round 1
(2) Janis Joplin, “Me and Bobby McGee”
SENT HOME
(15) Elliott Smith, “Thirteen”
213-183
AND WILL PLAY ON IN THE SECOND ROUND
Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on 3/7/22.
Karen Lentz on Janis Joplin’s “Me and Bobby McGee”
“Me and Bobby McGee” is a love song and a road song that uses neither of these words. Kris Kristofferson wrote it when he was a helicopter pilot, transporting rig workers back and forth in the Gulf, during an actual rainstorm on the way to Baton Rouge. You can bet that Janis Joplin was familiar with that kind of rain, hailing from the oil town of Port Arthur, Texas, and also with hitchhiking, not just around New Orleans but for the long haul, from Texas to California.
“I want to do that,” Janis said when she first heard “Me and Bobby McGee,” from Dylan associate Bob Neuwirth, hanging out with friends at the Chelsea in 1969. She picked up the guitar, wrote down the words, and “sang the shit out of it right on the spot,” according to Neuwirth, who added, snarkily or not, that “it wasn’t as if the chords were hard.”
Besides “Bobby,” Kristofferson has had many of his most well-known songs famously covered by others, e.g., “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” “For the Good Times.” One might expect some sort of artistic resentment about this, but Kristofferson called it exhilarating, and in the case of Janis Joplin singing “Me and Bobby McGee,” described it as the greatest feeling in the world, to see her make it her own.
Kristofferson’s songwriting was a departure from country music of the time, which generally relied on the sort of rhyming couplets embodied in the classic songs of Patsy Cline, where you can often guess the next line. There is, in the first verse of “Me and Bobby McGee,” however, the internal rhyme of “flat in” and “Baton,” “waiting” and “faded,” and the long lines rhyme train and rained, Orleans and jeans. The opening verse puts you in the cab of the truck that offers three things: a ride, music, and shelter.
This is the scene that the rest of the song takes place against: the crowded warmth of the front seat, jamming with just one’s own body and a harmonica, the rainwater pouring down and the windshield wipers doing their job against it. The splashes on the roof, the whisssh of the rubber tires on the highway, the glistening of the pavement, the shades of gray clouds, the headlights boring through it… who wouldn’t want to relive those hours? They settle into the understatement of “good enough for me.”
To rate an experience as good enough for you means to not need or even want any more. Whatever else might be on offer, it can stay out there. The thing about finding a place like that, when you listen to how Janis sang “Me and Bobby McGee,” is that it is always temporary.
“I sometimes think she may have been personally responsible for the explosion in the use of the word ‘fuck,’” an Austin friend said of Janis. When the city of Houston lifted its ban on rock performances in 1970, it made an exception for Janis Joplin, “for her attitude in general.” The story of her life generates a mixture of compassion and annoyance, awe and anxiety, crossing her out-of-bounds personality and substance abuse, her devastating live performances, her sexual appetites, her death at 27 of a heroin overdose.
I wanted for her some happy interludes, and was worried I wouldn’t find any. But I did—on a camping trip, which has to be about the furthest activity from her persona. Her friend and roadman Vince Mitchell remarked that he had never seen her so happy, describing her setting up the campsite and cooking in silver boots and popping up from her sleeping bag saying in sheer joy and discovery “You mean, this is camping!” The problem is, there were so few of these times in her life.
That hour in the cab of the diesel, with the music in the rain—that is, for the first-person singer, an exception. It’s not like that togetherness happens all the time, and she seems to know it is not to keep. The connections are transitory, and that sharpens their memory. You probably know the kind of hours I mean—where you would, if you could, freeze time. The wet dirt of a forest floor, the glow of a cherry flavored beer, the top of a hotel casino in an earthquake, the muscle curve of a plaid flannel shoulder with just a hint of woodsmoke and nightclub cologne, laughing like maniacs at something dumb. It’s a kind of focus, the connection: part of the headiness is not from what appears but from what disappears, not the drunkenness but the freedom, the shedding.
