Emitt Rhodes: The ‘one-man Beatles’ who became a cult figure among musicians

Emitt Rhodes was a rising pop star in the early 1970s, with songwriting and singing skills likened to those of Paul McCartney, who then gave up performing for more than 40 years, becoming a cult figure among musicians.

He died on 19 July at his home in Hawthorne, California. He was 70. The death was confirmed by Chris Price, a musician who produced Rhodes’s 2016 comeback album, Rainbow Ends. He did not know the specific cause.

Rhodes was something of a prodigy of pop music, playing in bands by 14 and signing his first major-label contract at 16, when he was with the group Merry-Go-Round.

By 19, he had become a solo performer, writing all of his songs, playing all the instruments and producing the recordings in a shed in his backyard – practically creating the idea of the home studio.

His self-titled debut album from 1970, which showed Rhodes on the cover moodily peering through a scorched windowpane, led a critic for Billboard magazine to call him “one of the finest artists on the music scene today”. The album reached No 29 on the Billboard charts.

The music was bright, catchy and meticulously arranged, and Rhodes’s soaring tenor voice invited immediate comparisons with McCartney. Rumours began to circulate that “Emitt Rhodes” was a pseudonym for McCartney or that The Beatles had recorded an unreleased album that was appearing under a made-up name; others suggested that the recently broken-up Beatles were working incognito as Rhodes’s backup band.

When it became apparent that Rhodes was playing the parts of John, Paul, George and Ringo – and their producer, George Martin – all by himself, he was dubbed the “one-man Beatles”.

“It was really flattering,” the very real Rhodes told The Washington Post in 2002. “Those guys were my idols.”

A second album, Mirror, appeared in 1971, and Rhodes – slender, clean-shaven and darkly handsome in those days – toured the country, seemingly on his way to stardom.

“I was chased, I had underwear thrown at me, I had groupies,” he told The Post. “It was like being in A Hard Day’s Night.”

In 1973, Rhodes released the aptly titled Farewell to Paradise, his somewhat disillusioned goodbye to the life of a budding rock star. He was 23.

When he had agreed to his record deal with the Dunhill label four years earlier, Rhodes was required to produce a new album every six months for three years. Moreover, he had signed away the royalty rights to his songs “in perpetuity”.

Busy writing the songs, singing, playing all the instruments and producing polished little power-pop gems, Rhodes fell behind the schedule dictated by his contract. His record company withheld his royalties and sued him for $250,000: “More money than I’d ever seen,” Rhodes later said. “I was horribly confused.”

He fell silent. He stopped writing music and went through personal problems, which he said included depression, drinking, drugs and divorce. The backyard studio went unused.

Rhodes spent the next 30 years working as a staff engineer and producer with Elektra and other recording studios. Nonetheless, his music endured, even as his mystery grew.

“He was a deep, deep cult figure,” said filmmaker Tony Blass, who interviewed Rhodes for a 2009 Italian-produced documentary, The One Man Beatles.

In the 1980s, the all-female band The Bangles recorded Rhodes’s “Live”, which he had written and performed on television at 17. Other musicians hailed him as a lost musical hero, a misunderstood pop genius not unlike Brian Wilson, the troubled leader of The Beach Boys – who had grown up blocks away from Rhodes in Hawthorne, a working-class Los Angeles suburb.

A more apt comparison might be with songwriter Tandyn Almer, who wrote the 1966 hit “Along Comes Mary” for The Association and contributed to some Beach Boys songs before living his final years in obscurity in a basement apartment in Northern Virginia.

In 2001, director Wes Anderson – on a suggestion from actor Jason Schwartzman – used one of Rhodes’s songs, the wistful “Lullabye”, in the movie The Royal Tenenbaums. When Rhodes saw the movie with his 10-year-old daughter, he heard the words he had written in 1970:

Tears that angels cry
And they darken all the sky
When the one you love says goodbye

“I’d forgotten the tune,” he told The Post, but added, “My little girl was proud of me.”

Because of the contract he signed as a teenager, Rhodes did not see any royalties from “Lullabye” or any of his other songs. Eventually, new agreements were worked out, allowing him to profit from his earlier work.

The 2009 documentary about Rhodes received several awards in Europe and helped raise his profile. He also became friends with musician Chris Price, who knocked on Rhodes’s door in 2007 and began to meet him for lunch.

Rhodes gave Price, now with the group Bebopalula, musical pointers but refused to discuss his earlier life. There had been occasions in the 1980s and 1990s when record labels tried to bring Rhodes back to the studio, but the plans always fell through.

Eventually, he warmed to Price and showed him folders containing more than 20 new songs. Many of them, such as “What’s a Man to Do”, were marked by a mature, wounded lyricism:

I hear the whispers, I hear the talk
I count the minutes, I watch the clock
I fear she’s leaving, won’t change her mind
The door is closing, I’m out of time.

Price convinced Rhodes that it was time to sing again. The old studio, which had shag carpet from the 1970s and was being used as a storage shed, was cleaned out and put back in service.

Musicians who had long idolised Rhodes were brought in, including guitarist Jason Falkner, keyboardist Roger Joseph Manning Jr and drummer Joe Seiders, with special appearances by singers Aimee Mann and Susanna Hoffs. Rhodes was back in his element, his voice as expressive as it had been in his youth.

Rhodes’s first album in 43 years, Rainbow Ends, received glowing reviews in 2016.

“He wouldn’t put his name on just anything,” Price said in an interview. “We went through every song, every chord, every bar.”

Emitt Lynn Rhodes was born on 25 February 1950, in Decatur, Illinois, and moved with his family to Hawthorne at the age of four.

Rhodes was interested in music from an early age and began his career as a drummer in a band with friends from his high school. By 16, he was the lead guitarist and singer for Merry-Go-Round, penning the minor hit “You’re a Very Lovely Woman”, along with “Live”.

“I wouldn’t call him a perfectionist,” Price said of Rhodes’s songwriting style. “I would say he had very keen instincts and seemed to know what would make a listener respond to a song emotionally.”

Perhaps a more lasting influence, however, was Rhodes’s single-minded dedication to his craft, exemplified by his professional-quality home studio.

“He was a home recording guy before anybody else was doing it,” Price said. “He made it so that you couldn’t distinguish something he made from something made at Capitol Records. He did something out of necessity to him that later became commonplace.

“This has fundamentally changed the way music is made.”

Rhodes’s marriages to Kathy Sharp and Charnelle Smith ended in divorce. Survivors include his fiancée, Valerie Eaton of Toronto; two sons from his first marriage; and a daughter from his second marriage.

After releasing his 2016 album, Rhodes seemed to have decided he had nothing more to say. He cancelled a comeback appearance scheduled at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, choosing to stay at home in Hawthorne, in the same house he had lived in for decades. In the title track of Rainbow Ends, he sang:

I wanna be somewhere far away
Somewhere where I won’t be afraid
I wanna be sheltered safe and warm
I wanna be somewhere far from harm

Emitt Rhodes, musician, born 25 February 1950, died 19 July 2020

© The Washington Post