‘Christine Lucy Latimer is a mother of lost medias. As an artist, she is drawn to the forgotten, the mouldy trash, the refused. How tenderly she touches these pictures again, along with the shadowy figures they contain, in order to begin the work of restoring them to view. In her practice, this means straining the often fragile, even falling-apart originals, through a series of analog/digital trespassings. Her animating question is not the same as an archivist, who works to retrieve and restore inside the dystopian frame of “the original.” Instead, this artist spellcasts her found footage – whether home movies, peep shows or late night TV grabs — into something else. Like “art” for instance.

‘Christine’s media translations bear the marks of her looking, which means that the footage has been necessarily transformed, touched by something in the present, and turned beneath that touch into something newly alive. Her meticulous reframings offer us a reflection on how pictures survive, and what we do with them in order to ensure their survival.

‘As my pal Mike told me, more than once, the reason great books are so great is not because they possess “universal values” but because they can be reinvented, over and over again, as each reader uncovers them in their singularity. They are available for radical reinterpretation, and because they are able to change, they endure. Chris Marker from San Soleil: “We rewrite memory much as history is rewritten. How can one remember thirst?”

‘A surreal moment in New York’s Collective for Living Cinema. It’s an afternoon screening and the room is jammed, strangely enough. Half the program belongs to Abigail Child who is showing some of her Is This What You Were Born For? masterworks, still fresh then, newly minted from the lab. Some feature kinetic, jazz-inspired reworkings of original “home movie” materials, and in the required question and answer period, fringe godfather Jonas Mekas asks what happened to the original footage that Abigail used. What? It seems he was less interested in the artist’s bravura collage, than the throwaway detritus that Abigail had wondrously transformed. I could feel the generational faultlines and mutual outrage, along with the sense that every frame was a line in the sand, every cut had to be argued and won over. The exchange was quintessential New York fringe: erudite and hostile.

‘The godfather, so often benevolent and easygoing, spent much of his life trying to preserve the most ephemeral of film practices, so his protests might be understood as a cautionary tale. What he failed to reckon with was that nearly every image drives towards disappearance. It’s the natural lean, the most usual thing. Sure Wittgenstein could hum an entire symphony after hearing it once, but most of my Netflix-addicted pals struggle to offer even the barest hint of a plot after a night’s viewing. As if pictures are vanishing even more quickly than they appear. It’s like Virilio’s riff on hyper speed: where you arrive before leaving. Pictures are not only arriving more quickly, they are disappearing at an even greater rate. The rapid succession of pictures that nearly every movie provides takes us through this process. Movies are a demonstration of death “at work,” of disappearance, forgetting and erasure. Movies offer us the joy, the beauty, the savouring of moments that mercifully will never happen again.

‘Christine Lucy Latimer’s work, mostly short and silent, suggests that the only way to look is to look again, to see something for the second time. And like Abigail before her, and how many others, she is offering us her own version of disappearance, along with her own views and transformations, her own necessary reframings.

‘But wait, what about the work’s “content?” Shortly after we met Christine pronounced herself “a formalist” and I wondered if that was the kind of thing that could be said out loud. But of course the fragments she rescues in her work are not incidental. For instance, there is a pronounced interest in the display of female bodies, both Ghostmeat and Format rework peep shows. A Fight to the Finish display nearly naked male boxers glitching up a love clinch, The Pool offers a quartet of men in bathing suits, performing masculinity in a viscous, toffee-coloured pool that clings to everything. But mostly the pictures are “abstract,” as if the artist was looking too closely, the eye pressed right up against its subject, until it dissolves in a wash of light and line and colour. Whether it’s Nationtime’s slowed firework eruption, the traffic glaze of The Bridge View, the pinball wizardry of Fraction Refrain, or the soft Oedipal revenge of Lines Fixial (a conjoining and reworking of a pair of Norman McLaren/Evelyn Lambart films), the artist offers us geometries freed from the burden of strict representation.’ — Mike Hoolboom

 

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Stills

 

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Further

Christine Lucy Latimer @ IMDb
Christine Lucy Latimer @ Vimeo
Book: ‘Christine Lucy Latimer: Media Archaeologist’
CLL @ MUBI
Fragile Systems: Films and Videos by Christine Lucy Latimer
CLL @ Underground Film Journal
CLL @ Letterboxd

 

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Extras

Christine Lucy Latimer INTERVIEW

Man Made Hill – One False Second (Music video by Christine Lucy Latimer)

Stephen Broomer Wild Currents, for Christine Lucy Latimer (2015)

 

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Interview
from BlackFlash

 

Leslie Supnet: Can you discuss the role media hybridity plays in your work?

