Jim Dandy
2004-02-08 04:20:45 UTC
http://www.lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=583&IssueNum=33
01-22-04
HAPPY HAPPY, JOY JOY
by By Erik Himmelsbach
With My Face on the Floor
Emitt Rhodes still doesn’t know what hit him. Thirty years ago, he was the
new Paul McCartney, an ambitious kid who craved the perfect pop song. Then he
got blindsided into submission by the heartless business of music. Now he’s
just another sad guy with a boatload of talent that got buried in a black hole
of depression. Rhodes’s dreams collapsed in full view. That he showed early
promise as a recording artist and made a tuneful blip on the popular
consciousness perhaps justifies an examination of his specific version of life
gone astray, particularly to those who obsess over the minutiae of Los Angeles
pop-music history. But, in a way, Rhodes’s story could be anyone’s.
Certainly, most of us have been one fateful step away from a similar plight.
What if, for example, while on an early leg of your particular journey, you
were stopped dead in your tracks, crippled by an obstacle that made it
impossible to continue pursuing your true calling – yet the majority of your
life still lay before you? You’d have options, of course. You might shrug,
dust yourself off, and seek fulfillment elsewhere. Or you might decide to live
in misery. Stripped of your true love, would you simply count the days until
your death? How many of us could live happily if we felt our existence had no
meaning? Three decades later, Rhodes is a disoriented 53-year-old musician,
still trying to crawl from the emotional wreckage. “Life disappoints me.
It’s a bitter place,” he says, pounding a plethora of cocktails across the
table at an El Porto oceanside cantina. “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.”
There’s an autumn coastal chill, but the stout, bearded Rhodes is oblivious
to the weather. He wears baggy shorts, a matching polo shirt, and battered
tennis shoes. When I first met him, more than six months earlier, he wore
exactly the same thing. He’s had two wives and three kids, but communication
with them is rare. He owns his Hawthorne home – located directly across the
street from where he grew up – but must rent out the bulk of it to cover his
nut. His own personal space is a glorified flop at the front of the house, with
room enough for a mattress and a TV. He doesn’t drive anymore, not since he
crashed his car a few years ago – Rhodes lapsed into a diabetic coma with his
young daughter in the passenger seat. The totaled vehicle still sits in his
driveway, too easily symbolizing the state of its driver’s life.
This is Emitt Rhodes, onetime musical wunderkind, playing out the string. He
bears little resemblance to the young dreamboat who peered assuredly from the
cover of his stunning self-titled 1970 solo debut. Indeed, that was many lives
ago, and it’s barely even a memory for the man who lived it. The youthful
songwriter was a genius inside the recording studio. A master of melody with a
voice dipped in honey, he could play any and all instruments and work the
console like a vet.
Rhodes created simple, nakedly honest pop songs. And he did it by himself, in
the garage studio he set up in his parents’ Hawthorne home. He wrote, played,
produced, and arranged his debut album, which climbed to No. 29 on the charts
and served as a sonic flashpoint at the dawn of the singer-songwriter era. He
was 20 years old.
Inside a recording studio, the young Emitt Rhodes could do no wrong, yet all
the promise would come undone by bad advice and his own signature. It was a
piece of paper that knocked Rhodes’s face to the floor. It seems ridiculous
now, at a time when recording artists drop a new album only once every few
years, if that. (Unless, of course, you’re Ryan Adams.) But in 1970, Rhodes
signed a laughably impossible contract with ABC/Dunhill that stipulated he
deliver a record every six months. Three years and a debilitating lawsuit
later, his seemingly insatiable desire to create music would be snuffed out.
Time Will Show the Wiser
Emitt Rhodes came of age in Hawthorne in the early ’60s. The Beach Boys,
fellow travelers from the neighborhood, were all over the radio. Rhodes, whose
first instrument was the drums, was a freshman at Hawthorne High during Beach
Boys drummer Dennis Wilson’s senior year. “He borrowed my drums and broke a
drum pedal and owes me one of those. I’ve yet to receive it,” he jokes.
The whole of the teenage South Bay was in a band, including Rhodes, whose first
group was a Top 40 cover combo called the Emerals. He became its drummer at the
tender age of 14, largely because he had a garage in which the group could
practice.
The Beatles, of course, changed everything. “The Beatles were an
inspiration,” he says. “I would have followed them into space.”
The Emerals jumped on the British Invasion wave, donning Edwardian garb and
morphing into the Palace Guard. By early 1966, the band had issued a single
(“Falling Sugar”) and had landed a regular gig at the Hullabaloo on the
Sunset Strip. “I was right there on Sunset,” Rhodes remembers. “People
walked the streets, dressed up in paisley and flowers. I was up there with all
the hippie stuff, listening to all the hippie bands … . I was a hippie; it
was good, life was good.”
