my power pop addiction, no. 115 (187)

I must confess that I'm not a huge Emitt Rhodes acolyte, but there's a handful of his songs that put me in an intensely reflective mood, not necessarily in a bad way, though there's an undeniable undercurrent of tragedy in much of Rhodes' music. I think tonight's selection is the best song he ever did. It puts his gift for communicating sadness and loss on full display and is deceptively affecting at under three minutes long. The problem for me is that I really don't wish to be this sad any more than I have to, so that whenever the song pops up on my iPod I have to decide whether or not I'm really in the mood to go down its dark and lonely passage. In fact, the entire trajectory of the Emitt Rhodes story is quite frankly just too depressing for me. I recently viewed an Italian documentary about him and had trouble sitting through the whole thing, kind of in the same way I had trouble sitting through Mayor of the Sunset Strip, the documentary about Rodney Bingenheimer. There’s no question of Rhodes’ talent. His self-titled first solo album after his stint as the leader of the Merry-Go-Round was released more or less contemporaneously with, and compared favorably to Paul McCartney’s first solo album in 1970. But there's so many times when talent alone doesn’t cut it. Lots of other factors enter into the equation: Dumb luck, personal charisma, record company backing, and the emotional resilience the artist does or doesn't posseses in dealing with the ups and downs of the star making machine. What I took away from the documentary was that the lack of this resilience in the face of the machine destroyed Rhodes, turning him into a maladjusted man child. Think Brian Wilson only with no chart success to buoy him even just a little bit. Throw in an indifferent record company and you’ve got a perfect storm for a shattered pop life. There may be days now and again when I’m feeling ghoulish and the arc of the Rhodes narrative will hold some appeal for me. It speaks to that part of me that digs Sunset Boulevard, The Last Tycoon, and even Helter Skelter. But usually the thought of Rhodes makes me sad in a way I don’t want to be if I can avoid it. I hope that doesn’t make me sound callous. I recognize his magnificent talent, but the whole package – the feelings stirred up by his music, and knowing the way his life turned out – I find it all too difficult to enjoy in anything other than small and infrequent dosages…