The trouble with eulogizing a Janis Joplin is that, in doing so, we are eulogizing not achievement or artistry but a life that did no one any real good, neither her nor those who idolized her,’ George Frazier commented in The Boston Globe in 1970. ‘To try to pass off as art what was merely drunk and disorderly is to mislead the young.’
But we continue to eulogize and romanticize her, and Morrison, and Jimi Hendrix, and Brian Jones, and Marc Bolan, and countless others, perpetuating the myth and the archetype. It’s okay to drink a bottle of Johnny Walker if you can still hit those high notes, Janis.
A trip to Mostly Posters on Commonwealth Avenue, is revealing. Interspersed among today’s deviants and future casualties Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Justin Timberlake and The Strokes many posters mark our glorification of the legendary and dead. Hendrix sits atop a shiny purple motorcycle, donning a neon orange leisure suit and a feather-topped fedora. He’s all smiles and shimmering patina no dilated pupils or bleeding noses in fantasy poster land. Morrison, appearing without those lecherous Doors, broods attractively with words materializing by his left flank: ‘Sensitive, mystical poet / Your Legacy lives on / Stoned as a petrified reptile / In the amber resin of your ageless words.’ Don’t worry, mom. This poster doesn’t feature Morrison’s famous indecent exposure fetish.
But the two-dimensional dead rock musician that appears the most at Mostly Posters is Nirvana’s volatile front man: Kurt Cobain. Though maintaining grunge music’s aloofness and mystique, Cobain rarely looks directly at the camera, his greasy, stringy blonde mane obscuring blue eyes. The posters place Cobain in a heavenly aura, as the lights from the ‘MTV Unplugged’ stage dance on his wanton head, worn green sweater and shining guitar. He is often fuzzy, out of focus. He’s soft. You want to hold him.
Cobain was never fuzzy. Prickly, manic, emotionally unstable, maybe but never fuzzy. Nirvana spearheaded the Seattle grunge movement, speaking for a generation of disgruntled youth in combat boots and flannel. From the band’s beginning in the late ’80s to Cobain’s suicide in 1994, Nirvana played with themes of rape and death and angst and achieved a number-one album, their ever-present faces splayed across all major magazines. But, as Cobain scribbled in his suicide note, his fans gave him ‘too much love.’ He couldn’t handle the fame and adoration. He shot himself in the head.
The books and the accolades started immediately (culminating in Rolling Stone, which named Cobain ‘Artist of the Decade’ in late 1999). And then came The Seattle Times’ cover picture on Saturday, April 9, 1994: a four-column photograph showed Cobain lying dead on the floor of his greenhouse. Cobain’s torso, right leg, black Converse All-Stars and clenched first, all in full, bright colors. The newspaper cropped his blown-in face and splattered brains. For many fans, Cobain’s crucifixion on the cover of a national newspaper crossed the line. Since when do said papers give musician corpses front-page billing? Letters poured into the Times, and as one member of Seattle’s alternative press loathed: ‘What makes these writers think they can turn a sad and lonely life into a piece of art?’
Of course, the Times was giving the public what they thought the public wanted: a tribute to the ‘tragic rock star.’ It was, indeed, the perfect visual manifestation of what society has been doing for years. But for once, people didn’t find the rock lifestyle glamorous how can drugs be glamorous if they end in graphic, grisly suicide?
In his song, ‘My, My, Hey, Hey (Out of the Blue),’ Neil Young moans, ‘Is it better to burn out / than to fade away?’ Current rock culture opts for burning out: it sells more magazines, warrants more posters and confirms our delusions about the glamour of indulgence and excess.
But what if as in the Kurt Cobain newspaper incident people were more outraged and moved to question the ‘tragic rock star’ archetype? Would it have prevented Elliott Smith from knifing himself? Probably not. But it would create a culture in which we place a higher value on celebrity life and set higher standards for musicians a culture in which rock star depression and drug use aren’t automatically equated with excusable death.
Later in the song, Young croons, ‘Hey hey, my my / rock and roll will never die.’ A sweeping hope, yes; but perhaps a call to action.