“I still struggle to really describe what it felt like,” Neil Gust recently told Fucked Up’s Damian Abraham. He was talking about the wrenching feeling of discovering that his best friend and Heatmiser bandmate, Elliott Smith, was about to become famous on his own, without him. The revelation happened during the recording sessions of Mic City Sons, the band’s final album and their first since signing their big major-label deal with Virgin.
No one savored the milestone, despite having worked ceaselessly toward it for years. Bewilderment, mute hurt, and resentment reigned. Thirty years on, all the surviving members of the band—singer-songwriter and guitarist Neil Gust, drummer-producer Tony Lash, and bassist and organist Sam Coomes—still talk about the Mic City Sons sessions as if piecing together a relationship-ending fight that happened in the middle of the night.
For most people, the Heatmiser story is Elliott Smith prologue, the group of friends he had to leave behind to embrace his solo career. Mic City Sons, their best album, is often painted as the moment when he began to transcend the band, when his staggering gifts started to break their containments. But for the men in the room with Smith, the story was a lot more wrenching and confusing. For them, Heatmiser was a story about how their beginning became their end, how far they’d come to get to this point, and their struggle to hold onto their friend.
Heatmiser were meant to be loud. Gust and Smith bonded over distortion blasts: They thrilled to a mindblowing Fugazi show, nursed keen disappointment at a lackluster Jane’s Addiction gig. They both bought Marshall half-stacks the same summer that Nevermind came out, and Heatmiser was forged in the fires of sweaty punk clubs like La Luna. They were muscular, confrontational. In these early years, Gust’s voice was the more self-assured one: He sounded more commanding while sneering over feedback-drenched guitars than Smith, whose little voice often trembled when he pushed it.
But when the feedback died down, Smith’s teenaged devotion to prog-rock epics began to subtly make itself known in his songwriting, particularly in his use of passing chords—chords with pieces and hints of other chords, shadows and implications of places where the song had not yet gone. Unlike the Beatles, who used passing chords as elegant stairsteps to blooming major-key choruses, Smith’s songs lived in the spaces between. “Plainclothes Man” is a profusion of chords—blue ones, inquiring ones, sour-apple ones, chords like a grimace and and chords like a pained laugh. There is no bright chorus waiting on the other end of them, just an endless fog of mixed emotions. Heatmiser’s music came alive in this conversational midrange, somewhere between a wry laugh and mutter.
The band seemed eager to evolve with him. Lash shifted the emphasis of his drumming, working his kit for color and tapping his snare from behind the rhythm guitar. Gust’s songs began changing tone to match Smith’s. “I wanted Elliott to love my songs so bad and I would do anything to write something that he would respond to,” Gust told Life of the Record podcast in 2021, matter-of-factly. For Gust, that meant absorbing Smith’s kaleidoscopic melodic language. There’s poignance in the mind-meld: What you hear on songs like “Low-Flying Jets” is one friend chasing another, pleading with him to stay connected, through the only language they could share: songcraft.
Gust and Smith’s voices were suited uniquely to each other—both cutting and thin with an elfin frailty. Gust’s was a rougher and slightly more splenetic version of Smith’s, and the two of them felt like they completed each other’s hazy half-thoughts. On songs like “Eagle Eye,” “Rest My Head Against the Wall,” and “Cruel Reminder,” Gust explored his loneliness and dissatisfaction as a young gay man seeking partnership, and his lyrics map a shifty, fidgety hyper-awareness that doesn’t feel too far from Smith’s own. There isn’t a lot of psychological distance between “Dead stop on the curb, eyes in the back of my head” (“Cruel Reminder”) and “Gonna walk walk walk/Four more blocks plus the one in my brain.”
In the end, you can’t write a song good enough to paper over a contract dispute, or to reunite the branching paths of fate. They sing to each other about burnout, resentment, and bad communication, but these diffident twentysomething guys couldn’t even agree on which songs were about whom—Smith, who wrote “Pop in G” about his frustration with Lash’s studio perfectionism, was furious because he thought Gust’s “Cruel Reminder” was about him (“Keep trying to see from a better position/It’s no good”), when in fact it was about an unrequited crush. On “Low-Flying Jets,” Gust sings, “You can’t hear me at all” in a very Smith-ian hush, while the only part Smith contributed to the song, a buzzing static guitar, slowly overtakes him and drowns him out.
Big arguments centered around cymbal sounds—arguments that led to one of them storming out to a café around the corner. “There was a lot of storming out of the room during those sessions,” Coomes laughed on Life of the Record. On “Pop in G,” Smith sings, “You go drink your problems still/A statue in the barroom/You’ve got feelings left to kill/And I won’t forget it too soon,” which is an intense thing to sing about a guy who maybe fiddled with his drum track too much.
Heard this way, the songs are the exact opposite of the classic Beatles’ White Album situation, one in which competing egos tug the band in differing directions. The tension that suffuses Mic City Sons like room tone is the sound of one iconic songwriter’s rise, and the sound of his closest friends, bending their own considerable talents, inflecting their voices in an effort to not lose everything they’d worked for.
Lost in the story of the struggle is the sound of the music itself, which becomes clearer with the addition of new and unreleased material in this new, 30th-anniversary reissue. Far from being an albatross around a generational songwriter’s neck, Heatmiser were the most telepathic and intuitive musicians that Smith played with. They were invaluable to him, and they drew things out of his music that no one did.
After leaving Heatmiser, Smith often struggled with scale: How much could he add to his sound without crushing it? The balance was elusive, and there were moments on solo albums like Figure 8 (“L.A.,” “Wouldn’t Mama Be Proud”) where he rendered himself nearly unrecognizable. Mic City Sons contains some of the best rock songs that an adult Smith would ever sing on. For a few precious moments, most notably during “The Fix Is In” and “See You Later,” Heatmiser ceased to be a bunch of guys trying to hold onto a supernova. They were a band, huddling around the flowering songwriter in their ranks, supporting him in a way he never would be again.
The additional material adds to the story in fascinating ways. Gust’s songs get a little more space to breathe: “Cocksucker’s Blues” and “Silent Treatment” are an excellent example of his pained, windswept register, similar to Meat Puppets. Another crucial addition is “I’m Over That Now,” a demo from Smith that receives an arrangement from the band, posthumously. The sound of Smith’s Le Domino guitar is unmistakable. It’s touching to hear—the band tiptoes around Smith’s frail, wounded tenor as carefully as they did when they were all gritting their teeth in the studio together, trying to make sense of their shifting dynamics. Lash’s kit work is gentle and brushlike, while Gust’s guitar swarms like fireflies. They still know how to cup the small flame of his songs, the way that only lifelong friends can.
