* texts culled from the sites Perfect Sound Forever, Emitt Rhodes Music, & various interviews
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'I’ve had all the good stuff, and I’ve have all the bad stuff. Sometimes I’m happy to be alive, and sometimes I couldn’t care less.'-- Emitt Rhodes, 2004
'Most cult heroes are cult heroes by design. Either his or her music is too esoteric to be accepted by the mainstream, or his or her personality too erratic or weird for most people to understand or tolerate. In either respect, the artist usually has sought out selective rather than widespread acceptance on purpose. The cult audience, in turn, is grateful for the opportunity to feel superior to all the stupid, smelly legions of idiots who make up the majority of the music-buying public.
'Then there's people like Emitt Rhodes, who's a cult hero for no good reason whatsoever. Far from obscure, his music is loaded with melodic charisma, that essential ingredient that makes you want to hear some records over and over again. Often called a musical dead ringer for Sir Paul McCartney, Rhodes is really the Macca we all wish Macca would be: an incredible pop tunesmith without all the gooey sentimentality and overflowing cuteness. The crown jewel of Rhodes' small body of work is his self-titled debut album. Released to critical acclaim and modest commercial success in 1970, Emitt Rhodes has since taken on mythical status among power-pop and '70's rock aficionados. The album is a tour-de-force: just like McCartney on his first solo album, Rhodes played all the instruments and sang all the vocals himself. But even more impressive are the songs. Only 20 years old at the time, Rhodes had already absorbed the best of '60s rock and matched it. Lennon/ McCartney certainly weren't writing songs the caliber of "Really Wanted You" or "With My Face on the Floor" at that age. This precocious, good-looking kid should have been unstoppable.
Emitt Rhodes:'For me it's one-four-five. It's Pythagorean Theorum. For me it's mathematics. I love Pythagoras. Everybody else in rock and roll loves Pythagoras, too, even if they don't know it. It's Pythagoras. You split the string in half and you get an octave. You split it into thirds and you get a third. I'm just telling you that Pythagoras was a wonderful guy. He lived a long time ago, nobody knows him and nobody cares. He gave us do re mi fa sol la ti do. Without him... somebody else would have had to do it. I love math. I love science. I love that stuff.'
'But as it turned out, Rhodes was pretty much dead in the water careerwise at 24. A contract dispute raised the ire of his record company, and instead of nurturing a talented and potentially lucrative artist, they ended up giving Rhodes a royal rogering. Chewed up and spat out, Rhodes was burned out before his career really got started. While he's flattered people still care about the music he made 30 years ago, being a self-described "has-been wannabe" doesn't quite sit well with him.
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'Born and raised in Hawthorne, California, a bastion of power-pop thanks to homeboys The Beach Boys, Rhodes started with rock 'n' roll in his early teens, playing drums in a band called The Emerals. "My father was really nice," Rhodes said."He let me use the garage. Having a garage was, for a drummer, a really popular thing. Every band needs a place to rehearse and I had one." The Emerals played the local circuit, including Hawthorne High School dances. It was at one of these dances that Rhodes had a run-in with one of his hometown's soon-to-be princes. "Dennis Wilson broke my drum pedal," Rhodes recalled over 35 years later. "He never paid for it or got me a new one. He just broke it and left." The Emerals soon evolved into The Palace Guard, who had a minor hit single called "Falling Sugar."
Emitt Rhodes:'We had the name first. I had green drums. Everybody was looking for any reason to pick a name. I had green drums so they called us the Emerals, and they spelled it wrong. It was seven of us and three of them were brothers. Don Beaudoin was the leader of the band. It was child abuse. D... B... was the same age as I was and he was abused by G... B... who ran the Hullabaloo and who was the head of Orange Empire Records. He fucked him. I was fourteen at the time and I knew, so I would imagine his brothers knew also and that his parents knew too. He was like the sacrificial goat so [we] could get that big plum job at the Hullabaloo. The Palace Guard didn't write our music. I didn't write it either. I wrote songs that the Merry Go Round did later, that were hits to some degree, but I didn't write "Falling Sugar". I have no idea who wrote that, but it wasn't anybody in the band. That was all stuff that was put together by this guy G... B... who liked to fuck D... B... in the butt.'
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'Emitt was still the drummer, but he was looking to step out from behind the drum kit and into the spotlight. In 1966, he left The Palace Guard and formed another group with a long name (remember this is mid-60s L.A.) called The Merry-Go-Round. Instead of keeping time, Rhodes was now the guitar-playing frontman and songwriter. Retaining guitarist Gary Kato from his old band, the 16-year-old Rhodes recruited drummer Joel Larson and bassist Bill Rhinehart to complete the line-up.
