©Ben McKeown
“So around the time Elliott was recording what would be his final album, I got to visit the actual basement on a hill. Satellite Park Studios. It’s a gorgeous house on the cliffs of Malibu owned by Josie Cotton with, you guessed it, a recording studio downstairs ‘basement ‘. I got to play Elliott’s guitar, the piano he used, and at the very least look at Tom Waits’ Chamberlin. The next best thing to meeting them I guess. Anyways, I was there with another band who was also recording there and one night, everyone but me had a lot to drink and the engineer opened up and I got to hear a story about Elliott. I was really eager to hear any Elliott stories but I wasn’t about to ask for any so I was glad when he started talking about him. I don’t know specific details of who or what but I’ll try to tell you the story as verbatim as I can remember it (mind you it’s been 13 or 14 years since I heard it so it’s more of a paraphrase I suppose ). “Do you know Elliott ‘ s song…what’s it called…Everything Means Nothing To Me? We were recording late one night at Elliott told me about this song. Now, don’t tell anyone because if it gets back to Elliott, he’s going to know it was me that told you because I guess he’s never told anyone else about this. So I guess Elliott got into a huge giant screaming fight with his girlfriend at the time and he ended up storming out of his house in the middle of the night. He decided to deal with it by just getting destroyed with heroin or speed or whatever. So Elliott finds what he’s after and he’s just wandering the streets at night, totally out of his mind. While he’s on this altered state I guess he starts thinking about how people say things like, “someday I’ll do this” or “one day I’m going to do that” and this was getting him angrier and angrier the more he thought about these sorts of phrases – talking about the future. So he goes to his studio and still out of his mind and uses a blade and cuts the word “N O W” into his arm and he just turns on a tape recorder and sits at the piano, blood streaming down his arm, and he just plays and improvises a song on the spot in one go: Everything Means Nothing To Me. “
The Little Daniels
related to the notorious quote taken from the 2004 Spin article that’s become some kind of Bible to some.
“Elliott told me about having a psychotic episode while he was recording Figure 8 says McConnell, a producer who has recorded the Los Angeles bands Goldenboy and Alaska!, as well as Josie Cotton, singer of the ’80s novelty hit “Johnny, Are You Queer?” “He was fed up with the current state of his life. A lot of people from the label were telling him he needed to get it together. He was so sick of people talking about the future. So he carved the word ‘now’ into his arm with a knife. And he sat down at the piano and wrote ‘Everything Means Nothing to Me’ as the blood was dripping down his arm.”
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