Look at Miss Ohio:
Elliott Smith, Gillian Welch, and the 2004 Presidential Election
November, 2004

Shortly after musician Elliott Smith’s death on October 21, 2003, an article in The New York Times spelled his name wrong. The correction, published a week later, reads, “The headline of the Playlist column last Sunday misspelled the given name of a musician who was cited for his influence on a younger generation of songwriters. He was Elliott Smith, not Elliot.” Smith’s given name, however, wasn’t Elliot with one “t” or two. It was Steve. He changed it himself in high school because he thought Steve sounded too jock-ish, and he wasn’t a jock.

As far as I can tell, the Times didn’t run a correction on their correction. Two months later, however, they once again fessed up to another mistake: publishing a picture of Smith’s bandmate Sam Coomes and labeling it as Smith. These are seemingly innocuous errors about one man in the Arts & Leisure section of The New York Times. But given that they occurred in the same year as an election seminal to our country’s history, amid countless malevolent inaccuracies on both sides of the aisle, I’m reminded just how much Americans seem content to know what large cultural and economic forces want us to know. The rest of reality, its good and its bad, is like a correction in the newspaper that no one reads—a few hidden lines that can’t possibly compete with the front page headline and its simple mistake, or its loud, boldfaced lie.

That tendency of America, to be merely simple and merely loud, should be beyond troubling to anyone who still believes that we live in a democracy, or ought to. Debate comes to us in rehearsed talking points that might fill a fleet of hot-air balloons, but take us nowhere nearer to understanding than the silence of a signed-off radio station. When President Bush was asked in the second debate what mistakes he’d made during his first term as president, he offered none to the moderator, to the public, or to the world. I have no doubt that at that moment, in order to avoid a potentially crippling sound bite, he distorted his reality enough to believe his own answer, but we are not that country. We are not always wrong, nor are we always right. We make great strides, and we fall. We’re a messy and complicated great nation that could be greater if we would just admit that we are messy and complicated. Saying our mis-steps aloud does not make us weak. It makes us strong. With it comes the freedom to ask for help, to rethink our path, and to start again. But if we are told time and again that we are the most powerful nation on earth, and that we do not make mistakes, it is human nature for some of us to believe it.

Most people in this country are no longer free in the place where it’s most necessary for both a working government and a full life: their minds. Large media outlets like CNN, Fox News, or NPR tell us what to think. Commercials tell us what to buy, what to wear, and what to eat. Because I’m a musician, I always remember that the same willful neglect applies to the music industry as well: commercial radio, corrupt at its core, plays the music it’s paid to play by record companies. You can opt out as a consumer, but most people don’t. Everyone in the country knows who Celine Dion is, but relatively few know about Elliott Smith, one of the most talented songwriters and musicians of this generation.

The larger public doesn’t know that Smith ever lived, and so they also don’t know that he died. The day that he put two stab wounds into his own chest was a day like any other day for most people. The day after he died, I received phone calls and e-mails from three close friends, breaking the news to me. The New York Times ran an obituary, but seeing it in black and white didn’t make it any more real, particularly because I soon learned that a posthumous album was already in the works. Since most of us fans only knew Smith through his music, the forthcoming album was, in every way, as if he continued to breath air and play shimmery guitar melodies for our pleasure.

The fall 2004 release of his album, From a Basement on a Hill, coincided with the last gassy breaths of presidential campaigning, and I was nearly nauseous about both. Certainly the election loomed larger in that last month. I was—and continue to be—terrified about President Bush’s renewed tenure in the White House. The specific worries of such an outcome were too many to count, even though it seems that I did so on a daily basis. Healthcare, gay rights, war, reproductive freedom, Social Security—they passed through my fidgety fingers again and again like secular rosary beads, and somewhere in the country someone counted real ones over many of the same fears, though my foil would have hoped for different outcomes. The country is as polarized as it could be on some of these issues, in part because of the lack of nuance and facts in the debate.

Why would a church-going Midwesterner not vote against gay marriage on a ballot initiative if their pastor has told them that a Democrat in the White House will mean an end to the legality of all marriage? Why would a gay man who wants to marry his long-time partner not think that all evangelical Christians want to lump in his love for another man with child molestation and murder when that’s what he hears the evangelicals saying on TV? Politicians, as well as their mouthpieces in local cultural institutions and media, have built the equivalent of the Berlin Wall right here in America, stifling our conversations and leaving us to hear only the echo of our own voice as we shout at the concrete in front of us. Both sides are hoping to get through to the cretin on the other side of the wall, a person whom they have never met, and don’t care to.