Christine Lucy Latimer: My work manifests from a fascination with moving-image tools and their evolution through various zeitgeists. Using the detritus from these histories (broken gear, found/abandoned videotapes and small-gauge home movies) as art-making material, I strive to comment on issues of authorship, relevance and obsolescence in lens-based media. I am curious to explore the particularities within a given imaging technology, and what happens when it is deemed no longer commercially relevant.

Therefore, my practice often employs the combining of multiple media formats into one hybrid image. I enter into diverse states-of-play with different processes, including multi-generational video transfers, lens/projection interruption and the daisy-chaining of several live technologies. Through modes of salvage and reconstitution, the unique artifacts of these historic mediums squish together to create image-scapes of indeterminate time/place origin.

How has time and place influenced your art practice?

My artist mother, avid film-and-television-watching father, and generally westernized, middle-class suburban upbringing (just on the outskirts of Toronto) were all quite important to the evolution of my art practice.

Toronto in the late 1990s was also a huge source of influence. At the time (as a double-majoring Photography and Integrated Media student at the Ontario College of Art and Design), a tacit fluency with digital imaging technologies had not yet emerged in the postsecondary institution. Training in lens-based crafts that preceded the digital were much more on the forefront of my education. I was taught archival film and paper processes in my photography classes, learned celluloid-based filmmaking, and worked with analog video using broadcast-quality Beta SP cameras.

The medium-specific leanings at OCAD were quite pointed when I was a student there. Many of my instructors were moving-image artists that became active in Toronto in the 1970s and ’80s, and they either identified strictly as experimental filmmakers OR video artists. At the time, experimental film and video art (in Toronto at least), largely existed as separate camps that prioritized very different things. There was a clear divide, with divergent infrastructures towards making, distribution, representation and exhibition.

The ways in which time-based making was differentiated in the arts institution were baffling to me, and this confusion increased with my expanding exposure to experimental film and video art. I grew up as any suburban, westernized middle-class kid did in the 1990s—going to the cinema and watching VHS tapes—with one foot planted squarely on either side of the film/video fence. The similarities among these forms were magical, because to me, they symbolized an obvious space of evolution and democratization. Film and video spooled backwards and forwards, transporting through time in the same way. They also were both made out of metal (silver emulsion and oxide).

I realized quite early on in my arts education that I was drawn to mediums that were uniquely bound to the industrial and electronic revolutions of the 20th century. I became curious as to how I could unify the mediums artists used to make moving images in a gesture of revolt towards the strange divisions I encountered. I began making work that hybridized film and video on one image plane, employing various transfer processes between mediums to try and eliminate the visual signifiers that would detail where film ends and video begins. Obviously, the nature of this sort of hybridity is quite era-specific, as definitions of ‘filmmaking’ were poised to change soon after, with the wide consumer emergence of digital lens-based technologies.

Artifacts, both digital and analog, create otherworldly environments in your works, such as in Mosaic, 2002. Was this your first piece? How did it come about?

Mosaic is my first official film, in that it’s the first project I made after finishing my schooling and striking out on my own as an artist. It’s also one of the first projects I made that incorporated digital image elements.

In my final years of school, broadcast television experienced a change with the arrival of digital cable. The infrastructure of over-air broadcast was so vast, while digital broadcast was much more a novelty—something that consumers weren’t yet convinced of the value of.

In 2001, I was offered 3 free months of digital cable, and the promise of hundreds of ‘specialty channels’ which were, at the time, more like half-baked nether-channels struggling for content to fill a programming day. I have always been an avid television-watcher, and this new form of television, replete with hundreds of totally crazy “geared to lifestyle” channels, sent me into a vortex of sleepless nights and blank staring. It wasn’t simply the burgeoning, desperate clangings of a new medium in its emergence; it was also the delivery system, the digital image itself that was being broadcast.

