Illustration by Al Parker for Cosmopolitan magazine, September 1954
Has this situation ever happened to you? People you know are all excited about something cool that they've discovered, and them sharing it with you gets you excited too. Then, when there's some news about this thing, those people have disappeared and you have no one to share it with. It's a weird feeling. My point is this - where are the people that introduced me to Emitt Rhodes?!? The lost albums of Emitt Rhodes have been like a Power-Pop Holy Grail or something for years. Now they've finally been remastered and released in a beautiful two-CD set by Hip-O Select. Why is no one talking about this? The easy answer that I hear a lot is that Emitt Rhodes is a second-rate McCartney imposter that never contributed anything new or original in his short solo career. My response to this is that Rhodes is not just A McCartney imposter - he is THE McCartney imposter to beat all others, and his songwriting talents and interesting story make his work different and worthwhile.
Rhodes grew up in Hawthorne, CA (known as the home of the Beach Boys) in the '60s. In an early brush with greatness, Dennis Wilson broke Rhodes' bass drum pedal at a school talent show. Rhodes was, of course, never a Beach Boys fan - he loved the Beatles, and by the age of fourteen, he was playing drums in the Palace Guard, an LA-area band that had a minor hit with the excellent garage-pop song "Falling Sugar". By sixteen, Rhodes was not happy behind the kit, and he had formed his own band the Merry-Go-Round, for which he sang, played guitar, and wrote almost all the material. The Merry-Go-Round specialized in sweet baroque pop, and their debut record for A&M Records had a regional hit with the song "Live" (later covered by the Bangles). Rhodes didn't thrive in the band dynamic, though, and the Merry-Go-Round was disbanded by his twentieth birthday.
And this is where the material on The Emitt Rhodes Recordings begins. Rhodes recorded four solo albums, presented in this set in the order they were recorded. The first of these albums, The American Dream, was made up of Merry-Go-Round leftovers and recorded by Rhodes with studio musicians to satisfy the Merry-Go-Round's contract with A&M. Rhodes' songwriting had already hit a new level, although the subject matter is largely abstract and hypothetical - understandable considering that he was just turning twenty and hadn't really lived much yet. The only problem with The American Dream is that the label slathered many of the songs in goopy string and horn arrangements that don't sound great. Rhodes completed the album in 1969, but A&M declined to release it right away. Rhodes decided it was time to do his own thing, so he set up a home studio in the shed of his parents' house in Hawthorne and started recording some new songs.
The new home demos were good enough to land Rhodes a deal with Dunhill Records, and these songs eventually became Rhodes' self-titled power-pop masterpiece. Emitt Rhodes featured Rhodes' most personal songwriting to date, and some of the overt McCartney-isms of his earlier work were fading as he found his own voice (ironically, his actual voice would always sound a lot like Paul). One of the very first true power pop records, Emitt Rhodes boasts twelve classic pop songs, including the bouncy tribute to alcohol "With My Face on the Floor", the wistful "Somebody Made for Me", and a brief lullabye titled "Lullabye" (which some may know from its appearance in The Royal Tenenbaums.) "Fresh as a Daisy" was an obvious standout as well, and Dunhill pushed it as a single - it reached #54 on the pop charts and the album sold well too. Not bad for a home-recorded debut record. The album probably would have done even better if A&M hadn't decided to finally release The American Dream around the same time, causing confusion among fans. "Fresh as a Daisy" was the single on the radio, but Rhodes' most recent release in stores was a record that didn't even have the song.
This was just the first of several bad turns that destroyed Rhodes' career. The second was that Dunhill was already asking for a second record within months of Emitt Rhodes' release. It turned out that Rhodes' recording contract required him to turn in a new record every six months, which is basically impossible for a guy writing and recording entire records at home. Rhodes started working on his next record, Mirror, right away, but Dunhill sued him when he didn't have it done on time for an amount of money exceeding the total he'd made from all his music combined. Rhodes finished the record anyway, but Mirror is definitely a product of the tension under which it was crafted. It doesn't sound sloppy or rushed, but the baroque style is thrown out entirely in favor of a more muscular and (oddly) piano-based sound. The songs are more bluesy and don't always play to Rhodes' strengths, but there's a nice contrast between the sweetness of his vocal melodies and the angry tension in the music. The softer songs, like "Love Will Stone You" and "Golden Child of God" are on par with any of Rhodes' best.
Dunhill didn't promote Mirror at all, so it flopped instead of building on the success of Rhodes' self-titled debut. The label continued with their lawsuit, but Rhodes still owed them another record, so he started working on his swan song, Farewell to Paradise. By this time, Rhodes was an accomplished engineer and producer and had taught himself several additional instruments, so Farewell to Paradise is a great-sounding record. On the down side, one of the instruments Rhodes taught himself was the saxophone, and (although he plays it pretty well) the noodling sax parts on some songs aren't really a good fit. Rhodes sounds totally worn out, too, making the record a pretty depressing listen in some ways. In fact, Farewell to Paradise is the first of Rhodes' records that actually has a "California" sound, and its vibe of soulful resignation sounds is very similar to Pacific Ocean Blue, the final record of Rhodes' old nemesis Dennis Wilson. "Warm Self-Sacrifice", "Blue Horizon" and "Farewell to Paradise" are so good and so sad that it's obvious that Rhodes was wrapping up his recording career in writing them. Dunhill barely released the record and it disappeared without a trace. In one last soul-crushing turn, Rhodes became a record-company A&R man when he gave up music, becoming part of the machine that had killed his dreams.
Rhodes has struggled to get by since the '80s, renting out his home studio to recording artists to make ends meet. He supposedly has hundreds of home demos on tape somewhere, but recent interviews indicate that the bright-eyed dreamer you hear on The Emitt Rhodes Recordings has been gone for years. Hopefully, people will start talking about this excellent set and its Limited Edition run will sell out - then Rhodes might finally see some royalty checks make their way to him after years of being abused by the industry.
"Fresh as a Daisy" by Emitt Rhodes
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