During the election, listening to hour after hour of talk on the radio and reading daily about the latest polls was alarming, because it solidified for me the sorry state of the country’s political discourse and the general sickness of the body politic. The mainstream media, be it liberal or conservative, doesn’t seem to care anymore about getting it right. Why must those reporters, or even the vice president of the United States, defer to FactCheck.org when they’d like someone to know the truth?

Like many people I know, most of the fall campaign I was mildly depressed. Despite the fact that I had just moved to Philadelphia, had no money and no job, I called the Young Voter Alliance and agreed to work for free in between the shows of a short tour I had planned for a recently completed album. It was a way to feel as though I had some sort of control over what might happen: volunteering would calm my nerves. It did make me feel a little better. But I still wasn’t sleeping well, was nervous and irritable, and had fallen prey to worse-than-usual mood swings. Sometime around mid October I started mainlining NPR, and inadvertently got my boyfriend, David, addicted as well. While brushing our teeth, doing dishes, or eating dinner, we listened nonstop to WHYY, our local NPR affiliate, frequently yelling at the radio. After whatever commentary had just been given, we would scream “But who is going to win the election!” at everyone from Fresh Air’s Terry Gross to newsman Carl Castle. Our frustration had made us indiscriminate: if you were talking on the radio, you ought to be telling us some bit of news that gave us a hint about the outcome of the election. We couldn’t stand not knowing anymore. I think I might know now what it’s like to play Russian Roulette. The anticipation is truly worse than the gun going off.

During that period, David and I would tentatively ask each other if we were ready to listen to the new Elliott Smith album, and we repeatedly decided we couldn’t do it yet. We came close a few times. We both visited record stores on our own but passed the album over for other titles. We would stare at the Smith poster on the door of Repo Records on South Street, waiting for a sign that we were supposed to go in and get it, and then we would move on. I also continued going door-to-door, reminding people to vote. The night of the election I was heartened to learn that the polling places I walked by on the way back to the Young Voter Alliance field office were reporting record voter turnout in Philadelphia, and it looked as though the Democrats would take Pennsylvania. But then I went to Lucy’s Hat Shop, a local bar, to watch the rest of the results with other YVA volunteers and employees, and the good vibes went away. Though a cheer went up when Pennsylvania turned blue, I looked at the blown up election map and stared at a still-undeclared Ohio, knowing that the math wouldn’t work in Kerry’s favor unless our neighboring state followed suit.

Just weeks before the election I had been playing shows in Cleveland and Columbus, and casually conversing with people in the bars there had been the upper I needed, as everyone seemed as though they were going to vote, and to vote Democratic. On every highway I had been on, I looked for Kerry-Edwards bumper stickers, and found them. This is the fourth presidential election I’ve voted in, and I’ve never seen the people my age so engaged. But as soon as I left those two liberal Ohio cities, as elsewhere in the country, there wasn’t much doubt that it was Bush country. Though some odd turns in events, I ended up in a church in Akron after the funeral of a friend’s father, eating homemade meatloaf and macaroni and cheese. From there I was going home to Philadelphia, a long, eight-hour drive, and as I looked around the reception hall, I couldn’t help thinking that these people, not the young people I’d met in Cleveland or Columbus, would decide the election.

I felt as though I had dropped down a rabbit hole—I was Alice at the Mad Hatter’s tea party. Here, at the church, were people who were nice enough, but whose reality, I supposed, was entirely different than mine. I looked out on even the most genteel grandmother, and imagined that in private, with her elderly friends, she tyrannically abused the unpatriotic peaceniks, the faggots, and the Dixie Chicks. And I felt guilty for that I felt that way. I am not by nature or nurture that person. I don’t judge people based on their skin color, their social class, or their last name, but here I was thinking for people whose names I didn’t know, ascribing atrocities to them. I was both fearful and filled with some sort of bloodlust for the moment, perhaps when someone spotted my nose ring and outed me as a liberal, that politics might replace the mashed potatoes on the table.

