The Pop Corporation

Elliott Smith has basically become something of an American Nick Drake – gone too soon and a voice for sensitive and introverted around the world’s bedrooms. Of course, there’s joy in both of their music and so much to love, but it’s the downer, depressed element that made both artists so enigmatic. And when you become an enigma, fans turn into devotees.

So with that, Elliott Smith fans have been left wanting more after his grim and untimely passing. It seems that there was rare music hiding in plain sight all along, but we’ll get to that.

There’s been a fair bit of chat about Elliott Smith’s high school band and, when asked about it during his peak years, Smith was typically evasive and cute about the whole thing.

When asked, he’d say: “I really promised myself a long time ago I would keep [them] from ever seeing the light of day.” He wouldn’t even say the band’s name because he didn’t want anyone fishing around and looking for his old music. Every musician has got embarrassing WIPs in the vaults, and even more have had childhood bands that they’d rather forget, regardless of the clamour for such things from nerds like us.

However, they’ve been around all along and we’re going to link to them, should you want to hear them for yourselves. They’re on YouTube but the uploader has disabled embedding, so hit the links.

Back then, Elliott was Steven Smith, a pupil at Lincoln High School in Portland. He made friends with some other music nuts, and over the years, they recorded six albums of their own material. Released locally on DIY cassettes at shows and local record shops, if you knew the guys, you could pick up a tape of someone who was about to become a very important voice and figure in US counterculture.

The band were called Harum Scarum and were very much an alternative rock band, making clattering, gonzo indie rock. In the track ‘Small Talk’, that’s definitely Elliott Smith on the vocals, in a kinda spoken, hectic thing, double tracked. Listen here. We can hear a pre-cursor to grunge – maybe a little Primus-meets-Sonic Youth? Jane’s Addiction? It’s hard to pin down, but the fact is, Smith didn’t need to be embarrassed of it.

In ‘Catholic’, it’s a more straightforward affair – again a alt-rock that’s got a sniff of punk, a sniff of early REM and again, nothing to be too ashamed of (but then, we’re fans of Elliott Smith and his hang-ups, bless him). Listen here and you’ll hear something of a precursor to ‘Everybody Cares, Everybody Understands’.

And there’s this which is a collection of odds-and-sods labelled as ‘early songs’, but many of them are band efforts, in the name of a little more accuracy. Again, a burgeoning talent which hadn’t quite found its feet, but absolutely nothing to be embarrassed of.

What’s always so fascinating when looking at things like this, is trying to pick out where the spark starts or threads of ideas that can found their way into songs that became more famous and saw Smith in the eye of the world’s music press.

Tracks like ‘Take A Fall’ is where it’s at though. You can hear who would become Elliott Smith real hard. That Beatle fanboy emerges with blissful country-rock stylings that wouldn’t be amiss on a Big Star LP or something.

It’s magical stuff.

Fact is, there’s a lot of youthful joy in these recordings and seeing as they were a bunch of teenagers hanging around in basements and smoking cigarettes in parking lots, there’s a whole load of stuff being figured out, feelings, and all that awkward and brilliant stuff.

In ‘Vatican Rock‘, they get a friend to perform a tap-dancing solo. Sure, you might cringe if you made the thing and became a massive indie-star, but by god, if that isn’t the cutest sentence we’ll ever write on these pages. Exuberance and throwing all your ideas at things for the sheer fuck of it. Truly, that’s the stuff that makes the world go around.

If you want an even deeper dive into all this, Pitchfork have recorded a podcast about the whole thing which is well worth a listen. Click here to get stuck into that.

All-in-all, this is good stuff and when we love a person’s music (and them as a person), then it is so satisfying to be able to get lost in unearthed gems and cute treasures like this. When someone’s gone too soon, we’re robbed of so much that, when things like this appear, it brings them back to life briefly, and that’s humbling, lovely stuff.