Notes

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Outside San Francisco's Bottom of the Hill on Wednesday night, a ticketless crowd had gathered to hear, if not see, its favorite singer-songwriter play an acoustic set to a sold-out house. Inside, the show hadn't even started, and Elliott Smith was already looking forlorn. He looked forlorn very well. ``The guitar is not working,'' he called from the stage to the sound technician at the back of the club.

Silence. ``Is it working?'' he tried again.

He strummed a chord. ``No, it's not working.'' Smith talks the way he sings and looks, like a winsomely ironic sad sack. Prerecorded music piped through the speakers to cover the onstage silence as he sat on a little hard-backed chair and patiently cradled his guitar, waiting.

It was a quintessential Elliott Smith moment, the sort of thing he would write into one of his brave and woeful songs: Man tries to make contact; man is thwarted; man is left sitting alone.

Except, of course, that these days Smith is anything but the small person lost in a big world so tellingly portrayed in his music. He was already an established cult figure and a critical favorite when director Gus Van Sant asked him to write a song for his film, ``Good Will Hunting.'' That song was the Academy Award- nominated ``Miss Misery,'' which millions of TV viewers and a house ful of celebrities watched a rumpled Smith perform at the 1998 Oscar ceremony. Life for the Northwest- raised, Los Angeles-dwelling singer hasn't been quite the same since.

At Bottom of the Hill, Smith's heightened profile was easy to ignore, unless you counted the number of people begging for tickets outside. With his blue sweatshirt, jeans and perpetually lank, light brown hair, he looked and sounded the way he always has, and the way his fans love him to: like any messed up but innately courageous soul on the block, albeit one with a genius for musical language.

Once his guitar was working, Smith delivered a quietly dazzling 70-minute set that included songs from his forthcoming CD, ``Figure 8,'' as well as copious material from his four earlier albums. He opened with a pair of recent songs, ``Son of Sam'' and ``Happiness: The Gondola Man,'' then switched to ``Southern Belle'' from his self-titled 1995 album and ``Behind the Bars'' from 1997's ``Either/Or.''

The intimate club environment gave full play to Smith's wonderfully idiosyncratic guitar playing. Where many acoustic musicians stick to standard chord progressions to focus on singing, Smith gave his guitar as much consideration as he did his vocals, plucking countermelodies and arpeggios while his gentle, occasionally raspy voice delivered lyrics about love, the loss of love and the possibility of surviving both.

``I can't see any of you,'' he told the crowd during a rare moment of stage banter. ``Are you all OK?'' This was Smith's way of asking whether everyone was having a good time, and he was answered with applause and cheers. Smiling, he moved on to ``Everything Means Nothing to Me,'' a song whose title speaks to the dualities in Smith's music and persona. He's alternately hopeful and hopeless, sweet and bitter.

A series of oldies followed -- including ``Last Call'' from his 1994 independent release, ``Roman Candle,'' and ``Needle in the Hay'' from ``Elliott Smith'' -- before he concluded his main set with a few new er numbers, among them the gently acerbic ``Pretty Mary K.''

Smith was dragged back for two encores before his pleaded a failing voice and left the stage. His parting shot was a cover of Big Star's ``Nighttime,'' which hinges on the refrain, ``Get me out of here/Get me out of here/I hate it here/Get me out of here.'' The indie-icon-turned-star smiled as he sang the harsh words, looking wistful, contrary and perfectly Elliott Smith.