All Apologies

A Fond Farewell to a Friend

Music is a ritual.  Suicide is a ritual.  Sometimes they happen so close to each other, the effect can be terrifying.  Yet, when it is an artist that has gotten under our skin, we have to listen again.  It was April 1994, when Kurt Cobain decided he’d had enough, wrote a suicide note quoting Neil Young and blew his brains out.  Cobain was 27, of course, and I was 21, a junior in college, attuned for this generational moment. I never quite got over it.   In 2003, tender, vulnerable, delicately melodic and petulant Elliott Smith stabbed himself in the chest while arguing with his girlfriend.  He was 34, I was 30, still making plans for life.  Every time we listen to Cobain or Smith (or the tragic beauty of Nick Drake and Judee Sill, whose music lifted so many others while they failed to lift themselves) it is impossible not to think of it as an elaborate suicide note, and we are compelled to listen to the very last notes recorded, filmed, documented in any way, looking for clues.  Such moments are the closest we can get to the afterlife.  Where were they, when they had our ears, our emotional lives, when they were so close to the other side?  We imagine every decision about writing, recording, performing.  (On the Nirvana MTV Unplugged recording, a few months near the end, we hear Cobain groaning to his bandmates, “Am I gonna have to do this by myself?”) Music always presents problems, but they are solvable. 

I talked about these sorts of things with my friend Will Georges, a deeply troubled and talented poet who took his own life on April 4, 2019, at the age of 24.  He reached out to me the previous summer because he couldn’t find anyone for musical conversations.  It became an instant friendship.  Everything was about poetry and music and relationships, and we made each other laugh, usually about the darkest things.   I told him about how, right before I went to Claremont on a fellowship in the summer of 2008, my colleague George Saunders told me he had just written to “Dave” Foster Wallace to tell him that we should hang out when I got there.  Wallace committed suicide shortly after I arrived.  I told Will I speculated that looking me up might have been the thing that pushed him over the edge.  Will thought this was funny.  It was his kind of humor.  I made him dinner every week, and I always made sure that he had extra to bring home. He wanted to learn about music from me.  He had never touched a piano, and I showed him how to improvise on Miles Davis’s “So What,” first the white keys, then the black.  His musical instincts were primitive, impressive for a beginner.  But he said he was freaked out.  We listened to Coltrane with Eric Dolphy, to Ornette Coleman and others.  He said he was really freaked out.  He loved it, though, or so he said.  Soon after, he checked himself into a psych ward—not a very good one—because he was imagining hitting strangers over the head with a giant hammer.  I told him Melville wrote about such feelings at the beginning of Moby-Dick:

…whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball.

It was a way of letting him know that he could be ok.  All us writers were a bit mad, right?  Dear, sweet Will wrote these lines:

In all men a single hatchet is buried

in a stump, it is waiting

to be plucked out and swung at anything

with innocence to its name.

“This is not my life, it’s just a fond farewell to a friend.”  That was Elliott Smith, on a posthumously released track.  This was probably his emotional state when he was having that fight with his girlfriend.  “A little less than a happy high/A little less than a suicide / The only thing that you really tried…” The voice is so thin, anguished, helpless, yet stubbornly melodic. We, who are listening, are not arguing. He loved harmonies; he loved The Beatles.  But a song is over in five minutes or so.  There are those times between writing and performing when one has to live, and those are not so easy for some of us, especially the ones we live through on our headphones, in our internal breakdowns.  When I look back on Will, I wonder if there was something magical I could have said that would have made him want to live.  I felt like we talked about everything.  But did I miss something?  We keep going back to the edge for clues.  We, the bereaved, the survivors, we search for that spot that would make most people uncomfortable, but we are addicted.  It was April of 1994 that Cobain left us, and it was April of 2019 that Will left us, about three years now.  His posthumous collection of poetry, It’s You I Like, deserves attention, including a picture of the tragic poet, looking like a Calvin Klein model. The Icarus myth yet again.  When I miss him, I can visit him there.

When I first heard Nirvana’s “All Apologies,” I thought the last line was, “All alone is all we are,” when it was really, “All in all is all we are.”  And yet all alone is how we feel when we are cornered, when there is nowhere else to go.  All in all is acceptance that we become part of everything in the end.  The ones who leave us become part of the all in all, and we are the ones who feel all alone, until we turn up the volume and pay our friends another visit. 

There is amateur video of Elliott Smith’s last concert, Salt Lake City, September 19, 2003, and the finale was “Long, Long, Long,” a sublimely morose George Harrison song from The White Album.  Smith hangs on.  He finishes.  He takes the applause.   He seems happy for a moment. (Is this what Camus meant when he said one must imagine Sisyphus happy?)  Would Smith have been happier with more applause?  Of course not.  Will and I talked about Smith.  We talked about how he sounded like a skinnier guy than he was.  He looked sort of like a bruiser.  We imagined him looking as vulnerable as he sounded.  But when I look at that final concert, I see him disappearing into the music.  It is the only thing he has between him and the world, and it will be over soon.  I gave Will a hug, as always, that final night I cooked him dinner.  I told him to reach out to me anytime. I texted him a couple of days later. I think it may have been around the time he asphyxiated himself with a belt and a doorknob.  I’ll never know what I could have said in the intervening 48 hours, but I imagine that space was like watching the end of Elliott Smith’s last concert.  That George Harrison song was about eternity, which takes a long, long time.  But not long enough.  It is a droning G Minor chord, which then goes from relative major, to the fourth, then back again.   How could I ever have lost you?  When I loved you.  You know that I need you.  When I loved you…  The chord lingers, the crowd cheers, the song is over.  Elliott Smith has somewhere else to go.