Neuwirth was right that “Me and Bobby McGee” is not hard to play. As an elementary guitar player, I was surprised how easily I could do it. I was all in for the Baton Rouge rainstorm, but I could feel the song picking up steam in the key change from G to A going into the second verse. The key change takes us to Kentucky, California. The narrator and Bobby cover ground from east to west, racking up shared episodes of misery, drudgery, heat, glory, and reprieve. Performing the divination of the road: what does this wood tell us, this tree, this motel, this truck stop. Where will we sleep tonight.
Some of us are never without this thought: I could be GONE. Pick a highway, any highway, Highway 9, Highway 67, Route 39, I will drop what I’m doing and take it, any and every time.
To know and love this song, it helps to have been a lot of places. I would have always been a highway woman, but I might not have gone so far afield except that in the early 2000s my life intersected with the Internet. Not what you could do on the Internet, but the Internet itself. I had not thought of it as a thing that needed to be taken care of to make sure it survived. It was the first job I had that was not too easy; rather, it was too hard, which I guess is what makes a career. I was dazzled by the fact that my work touched the entire world and it touched me back. I didn’t have a passport before that, but then I had to get the kind with extra pages, and that became a life.
This is the money line in the song, quoted all over and it still can catch you off guard when it comes around:
Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.
It’s the line that, if you are listening in a car or singing karaoke, someone near you will do that intake of breath with a sound that, if it forms a word, is essentially—oh. And there are two kinds of people in the world: those who make the sound and those who don’t.
Kris Kristofferson was one of those all-around guys, in turn a football player, writer, Rhodes scholar, Blake poetry fan, musician. He left a plum job offer at West Point for the chance to write songs in Nashville - songs of experience, songs for grown-ups, songs for fringe dwellers. To walk away from a perfectly good life because of some wild longing requires that you do violence to your life as it exists, to the sleepy sad people who have done nothing wrong but do not hear the frequency beckoning you away. To free yourself from anything is, inherently, a loss.
At age 22, Janis returned from San Francisco to her parents’ house, weighing 88 pounds and sick and scared by her own addiction. She stayed there for a chunk of 1965, talking about becoming a secretary and avoiding singing, drinking, or any other possible gateways. She gave every indication of trying to locate her life in this—“trying” being the key word. You get the sense that part of her really wanted that—to put to rest the need for any more exposure, any acts of ambition. She could only see it, though, as a requirement to change herself. When she left town again for Austin, which would lead to her Big Brother gig, she told her therapist “I’m going to go be what I am.”
And to continue, to achieve, requires leaving more people and places behind. Janis agonized over leaving Big Brother to go solo for months, likening it to a divorce. It meant alienation from her community, her band, and even many of her fans. It could have been a huge mistake and she knew this. “But if I had any serious idea of myself as a musician,” she said, “I had to leave.”
The compensation for each of these losses may be success—like Kristofferson’s in Nashville, or Joplin’s European tour and the recording of I Got Dem Ol Kozmic Blues Again Mama. Or it may be the high of freedom itself—like breathing full into the open night after escaping a too-hot room. There are glories and caverns to freedom: the feeling of liftoff, of leaving shore, the semi engine rolling over in the morning, the dawn coffee, the road curving out of a town that you will never see again, the freeway entrance. A life like this possesses an undeniable attraction, for those who live it and those who watch. Motion itself keeps at bay so many epiphanies, that advance toward you once there is stillness.
In Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing, Billy Parham has been a drifter in Mexico for a few years when he meets an old man who tells him that, although he is an orphan, “he must cease his wanderings and make for himself some place in the world because to wander in this way would become for him a passion and by this passion he would become estranged from men and so ultimately from himself.” I do not think Janis would have disagreed with this. But I do think she couldn’t figure out how to find the place in the world that was hers.
A pilot once told me that anyone who has done it two or three times can successfully navigate a plane into the air; it is the landing that throws wind and angles and geometrical illusions at you, and for that you want a professional. For that is the most dangerous.
Performers like Chrissie Hynde and Melissa Etheridge, talking about growing up watching Janis, mention reactions of fascination and fear. The hair. The emotion. The screaming. Critic Paul Nelson said that Janis Joplin does not so much sing a song as strangle it to death. It is true that she demands a certain kind of attention. Janis Joplin did not sing background music.
