I have a deep fascination with rock locations – those places that frame the music and bring it to life.  As a semi-Seattle native by way of Hawaii, I went to Garfield High School that has Jimi Hendrix and Quincy Jones as alums and lived through the glory days of the rise of grunge and could walk the streets marked forever in songs by Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden.  But the mantle of rock coolness moved south of Seattle at the end of the Clinton years and the crown passed to Portland, Oregon.  It is a great place that channels the vibe of other cities at opposing ends of the I-5 corridor here on the West Coast of America —the Beat sensibility of San Francisco and the caffeine-induced Grunge introspection of Seattle. It is a city that sports a wonderful river walk and the temple to used book lovers that is Powell’s, one of the greatest independent used bookstores on the planet.   Portland used to be the lesser cousin of major cities on the West Coast, until it found its hero and martyr in Elliott Smith.

Today’s cities become personalities when they lift up an icon that both embodies what the collective urban culture is yearning for and challenges the city’s future at the same time. For many cities this is an artist who, for a brief time, embodies the unique urban history of a place while adding chapters to its history. New York has Lou Reed in the 1960s, Detroit has Iggy Pop from the early 1970s, Seattle had Kurt Cobain in the early 1990s. And Portland has Elliott Smith. While Portland has become ‘popular’ as the American hipster capitol of late due in large part to the success of IFC’s sketch comedy “Portlandia” staring SNL’s Fred Armiston and Slater-Kenney’s Carrie Brownstein and indie bands like The Decemberists, it is really with Elliott Smith that Portland found its voice.

When most people think back on Elliott Smith’s career, three words come to mind: Good Will Hunting. Gus Van Sant, a fellow Portland auteur and indie darling, featured Smith’s fractured and tortured songs in the 1997 film about a genius trapped in the life of an abused, emotionally fragile Peter Pan. The movie starred then-unknown Harvard grad Matt Damon and Ben Affleck and catapulted Elliott Smith from the Portland indie scene to a spot on the Oscars stage next to Céline Dion. In an act that seemed to endorse Frederick Nietzsche’s aphorism that “God is Dead”,  Céline Dion ended up winning the Oscar that year. In many ways, if the movie had been focusing on a musical genius rather than on a mathematical wunderkind, we would have been watching Good Elliott Smith on the screen. Elliott Smith’s music came at a time when the Pacific Northwest grunge mania was finally dying out and his brand of “miniaturized psychodrama” seemed the ideal balm for a regional music scene that felt as if it had just been erased by corporate takeover. In a retrospective article of Elliott’s career, Portland writer John Graham talks about Elliott’s connection to his sense of place as a Portland musician:

“Elliott’s early solo albums are like cheat sheets for comprehending every Rose City songwriter who ever wrestled with a four-track recorder in his or her bedroom: Fighting the guitar for that elusive transitional bridge chord. Trying to decipher lyrics scribbled onto a bar napkin at last call. Whispering into the microphone so as not to wake the housemates. It was these confessional tales, on Roman Candle, Elliott Smith and Either/Or, which made him such an adored figure around town. There was something about the solo albums—so private and yet strident at the same time—that hit some kind of Portland indie-rock G-spot. Witnessing the odd symbiosis that occurred between Elliott and his audiences during those early shows was like being privy to a cerebral orgy.”

Elliott Smith’s music is the sound and heartbeat of Portland.  To hear lyrics like “They’re waking you up to close the bar / The street’s wet, you can tell by the sound of the cars” (from the song Clementine) could describe Glasgow’s Ashton Lane at 3 a. m in rainy West Scotland, but it’s a scene that is deeply grounded in almost every rain- and beer-soaked curb that a Portlander can identify. In Condor Avenue, a song Smith wrote at age seventeen and that later became the centerpiece for 1994’s Roman Candle, he writes like James Joyce describing Dublin in Ullysses:

(more…)