The Palace Guard worked two shows a night, six nights a week. Rhodes was given
one solo turn per performance, singing the Beatles’ “Michelle,” replete
with McCartney-esque Liverpudlian nuances. The 16-year-old drummer was merely
happy to get out from behind the kit. “I was the center of attention,” he
says.
“I enjoyed singing ‘Michelle,’ but the drums were a pain in the butt.
Everybody up front gets more attention,” he says. “Sensory organism, you
run through life trying to gratify it.” At the Hullabaloo, he began to find
ways to feed that jones, writing “You’re a Very Lovely Woman” (which
would become the second single by his next group, the Merry-Go-Round) while
´´ hanging around backstage.
Russ Shaw caught Rhodes singing “Michelle” and made the drummer a
proposition: Leave the band, and I’ll make you a star. The son of music
publisher Eddie Shaw, Russ was doing gofer work for A&M Records, and saw the
sweet-faced Rhodes as his ticket into the business. He became Rhodes’s
manager and brought along his dad to handle the publishing. This would be
Rhodes’s first mistake. “I was a 16-year-old boy when I published my first
song, ‘Live,’ with Eddie Shaw. The contract read ‘in perpetuity.’
“I was a teenager,” he continues. “I forgive myself only because
teenagers are stupid. Hey, I thought Eddie loved me; he was like my second
dad.” Neither Rhodes nor his parents had the foresight to show the contract
to an attorney before signing. “Eddie brought all of the lawyers. I was
represented by Eddie’s lawyer.”
“Live” was among several tracks the Merry-Go-Round (which featured Rhodes
on guitar and vocals, high school pal Gary Kato on bass, Joel Larson on drums,
and Bill Rinehart on guitar) recorded as a demo in 1966. Russ Shaw brought the
material to A&M, which issued “Live” as a single; it quickly became a huge
local hit. And it had legs: Nearly two decades later, the track was covered by
the Bangles, who included the song on its 1984 debut album, All Over the Place.
(It would subsequently appear on two Bangles hits compilations, as well.)
“I loved ‘Live.’ I just loved the lyrics; it was so uplifting. It became
one of our standards,” says Bangles drummer Debbi Peterson, who took the lead
vocal on her band’s version of the tune.
Rhodes says he’s never received a dime of royalties for the Bangles’
version of the song. “Eddie Shaw later decided that when the Bangles did
‘Live,’ that I wasn’t entitled to any money,” he says. “So he stopped
paying me for that song. He didn’t feel like it. And I didn’t do anything
about it because lawyers cost money. And my experience with lawyers isn’t so
good. They’re just like real people, and the law is like a game: Who puts on
the best show. It’s a weird reality to me.”
“Eddie Shaw was a thief,” says former Merry-Go-Round drummer Joel Larson.
“He ended up fucking Emitt out of all his money. He seemed like your friend,
but he was unscrupulous.”
Eddie and Russ Shaw are both dead and thus cannot defend themselves. Surviving
son Mark Shaw now handles Rhodes’s publishing. “I was never privy about too
much of what happened,” Shaw says. “When you’re depressed, it’s easy to
blame somebody else and not look inwardly.”
But when Rhodes signed the deal, in 1966, he wasn’t thinking about
perpetuity. He was just excited to record his own music. And with the promise
of “Live,” A&M rushed the Merry-Go-Round’s debut album in 1967,
sweetening the band’s demos with both instrumental and vocal overdubs. The
Merry-Go-Round was loaded with melodic, baroque pop and folk rock punctuated
with sweet harmonies and Emitt’s wide-eyed South-Bay-meets-North-of-England
vocal stylings.
“I thought of the Merry-Go-Round and Rhodes’s solo stuff as sunny and
quintessentially Southern California as Brian Wilson,” says journalist Bud
Scoppa, who met Rhodes when penning the liner notes for the 1985 Rhino Records
compilation Best of the Merry-Go-Round.
Though the album failed to make a dent nationally, the band continued to cut
singles. And, while each new track signaled an upward curve in the development
of Rhodes’s studio and songcrafting acumen (“Emitt was a perfectionist, he
was a melodic genius,” says Larson), the record-buying public was not so
impressed with swirly psychedelia like “Come Ride Come Ride,” “Listen
Listen,” and the glorious “Hollypark.”