As a musician, she was essentially self-taught, her singing based on hours listening to radio and records, hours of imitation and experimentation. She never took lessons because she thought the teachers would want her to sing differently, which they almost certainly would have. One cannot wail in public the way that Janis Joplin wailed in public. So many people found her grandiose and egotistical and invested in things like magazine covers and who else got invited to perform before her, but simultaneously insecure, often labeling herself a street freak rather than a real musician. How sadly circular, to cultivate a whole personality as a free spirit who doesn’t care what anyone thinks, and then be constantly on the alert for what people think of it.
Her catalog of songs hits on certain notes again and again—loneliness, pain, now, then, and always, which was part of her own integrity. She never was interested in singing lyrics that didn’t reflect her experience. “My gig is just feeling things,” she said once. Her singing is to tell you everything about what it feels like to be her, and this may be the secret to why it is so affecting. Why listen to some secure, happy, well-adjusted person, to tell you about what you will never understand? Even voices that are stunning in the musical sense sound curiously flat after listening to Janis Joplin. Held back. Tame. Constrained.
It was almost always after a show, not before, when she reached for heroin. The time when one would expect to relax, exhale, relive the highlights—and she did do that, but still at the end of every night you have to go someplace, and for her that was often an empty motel room. She was, by all accounts, extraordinarily disciplined when it came to being ready for a show. It was afterwards that she flailed, no less from success than from failure.
When I used to travel for business, I’d be overtaken by a wave of homecoming joy flying back over Los Angeles and the lights of 3 million people swirled over the mountains, as the wheels janked out of their cages and the phones got turned back on. I’d move robotically through the lines for passports, luggage, bathrooms. And then, as I passed through the sliding doors, the same scene—a vehicle glides up, the trunk automatically unlatches, somebody slides their bag into the hatchback and gets in the passenger side, and they drive off. A vehicle glides up, pops the trunk, and a person gets out of the driver’s side and hugs the passenger, lifts their bag into the trunk, and they both scurry back to the car and drive off. All around me as I waited for the crosswalk light to change. It was impossible to believe, somehow, that I had come so far, from the other side of the globe, engineered some great professional success or endured a failed one, navigated three flights and six cultures and the physical travail of stale air and cramped space for 22 hours, and yet it mattered to zero people here, where I lived, that I had come back.
Liftoff feels like freedom, or can. But on returning to the ground, it does not feel like freedom; it feels like lugging a bunch of heavy stuff up the stairs because the elevator is broken. I should add maybe that plenty of people would have come to get me from the airport, had I asked. It was the automaticness of it that was lacking. The line of headlights coming into LAX formed an endless river: look back as far as it can go and none of them were coming for me, and it broke me every damn time.
Something like this is what I think it must have been like for Janis Joplin; there is story after story of her taking her audience through a spiritual experience and then being found later having a drink by herself. After the applause, the parties, after going out to dinner or to the bar, or to someone’s apartment, or to a lot of bars, at the end, everybody is supposed to go home. Imagine the anticlimax of being Janis Joplin, giving the kind of performances that Janis Joplin gave, and to have the night end up with the sound of flipping on the lightswitch in the silence. Music publisher Sam Gordon said, “Sure, Albert [Grossman, her manager] was there a phone call away and the band was there for tunes and the wine store was down the block and there were freaks in the lobby for her entertainment. But after that, it was just a situation with four walls, a chick laying in a fucking hotel room with nobody and nothing.” Imagine the extreme experiences of audience adoration and utter aloneness afterward in such proximity.
She loved and needed the adoration of crowds, but it was adoration that was spontaneous and generated rather than decided, committed, maintained. What happens near Salinas when the narrator goes one way and Bobby another—you can imagine this in many different lights. What feels true here is that she wants Bobby to find his home—you would want this for anyone you love—but there’s no expectation that she is going to find hers. The original was “looking for the home I hope she’ll find” … but in Janis’s impetuous “I hope he finds it,” that home is a fully formed place, delineated in wood and acceptance and feeling whole in one’s own life.