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The Merry-Go-Round
'The new group quickly recorded what would be its biggest hit, a Rubber Soul soundalike called "Live." Based on a demo of "Live" and another song called "Clown's No Good," A&M Records signed The Merry-Go-Round and released "Live" as a single. After the song shot to number one in L.A., A&M slapped together a bunch of demos and called it M-G-R's debut album. Called simply The Merry-Go-Round, the album holds up surprisingly well considering the circumstances. "Gonna Fight the War" and "Low Down" are tough guitar songs that rival the best Buffalo Springfield, while more melancholy tracks like "You're A Very Lovely Woman" and "On Your Way Out" out-Big Star Big Star more than three years before #1 Record. Essentially a garage "boy band," The M-G-R nevertheless had a sophisticated sound, due in large part to Rhodes' rapidly developing songwriting ability.
Emitt Rhodes:'My problem is "Live." I've had friends tell me this; I don't really know. The Bangles did it and they put it on compilations and I should have got paid for it, but my publisher sent me a statement saying I didn't, that he took the rights to the song back or something. I look at the contracts I signed when I was a sixteen year old, it's child abuse. My mother and my father signed with me. I just wanted to make music. My mother and father didn't know any better so they just signed with me and I have contracts that say "for perpetuity.""We own these songs for perpetuity." Forever, and I'm going "oh, okay." I was only fourteen, fifteen, sixteen years old and I didn't understand.'
'But by 1969 Rhodes, now 19, grew tired of the inevitable in-fighting that comes with being in a group. He wanted to make music for himself and by himself, so he set up a makeshift studio in a shed behind his parents house. "I bought myself a machine. It was an old four track machine, an Ampex,"Rhodes recalled. "It had huge knobs and giant meters. It was the size of a washing machine. It looked like something out of Flash Gordon."With his brand new four-track, Rhodes began bashing out songs for his first solo album. His desire to record everything himself was practical because he didn't have any money to hire musicians. Alone in the studio he was open to experimentation. "I was a drummer and I had a piano and I had a guitar and I just started there. The next thing I knew I wanted to play the violin and the sax and the flute and the harmonica and the banjo and everything. I'm a tinkerer. I would buy an instrument and an instructional book, and just play scales for an hour a day until I felt comfortable doing it. And then I would write parts. I was more of an arranger I guess."
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'With only three mics, two mixers and his four track crowded in the 20 foot long by 10 foot wide shed, recording was a time consuming process. "I had the machine on one end and the drums on the other, and I'd press the record button and run over and sit down and put the phones on. It was pretty rudimentary." As Rhodes assembled the record, he had no idea he was creating his masterpiece. "I was just doing the best I could do, writing what I thought was important at the time."
Emitt Rhodes "Really Wanted You" 1971 Promo Film
'In the middle of working on the album, Rhodes approached ABC/Dunhill with some instrumental tracks. The label signed him and paid Rhodes the princely sum of $5,000. When Emitt Rhodes was released in 1970, it charted at #29 and the single, "Fresh as a Daisy," broke the top 60. Rhodes was hailed by critics as an artist to watch, and with the singer-songwriter movement just underway, his career appear to be on the fast track.
'Maybe too fast. ABC/Dunhill wanted more product from their hot new star, and they wanted it soon. His contract stipulated that he release two albums every year, a feat The Beatles regularly pulled off in their heyday. But unlike the Fab Four, Rhodes was only one person doing everything himself. It was hard work and a lot of pressure for a guy still living with his parents, but ABC/Dunhill was less than understanding. As work on his second album Mirror dragged on for nearly a year, the record company suspended his contract and sued him. "I got in trouble," Rhodes said. "I was being sued for more money than I ever made. It didn't make any sense to me."
'Released in 1971, Mirror bombed, going to only #182 on the charts. While the record boasts some great songs, Rhodes had clearly lost his momentum. "I worked really hard, did the best I could, and I got in trouble. I mean, it's like, what am I doing? What am I doing this for?" he said. "You have to get your dog biscuit after you rollover or sit up. Otherwise you don't want to do it again ... I burned out."Another album, Farewell to Paradise, followed and did even worse on the charts than Mirror. At 24, eight years after he formed The Merry-Go-Round, Rhodes stopped recording. "There were lawsuits and lawyers and I wasn't having any fun anymore. That's it. Simple as that. I worked really hard and there was no reward," he said.
Emitt Rhodes:'I believe in death. It works. It goes black and then you're not there anymore. I've been there a few times. I'm against death. I believe in life. I have my own religion. I'm an atheist. I believe in life being the most important thing there is. Life is it. I believe everybody will agree that life's important. I've been dead so I know what death is. You go black. Kind of whiteout really. Your brain works up until the time that it doesn't work anymore. My afterwards is different than yours might be. My afterwards is I don't have blood sugar. My brain dies. It's like I can't think anymore because I don't have enough blood sugar for my brain to function anymore. The last experience I had is that I was lying in the middle of my room trying not to drown on my own saliva because I couldn't swallow because swallowing means that muscle has blood sugar to do it. I was beyond that.'