At this stage, digital broadcast was highly unstable and prone to failure. It would vacillate endlessly between moments of representation and abstraction—a chunky coloured square array could become an episode of “Extreme Fishing,” while a late-night “Turner Classic” movie could became an achromatic vibrating houndstooth pattern. These distortions of signal were not the snowy screens of broadcast television that I grew up with, but something else that represented that struggle of the new—an image trying to wrestle against its own technological limitations in order to emerge.

I began to record hours of these distorted signals onto VHS tape. I was quite preoccupied, because it was all so beautiful, and it was constantly changing. One particular day, there was a Muai Thai fight on one of these channels that was producing some terrific visual distortion, but was also simultaneously distorting the ways in which I understood the fight. The distortion removed any concept of winning or losing, prioritizing simply the placement of engaged bodies, wrestling to find their next position. I loved the unlikeliness of this footage, and that I could capture these fledgling digital distortions on a tape media that the digital revolution itself would soon render obsolete. I wanted to collapse further history into this image, to describe the newness and preciousness of that moment in time with a traditionally more precious moving image medium. So, I got a local film processing lab to transfer my VHS footage of a digitally scrambled cable TV boxing match onto B&W 16mm film.

How do chance and improvisation inform your moving image practice?

Whatever I am working on is usually guided by the images or technologies I have most recently found to play with. I am constantly on the hunt for abandoned media and gear, some of which I have to either fix or teach myself to use, which allows for several elements of chance in my process.

My ideas are always about generating unpredictable, unexpected results from the unlikely marriage of formats or processes. I tend to work in bursts, finishing projects very quickly.

Each project is highly mysterious, prone to failure, and inconceivably impossible to picture until it’s actually finished.

 

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18 of Christine Lucy Latimer’s films

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Fraction Refrain (for Loeser, Evans & Snow) (2016)
‘An auto-mechanized directive for mapping a microcosmic landscape. Using cut-glass filters on a broken VHS camera, I traverse the terrain of a vintage pinball machine using mechanical movements reminiscent of Michael Snow’s La Region Centrale. (Dedicated to Mark Loeser, Justin Evans and Michael Snow).’ — CLL

 

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Still Feeling Blue About Colour Separation (2015)
‘This film rephotographs over 200 internet-sourced images of ‘Macbeth ColorChecker’ cards on to super-8mm cyanotype emulsion. Macbeth Cards (precision tools in colour film processing), were a popular accessory for small-gauge Kodachrome filmmakers in the 1970’s. They have since been re-adopted by contemporary digital photographers, who use them to compare lighting scenarios on internet blogs and forums. Tracing the history of the colour calibration card through many lenses, I effectively remove all colours, save one.’ — CLL

 

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C2013 (2014)
‘A durational feedback-variation study using a found VHS banjo lesson cycled through a (mostly broken) betamax deck. A distorted hearkening to the various ‘lessons’ of youth combines with inquiries surrounding learning, training and the mastery of a medium. The project’s length and pacing simulates that of a childhood music lesson: 40 minutes that feel like a lifetime. (The project title is a notation taken from banjo music tablature, denoting that a C chord is played with fingers on the 2nd, open, 1st and 3rd frets of the instrument).

‘**NOTE – this project is an installation video, meant for casual approaching and walking away from.’ — CLL

 

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Physics and Metaphysics in Modern Photography (2014)
‘This hybrid project uses a cell-phone to document a series of colour plate advertisements from The 1957 Photographer’s Almanac. The footage is then transferred to 16mm film, presenting the advertised technologies of 1957 (coincidentally, the first year a digital image was ever generated) through simultaneous analog and digital lenses. History is collapsed in a comment on the changing terminologies of lens-based practice.’ — CLL

 

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Jane’s Birthday (2013)
‘A simultaneous low-definition/ high-definition spastic depiction of an attempted journey to the beach on my sister’s birthday. Windshield wipers punctuate and jump-cut our rapid movement through white-knuckle moments of abstraction.’ — CLL

 

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Lines Postfixal (2013)
‘Two found companion 16mm film prints (salvaged from the garbage at the National Film Board of Canada) are simultaneously reunited in a coda to their original composition. The image is worked in multiple generations through betamax and vhs tape decks to weave threads of video artifact into the celluloid fabric.’ — CLL

 

