Heatmiser: In the lost and found fun

He sees a couple in front of him: a girl, a boy, and, more unexpectedly, the girl's little sister clinging onto the boy's pants, hopping on one of his legs while he tries to walk. The boy looks kind, calm, but also really self-conscious of all the attention the child is drawing towards him.

This attention – and the achingly familiar sight of self-awareness – is also what drives Gust towards him. More than 30 years later, he hasn't forgotten the first time he ever saw Elliott Smith. "I remember watching the scene, seeing him in that situation, and just thinking – that's exactly how I feel!"

"That's exactly how I feel" is a common refrain when it comes to Elliott Smith, the American songwriter who restlessly sang about vulnerability, pain, and relationships in a more articulate and intimate way than most.

Singing about emotions often tells a story of how those feelings change over time, but during the period when Smith formed the alt-rock band Heatmiser, alongside Gust, drummer Tony Lash, and bassist Brandt Peterson, the story was loud, swift, young, and fun.

Third Man Records has teamed up with the band to release The Music of Heatmiser, a compilation of 29 unheard demos and live tracks dating back to 1992. The record borrows the title, original cover, and six songs from a cassette tape that the band used to distribute to local press and labels, all in pursuit of a record deal.

For the generations that came after that era – and for whom Elliott Smith's solo career serves as a gateway to the grungy essence of Heatmiser – the new release brings a surprising quality as it diverges significantly from the folk singer's allure. The lead single, "Lowlife," is a 1'45" punchy hardcore track that has left some of Smith's devoted fans squinting, trying to recognise him shouting behind the mic.

“It just sounds like we're quick, and we’re doing it without thinking – it has that kind of natural intensity to it,” Gust reflects. “We were really excited to be playing music, and Elliott wanted something full of that energy when he came up with that riff, ‘dan, dan, dan, dan, dan.’ It all evolved from there. I think Elliott did find a language more suited to him when he mellowed out, but that's not to say that he didn't want it to be noisy or fast, or rocking sometimes as well. He had it in him to do all different kinds of things.”

"Lowlife" sets the story in Southeast Portland, where Gust and Smith shared an apartment, and Heatmiser rehearsed in the basement. To make ends meet, Elliott Smith worked as a baker in a French bakery, while Gust found himself working at a photocopy store run by fundamentalist Christians, during the time of Queer Nation and AIDS activism. “I had just come out as gay, and I was working at this copy shop run by people who couldn’t stand that stuff. It was a weird time,” he tells me.

It was weird but also a great time to be in Portland, which was “fast, energetic, cool and chaotic'' as he describes. It was the summer of '91, and Nirvana’s Nevermind had just come out and put a stamp on the hype around the Seattle and Pacific Northwest American scene that had been simmering since the late 80s.

Amidst French patisserie, photocopiers, and no money or record label to record a 7” vinyl, Heatmiser went to the studio on a mission to record as many songs as possible, as quickly as they could. The first takes of the songs were deemed the definitive ones, and the result was a tape that mirrored the way the band sounded live.

I ask Gust how he feels listening to these tracks now, three decades later, when Heatmiser disbanded in 1996 and Elliott Smith’s rocketing solo career was suddenly interrupted by the singer’s death by suicide at age 34. “We actually sound much cooler than I remembered,” he laughs. “Over the years, I kind of thought that Heatmiser didn’t have any value and what people really wanted was just Elliott Smith, and his quiet songwriter self,” he reflects. “Elliott's records are just gorgeous, I love them – but for a while, I also thought that this meant Heatmiser must not have been any good. So when I heard these old tapes, I was struck that we were that good! At that point, we were all fully into it, and you can hear this.”

Heatmiser started wanting to be a fierce rock band, and these recordings capture the freshest moments when they were still in love with that idea – something that didn't last too long. Touring and gigs brought the band a deep feeling of disconnection with the audience: “We didn't feel like we were connecting with people like us,” and also with how they sounded, which no longer felt like the right voice for all they wanted to say. “Elliott had an endless number of ideas and didn't want to be like a rock band that was very narrowly defined,” Gust recalls. “We then started to record these beautiful, intimate, quiet songs with different stories to tell, definitely different recording techniques, and Heatmiser just opened up to being like ‘wow!’ The change between our first record and second, Cop and Speeder, felt like a big one; already a different kind of band than when we started.”

As all of this unfolded, Elliott Smith was also launching a solo project, delving deeper into the quiet, eloquently acoustic, and lyrical songwriting that would become his trademark – and carving out for himself a more prolific space than the one he had found with Heatmiser. In 1994, he released his first record Roman Candle, in 1995 the eponymous Elliott Smith, and his solo career took off. “I think Elliott is always so resonant because it feels very human. Sad is part of this, but there's hope and beauty in it. There's also that kind of poetry with the fact that things aren't going to work out, you know? Because that’s just how things are sometimes.”

Different forces came into play and started to pull in subsequently different directions, and if Heatmiser didn’t openly discuss how things were no longer working out, the end was in sight. “It’s hard to encapsulate this evolution because it happened really fast, and it was also painful,” Gust pauses. “When the band finished, it broke my heart. Tony, Sam, and Elliott were my brothers, and I wanted to keep making records with them, but I knew that was not going to happen.”

Heatmiser released their third and last record, Mic City Sons, in 1996 and split up after that. Elliott Smith set out to be a powerhouse singer-songwriter; with five solo studio records released and one of his songs, "Miss Misery," running for the 1998 Oscars. As his success rocketed, he embarked on a genre-defining career that mastered lyrical and melodic brilliance, weaving between pop, rock, and classical music, alongside confessed pain and minimalist prose.

“At the end [of his life], Elliott expressed a lot of regret about the way that Heatmiser had ended, and he was like: ‘do you want to do another record? I could spend a year touring for it or something.’ But at the time, he wasn't very healthy. I said I would love to do that; I think everyone else would do it too – Sam would, Tony would too – but not really until you're ready. That was the last time I saw him.”

“But this story is not about Elliott Smith,” Gust warns. “He became a whole other thing, and this is way before that. It's about him and his friends, and a period of time in the Pacific Northwest when this music was exploding, young people were going to shows and it was so much fun. There was a speed and energy to it that was really special. It's hard for me to listen to Elliott’s solo music; I don't listen to it a lot. But I do know that people connect with the beauty of it, and I think that his rock music also has a lot of beauty to it. He's one of the best songwriters of his generation, and listening to him in a band that he loved being in at the time, it’s fucking great.”