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'Other than a brief moment in 1980 when he had a record deal with Elektra/Asylum that was eventually terminated, Emitt has stuck to recording demos in his home studio that will probably never the see the light of day. "It's just songs," he said of his demos. "It's melodic. I like melodies that go from one place to the next. I like chords. I can't say what (a new album) would sound like because I haven't heard it yet."
'There was some excitement in the past year among Rhodes' fans when the 50-year-old signed to the small indie label Rocktopia. Rhodes even started pre-production work on what would have been his first record in over 25 years, sorting through his collection of hundreds of demos, and he was planning on hiring musicians instead of doing everything himself. "I wanted to hire people to come play with me and just play producer and songwriter," he said. "I'm an old guy now. I get sleepy at night. I have friends that play so much better than me (and) I just love listening sometimes."
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'But his deal with Rocktopia ultimately fell through when the label ran out of money. Without an advance to finance a new record, Rhodes can't move forward. "I have the desire to do it but I don't know if I have the time," he said. "It's on hold at the moment, unless I find a way to support myself without working. I could win the lotto I guess."
Emitt Rhodes:'I met this guy, an enthusiast. Wasn’t a great songwriter. But I liked him, so I thought, well, I’ll help him out and help him write a song. So he gave me this lyric, and I went over the lyric, and there was only one phrase in the whole thing that appealed to me, and that was, ‘Oh Lord, what’s a guy gonna do? What’s a guy supposed to do?’ or something like that. And it was about him waiting for his girlfriend who was upstairs talking on the phone to another girlfriend, and he was getting tired and didn’t want to go out, and anyway, it was complete nonsense, and I changed it to, ‘Oh Lord, what’s a man to do?’ and put it in minor key and sent him home and said, ‘Write some lyrics’. And he came back, and he had written, ‘How long I’ve anguished and set aside what little’s left of my foolish pride’, and I thought that that was so good that I wrote more to it. It all made sense to me; I saw the focus of it. So I kind of kept steering the lyric in that manner, and he would write more, and I’d send him home and he’d write more. Then every once in a while I’d throw a line in there, and then I used [with mock grandiosity] my superior ability in writing chord progressions to write what I thought was a real beautiful chord progression in its own right, even without a melody. And then I put a melody to it, so then I made it my song, you know. And then we went on from there and we did three songs, ’cause going to do just one didn’t seem right. He had this friend who had a studio in an office building, so we went into that studio and started recording. And we were like the first people in it, and I had friends come by and play, and stuff like that. And it was good for his studio, I thought. But this guy was just digging a hole for me to walk into. He handed me a bill. Some people are like, you know, they trip you, and then they call you clumsy.'
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'Today Rhodes still lives in the neighborhood where he grew up, in a house across the street from his parents' old house. "I'm just trying to stay alive," he said. "I have a small studio and I rent studio time ... I'm not a rich person. I make a living."'-- collaged
"I was real fortunate. I had two parents who allowed me to make noise as long as it was outside in the garage. I made those records when I had no bills. I didn't have a house at the time. I had very little bills and very little worries at the time. Music was pretty much the focus of my life, just making noise. Now it's making noise to pay the landlord."
Trailer: 'THE ONE MAN BEATLES: The Emitt Rhodes Story'
Emitt Rhodes playing piano in 'One Man Beatles'
EMITT RHODES - LOST PHOTOS AND MEMORIES
Emitt Rhodes Music
Official Emitt Rhodes @ Facebook
Emitt Rhodes Discography
Emitt Rhodes interviewed @ L.A. Record
Emitt Rhodes interviewed @ The LA Beat
Emitt Rhodes interviewed @ SCRAM Magazine
'One Man Beatles' @ imdB
'The Emitt Rhodes Collection'
'Emitt Rhodes Recorded At Home' @ Tape Op
*
p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Agreed. ** Tosh Berman, Hi, Tosh. Thanks. That Beau Rice event should be nice. How was it? ** Steevee, Hi, Steve. I'm happy to hear that Janus is handing Howard's film, obviously. ** Sypha, I like gloomy, so who knows. I just get irked by inflexible nihilism really. Yeah, I guess my recurring motifs are self-explanatory. Understood about your problem with Blake's 'horror'. I like his usage for the same reasons you don't, I guess, but I never think of his work as 'horror', just as work that employs and occupies 'horror' when necessary or convenient to reach his aim, I guess in the same way that I use, say, the pornographic or certain YA narrative conceits or 'gayness' or etc. in my stuff at times. Anyway, your thoughts on the troubles and positives you have with Blake's stuff is very interesting, and I appreciate your parsing and explaining that. ** Sickly, Hi, man. You know that Rice guy, cool. That's a sharp book he wrote there. How was the launch, and how did he handle presenting the book in a live setting? My ribs are ever so slowly retuning to their basic form, I