Silver Lake's Elliott Smith wall gets a very homemade touch-up

We really appreciate the kindness motivating several anonymous artists associated with the music/art/activist collective FMLY to spruce up the Elliott Smith tribute wall outside of the Solutions speaker shop. The mural, seen on the cover of Smith's album "Figure 8," was under constant assault from taggers and had become an especially hurtful eyesore for fans of Smith's tender, virtuoso folk.

We even think the black and white stencil of Smith's visage, as seen on the "Figure 8" cover, was a sweet touch, especially on the occasion of his birthday last weekend. And we get it that painting murals costs time and money, and anybody who volunteers for such a job doesn't undertake it lightly, and L.A. music fans should be grateful to anyone who does it freely out of respect for an artist.

That said, would it have been that much extra work to tape off some lines for the stripe design?

-- August Brown

Photo credit: FMLY

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Bike ride and a concert with the FMLY

 

Elliott Smith gets a career retrospective. What's essential? What's missing?

When singer-songwriter Elliott Smith died in Los Angeles 2003, he left behind a vast and diverse catalog of his inimitable songwriting and virtuoso musicianship across four different record labels. On Nov. 2, Kill Rock Stars will try to encapsulate it on a single career-retrospective CD and double LP, "An Introduction to ... Elliott Smith."

Smith's progression from the hiss-soaked home recordings of "Roman Candle" to the orchestral suites of "XO" and the acid-tinged noise experiments of the posthumous "From a Basement on the Hill" was never less than fascinating, and "An Introduction" could be a useful first stop for younger fans beginning to unpack his legacy. But as with all retrospectives, the track list is forever up for debate. Most of his indisputable great songs are included -- "Needle in the Hay," "The Biggest Lie," "Angeles" and "Between the Bars" -- ably represent his KRS years, generally considered his creative peak by most fans.

But the compilation leans a bit heavily on his breakthrough "Either/Or," and curiously skirts all but one track, "Waltz #2," from his much-underrated major label debut "XO" (it also takes only one from its follow-up, "Figure 8"), and leaves off a few of his most beloved stray recordings. No cover of Big Star's "Thirteen"? Only an early demo version of "Miss Misery," the song he performed at the 1998 Oscars? No "High Times," probably the most harrowing song on the B sides collection "New Moon"?

Licensing such a wide catalog surely posed its own difficulties, and synopsizing his career on one record is an impossible effort. But hopefully, this will spur curious fans to pick up absolutely everything he's done -- there still hasn't been a singer-songwriter who can match Smith at his best. Full track list after the jump, and David Greenwald has more thoughts over at Brand X.

-- August Brown

Photo by Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times

Roger Waters on wheat-pasting over the Elliott Smith memorial wall: "We had no intention to cover up something precious"

Roger Waters of Pink Floyd knows the artistic potency of an image on a wall.  But his recent campaign to wheat-paste an anti-war quote from President Eisenhower across American cities to promote his touring revival of the Floyd staple “The Wall” unexpectedly proved his point, after his employees pasted the quote over the storefront of Solutions speaker repair in Silver Lake. The wall has served as an impromptu fan memorial to the late singer-songwriter Elliott Smith for nearly a decade.

Smith passed away in Los Angeles in 2003, and fans have left personal messages and quoted lyrics on the wall, the backdrop to the cover art of his album “Figure 8,” ever since. But as of Monday night, fans noticed that the wall also featured Waters’ image of a soldier cradling a child with the Eisenhower quote nearby.

Though the oft-abused wall has also been a favorite target for taggers and is frequently overwhelmed by non-Smith-related writing, local reaction to Waters’ wheat pasting, including an L.A. Weekly blog post,  was swift and critical. In a phone interview Tuesday evening, Waters apologized to any Smith fans who found his choice of walls callous.

“It was absolutely an accident,” Waters said. “I didn’t want to disrespect Elliott Smith’s fans, and I’ve instructed (the team) to remove the wheat paste immediately. It was a random pasting in the normal course of this, and I want to make it public that we had no intent to offend or cover up something precious.”