Emitt Rhodes’ eponymous debut is absolutely one of the most inspiring albums that we have ever heard; a baroque-pop masterpiece channelled from his parents garage.
Early 1970, Hawthorne, California, 20-year old Emitt Rhodes got down to work on a set of songs that would form his solo debut LP. He was already some years into his career, firstly drumming for LA garage band The Palace Guard and having been the singer-songwriter behind the (absolutely excellent) psych band, The Merry-Go-Round. Creative differences had led to Rhodes disbanding the group in early 1969, focusing on ploughing his own furrow, investing in an aging second-hand Ampex 4-track machine and converting his parents garage space into a studio. To explain briefly, what he managed to accomplish creatively on this album with his technical limitations is just extraordinary.
Emitt Rhodes wrote, performed and produced it entirely. The richness of his power pop is just ludicrous, with Rhodes recording and bouncing the various components onto the same four tracks on the tape so that he could add his rich suite of vocal harmonies. It was a complicated process with plenty of pre-planning and the constant risk of performances going out of sync. He managed to make doing something extraordinarily complicated sound as graceful and freeflowing as any big studio album of the time.
“I learned how to engineer by being in the studio and watching. So when it came time to do it myself, I was familiar with how things worked. But being in the studio was a wonderful thing, watching the wheels go round and round”
Across his short discography, Emitt Rhodes experienced more than his fair share of bad luck. After the disbanding of The Merry-Go-Round, Rhodes fulfilled the A&M Records contract, but the songs were shelved indefinitely as he went solo. But after the great response to Emitt Rhodes‘ release on Dunhill Records, A&M rushed out the long-shelved The American Dream, the album of songs that Rhodes had recorded during the The Merry-Go-Round era. After an initial non-commercially released version, they bodged a revised version in 1971 which confused the campaign around the self-titled release. Dunhill weren’t much better, locking Rhodes into a contract that demanded an album every six months - six albums over three years - which was just an impossible schedule for him to meet, especially in the way he worked. When he was unable to deliver a second album six months after his eponymous release, his contract was thrown into default and he was actually sued by the label for breach-of-contract. There were a couple of albums that followed over the next few years, but he had become totally disillusioned. He is one of music’s most poorly handled stories.
Although the recording process, competence and ingenuity of production is quite remarkable, the most enduring part of this glorious album is the double hit of Rhodes’ amazing voice and that these are just brilliantly written and arranged songs. He is often compared (favourably) to Paul McCartney - who was of course working on his own self-recorded and self-titled opus McCartney at the same time - and any of the songs on Emitt Rhodes would comfortably sit across the sequence of the last couple of Beatles albums. Straight up.
Fresh as a Daisy is a three minute sunshine pop sizzler, Lullabye is a sweetly woozing curiosity and Promises I’ve Made is just hands down a perfect song; one of the finest ever. There is always a little flash of melancholy amongst the sunshine, and his arrangements have such a timeless quality to them too. Nothing is ever overly fussy, there is actually a great deal of restraint. Although I rarely see copies come up second hand, every time I have over the years I have bought a copy. Treasures! It is a magical album of propulsive guitar pop and soaring vocals.
A proper Sunday Classic.