think. Seems so. Thanks for the pro-health wish. ** Tim Jones-Yelvington, Hi, Tim. Yeah, me too, re: the Jemc and Hunter books. The others in the group were awesome too. Well, obviously I think so, I guess. Love the latest Troyan too, yeah, for sure. I'll get and check out the James Tadd Adcox book. ** Zach, Hi. Yeah, I had kind of that thought about the Rice too, interesting. Huh, you just made Dorothy Wordsworth's Alfoxden Journal something I clearly need to find and read. Fascinating. Thanks a lot for that share. Really cool about your literary zine! I'll definitely share the alert/request right now. And If I make or find something of mine, I'll send it along for your perusal. Everyone, D.l. Zach is doing a literary journal, and he would be interested in considering work by anyone within the sight if these words. Well, in his words: 'also, this post reminded me that i ought to say here, to all the folks around me as well, that i am working on a literary magazine that will be published online in a pdf format, with some smaller zine like distribution as a printed object as well. folks here should send us stuff! www.americanchordata.org.' Strongly consider that, yeah? If I can dig something up to submit, I certainly will. ** Kier, Hi, K! I don't even know if I could be mouse quiet if I tried. I mean, I'm not a huge talker, so that part is doable, but I am big and kind of clumsy. I like Xmas too. Paris does Xmas proud. Speaking of, the patisseries are starting to reveal their buche designs for this year, so that's exciting. I don't think the military base was why I knew that place. I can't remember why. Iceage is on December 1st. (Ha ha, Blogger just spell-corrected Iceage into Ikea). My yesterday ... I worked on the theater piece. That was hard, but it's happening. I did that as much as I could. I made a blog post. I'm still behind, and there might be some reruns coming, we'll see. Conferred with Zac and Gisele. I guess the highlight was having a long coffee with Peter Sotos, who's in Paris at the moment. He's great, and that was really nice and fun. Then I got home to some potentially scary news that I don't want to detail, but it put me in a spooked and unsettled mood that persists this morning, and I guess I'll find out how scary it's going to be today, and fingers crossed. That kind of swamped my day, and has made my day report blah, but I'll try to be more telling and entertaining tomorrow if my today manages to make my fear go away. How was your 'being back at work' day? ** Damien Ark, Hi, Damien. Oh, Sociology. The university I sent to for one year was full of Sociology majors, I don't know why. I guess the school was known for that or something. I hope you don't go bankrupt, obviously, man. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Any book authored by McNeil/Osbourne in oral history form, which I'm guessing is that book's form, has to be super fun based on past examples. I'll look for it. Marc Almond should be a cool gig. Is it a 'best-of' kind of show, or is he showcasing some particular album or project? ** Schlix, Hi, Uli. You're in Amsterdam, cool, except what I presume is the wet and cold weather based on my years there. Nice gigs. How were Loop? I just saw that Ride has reformed and will play here. I generally stay away from reunion gigs, but that one is luring me against my better judgement. I find the virulent anti-Elizabeth Ellen stuff very depressing. ** Kyler, Hi. Cool that you're cool with my not liking Auster. But, hey, to each his own and live and let live and all that French attitude stuff. ** Keaton, Hi. Is it even possible to know what one's libido is doing without becoming delusional? There's a new Night of the Living Dead? I guess it would be easy to get baptized here? A lot of churches around, and I guess people must go inside them for religious reasons at least once in a while. If I have any pills left, and, at the moment, I can't say given my slow recovering, I'll slip you some. But they're very weak. Don't expect much at all from them. ** Jose Acevedo, Hi, Jose! Cool, send me stuff. Just be forewarned, if I haven't already forewarned you, that I can be molasses slow, especially now when I'm swamped with work that I have to do, but, that said, it will be a great pleasure to see and experience your work, and thank you! How is 'Energy Flash'? I like Simon Reynolds's writing a lot. Wow, really interesting stories, man. Your energy is exciting! I'll message you at Facebook the next time I go there, cool, thanks. ** Misanthrope, Hi, G. Okay, I'll hold onto the Iceland bills 'til ... Ah, she's scared the school thing will lead to an examination of her. How, sorry, selfish of her. But, yeah, fear is a beast, so I get it. I don't think I have any FB friends who reference God. I have a bunch who chase outrage like it's a winning lottery caught in a breeze or something. Your frustration with that situation is a million percent understandable. Jesus. ** Etc etc etc, Hi, Casey. I saw an email from you this morning, but I haven' had the chance to open it. Thank you! Please be patient because I'm way overworked at the moment, but I'm excited! Cool! ** Bill, Hi. I liked 'Rose Alley' a lot, so I don't know if you'll like 'Fancy'. It's different but it's in its/his general style and mindset. People sometimes send me books/pdfs really early sometimes. I'm lucky that way. ** Okay. I'm focusing on Emitt Rhodes today. Weirdly overlooked pop song form maestro circa the early 70s mostly who famously never hit it big for reasons that no one can quite understand. See you tomorrow.
