This week Paper Covers Rock is presenting a live Elliott Smith show in five installments. Mp3s in each entry will expire when the next installment is posted. All apologies from the writer/recordist, etc.

Elliott Smith (Live @ Largo, 4/11/98) requests “Rose Parade” requests/tuning break “No Name #3″ “The Biggest Lie” banter “Coming Up Roses” requests “Alameda”

A little local Portland color is painted into this portion of our Elliott Smith set from Low Saturday 1998. It is, after all, the City of Roses and Microbrews, home to its own annual, well, “Rose Parade.”

Smith uses this opportunity to set up a contrast that’ll ring true for most of us, sort of drawing the team lines in life. On the parade route we have the favored sons on display, false and fancy even if all is not right. The parade is passing by dwellers of the lowlife, rowdy, rundown and pushed to the margins.

OK, so snobs v. slobs is a storyline of enduring power–or at least it endured through most of our favorite 80s movies–and it’s not because there are exactly two kinds of people in the world. It’s that anyone can relate to feeling alienated, and as much as people tend to identify with strength, there’s always space in the human heart for the misfits and underdogs of the world.

Smith finishes off this scene with a heavy dose of self-loathing: “when they clean the streets/I’ll be the ony shit that’s left behind,” and the whole thing is indeed kinda dusty and down-in-the-mouth, but sing-song catchy enough to leaven the mood.

After demurring on a request for “Freddy’s Dead,” Elliott launched into an older song, “No Name #3″ from his solo debut, 1994’s Roman Candle. In its gentle and trebly stop-start strums and ghostly whispers, the song borders on the atmospheric. And indeed its lyrics manage an almost Impressionist retelling of some kind of emergency, a deep domestic trauma.

The details as they’re presented, the things we look at when we have to look away from something horrible, carry an undercurrent of defiance–something matter-of-fact and untouched by grief in “everyone is gone/home to oblivion”–even as the I of the song incants, “come on night.” The wail of police sirens really wasn’t the worst backing vox for this one.

Not a Hüsker Dü cover but rather the closer from Smith’s self-titled 1996 record, “The Biggest Lie” is a sturdy, almost traditional breakup tune. Against Elliott’s own twist on at least the second-oldest pop chord progression (I vi IV V, FWIW), the tune is set among some of the typical details of our modern urban life–public transport, the hum of commerce–but expands them, quite naturally, into metaphors for yr good old timeless themes–separation from love, feeling used up at love’s end.

Or, put another way, Elvis C. said, “you won’t take my love for tender,” but before “The Biggest Lie” I didn’t think I’d be moved by references to a credit card.

Elliott invited Largo’s Friday night resident, Most Musical Man on Earth Jon Brion, to accompany him on vibraphone starting with “Coming Up Roses,” and, hey, there’s roses and the moon again, hallmarks of Smith’s Portland days in song.

As with many tracks off of the self-titled record, “Roses” uses addiction as a large-scale metaphor or subject matter, although it’s a bit oblique this time around. Nothing’s fully spelled-out, there’s just a compulsion on the biological level, ominous signs from above and “a kind of trouble/nobody knows.”

The song’s got a bit of an upbeat feel by the time the chorus swings around, and it got such a reading here with the glassy, echoing tones of Brion’s vibes chiming along. But the roses this tune always brings to mind look more like a plume of blood swirling into the chamber of a syringe.

“Alameda,” off Either/Or, falls within an entire of subcategory of Smith’s songs that address a subject and give ‘em a good fuckin’ talking-to. It’s hard to say whether these were aimed at friends who’d let him down, at characters invented to illustrate a type and a problem, or at himself, but these are harsh words devoid of self-righteousness.

In “Alameda” we’re talking about a manipulator who keeps the world at arm’s length, always looking for an angle, and the emotional wasteland that results. It still feels distinctly like a slice of the lowlife, and you don’t get much more cutting than to say, “nobody broke yr heart/you broke yr own ’cause you can’t finish what you start.” Of course, the character study is so fully drawn that the putdown “I never pay attention” is canceled before its song, like the million songs out there that go to great lengths to tell someone “I don’t care.”

And out of this–the rejection of falsity, the demand to open up to people, to meet the outside world on its own terms–a litany of accusations coalesces into something like a philosophy.

Donate to the Elliott Smith Memorial Fund.
Elliott Smith music on iTunes.
Roman Candle on Newbury Comics.
S/T at Newbury Comics. (or mp3s at Insound.)
Either/Or at Newbury Comics. (or mp3s at Insound.)