Nor was A&M, which pulled the plug on the group in 1969. The Merry-Go-Round
would soon disband. With the money he’d earned, Rhodes purchased a four-track
board and set it up in his parents’ garage, where he would create demos for
what would become his first solo album.
He was quickly snatched up by ABC/Dunhill. “I loved the demos that he had,
they had a great sound,” says Steve Barrie, then the label’s vice president
of A&R. “He was just a natural for that time. His songs were very melodic; he
was a young, good-looking guy. With Emitt, it was just about his talent and the
feeling that we could develop him.” For his efforts, Rhodes netted $5,000.
Yet, at the behest of Eddie Shaw, Rhodes signed a deal that required him to
produce a full album of material every six months, a tall order for a one-man
band. He signed on the dotted line, knowing full well that the album he’d
just submitted to ABC/Dunhill had taken nearly a year to make.
“I knew it was wrong, because it didn’t make sense,” Rhodes says. “Six
months a record … and I just spent nine months in the studio every day. When
was I going to perform? When was I going to tour? When was I going to take a
vacation? When was I going to have a life? I did it because I was stupid.
“I had spent nine months making a record, and he wanted me to make a deal for
two albums a year,” Rhodes continues. “[Eddie] said, ‘We’ll get people
to play and get people to write your songs.’ I was gonna be Elvis. I was
gonna be, you know, Frank Sinatra. But that’s not what I was. He had no
concept of what I was doing.”
“At that time, there was tremendous pressure on artists to do two LPs a
year,” says Barrie, who also signed Steely Dan and Jim Croce to ABC/Dunhill.
“It was just so difficult to do so. [Label president] Jay Lasker was a tough
guy; he was a tough cookie. He was very hard on the artists.”
Emitt Rhodes was critically well received, and the artist toured to promote the
record, which put him behind schedule. “I should have had 18 months to make a
record, I should have been pampered … because I did a good thing.”
But by the time he was prepared to cut the followup, Mirror, in early 1971, he
learned he was being sued by his label for breach of contract. “The harder I
worked, the more trouble I was in,” Rhodes says. “I should have been put on
drugs immediately.
“It was a nightmare,” he adds. “By the time the record was successful, my
contract was already on suspension.” The label was asking for damages in the
amount of $250,000.
“Emitt did it all himself, but he didn’t have a support system that would
withstand the blue meanies of the record business,” says his friend, musician
and writer Ken Sharp.
Rhodes says, “To me, it was a nightmare. I was bad, I was wrong. All of a
sudden I wasn’t doing what I was supposed to do, and I couldn’t do it. It
was the beginning of my hopelessness.”
The suit wasn’t settled until 1973, when Rhodes delivered his third and final
solo record, the aptly titled Farewell to Paradise. “That was it, I didn’t
want to do it anymore,” he says. “I wanted to open a Laundromat and watch
the dryers go around.”
Though he believed his days as a recording artist were finished, Rhodes was
still a marketable studio guy, and he landed a gig as a producer-engineer and
as a staff A&R person for Elektra/Asylum for four years starting in 1976. “I
was hired to say no, to say no unless my life depended on it.” He said yes
only once, signing Canadian popper Bim to Elektra and producing his 1978 album,
Thistles.
In 1980, Rhodes attempted a half-hearted recorded comeback – for
Elektra/Asylum – but only one song, the slickly mellow “Isn’t It So,”
has ever emerged. Then, Rhodes says, “My life went weird.”
Live Till You Die
Emitt Rhodes currently resides in a wilderness, lost in the thick brush of his
own mind. He’s seldom able to look forward, preferring the slow death of
dwelling on the past. “I was diagnosed as depressed,” he says. “Just
unhappy stuff. The lack of future. No hope. No hope is a horrible place to
be.” It’s a place he’s inhabited for most of the past two decades.
When Scoppa made the pilgrimage to Rhodes’s Hawthorne home in the mid-’80s,
he was surprised by what he saw. “He seemed angry, kind of unsure of what he
was going to do with his talent,” the writer says. “I half-expected that
he’d be delighted to see me as the archival biographer of his oeuvre. It
didn’t seem to light him up at all. It seemed like a chore. The other
impression was one of extreme isolation. He was a community of one, almost
defiantly so.”
Debbi Peterson had a similar experience when she and her Bangles bandmates
visited Rhodes to tell him about their desire to play “Live.” “He seemed
kind of down,” she recalls. “It’s disillusioning and sad to see how
bitter he was. How the music business can do that to you.”
