Excavation of a Tune: "Alphabet Town" by Elliott Smith

ALPHABET TOWN: WHERE WAS I?

It’s 1997 and after. Alphabet Town creeps in my head. It happens a lot.

All other tunes on that first Elliott Smith album are phenomenal. I don’t even think the one I am choosing here can be called his best. But Alphabet Town creeps.

Smith had a good handful of albums, all very good—great even. None of them could exactly top the raw first studio effort entitled “Elliott Smith” for me; I’m not always a purist.  All tracks on that first one had a cinematic tension and the common desperation of basement tapes.  And none more than this track.

When I first heard the album, it was ’97 or early ’98. You could say I was a couple years late to the game, except I don’t think he had much airplay and I am not sure how I was getting new music then.  Probably getting new ideas from walking into Amoeba and Tower.  I’d recently moved to San Francisco and I was keenly aware of the songs fitting perfectly with a cool, partially foggy day. I spent a lot of time walking around, drinking coffee and writing in a notebook.

Sparklehorse and other sotto voce style efforts had not been released yet I think and this felt more like a Bert Jansch style sixties folkie singing an outtake than anything trendy. Later Smith-mania had become ridiculous complete with in-fighting and speculative articles relating to his death. Do you remember this? Of course you do. Smith didn’t want it that way, but everything Elliott imploded including the fan base.

I remember which café I was in when I first heard the album, and you are welcome to chalk it up to my yuppy San Francisco dream, but it seems like a relevant detail. Royal Ground on Polk, an old local chain probably shuttered. How many times have I mentioned that place? My wife and I lived in a tiny apartment with a couple of cats and if you craned your neck you could see a little chunk of the Golden Gate Bridge, but it was elusive. It was a metaphor for what we had then but it would take me awhile to flesh that out.  Our neighbors were holdovers from the eighties taking advantage of strict rent control that existed then. I struck up a conversation about law school with a guy at a bus stop twenty years my elder and that was all it took to make a good friend. We eventually studied for the Bar Exam together and I never heard from him after that. He had mentioned moving to DC. That’s how simple life was. You made a friend, you lost a friend. I could name a long line of people kind of passionate about that elusive thing you want in San Francisco: a cabbie, an actor, a radical economist, a poet, a photographer. You would walk down the street and see one of them, maybe get a drink. This was before San Francisco was a tech town and it still felt post-hippy like something out of an Armistead Maupin column.

So I sat there back in ’97 at Café Royale and I listened. I listened to Elliott Smith without even knowing his name. Every song was good and like nothing I’ve ever heard before yet I felt the presence of John Lennon’s acerbic angel listening overhead and the early Dylan finger picking showed up too. But the lyrics, I’d never heard anything like them. Alphabet Town seeped in my mind first or maybe “Needle in the Hay”. Also “Coming up Roses.”  I still remember what the young barista looked like. Serving coffee in a dirty white tee shirt like Elliot himself would have worn, and I went directly to counter and said, what’s this?! I pointed up.  He told me, Elliott Smith.  Great, I said. He nodded because he already knew.  “from Seattle,” And he turned it up a little.

I would eventually pay $7 to see him at the Fillmore, later that year.  I got what I paid for. The place was packed with wide eyed people like me wearing unseasonable beanies and trucker caps. Elliott wore that café girl’s white tee and made as little eye contact with us as Bob Dylan or later Cat Power would’ve.  He seemed apprehensive or uncomfortable from the Grammy he won the month before.  Every number was quietly compelling but there was no dramatic arc that night. The show ended in about an hour.  An hour?! I do remember the harmonica giving me the chills.

ALPHABET TOWN: THE INTERNAL PLACE

The long note played on a harmonica at the beginning of Alphabet Town haunts, then ascends and haunts again. Painfully simple as is the rest of the song. A few sparse lines are brush strokes on a minimalist palate. Strumming chords that surround a couple notes in complex ways a non-musician cannot describe. The piece is personal and intimate. “Alphabet City is haunted. Constantina feels at home.”

The trademark insecurity sounds genuine in the moment:  “She probably won’t say you’re wrong, You’re already wrong… you threw up whatever she shot down. Said show me around this Alphabet Town.”

At first it felt like an Abby Road Studios outtake. The effect is like a three-minute moan but the chord changes draw you inside for a closer look.

“She put her hand on your arm, told you a name you can’t pronounce.”

Alphabet City? Alphabet Town? It’s cold, he’s walking block to block, maybe walking up some industrial side street in a city in the Northwest. Maybe it’s about shooting up. Maybe it’s about …

“I won’t say you’re wrong, it’s what I want. Let’s go out.”

…It’s about something deviant and banal, he’s somewhere  he shouldn’t be, drawn into an exchange with a stranger – for drugs, sex or both. A chilling still life, a gritty moment pregnant with regret and dull ecstasy.

And that’s all. That’s all he gives us. Part of a scene obscured but compelling.

Alphabet Town – now you see it, now you don’t. It can be New York or Seattle or anywhere. The moment haunts, it’s a window on what you think you see—and it’s what makes the entire album an album and not just a series of genius, forever songs. It’s a remarkable moment.