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Nationtime (2013)
‘Cell-phone video footage of exploding fireworks is processed and extended through a series of VHS feedback loops. What was once a momentary blast becomes drawn out in time, emphasizing the beauty of pyrotechnic light, while juxtaposing analog and digital video artifacts.’ — CLL

 

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The Pool (2012)
‘1950’s 16mm swimmers dive unknowingly into video-infested waters. A hybrid project created with found 16mm film projected through a broken glass plate, captured by two daisy-chained video cameras (one analog, one digital) and run through a Vidiffektor (an analog video signal attenuator custom-built by James Schidlowsky).’ — CLL

 

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The Magik Iffektor (2011)
‘A video that electronically twists the fates of witches, monkeys, apparitions and conjoined bald men. Created with found VHS footage.’ — CLL

 

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Fruit Flies (2010)
‘This film seals under perforated 16mm splicing tape all of the fruit flies that drowned in the vinegar trap on my kitchen counter last summer.’ — CLL

 

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Format (2010)
‘In one long take, I shoot super 8 footage of a found nudie film that is projected both on the wall, and within the LCD screen of a digital video camera. A film of a film of a video of a film ensues.’ — CLL

 

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Focus (2009)
‘Using glue and 16mm splicing tape, I place over 1500 individual super 8 film frames from a decimated home movie one-by-one on to clear 16mm film. The resulting floating film-within-a-film becomes a jarring landscape that prioritizes the structure of the super 8 frame over its photographic contents.’ — CLL

 

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A Fight to the Finish (2009)
‘A Fight to the Finish is a chaotic duel between the film and video depictions of a violent animal encounter. A project combining found 8mm film and pixelvision.’ — CLL

 

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Just Beyond the Screen: The Universe, as We Know It, Is Ending (2009)
‘This film and video hybrid depicts a rainbow digital apocalypse looming directly outside a floating cinema entrance-way.’ — CLL

 

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Over {Past:Future} Sight (2008)
‘This film uses video footage captured from the surgeon’s microscope during my father’s laser eye surgery. The footage is transferred to 16mm colour film negative, printed, edge-fogged and brown-toned. Clinical and impersonal video documentation transforms into an intimate hand-made celluloid exchange with my father’s watchful yet un-watching eye.’ — CLL

 

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The Bridge View (2005)
‘“Road-Watch” television footage of Toronto highways (from the local stock-market information channel) is processed through a series of slow-shutter VHS feedback loops. A cinematic surveillance depicting traffic absent of time/place designations.’ — CLL

 

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Ghostmeat (2003)
‘This hybrid film/video uses a toy pixelvision camera to document a dual-projection of a found 16mm film and a liquid light array. The 16mm film was salvaged from a mutoscope, a turn-of-the-century device outfitted with an eyepiece in a (sometimes coin-operated) mechanical cabinet that enables a viewer to have a private film-watching experience. The footage, shot in the home, is of a late-1940’s woman undressing slowly for the camera (and its operator). Between found film, the perpetual movement of abstract light, the degraded pixelvision image and the particularities of documented 1940’s female sexuality, these juxtaposed projections move through a panoply of interpretations surrounding resurrection and decay.’ — CLL

 

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Mosaic (2003)
‘VHS footage of a digitally scrambled cable TV kickboxing fight is transferred to 16mm B & W film negative and printed by hand. Digital interference foregrounds and destroys the representational action, creating a rhythmic, abstract tonal landscape.’ — CLL