No matter how exhilarated or tired you are when you arrive, sometimes you put down wheels at a way station, staying with friends, where the wood is polished to a honey color and the soap smells like an apple-cucumber cocktail, and time rests in huge space, the hardest part of the day is backing the car out of the garage, and they go to bed early and the pillows are clean and the air soft as anything comes through the windows, and you marvel that they live like this all the time, and you leave with a lot of questions.
One of the more famous Joplin quotations is “I'd rather have 10 years of superhypermost than live to be 70 sitting in some goddamn chair watching television.” That’s the one they include in the motivational posters and calendars.
Her publicist and later biographer Myra Friedman recalls Janis saying once: “Ya wanna know something? Just give me an old man that comes home, like when he splits at nine I know he’s gonna be back at six for me and only me and I’ll take that shit with the two garages and the two TVs.”
And Friedman protests that she’s kidding, and Janis says “No I’m not, man. I’m not kidding at all.”
She said, and I believe meant, both things. You can find enough anecdotes to support either contention about what she “really” wanted, but the whole idea of her only being allowed to want one or the other is so frustrating. People need adventure. People need safety. You learn to detect the overtones of punishment at having your life reviewed—you wouldn’t be alone if you weren’t out globetrotting, trying to be someone in the world.
Janis wrote in a letter to her family in 1970 that ambition was not necessarily about scrabbling for position or money, but about what you needed to be loved and to be proud of yourself.
Bantering in a concert in the middle of “Cry Baby,” she talked disparagingly and quite directly about an ex running from home and love, how he was going to wake up in Casablanca one morning and wonder “What am I doing in Casablanca, man?” I know the moment she means—using the exact same words, what am I doing here, only instead of wonder and delight (wow, that’s the Persian Gulf), they come with weariness and disgust (what city is this, I have lost track, they all look the same). And anyone who keeps pushing themselves to the next act, who keeps reaching for more, greater adventure as the solution, knows the exact moment when that goes bankrupt.
This is what makes a story: a turning point, realizing what you want and going back to it. A journey is supposed to have an end, otherwise you are still out there on the road stopping at a series of temporary homes, trying to find one place that blends everywhere you have been and everything you want. It keeps you out there with your energy stretched out in increments trying to create a narrative, trying to tell yourself there is any pattern or logic or internal coherence to this life. Imagine if the Odyssey just ended with Odysseus coming home and there was no Penelope, no Telemachus—what kind of story would that be? The homecoming of Odysseus if he simply goes back to where he used to live, says hello to his servants and maybe visits some people.
Janis bought a house in Larkspur and dreamed about finishing the tour and living a rustic life walking with her dogs by the creek, waking up to a picture window of redwood trees. Same fantasies as we all have about quitting what’s hard and making life easy. Only when she did that, it was a disaster, with her hurtling back and forth to Sausalito to party all day every day, pulling into the crazed orbit everyone who came to visit, including Kris Kristofferson.
At many points in her biography, Friedman recalls reminding Joplin of the option to quit. She didn’t have to keep touring like this. She had the money, the house, she could control her own schedule, perform or record when she wanted. Janis’s response, out of all I read about her, is the line that haunts me the most: “I don’t have anything else.” Stay in the grind of a career, the road, the next destination, anything to keep it going, anything but the landing. “Me and Bobby McGee” is the song for when someone else—almost everyone else—has settled, has landed, and you cannot figure out how.
Wanting to trade multiple tomorrows for one yesterday suggests a person who believes their past is better than their future will be. Alas, no one comes along offering such trades, and the song is the ballad of knowing perfectly well that Bobby ain’t coming back.
There is no screaming from Janis in “Me and Bobby McGee.” This is a country song, a natural for her. You can hear the fun in her voice, rolling over the lalalalala’s in the coda, which have turned out to be my favorite part to play. She’s killing this song and she knows she’s killing it. It’s the Janis of the Monterey Pop Festival, after “Ball and Chain” as she has cried and crooned to the audience, so happy with the applause and doing a little skip as she crosses the threshold backstage.