Officially diagnosed as depressed, Rhodes has tried doctor-prescribed drugs but
found them wanting. “I tried Prozac. It was good. I ran around smiling, and I
wondered why the hell I was smiling. But it didn’t get me loaded. Make the
trees stretch, will ya? A kaleidoscope of colors or something? Otherwise, I
can’t tell I’m on drugs.”
Compounding his depression is diabetes, which led to his 2001 automobile
accident. He says he spent the day before that incident “on the floor, trying
not to drown in my own saliva because I couldn’t swallow.” He thought
he’d gotten his blood sugar under control, but he blacked out at a stoplight
and rolled his car into a truck. “That was the last time I saw [my daughter],
because I’m not a good dad. She’s afraid to be with me.”
Rhodes may prefer to view his legacy as one of failure, but he’s a minority
in this regard. And just maybe there’s a renaissance afoot. In 2001, film
director Wes Anderson used, to poignant effect, the musician’s 1970 tune
“Lullabye” in the soundtrack to The Royal Tenenbaums.
It was great to hear Rhodes’s music in a big Hollywood movie, but he still
wanted to get paid. When Ken Sharp, who had formed a friendship with Rhodes
after interviewing the musician for his book Power Pop!, learned the song was
to be in the film, he asked Rhodes if he’d received a royalty for its use.
The songwriter said he hadn’t heard a thing.
“I made a bunch of calls on his behalf,” Sharp says. “Ten minutes after I
got off the phone with the label, [publisher] Mark Shaw called him. He told him
that he couldn’t find his number. It’s ironic, because he’s listed in the
phone book and lives across the street from where he grew up.”
Now, Rhodes says, he gets the occasional check from Shaw. “I’m not sure I
would have seen them had Ken Sharp not told me who to call.”
For his part, Shaw says he’s now attempting to license other Rhodes songs for
film and commercials, to help ease the burden of the artist’s rapidly
approaching golden years. “My heart’s out to him,” Shaw says. But it
hasn’t been easy, given Rhodes’s fragile emotional state. “You have to
pick yourself up. He doesn’t seem to have picked himself up for what he feels
Dunhill’s done to him. He has a hard time getting things together. It’s not
an easy thing to work with somebody who is too depressed to get motivated.”
Shaw seems sincere in his efforts and sounds understandably frustrated. He is
dealing with a man who is uncertain of his abilities, almost paralyzed to
follow his muse to completion. “You’re talking to a sick person,” Rhodes
says. “I have difficulty completing things. My whole life. I’ll die and
say, ‘Hold on, I’m not done yet.’”
Sharp believes Rhodes could reverse his fortunes by performing around Los
Angeles, to adoring crowds of pop fanatics who found Rhodes’s scratched solo
discs in thrift shops. “It’s depressing that someone of his stature is just
scraping by,” he says. “Emitt has the power to save himself. He could do
the Troubadour, and all the pop heads would support him, and he could revive
his career. He just loved recording, he lived and died to make music.”
The audience is there, as proven by the buzz generated before his short
performance at the 1998 Poptopia Festival. Not surprisingly, Rhodes is
mortified by the idea of gigging more frequently. “It scares me doing
that,” he says. “I might pass out, go into convulsions onstage.”
The stage may just be a bit too public an arena for the reclusive musician, but
the studio is an altogether more comfortable place. Rhodes stopped making
records, but he never stopped making music.
Located just beyond his parched backyard, his garage studio is a disheveled
holding pen for keyboards, drums, guitars, physics books, and empty bottles of
booze. But no matter. Rhodes has a song to play, a melancholy tune called
“Rainbow’s Ends.” He says it’s the first track he’s finished in 15
years.
The song is simple, but that pure, sweet voice, burnished with years of pain
and disappointment, sounds more poignant than ever. It’s a touching,
undeniably beautiful piece of work.
“I got to the point where I didn’t like anything I was doing,” he says.
“I just started liking it now. So now I kind of want to do it.
“I do it because it’s the only thing I know,” he continues. In his
garage, there are song fragments that go back a quarter century. “I may make
another record,” he says. “I’m working on it now. I’m thinking about
it. It might not take very long, because I have all these tunes. I just have to
put them together. And I know what I like now, so that’s a good thing.
“You put some chords together, and you like the way it sounds,” he adds.
“It means something to you. It’s always therapy, but it doesn’t solve
anything. It’s making wishes. It’s like hoping the world’s flat, hoping
there’s a heaven. You got your vest on, you’re walking up to the crowd,
you’re getting ready to blow yourself up."