This, as I ate the food I’d been offered by strangers at the funeral of a friend’s father, a man whose friends and family were grieving his loss, and who had raised a daughter more liberal than most, just as my conservative father had. I not only assumed that we couldn’t have had an intelligent, respectful conversation had politics been broached, but that I didn’t belong there, that I needed to leave as quickly as possible, and—even though I am enraged at the lack of debate in this country—that the least desirable thing that might happen was that we might talk to one another. I left feeling convinced that I had escaped something, just as though you might leave a sick ward thankful that no one had touched you. I got in the car and tried to find an NPR station.

This irrational state of mind—free from borders, without electoral votes—is exactly where the government and the media would like us to be. They’ve successfully made us afraid not only of real and imagined terrorists, but of our own shadow, of our fellow citizens. And as long as we are afraid to talk to one another, they will continue to make deals that no one notices, selling off public airwaves to the highest corporate bidder and letting our increasingly privatized prison system be run be the lowest. Healthcare. Gay rights. War. Reproductive freedom. Social Security. A thousand other issues and injustices. It is exhausting to think about, and so many of us choose not to. Instead, we listen to the familiar and soothing voice of our choice as it tells us what we want to hear.

When I woke November 3 and found the media trying to make more of the presidential contest than was there, I gave up. Three months of stress tying up my body fell away and left me with a cold numbness, the kind you get when you’re mourning and the pain is still there but you can’t cry anymore. I admit I even let go a few tears listening to Kerry’s concession speech, and at the moment he said it, as embarrassing as it is, I wished he could have wrapped his arms around me too.
Kerry had lost, and that, among other things, meant that listening to Elliott Smith would have to wait until David and I were feeling a little better. It had been a year since Smith died, and trying to reconcile the next four years while finally dealing with the finality of his death seemed oppressive. Smith will not make more music. It can’t change. It can’t be better. It’s just over. The organization I work for now, The Bread & Roses Community Fund, made buttons after the election reasserting the advice of Mother Jones, “Don’t mourn. Organize.” That’s great for politics, but no protest will ever bring Elliott Smith back. For him, I can only mourn.

Two weeks passed. On November 16, several new albums made their way onto my kitchen table: Kruder and Dorfmeister, Chet Baker, Dean Wareham and Brita Phillipsæ—and Smith’s From a Basement on the Hill. I wasn’t the one who had bought them, but I agreed it was time. David and I listened to everything else first, and then put Smith’s album on after we’d had a few glasses of cheap champagne. We said very little while we listened. I swooned over the beautiful bits, let the anger sink into me, and was sick that this was the last of it. And then, at the end of the album—the final last song I would ever get to hear from Elliott Smith—I looked at the title, “A Distorted Reality is Now a Necessity to be Free,” and I caught the lyrics, “You disappoint me/you people raking in on the world/The Devil's script sells/you the heart of a blackbird,” followed by “It's so disappointing/first I put it all down to luck/God knows why my/country don't give a fuck (fuck).”

It’s not as though Smith hadn’t touched on issues of class and denial before in other songs; he seems always to be looking at someone he once had a connection to that has gone on to some other sphere in the same town. But this was so direct a hit that it really took me aback, and it seemed strange to me that his posthumous editors, engineers, and mixers had let these be his last words; I don’t think of him as a political artist, and here was a song in which you can’t ignore the anger directed not only at himself, which is typical, but also at an amoral capitalism.

Reviews of the song occasionally acknowledge its political content, but they focus on the drug references. MoveOn.org and McSweeny’s went so far as to put “A Distorted Reality is Now a Necessity to be Free” on a compilation titled Soundtrack for a Future America. But I’m still glad that I didn’t listen to the song until after the election was over. It seems even more powerful now, because it so effortlessly mixes personal sickness with the sickness of the country. It was exactly the state I had been in. The song starts with Smith’s ubiquitous heroin references, “I'm floating in a black balloon/O.D’d on Easter afternoon/My mama told me, ‘Baby stay clean/there's no in between.’" He’s first talking about the degradation of his own body, and then he moves on to the violation of the environment, singing, “Sun's rising on a choppy glare/Rain dropping acid bought up in the air,” and then he melds the imagery together in the choruses when he sings, “Shine on me baby/cos it’s raining in my heart.” It’s a brutal song, and there is no relief anywhere, even in the sweetness of Smith’s vocals.