The “Me and Bobby McGee” track was recorded on September 25, 1970, as she had just over a week left to live. It was released on her posthumous album Pearl, and became her biggest hit, staying at #1 for two weeks in March 1971. It has all her moods: humor, anger, fierceness, abandonment, longing. It was made for her, or she found her home inside it.
Because she died young, we never saw Janis Joplin reach the midlife juncture of someone who has been Out There on the edge for years, made a life out of movement and notoriety, asking the questions of what do I want? Have I accomplished enough? Have the things I’ve accomplished been the ones that matter most? Shall I now shrink back into the suburbs from which I came, and who am I then? Will I become bored, or worse, boring? To whom? What is it that I am afraid of?
I’ve been rambling around Hollywood this California winter, not because it’s an inspiring place but because it’s where Janis Joplin spent her last day, in the studio and then in Room 105 at what is now the Highland Gardens Hotel. Her Walk of Fame star has only been there since 2013, in front of Musicians Institute and surrounded by those of Hall & Oates, Adam Levine, and Journey. I keep thinking of what to go put there as a tribute, but I walk down Hollywood Boulevard aimlessly wondering about roses and pearls and feathers and Southern Comfort bottles because none of those seem right. I haven’t figured out what ambition means in the world of the 2020s, whether it exists or is only changing shape or form, or how it can help me save this overgrown beast city that I love so much.
The only thing I can think of is go home and put on her record. Turn it up, man. How long do you think we have.
Karen Lentz is a writer living in Los Angeles. You can find her words in Delos: A Journal of World Literature and Hippocampus. She has an MFA from American University and an MS in Journalism from Northwestern University. In 2013, she lived in Chapala, Mexico, as the first recipient of a 360 Xochi Quetzal writing fellowship. She is Vice President of Policy Research and Stakeholder Programs at The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Find her on Twitter @estreetlove.
Gut Punch of Sincerity: Andrew Jones on elliott smith’s “Thirteen”
won’t you let me walk you home from school
There exists in the history of Google Street View images, three frames at the corner of University and Pennsylvania avenues in Dubuque, Iowa where my daughter and I are visible. Today, you need to shift the street view back to 2013 to find us, but we are there, in the crosswalk, holding hands. It is an October afternoon and it is still warm. My daughter wears a dress with four horizontal panels of mostly purple and I’m carrying her pink Hello Kitty backpack. She’s four and we are walking home after she’s completed another day of pre-K at the Montessori school in town. The school is housed in a former community theater building shaped like a barn and shares a parking lot with the public pool. It didn’t take much imagination on my part to find the lyrics from “Thirteen” rattling around in my head while I waited to pick her up one day, and so it became my tradition to sing it on our walks home that year.
The first time I heard “Thirteen” was in the fall of 1997. I’d sought out Big Star after hearing Son Volt cover “Holocaust” in concert that summer and I’d come away with a reissue of #1 Record and Radio City as a single CD. But nothing from the CD stuck with me. I was about to turn 19, a freshman at the local state college, and a bit of an alternative country snob. I wasn’t very interested in the pop elements Alex Chilton and Chris Bell layered on Big Star’s tunes. The songs weren’t bad; I just wasn’t ready for them in that form.
In August of 1998, I read about the release of Elliott Smith’s XO and took a chance on it. In a short span of time, I began consuming all things Elliott. I’d made my way into the magic of music listservs and AOL messageboards where folks traded live bootlegs or offered up “blanks and postage” deals for those without much of a bootleg collection. In one of these deals, I received a VHS tape of an Elliott Smith concert which proved almost unwatchable. The camera shook incessantly and the sound was drowned out by bass distortion. But tacked onto the VHS tape, in an attempt to fill the extra runtime after the concert, was the short film Lucky 3: An Elliott Smith Portrait. Directed by Jem Cohen and running all of 11 minutes, this documentary presented Smith performing two original songs with a cover of “Thirteen” sandwiched in between. It proved to be the performance I needed to appreciate the song.
rock ‘n’ roll is here to stay
In Lucky 3, Smith performs “Thirteen” in October of 1996 in what appears to be an empty, generic office space cleared of cubicles and desks. Fluorescent lighting shines down on him, adding a glow to the drab yellow dress shirt he wears. Smith sits on a chair with his acoustic guitar before a simple microphone, a keyboard of some sort leaning against the wall nearby. The only embellishment is an ironic blacklight poster featuring a heavy metal skeleton proclaiming “Rock Is King” on the wall behind him.
