The story of how Elliott Smith helped build a Portland recording studio
Elliott Smith had the kind of worldly, ethereal voice that seemed unbothered with boring human distractions; could you ever picture this man in a queue at the dentist, or searching out a plumber when a pipe burst in his bathroom?
Instead, Smith’s angelic timbre was suited for titillations of a higher power, carrying the perfect old-soul softness to meditate on love, loss, grief, and loneliness, and for it to feel like a Shakespearean sonnet had grown legs, he tacked on some colloquialisms and strutted right into the late 1990s.
However, the conditions for this voice to flourish had to be perfect, which relegated the poetic maestro to the human realm while he could figure out exactly where the four walls privy to his recordings should be, and what they should feel like. Smith knew not to understate the importance of this, wherein, just as you can tell that the Beatles track ‘Yer Blues’ was recorded in a cupboard, so too can you hear the world trapped in the recordings reflected to the listener.
In 1997, Smith co-founded Jackpot! Recording Studio with his friend, Larry Crane. However, five months later, Smith would escape to the Big Apple, leaving his presence suitably ghost-like. But the evidence was there: he’d moved all of his personal recording gear into the space from the very start, and as of 2024, many items were still there, such as a Boss DM-2 delay pedal and an Electro-Voice RE20 dynamic mic, used specifically for the bass on ‘Miss Misery’.
The pair landed on a little white-and-blue shop at 1925 SE Morrison in Portland for $500 a month, but work didn’t cease as soon as the lease was in their name, for the pair had to build a wall to divide the main space into the live room and the control room. Turns out, Smith had done this sort of thing before, being a master mud and tape craftsman and helped erect the division with local musicians who would trade work for future recording time.
Despite the unyielding darkness that would follow Smith around and imbue many of his songs with a breathtaking heaviness, he often engaged with the world in total colour. Crane remembers how Smith chose bright colours for the inside of the studio, a legacy that continues to this day.
Smith’s fingerprints aren’t just in the grooves of the wall or in the colour choice, but he ended up using the studio as a place to crash when he was flitting across the country. When he returned to Portland, the songs would sit at his fingertips, and he’d have no time to waste, often crashing on the small sofa in the studio and not showering.
As Crane recalled in a Substack, “‘I’m sorry I smell’ was a phrase I heard more than once, and ‘Smelliot’ became a nickname Joanna Bolme and I would use when needed”.
Jackpot! Recording Studio has borne witness to other musical greats over its nearly three decades, including Sleater-Kinney, Sonic Youth, Eddie Vedder, Pavement and Eddie Vedder, all thanks to Smith’s handiwork.