"If she had lived, Mary Jo Kopechne would be 62 years old. Through his tireless
work as a legislator, Edward Kennedy would have brought comfort to her old
age." -- Charles Pierce, Boston Globe, Jan 5, 2003
01-22-04
HAPPY HAPPY, JOY JOY
by By Erik Himmelsbach
With My Face on the Floor
Emitt Rhodes still doesn’t know what hit him. Thirty years ago, he was the
new Paul McCartney, an ambitious kid who craved the perfect pop song. Then he
got blindsided into submission by the heartless business of music. Now he’s
just another sad guy with a boatload of talent that got buried in a black hole
of depression. Rhodes’s dreams collapsed in full view. That he showed early
promise as a recording artist and made a tuneful blip on the popular
consciousness perhaps justifies an examination of his specific version of life
gone astray, particularly to those who obsess over the minutiae of Los Angeles
pop-music history. But, in a way, Rhodes’s story could be anyone’s.
Certainly, most of us have been one fateful step away from a similar plight.
What if, for example, while on an early leg of your particular journey, you
were stopped dead in your tracks, crippled by an obstacle that made it
impossible to continue pursuing your true calling – yet the majority of your
life still lay before you? You’d have options, of course. You might shrug,
dust yourself off, and seek fulfillment elsewhere. Or you might decide to live
in misery. Stripped of your true love, would you simply count the days until
your death? How many of us could live happily if we felt our existence had no
meaning? Three decades later, Rhodes is a disoriented 53-year-old musician,
still trying to crawl from the emotional wreckage. “Life disappoints me.
It’s a bitter place,” he says, pounding a plethora of cocktails across the
table at an El Porto oceanside cantina. “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.”
There’s an autumn coastal chill, but the stout, bearded Rhodes is oblivious
to the weather. He wears baggy shorts, a matching polo shirt, and battered
tennis shoes. When I first met him, more than six months earlier, he wore
exactly the same thing. He’s had two wives and three kids, but communication
with them is rare. He owns his Hawthorne home – located directly across the
street from where he grew up – but must rent out the bulk of it to cover his
nut. His own personal space is a glorified flop at the front of the house, with
room enough for a mattress and a TV. He doesn’t drive anymore, not since he
crashed his car a few years ago – Rhodes lapsed into a diabetic coma with his
young daughter in the passenger seat. The totaled vehicle still sits in his
driveway, too easily symbolizing the state of its driver’s life.
This is Emitt Rhodes, onetime musical wunderkind, playing out the string. He
bears little resemblance to the young dreamboat who peered assuredly from the
cover of his stunning self-titled 1970 solo debut. Indeed, that was many lives
ago, and it’s barely even a memory for the man who lived it. The youthful
songwriter was a genius inside the recording studio. A master of melody with a
voice dipped in honey, he could play any and all instruments and work the
console like a vet.
Rhodes created simple, nakedly honest pop songs. And he did it by himself, in
the garage studio he set up in his parents’ Hawthorne home. He wrote, played,
produced, and arranged his debut album, which climbed to No. 29 on the charts
and served as a sonic flashpoint at the dawn of the singer-songwriter era. He
was 20 years old.
Inside a recording studio, the young Emitt Rhodes could do no wrong, yet all
the promise would come undone by bad advice and his own signature. It was a
piece of paper that knocked Rhodes’s face to the floor. It seems ridiculous
now, at a time when recording artists drop a new album only once every few
years, if that. (Unless, of course, you’re Ryan Adams.) But in 1970, Rhodes
signed a laughably impossible contract with ABC/Dunhill that stipulated he
deliver a record every six months. Three years and a debilitating lawsuit
later, his seemingly insatiable desire to create music would be snuffed out.
Time Will Show the Wiser
Emitt Rhodes came of age in Hawthorne in the early ’60s. The Beach Boys,
fellow travelers from the neighborhood, were all over the radio. Rhodes, whose
first instrument was the drums, was a freshman at Hawthorne High during Beach
Boys drummer Dennis Wilson’s senior year. “He borrowed my drums and broke a
drum pedal and owes me one of those. I’ve yet to receive it,” he jokes.
The whole of the teenage South Bay was in a band, including Rhodes, whose first
group was a Top 40 cover combo called the Emerals. He became its drummer at the
tender age of 14, largely because he had a garage in which the group could
practice.
The Beatles, of course, changed everything. “The Beatles were an
inspiration,” he says. “I would have followed them into space.”
The Emerals jumped on the British Invasion wave, donning Edwardian garb and
morphing into the Palace Guard. By early 1966, the band had issued a single
(“Falling Sugar”) and had landed a regular gig at the Hullabaloo on the
Sunset Strip. “I was right there on Sunset,” Rhodes remembers. “People
walked the streets, dressed up in paisley and flowers. I was up there with all
the hippie stuff, listening to all the hippie bands … . I was a hippie; it
was good, life was good.”