Given the heavy influence that the Beatles had on Smith, I think it’s possible that the “heart of a blackbird” is a reference both to the Beatles song and Smith’s own heart: it was no secret that Smith despised the record industry’s shameless shilling, and this album was probably going to be a return to touring and publicity after a few years of silence brought on in part by his aversion to fame. It was the irony of ironies that Smith had to share a stage with the audience-adoring Celine Dion when his song “Miss Misery” on the Good Will Hunting soundtrack was up for a Grammy. (Smith lost out to Dion, of course, hit bottom again, and then had cleaned himself up with the help of an alternative addiction center before he died.) He once told a reporter that his friends, upon seeing him on television at the ceremony, felt as though one of them, one of their own, had gone to the moon. That seems right. He was just as much an alien at the Grammy’s as I was in a church in Akon, Ohio. The Grammy’s usually serve the next big boy band, and here, improbably, was a West Coast junkie with a scarred face and a bizarre white suit, singing one of his eloquent, beautiful songs among people with much larger bank accounts and considerably less talent.

It’s worthy to note that according to a biography of him, Elliott Smith apparently routinely defended Celine Dion as his friends took easy pot shots at her. He didn’t want the easy take. He didn’t need it. He understood exactly how distorted reality could be, and how complicated. I’d argue that’s exactly why his songs are so affecting and beautiful. He lets heavy lyrics rest improbably on soaring melodies, and he throws out layers of vocals that snare you in sweet, dewy nets. His music doesn’t tell you what to think, it just stops you long enough that you start to think. That’s why it’s so frustrating that Smith didn’t take a cue from the Beatles song and fly into the “light of a dark black night,” on this last album, or in his own life. Instead, in that final song, he turns out the spotlight for good, and floats away in his black balloon.

When the last notes had rung out that night on From a Basement on the Hill, David went to the stereo, and played Gillian Welch’s Soul Journey, another album we had first listened to in silence, sitting in a run-down rooming house in Allentown, Pennsylvania. I cried after four bars, just before the vocals kick in. Here was the same sentiment in some way, but from a gentler, more innocent time. Welch, as usual, is able to evoke an entire life and ethos in a few simple lines, and in “Miss Ohio” we get not heroin addiction and acid rain but a society girl who just wants the sun on her face, “Oh, me-oh-my-oh/Would you look at Miss Ohio/She’s running around with the ragtop down/Says I want to do right, but not right now.” Her vice is freedom of mind. She’s floating away on her own good vibes knowing that eventually she’ll need to leave the imagined, liberal land of Atlanta, GA, to be tethered down with responsibility and the middle class values of her home in Ohio. Welch sings, “She runs around on the shoulder/of a regimental soldier/and mama starts pushing that wedding gown/She says I wanna do right, but not right now.” She’ll come back from her joyride, marry, and the ragtop will go up forever on her fresh air and freedom.

The song’s slow, mournful beat and weeping slide guitar is paired with a sly narrator’s voice that is both judgmental and joyful—it’s the voice of an older person clucking her tongue to a friend as they rock on the porch, while their smiling eyes say, “Go ahead, sweetheart. Ride as far away as you can get.” As I listen to these opposing fealties—to the past and to the future—I think about our country’s evolving mores, especially in this post-election context. I keep thinking, Ohio wants to do right, but not right now. In all likelihood some of those church ladies in Akron felt the same as the narrator in Welch’s song, whether I could see it at the time or not. And so I have to remind myself to be patient. Not to remain silent, but to be patient. What’s “right” is changing, it’s just changing slowly. Right forty years ago meant Miss Ohio came home and married the boy next door. Right today means she’s free not to come home, or to come home and not marry. Right in fifty years will mean she comes home and passes over the boy next door for the girl next door, and that the whole neighborhoods fetes the happy couple at a church supper in Akron. It will happen. Just not right now.

While the election had the finality of a death in the first few weeks, it feels now more like a hangover. We’ve poisoned ourselves, but it’s not for good. And hopefully America will make a better choice next time. It was a close race, despite the dismissive language of “mandates” and “political capital” that have spun the election results for the people who want to hear it that way. The next four years will be filled with both acid rain and regimental soldiers, but I have to believe that even in my lifetime that my gay friends will marry if they choose to, that America will stop democratizing people at gunpoint, and that religious differences will not automatically spur wars abroad and at home. Though that time and that place might for some seem unfathomably distant, strange, and new, we should remember that we once had a president who believed we could send a man to the moon, and we could have again. To get there, dialogue and understanding must take the place of our combative media and government. Liberal and conservative citizens alike must admit that we are failing our country by allowing our identities and our humanity to be defined by powers that would prefer us to believe that the other has neither. We are not who they say we are.