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'I’ve had all the good stuff, and I’ve have all the bad stuff. Sometimes I’m happy to be alive, and sometimes I couldn’t care less.'-- Emitt Rhodes, 2004
'Most cult heroes are cult heroes by design. Either his or her music is too esoteric to be accepted by the mainstream, or his or her personality too erratic or weird for most people to understand or tolerate. In either respect, the artist usually has sought out selective rather than widespread acceptance on purpose. The cult audience, in turn, is grateful for the opportunity to feel superior to all the stupid, smelly legions of idiots who make up the majority of the music-buying public.
'Then there's people like Emitt Rhodes, who's a cult hero for no good reason whatsoever. Far from obscure, his music is loaded with melodic charisma, that essential ingredient that makes you want to hear some records over and over again. Often called a musical dead ringer for Sir Paul McCartney, Rhodes is really the Macca we all wish Macca would be: an incredible pop tunesmith without all the gooey sentimentality and overflowing cuteness. The crown jewel of Rhodes' small body of work is his self-titled debut album. Released to critical acclaim and modest commercial success in 1970, Emitt Rhodes has since taken on mythical status among power-pop and '70's rock aficionados. The album is a tour-de-force: just like McCartney on his first solo album, Rhodes played all the instruments and sang all the vocals himself. But even more impressive are the songs. Only 20 years old at the time, Rhodes had already absorbed the best of '60s rock and matched it. Lennon/ McCartney certainly weren't writing songs the caliber of "Really Wanted You" or "With My Face on the Floor" at that age. This precocious, good-looking kid should have been unstoppable.
Emitt Rhodes:'For me it's one-four-five. It's Pythagorean Theorum. For me it's mathematics. I love Pythagoras. Everybody else in rock and roll loves Pythagoras, too, even if they don't know it. It's Pythagoras. You split the string in half and you get an octave. You split it into thirds and you get a third. I'm just telling you that Pythagoras was a wonderful guy. He lived a long time ago, nobody knows him and nobody cares. He gave us do re mi fa sol la ti do. Without him... somebody else would have had to do it. I love math. I love science. I love that stuff.'
'But as it turned out, Rhodes was pretty much dead in the water careerwise at 24. A contract dispute raised the ire of his record company, and instead of nurturing a talented and potentially lucrative artist, they ended up giving Rhodes a royal rogering. Chewed up and spat out, Rhodes was burned out before his career really got started. While he's flattered people still care about the music he made 30 years ago, being a self-described "has-been wannabe" doesn't quite sit well with him.
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'Born and raised in Hawthorne, California, a bastion of power-pop thanks to homeboys The Beach Boys, Rhodes started with rock 'n' roll in his early teens, playing drums in a band called The Emerals. "My father was really nice," Rhodes said."He let me use the garage. Having a garage was, for a drummer, a really popular thing. Every band needs a place to rehearse and I had one." The Emerals played the local circuit, including Hawthorne High School dances. It was at one of these dances that Rhodes had a run-in with one of his hometown's soon-to-be princes. "Dennis Wilson broke my drum pedal," Rhodes recalled over 35 years later. "He never paid for it or got me a new one. He just broke it and left." The Emerals soon evolved into The Palace Guard, who had a minor hit single called "Falling Sugar."
Emitt Rhodes:'We had the name first. I had green drums. Everybody was looking for any reason to pick a name. I had green drums so they called us the Emerals, and they spelled it wrong. It was seven of us and three of them were brothers. Don Beaudoin was the leader of the band. It was child abuse. D... B... was the same age as I was and he was abused by G... B... who ran the Hullabaloo and who was the head of Orange Empire Records. He fucked him. I was fourteen at the time and I knew, so I would imagine his brothers knew also and that his parents knew too. He was like the sacrificial goat so [we] could get that big plum job at the Hullabaloo. The Palace Guard didn't write our music. I didn't write it either. I wrote songs that the Merry Go Round did later, that were hits to some degree, but I didn't write "Falling Sugar". I have no idea who wrote that, but it wasn't anybody in the band. That was all stuff that was put together by this guy G... B... who liked to fuck D... B... in the butt.'
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'Emitt was still the drummer, but he was looking to step out from behind the drum kit and into the spotlight. In 1966, he left The Palace Guard and formed another group with a long name (remember this is mid-60s L.A.) called The Merry-Go-Round. Instead of keeping time, Rhodes was now the guitar-playing frontman and songwriter. Retaining guitarist Gary Kato from his old band, the 16-year-old Rhodes recruited drummer Joel Larson and bassist Bill Rhinehart to complete the line-up.