The majority of the performance is filmed from Smith’s right, providing only a side view of his face as he sings and his hands as they pluck through the progression of the song. The emptiness of the scene adds to the weight of the performance. There are no visual distractions— it’s like listening to a friend play a personal song in a dim basement or bedroom. Nothing covers up Smith’s gentle voicing and the quiet guitar. He’s captivating for the two-and-a-half minutes of performance. And when he finishes, he poses to mimic the poster behind him: one raised fist, the other hand holding his guitar in the air by the neck, his face a serious scowl as if to lighten the mood after such a trance-like performance.
“Thirteen” has been praised repeatedly as a perfect take on what adolescence feels like. Many of the commentaries claim that songwriter Alex Chilton’s thirteen-year-old speaker captures the feeling as if a teen wrote the song. And, to be sure, Big Star’s original version (1972) sparkles with pop power—dreamy production, layered guitars, and accompanying ethereal vocal harmonies elevating the 2nd and 3rd verses. The production hints at a desire to appeal to teens and pop radio rather than the honesty of an adolescent point of view. In doing so, it actually hurts the song.
This is why Elliott Smith’s version is the superior take on the song. Like the performance in Lucky 3, Smith’s officially released version comes from 1996. It was recorded in April and debuted on Oregon disc jockey Rob Jones’ radio show later that summer before appearing on the posthumous rarities collection New Moon (2007). The recording features Smith alone in his basement with a single guitar and his voice—his sweet spot. While Smith’s later recordings display his ability to build masterfully intricate full-band songs in the studio, his solo acoustic performances have always carried a heftier gut punch of sincerity and power.
Many covers of the song miss the mark because they try to create emotion through the production—vocal harmonies and ambient noise layers attempting to manufacture a mocked-up dream of the past or they awkwardly emphasize certain words for effect. It becomes an exercise in creating manufactured emotion and sonic perfection—a sort of nursery rhyme, if you will. It’s as if the performers are afraid of something quiet and imperfect, the very sort of memory that the song reawakens in an adult listener.
come inside, well it’s okay
The first time I saw Elliott Smith perform in person was March of 1999 at a free in-store gig for Amoeba Records in San Francisco. It was an afternoon performance and I had arrived well ahead of the show with my best friend, Jody. We staked out a center spot a few rows of used CDs back from the tiny stage. Much like Lucky 3, the set up was Elliott seated, an acoustic in his hands, and a single microphone. He started off shaky and seemed unhappy to be performing so early in the day. But after just one song, he settled into a zone and played ten more songs over 40 minutes. I don’t think anyone in the crowded record store expected that much of a show but they were quite possibly the best crowd I’ve ever been a part of—quiet, rapt, polite.
After he finished playing, we dodged the line snaking away from a small table where Smith would soon come out to sign merchandise and instead headed straight over to the Fillmore Auditorium where we had tickets for his show later that night with Quasi opening and then pulling double duty as Smith’s band. We were there hours before the doors would open and we were unsure what else to do, so we leaned against the fence of the empty lot next to the Fillmore where Jim Jones’ People’s Temple once stood, content to wait in the late afternoon sun. Some forty-five minutes later, a car stopped on the street and Smith emerged, immediately lighting up a cigarette. He spotted us and walked over to ask if we were waiting for the show already. We explained that we didn’t know what else to do since we weren’t yet twenty-one and couldn’t go for a drink. He stood around with us and we chatted about the in-store performance until he finished his smoke. We shook hands and he walked through the rear entrance. We didn’t ask for autographs or pose for a picture with Smith and, unfortunately, there wasn’t a Google car driving by the corner of Fillmore and Geary that spring day. Elliott Smith wasn’t shy or indifferent. He didn’t come across as the depressed or drugged-out artist as he was so often portrayed. He was caring and he seemed almost as embarrassed as us that someone would want to wait so long to see him perform.
