Elliott Smith - Henry Fonda Theater, Los Angeles (January 31, 2003)

The first time I lived in L.A., I went to a lot of concerts with my friend Naoko. We met because I bought a ticket from her to see Ryan Adams solo at the Wiltern Theater with Tegan & Sara. We ended up going to a ton of shows together. A ton of memorable shows. I’ve lost touch with her, but wherever she is, I hope she’s good.

We had tickets to see Elliott Smith the same weekend my friend Scott was visiting from Indiana. Scott and I met Naoko and her friend in Hollywood and then we split up; Naoko and I going to the Henry Fonda to see Rilo Kiley and Elliott Smith and Scott and her friend going to get drinks and wait on us.

I’ve never been a huge Rilo Kiley fan, but they put on a decent show and we sat down on the floor to wait for Elliott. He came out solo and everyone stayed sitting down. Technically, he wasn’t bad at all, but it was obvious he was on something. At the time, we assumed he’d relapsed on heroin, but with his suicide less than nine months later, and a negative toxicology report, it’s now obvious he was just drunk.

Watching the video now, it’s not as hard as it was sitting there, but it’s still not easy to see him in that state, especially with the gift of hindsight. It wasn’t, for our tastes, a good show. It was hard to pay attention. His music was dynamic, but this performance was not. He said a lot of things, that, especially in hindsight, seem like foreshadowing. He keeps reassuring people he’s okay, that these are just sad songs from another time when he was sad. We stayed for about 45 minutes and then left.

I remember very clearly, that day in October, being at work and finding out they’d found his body and it was a self-inflicted stab wound. After work, I drove over to the sound store in Echo Park where the Figure 8 mural is, and it was already a well established shrine to his memory.

I don’t try to make anymore sense of things like this than one should. It’s sad. And, while I’d never even met the man, sharing a room with him, watching him perform from about twenty feet away, in that intimate setting and having spent hours with his songs, it was some kind of a loss. it’s definitely a night I’ve thought about many times over the last twenty years.

Hard to believe it’s been that long.