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The Merry-Go-Round
'The new group quickly recorded what would be its biggest hit, a Rubber Soul soundalike called "Live." Based on a demo of "Live" and another song called "Clown's No Good," A&M Records signed The Merry-Go-Round and released "Live" as a single. After the song shot to number one in L.A., A&M slapped together a bunch of demos and called it M-G-R's debut album. Called simply The Merry-Go-Round, the album holds up surprisingly well considering the circumstances. "Gonna Fight the War" and "Low Down" are tough guitar songs that rival the best Buffalo Springfield, while more melancholy tracks like "You're A Very Lovely Woman" and "On Your Way Out" out-Big Star Big Star more than three years before #1 Record. Essentially a garage "boy band," The M-G-R nevertheless had a sophisticated sound, due in large part to Rhodes' rapidly developing songwriting ability.
Emitt Rhodes:'My problem is "Live." I've had friends tell me this; I don't really know. The Bangles did it and they put it on compilations and I should have got paid for it, but my publisher sent me a statement saying I didn't, that he took the rights to the song back or something. I look at the contracts I signed when I was a sixteen year old, it's child abuse. My mother and my father signed with me. I just wanted to make music. My mother and father didn't know any better so they just signed with me and I have contracts that say "for perpetuity.""We own these songs for perpetuity." Forever, and I'm going "oh, okay." I was only fourteen, fifteen, sixteen years old and I didn't understand.'
'But by 1969 Rhodes, now 19, grew tired of the inevitable in-fighting that comes with being in a group. He wanted to make music for himself and by himself, so he set up a makeshift studio in a shed behind his parents house. "I bought myself a machine. It was an old four track machine, an Ampex,"Rhodes recalled. "It had huge knobs and giant meters. It was the size of a washing machine. It looked like something out of Flash Gordon."With his brand new four-track, Rhodes began bashing out songs for his first solo album. His desire to record everything himself was practical because he didn't have any money to hire musicians. Alone in the studio he was open to experimentation. "I was a drummer and I had a piano and I had a guitar and I just started there. The next thing I knew I wanted to play the violin and the sax and the flute and the harmonica and the banjo and everything. I'm a tinkerer. I would buy an instrument and an instructional book, and just play scales for an hour a day until I felt comfortable doing it. And then I would write parts. I was more of an arranger I guess."
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'With only three mics, two mixers and his four track crowded in the 20 foot long by 10 foot wide shed, recording was a time consuming process. "I had the machine on one end and the drums on the other, and I'd press the record button and run over and sit down and put the phones on. It was pretty rudimentary." As Rhodes assembled the record, he had no idea he was creating his masterpiece. "I was just doing the best I could do, writing what I thought was important at the time."
Emitt Rhodes "Really Wanted You" 1971 Promo Film
'In the middle of working on the album, Rhodes approached ABC/Dunhill with some instrumental tracks. The label signed him and paid Rhodes the princely sum of $5,000. When Emitt Rhodes was released in 1970, it charted at #29 and the single, "Fresh as a Daisy," broke the top 60. Rhodes was hailed by critics as an artist to watch, and with the singer-songwriter movement just underway, his career appear to be on the fast track.
'Maybe too fast. ABC/Dunhill wanted more product from their hot new star, and they wanted it soon. His contract stipulated that he release two albums every year, a feat The Beatles regularly pulled off in their heyday. But unlike the Fab Four, Rhodes was only one person doing everything himself. It was hard work and a lot of pressure for a guy still living with his parents, but ABC/Dunhill was less than understanding. As work on his second album Mirror dragged on for nearly a year, the record company suspended his contract and sued him. "I got in trouble," Rhodes said. "I was being sued for more money than I ever made. It didn't make any sense to me."
'Released in 1971, Mirror bombed, going to only #182 on the charts. While the record boasts some great songs, Rhodes had clearly lost his momentum. "I worked really hard, did the best I could, and I got in trouble. I mean, it's like, what am I doing? What am I doing this for?" he said. "You have to get your dog biscuit after you rollover or sit up. Otherwise you don't want to do it again ... I burned out."Another album, Farewell to Paradise, followed and did even worse on the charts than Mirror. At 24, eight years after he formed The Merry-Go-Round, Rhodes stopped recording. "There were lawsuits and lawyers and I wasn't having any fun anymore. That's it. Simple as that. I worked really hard and there was no reward," he said.
Emitt Rhodes:'I believe in death. It works. It goes black and then you're not there anymore. I've been there a few times. I'm against death. I believe in life. I have my own religion. I'm an atheist. I believe in life being the most important thing there is. Life is it. I believe everybody will agree that life's important. I've been dead so I know what death is. You go black. Kind of whiteout really. Your brain works up until the time that it doesn't work anymore. My afterwards is different than yours might be. My afterwards is I don't have blood sugar. My brain dies. It's like I can't think anymore because I don't have enough blood sugar for my brain to function anymore. The last experience I had is that I was lying in the middle of my room trying not to drown on my own saliva because I couldn't swallow because swallowing means that muscle has blood sugar to do it. I was beyond that.'