The Palace Guard worked two shows a night, six nights a week. Rhodes was given
one solo turn per performance, singing the Beatles’ “Michelle,” replete
with McCartney-esque Liverpudlian nuances. The 16-year-old drummer was merely
happy to get out from behind the kit. “I was the center of attention,” he
says.
“I enjoyed singing ‘Michelle,’ but the drums were a pain in the butt.
Everybody up front gets more attention,” he says. “Sensory organism, you
run through life trying to gratify it.” At the Hullabaloo, he began to find
ways to feed that jones, writing “You’re a Very Lovely Woman” (which
would become the second single by his next group, the Merry-Go-Round) while
´´ hanging around backstage.
Russ Shaw caught Rhodes singing “Michelle” and made the drummer a
proposition: Leave the band, and I’ll make you a star. The son of music
publisher Eddie Shaw, Russ was doing gofer work for A&M Records, and saw the
sweet-faced Rhodes as his ticket into the business. He became Rhodes’s
manager and brought along his dad to handle the publishing. This would be
Rhodes’s first mistake. “I was a 16-year-old boy when I published my first
song, ‘Live,’ with Eddie Shaw. The contract read ‘in perpetuity.’
“I was a teenager,” he continues. “I forgive myself only because
teenagers are stupid. Hey, I thought Eddie loved me; he was like my second
dad.” Neither Rhodes nor his parents had the foresight to show the contract
to an attorney before signing. “Eddie brought all of the lawyers. I was
represented by Eddie’s lawyer.”
“Live” was among several tracks the Merry-Go-Round (which featured Rhodes
on guitar and vocals, high school pal Gary Kato on bass, Joel Larson on drums,
and Bill Rinehart on guitar) recorded as a demo in 1966. Russ Shaw brought the
material to A&M, which issued “Live” as a single; it quickly became a huge
local hit. And it had legs: Nearly two decades later, the track was covered by
the Bangles, who included the song on its 1984 debut album, All Over the Place.
(It would subsequently appear on two Bangles hits compilations, as well.)
“I loved ‘Live.’ I just loved the lyrics; it was so uplifting. It became
one of our standards,” says Bangles drummer Debbi Peterson, who took the lead
vocal on her band’s version of the tune.
Rhodes says he’s never received a dime of royalties for the Bangles’
version of the song. “Eddie Shaw later decided that when the Bangles did
‘Live,’ that I wasn’t entitled to any money,” he says. “So he stopped
paying me for that song. He didn’t feel like it. And I didn’t do anything
about it because lawyers cost money. And my experience with lawyers isn’t so
good. They’re just like real people, and the law is like a game: Who puts on
the best show. It’s a weird reality to me.”
“Eddie Shaw was a thief,” says former Merry-Go-Round drummer Joel Larson.
“He ended up fucking Emitt out of all his money. He seemed like your friend,
but he was unscrupulous.”
Eddie and Russ Shaw are both dead and thus cannot defend themselves. Surviving
son Mark Shaw now handles Rhodes’s publishing. “I was never privy about too
much of what happened,” Shaw says. “When you’re depressed, it’s easy to
blame somebody else and not look inwardly.”
But when Rhodes signed the deal, in 1966, he wasn’t thinking about
perpetuity. He was just excited to record his own music. And with the promise
of “Live,” A&M rushed the Merry-Go-Round’s debut album in 1967,
sweetening the band’s demos with both instrumental and vocal overdubs. The
Merry-Go-Round was loaded with melodic, baroque pop and folk rock punctuated
with sweet harmonies and Emitt’s wide-eyed South-Bay-meets-North-of-England
vocal stylings.
“I thought of the Merry-Go-Round and Rhodes’s solo stuff as sunny and
quintessentially Southern California as Brian Wilson,” says journalist Bud
Scoppa, who met Rhodes when penning the liner notes for the 1985 Rhino Records
compilation Best of the Merry-Go-Round.
Though the album failed to make a dent nationally, the band continued to cut
singles. And, while each new track signaled an upward curve in the development
of Rhodes’s studio and songcrafting acumen (“Emitt was a perfectionist, he
was a melodic genius,” says Larson), the record-buying public was not so
impressed with swirly psychedelia like “Come Ride Come Ride,” “Listen
Listen,” and the glorious “Hollypark.”