So much of the writing about “Thirteen” fails to consider how much nostalgia and sentimentality are needed to make it work. I always thought of the song as the tender expression of unrequited love of another (and of music). The opening verse serves as an attempt at connection with another—hopeful and expectant and awkward. “Won’t you let me meet you at the pool,” followed by “maybe Friday I can get tickets for the dance/and I’ll take you.” Once the connection—however tenuous—is established, it consumes the speaker and pushes logic aside: “tell him what we said,” “rock ‘n’ roll is here to stay,” “I’ll shake you.” Nothing can stand in the way. Eventually, the speaker ends up beyond infatuation, blindfold removed, wanting an honest, open way forward: “tell me what you’re thinking of,” “would you be an outlaw for my love,” and “if it’s no, then I can go.” The three parts of the song are like an understanding of relationships maturing in the short span of three minutes.
There is a level of anxiety in the way Elliott Smith delivers his version. The speed is a little faster and the vocals more uneven. His voice seems constantly on the verge of breaking or even going silent. It’s the same way it sounded at Amoeba Records. There’s a begging, pleading element in its softness. The phrasing quickened and then slowed. As a listener, I worry he might not make it. It’s imperfect and intimate and fragile. And there is its beauty.
The seemingly simple lyrics take on more weight as an adult than as a teenager. Hope waits around the corner at thirteen; the devastation of rejection or missed connection ends up being a fleeting aside because there is so much expectation ahead. But later in life, it’s much easier to tally the marks and consider that there will be fewer chances in our future. Or maybe it has to do with the clock stopping so early for Elliott Smith in October of 2003. Perhaps knowing that he’ll sink a kitchen knife into his heart at the age of 34 adds to the honesty I hear in his vocals, the fleeting sound of hope and time disappearing on the recording.
won’t you tell me what you’re thinking of
A good song, like a good book, finds new meaning for the listener at different points in their life. My life is now much more concerned with “won’t you tell me what you’re thinking of” than meeting anyone by the pool. I've become the dad who needs to chill with jokes and questions and unprompted advice or stories (“won’t you tell your dad, ‘get off my back’”). Listening to this song at 43 years old is about accepting roles, remembering the past, and learning to let go. In some ways, it’s like being a teen again, except now I’m more concerned with someone I love getting hurt than my own pain. Which might be why this song appeals to me now—I can imagine the peril or joy that might await the speaker much more clearly and how fraught either path that awaits them will be. Maybe that’s always been the case. Maybe, for me, the song has always been about sentimentality and the concern for someone else.
If anything about this song appeals to teens, it’s the musical simplicity and quiet in a sea of angst and confusion. Especially Elliott Smith’s cover. It’s raw and brittle and heartfelt. It’s a safe haven of sound for two minutes and forty-three seconds.
In a few weeks, my daughter will turn thirteen on a March day almost exactly twenty-three years after I stood silently watching Elliott Smith sing softly in a record store. Around the same time, she plans to attend her first middle school dance. She doesn’t remember me singing “Thirteen” to her on our walks home or pointing at the Google car in the Street View image of us. But recently she was sitting on the couch next to me, phone in her hands playing a video game, when I tracked down and played the YouTube clip of Elliott Smith singing “Thirteen” in Lucky 3. She remembered the opening verse and she quietly sang along, before giving her full attention to the second half of the video. When it reached the short guitar solo prior to the final verse, she asked me who was performing. “Elliott Smith,” I answered.
“He’s good,” she conceded, before turning her attention back to her phone when the song ended. She didn’t complain when I replayed it right away, waiting for nostalgia to wash over me.
Andrew Jones is the author of the poetry collection Liner Notes (Kelsay Books, 2020). His writing has appeared in North American Review, Sierra Nevada Review, and Hobart, among other publications. A native of the San Francisco Bay Area, he teaches at the University of Dubuque in Iowa.