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'Other than a brief moment in 1980 when he had a record deal with Elektra/Asylum that was eventually terminated, Emitt has stuck to recording demos in his home studio that will probably never the see the light of day. "It's just songs," he said of his demos. "It's melodic. I like melodies that go from one place to the next. I like chords. I can't say what (a new album) would sound like because I haven't heard it yet."
'There was some excitement in the past year among Rhodes' fans when the 50-year-old signed to the small indie label Rocktopia. Rhodes even started pre-production work on what would have been his first record in over 25 years, sorting through his collection of hundreds of demos, and he was planning on hiring musicians instead of doing everything himself. "I wanted to hire people to come play with me and just play producer and songwriter," he said. "I'm an old guy now. I get sleepy at night. I have friends that play so much better than me (and) I just love listening sometimes."
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'But his deal with Rocktopia ultimately fell through when the label ran out of money. Without an advance to finance a new record, Rhodes can't move forward. "I have the desire to do it but I don't know if I have the time," he said. "It's on hold at the moment, unless I find a way to support myself without working. I could win the lotto I guess."
Emitt Rhodes:'I met this guy, an enthusiast. Wasn’t a great songwriter. But I liked him, so I thought, well, I’ll help him out and help him write a song. So he gave me this lyric, and I went over the lyric, and there was only one phrase in the whole thing that appealed to me, and that was, ‘Oh Lord, what’s a guy gonna do? What’s a guy supposed to do?’ or something like that. And it was about him waiting for his girlfriend who was upstairs talking on the phone to another girlfriend, and he was getting tired and didn’t want to go out, and anyway, it was complete nonsense, and I changed it to, ‘Oh Lord, what’s a man to do?’ and put it in minor key and sent him home and said, ‘Write some lyrics’. And he came back, and he had written, ‘How long I’ve anguished and set aside what little’s left of my foolish pride’, and I thought that that was so good that I wrote more to it. It all made sense to me; I saw the focus of it. So I kind of kept steering the lyric in that manner, and he would write more, and I’d send him home and he’d write more. Then every once in a while I’d throw a line in there, and then I used [with mock grandiosity] my superior ability in writing chord progressions to write what I thought was a real beautiful chord progression in its own right, even without a melody. And then I put a melody to it, so then I made it my song, you know. And then we went on from there and we did three songs, ’cause going to do just one didn’t seem right. He had this friend who had a studio in an office building, so we went into that studio and started recording. And we were like the first people in it, and I had friends come by and play, and stuff like that. And it was good for his studio, I thought. But this guy was just digging a hole for me to walk into. He handed me a bill. Some people are like, you know, they trip you, and then they call you clumsy.'
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'Today Rhodes still lives in the neighborhood where he grew up, in a house across the street from his parents' old house. "I'm just trying to stay alive," he said. "I have a small studio and I rent studio time ... I'm not a rich person. I make a living."'-- collaged
"I was real fortunate. I had two parents who allowed me to make noise as long as it was outside in the garage. I made those records when I had no bills. I didn't have a house at the time. I had very little bills and very little worries at the time. Music was pretty much the focus of my life, just making noise. Now it's making noise to pay the landlord."
Trailer: 'THE ONE MAN BEATLES: The Emitt Rhodes Story'
Emitt Rhodes playing piano in 'One Man Beatles'
EMITT RHODES - LOST PHOTOS AND MEMORIES
Emitt Rhodes Music
Official Emitt Rhodes @ Facebook
Emitt Rhodes Discography
Emitt Rhodes interviewed @ L.A. Record
Emitt Rhodes interviewed @ The LA Beat
Emitt Rhodes interviewed @ SCRAM Magazine
'One Man Beatles' @ imdB
'The Emitt Rhodes Collection'
'Emitt Rhodes Recorded At Home' @ Tape Op
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p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Agreed. ** Tosh Berman, Hi, Tosh. Thanks. That Beau Rice event should be nice. How was it? ** Steevee, Hi, Steve. I'm happy to hear that Janus is handing Howard's film, obviously. ** Sypha, I like gloomy, so who knows. I just get irked by inflexible nihilism really. Yeah, I guess my recurring motifs are self-explanatory. Understood about your problem with Blake's 'horror'. I like his usage for the same reasons you don't, I guess, but I never think of his work as 'horror', just as work that employs and occupies 'horror' when necessary or convenient to reach his aim, I guess in the same way that I use, say, the pornographic or certain YA narrative conceits or 'gayness' or etc. in my stuff at times. Anyway, your thoughts on the troubles and positives you have with Blake's stuff is very interesting, and I appreciate your parsing and explaining that. ** Sickly, Hi, man. You know that Rice guy, cool. That's a sharp book he wrote there. How was the launch, and how did he handle presenting the book in a live setting? My ribs are ever so slowly retuning to