Nor was A&M, which pulled the plug on the group in 1969. The Merry-Go-Round
would soon disband. With the money he’d earned, Rhodes purchased a four-track
board and set it up in his parents’ garage, where he would create demos for
what would become his first solo album.
He was quickly snatched up by ABC/Dunhill. “I loved the demos that he had,
they had a great sound,” says Steve Barrie, then the label’s vice president
of A&R. “He was just a natural for that time. His songs were very melodic; he
was a young, good-looking guy. With Emitt, it was just about his talent and the
feeling that we could develop him.” For his efforts, Rhodes netted $5,000.
Yet, at the behest of Eddie Shaw, Rhodes signed a deal that required him to
produce a full album of material every six months, a tall order for a one-man
band. He signed on the dotted line, knowing full well that the album he’d
just submitted to ABC/Dunhill had taken nearly a year to make.
“I knew it was wrong, because it didn’t make sense,” Rhodes says. “Six
months a record … and I just spent nine months in the studio every day. When
was I going to perform? When was I going to tour? When was I going to take a
vacation? When was I going to have a life? I did it because I was stupid.
“I had spent nine months making a record, and he wanted me to make a deal for
two albums a year,” Rhodes continues. “[Eddie] said, ‘We’ll get people
to play and get people to write your songs.’ I was gonna be Elvis. I was
gonna be, you know, Frank Sinatra. But that’s not what I was. He had no
concept of what I was doing.”
“At that time, there was tremendous pressure on artists to do two LPs a
year,” says Barrie, who also signed Steely Dan and Jim Croce to ABC/Dunhill.
“It was just so difficult to do so. [Label president] Jay Lasker was a tough
guy; he was a tough cookie. He was very hard on the artists.”
Emitt Rhodes was critically well received, and the artist toured to promote the
record, which put him behind schedule. “I should have had 18 months to make a
record, I should have been pampered … because I did a good thing.”
But by the time he was prepared to cut the followup, Mirror, in early 1971, he
learned he was being sued by his label for breach of contract. “The harder I
worked, the more trouble I was in,” Rhodes says. “I should have been put on
drugs immediately.
“It was a nightmare,” he adds. “By the time the record was successful, my
contract was already on suspension.” The label was asking for damages in the
amount of $250,000.
“Emitt did it all himself, but he didn’t have a support system that would
withstand the blue meanies of the record business,” says his friend, musician
and writer Ken Sharp.
Rhodes says, “To me, it was a nightmare. I was bad, I was wrong. All of a
sudden I wasn’t doing what I was supposed to do, and I couldn’t do it. It
was the beginning of my hopelessness.”
The suit wasn’t settled until 1973, when Rhodes delivered his third and final
solo record, the aptly titled Farewell to Paradise. “That was it, I didn’t
want to do it anymore,” he says. “I wanted to open a Laundromat and watch
the dryers go around.”
Though he believed his days as a recording artist were finished, Rhodes was
still a marketable studio guy, and he landed a gig as a producer-engineer and
as a staff A&R person for Elektra/Asylum for four years starting in 1976. “I
was hired to say no, to say no unless my life depended on it.” He said yes
only once, signing Canadian popper Bim to Elektra and producing his 1978 album,
Thistles.
In 1980, Rhodes attempted a half-hearted recorded comeback – for
Elektra/Asylum – but only one song, the slickly mellow “Isn’t It So,”
has ever emerged. Then, Rhodes says, “My life went weird.”
Live Till You Die
Emitt Rhodes currently resides in a wilderness, lost in the thick brush of his
own mind. He’s seldom able to look forward, preferring the slow death of
dwelling on the past. “I was diagnosed as depressed,” he says. “Just
unhappy stuff. The lack of future. No hope. No hope is a horrible place to
be.” It’s a place he’s inhabited for most of the past two decades.
When Scoppa made the pilgrimage to Rhodes’s Hawthorne home in the mid-’80s,
he was surprised by what he saw. “He seemed angry, kind of unsure of what he
was going to do with his talent,” the writer says. “I half-expected that
he’d be delighted to see me as the archival biographer of his oeuvre. It
didn’t seem to light him up at all. It seemed like a chore. The other
impression was one of extreme isolation. He was a community of one, almost
defiantly so.”
Debbi Peterson had a similar experience when she and her Bangles bandmates
visited Rhodes to tell him about their desire to play “Live.” “He seemed
kind of down,” she recalls. “It’s disillusioning and sad to see how
bitter he was. How the music business can do that to you.”
Officially diagnosed as depressed, Rhodes has tried doctor-prescribed drugs but
found them wanting. “I tried Prozac. It was good. I ran around smiling, and I
wondered why the hell I was smiling. But it didn’t get me loaded. Make the
trees stretch, will ya? A kaleidoscope of colors or something? Otherwise, I
can’t tell I’m on drugs.”
Compounding his depression is diabetes, which led to his 2001 automobile
accident. He says he spent the day before that incident “on the floor, trying
not to drown in my own saliva because I couldn’t swallow.” He thought
he’d gotten his blood sugar under control, but he blacked out at a stoplight
and rolled his car into a truck. “That was the last time I saw [my daughter],
because I’m not a good dad. She’s afraid to be with me.”
Rhodes may prefer to view his legacy as one of failure, but he’s a minority
in this regard. And just maybe there’s a renaissance afoot. In 2001, film
director Wes Anderson used, to poignant effect, the musician’s 1970 tune
“Lullabye” in the soundtrack to The Royal Tenenbaums.
It was great to hear Rhodes’s music in a big Hollywood movie, but he still
wanted to get paid. When Ken Sharp, who had formed a friendship with Rhodes
after interviewing the musician for his book Power Pop!, learned the song was
to be in the film, he asked Rhodes if he’d received a royalty for its use.
The songwriter said he hadn’t heard a thing.
“I made a bunch of calls on his behalf,” Sharp says. “Ten minutes after I
got off the phone with the label, [publisher] Mark Shaw called him. He told him
that he couldn’t find his number. It’s ironic, because he’s listed in the
phone book and lives across the street from where he grew up.”
Now, Rhodes says, he gets the occasional check from Shaw. “I’m not sure I
would have seen them had Ken Sharp not told me who to call.”
For his part, Shaw says he’s now attempting to license other Rhodes songs for
film and commercials, to help ease the burden of the artist’s rapidly
approaching golden years. “My heart’s out to him,” Shaw says. But it
hasn’t been easy, given Rhodes’s fragile emotional state. “You have to
pick yourself up. He doesn’t seem to have picked himself up for what he feels
Dunhill’s done to him. He has a hard time getting things together. It’s not
an easy thing to work with somebody who is too depressed to get motivated.”
Shaw seems sincere in his efforts and sounds understandably frustrated. He is
dealing with a man who is uncertain of his abilities, almost paralyzed to
follow his muse to completion. “You’re talking to a sick person,” Rhodes
says. “I have difficulty completing things. My whole life. I’ll die and
say, ‘Hold on, I’m not done yet.’”
Sharp believes Rhodes could reverse his fortunes by performing around Los
Angeles, to adoring crowds of pop fanatics who found Rhodes’s scratched solo
discs in thrift shops. “It’s depressing that someone of his stature is just
scraping by,” he says. “Emitt has the power to save himself. He could do
the Troubadour, and all the pop heads would support him, and he could revive
his career. He just loved recording, he lived and died to make music.”
The audience is there, as proven by the buzz generated before his short
performance at the 1998 Poptopia Festival. Not surprisingly, Rhodes is
mortified by the idea of gigging more frequently. “It scares me doing
that,” he says. “I might pass out, go into convulsions onstage.”
The stage may just be a bit too public an arena for the reclusive musician, but
the studio is an altogether more comfortable place. Rhodes stopped making
records, but he never stopped making music.
Located just beyond his parched backyard, his garage studio is a disheveled
holding pen for keyboards, drums, guitars, physics books, and empty bottles of
booze. But no matter. Rhodes has a song to play, a melancholy tune called
“Rainbow’s Ends.” He says it’s the first track he’s finished in 15
years.
The song is simple, but that pure, sweet voice, burnished with years of pain
and disappointment, sounds more poignant than ever. It’s a touching,
undeniably beautiful piece of work.
“I got to the point where I didn’t like anything I was doing,” he says.
“I just started liking it now. So now I kind of want to do it.
“I do it because it’s the only thing I know,” he continues. In his
garage, there are song fragments that go back a quarter century. “I may make
another record,” he says. “I’m working on it now. I’m thinking about
it. It might not take very long, because I have all these tunes. I just have to
put them together. And I know what I like now, so that’s a good thing.
“You put some chords together, and you like the way it sounds,” he adds.
“It means something to you. It’s always therapy, but it doesn’t solve
anything. It’s making wishes. It’s like hoping the world’s flat, hoping
there’s a heaven. You got your vest on, you’re walking up to the crowd,
you’re getting ready to blow yourself up."
"If she had lived, Mary Jo Kopechne would be 62 years old. Through his tireless
work as a legislator, Edward Kennedy would have brought comfort to her old
age." -- Charles Pierce, Boston Globe, Jan 5, 2003