their basic form, I think. Seems so. Thanks for the pro-health wish. ** Tim Jones-Yelvington, Hi, Tim. Yeah, me too, re: the Jemc and Hunter books. The others in the group were awesome too. Well, obviously I think so, I guess. Love the latest Troyan too, yeah, for sure. I'll get and check out the James Tadd Adcox book. ** Zach, Hi. Yeah, I had kind of that thought about the Rice too, interesting. Huh, you just made Dorothy Wordsworth's Alfoxden Journal something I clearly need to find and read. Fascinating. Thanks a lot for that share. Really cool about your literary zine! I'll definitely share the alert/request right now. And If I make or find something of mine, I'll send it along for your perusal. Everyone, D.l. Zach is doing a literary journal, and he would be interested in considering work by anyone within the sight if these words. Well, in his words: 'also, this post reminded me that i ought to say here, to all the folks around me as well, that i am working on a literary magazine that will be published online in a pdf format, with some smaller zine like distribution as a printed object as well. folks here should send us stuff! www.americanchordata.org.' Strongly consider that, yeah? If I can dig something up to submit, I certainly will. ** Kier, Hi, K! I don't even know if I could be mouse quiet if I tried. I mean, I'm not a huge talker, so that part is doable, but I am big and kind of clumsy. I like Xmas too. Paris does Xmas proud. Speaking of, the patisseries are starting to reveal their buche designs for this year, so that's exciting. I don't think the military base was why I knew that place. I can't remember why. Iceage is on December 1st. (Ha ha, Blogger just spell-corrected Iceage into Ikea). My yesterday ... I worked on the theater piece. That was hard, but it's happening. I did that as much as I could. I made a blog post. I'm still behind, and there might be some reruns coming, we'll see. Conferred with Zac and Gisele. I guess the highlight was having a long coffee with Peter Sotos, who's in Paris at the moment. He's great, and that was really nice and fun. Then I got home to some potentially scary news that I don't want to detail, but it put me in a spooked and unsettled mood that persists this morning, and I guess I'll find out how scary it's going to be today, and fingers crossed. That kind of swamped my day, and has made my day report blah, but I'll try to be more telling and entertaining tomorrow if my today manages to make my fear go away. How was your 'being back at work' day? ** Damien Ark, Hi, Damien. Oh, Sociology. The university I sent to for one year was full of Sociology majors, I don't know why. I guess the school was known for that or something. I hope you don't go bankrupt, obviously, man. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Any book authored by McNeil/Osbourne in oral history form, which I'm guessing is that book's form, has to be super fun based on past examples. I'll look for it. Marc Almond should be a cool gig. Is it a 'best-of' kind of show, or is he showcasing some particular album or project? ** Schlix, Hi, Uli. You're in Amsterdam, cool, except what I presume is the wet and cold weather based on my years there. Nice gigs. How were Loop? I just saw that Ride has reformed and will play here. I generally stay away from reunion gigs, but that one is luring me against my better judgement. I find the virulent anti-Elizabeth Ellen stuff very depressing. ** Kyler, Hi. Cool that you're cool with my not liking Auster. But, hey, to each his own and live and let live and all that French attitude stuff. ** Keaton, Hi. Is it even possible to know what one's libido is doing without becoming delusional? There's a new Night of the Living Dead? I guess it would be easy to get baptized here? A lot of churches around, and I guess people must go inside them for religious reasons at least once in a while. If I have any pills left, and, at the moment, I can't say given my slow recovering, I'll slip you some. But they're very weak. Don't expect much at all from them. ** Jose Acevedo, Hi, Jose! Cool, send me stuff. Just be forewarned, if I haven't already forewarned you, that I can be molasses slow, especially now when I'm swamped with work that I have to do, but, that said, it will be a great pleasure to see and experience your work, and thank you! How is 'Energy Flash'? I like Simon Reynolds's writing a lot. Wow, really interesting stories, man. Your energy is exciting! I'll message you at Facebook the next time I go there, cool, thanks. ** Misanthrope, Hi, G. Okay, I'll hold onto the Iceland bills 'til ... Ah, she's scared the school thing will lead to an examination of her. How, sorry, selfish of her. But, yeah, fear is a beast, so I get it. I don't think I have any FB friends who reference God. I have a bunch who chase outrage like it's a winning lottery caught in a breeze or something. Your frustration with that situation is a million percent understandable. Jesus. ** Etc etc etc, Hi, Casey. I saw an email from you this morning, but I haven' had the chance to open it. Thank you! Please be patient because I'm way overworked at the moment, but I'm excited! Cool! ** Bill, Hi. I liked 'Rose Alley' a lot, so I don't know if you'll like 'Fancy'. It's different but it's in its/his general style and mindset. People sometimes send me books/pdfs really early sometimes. I'm lucky that way. ** Okay. I'm focusing on Emitt Rhodes today. Weirdly overlooked pop song form maestro circa the early 70s mostly who famously never hit it big for reasons that no one can quite understand. See you tomorrow.