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. If anyone reading this happens to be in Toronto, there’s an event there tomorrow night called Fragile Systems: Films and Videos by Christine Lucy Latimer where the vast majority of her short films and videos will be shown. Use the link for more information. ** malcolm, Hey, Malcolm. I’m happy he pleased your ears. I hope you get to have that emotional epiphany on your shoot. It was kind of shocking to feel happening. I’m not a person who’s given to crying almost ever. If you remember the car scene in PGL, which is my favorite scene, that’s when it happened. The performers just beyond nailed it on the first take, and I was blubbering. Afterwards I was hugging them and thanking them, and they were really surprised they’d been so good. It’s very interesting to me on shoots how the actors often don’t really know when they’re being amazing. We’ll be lucky here in Paris to get 15 minutes of piddly snowfall the whole winter. When I first moved to Paris, we’d get a few snow dumps over the season, but it’s too warm here now. It’s sad for me because, growing up in coldness-defying LA, snow is super romantic to me. Any highlights re: you today? ** Dominik, Hi!!! Yeah, right? I never think to eat pomegranates, and I really should. My friend the artist Charles Ray decided he wanted to figure out the perfect joke as an art piece, and he spent about two years trying to figure it out and telling his friends jokes and asking if they were perfect, and they never were, as far as we could tell, and he eventually gave up. There are a fair number of those ‘Nirvana fans’ here in Paris. Love deciding to become everyone’s groupie, G. ** _Black_Acrylic, Yeah, the overlooked genius archetype is very magnetising. I suppose this blog is often trying to unearth them. I watched a little of the French team’s match, and, yeah, Mbappe is a joy. I was going to ask you why the World Cup wasn’t being held in the country of the previous year’s winning team, and then I realised I was confusing the World Cup with Eurovision, ha ha. ** Steve Erickson, I saw Nan around in those days, and I was acquainted with some of her photographed friends, but I didn’t get to know her until some years later. Everyone, Steve has reviewed Laura Poitras’ documentary on Nan Goldin ALL THE BEAUTY AND THE BLOODSHED, which I, for one, am dying to see, here. ** David Ehrenstein, NC was amazingly ahead of his time. ** Brian, Hi, Brian! Virtually every time I get really stressed out, money is always heavily involved in the reason. Which is no doubt a big reason why I’m an anarchist. Not that that helps in a practical way. ‘What you think and what you irrationally feel often don’t square very easily’: Boy, is that true. It’s also like the first sentence in a Dickens novel. Maybe. I suppose you’ve tried to just think of food as fuel and nothing else? I kind of think of food as that. I eat the same boring thing every day, and I don’t care one bit. I like your Halloween/Thanksgiving hybrid event. Wait, it’s Thanksgiving today, I think. Do you have a big family turkey-centric ‘feast’ set for today, and, if so, I’m assuming you are dreading the feast part. My non-Thanksgiving will involve having to go to an art opening this evening to schmooze and nudge the show’s curator who promised money for our film and hasn’t delivered yet nerve-wrackingly. Happy happy hopefully! ** Ahh! Licks James, I’m trying to guess who James is. I agree with everything you wrote. ** Autumn Glint, Yeah, they do Black Friday here, and I really should use it to buy the Switch I’ve been procrastinating about buying for forever, but I probably won’t. As for you, buy the farm! ** Okay. I feel fairly safe in assuming that most of you are not familiar with the exciting films and videos of Christine Lucy Latimer, and that explains why I felt it was valuable to make the introduction. Christine, meet the blog readers. Blog readers, meet Christine. See you tomorrow.

* (restored/texts culled from the sites Perfect Sound Forever, Emitt Rhodes Music, & various interviews)

 

‘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.’ — Emitt Rhodes, 2004

‘Most cult heroes are cult heroes by design. Either his or her music is too esoteric to be accepted by the mainstream, or his or her personality too erratic or weird for most people to understand or tolerate. In either respect, the artist usually has sought out selective rather than widespread acceptance on purpose. The cult audience, in turn, is grateful for the opportunity to feel superior to all the stupid, smelly legions of idiots who make up the majority of the music-buying public.

‘Then there’s people like Emitt Rhodes, who’s a cult hero for no good reason whatsoever. Far from obscure, his music is loaded with melodic charisma, that essential ingredient that makes you want to hear some records over and over again. Often called a musical dead ringer for Sir Paul McCartney, Rhodes is really the Macca we all wish Macca would be: an incredible pop tunesmith without all the gooey sentimentality and overflowing cuteness. The crown jewel of Rhodes’ small body of work is his self-titled debut album. Released to critical acclaim and modest commercial success in 1970, Emitt Rhodes has since taken on mythical status among power-pop and ’70’s rock aficionados. The album is a tour-de-force: just like McCartney on his first solo album, Rhodes played all the instruments and sang all the vocals himself. But even more impressive are the songs. Only 20 years old at the time, Rhodes had already absorbed the best of ’60s rock and matched it. Lennon/ McCartney certainly weren’t writing songs the caliber of “Really Wanted You” or “With My Face on the Floor” at that age. This precocious, good-looking kid should have been unstoppable.

 

 

Emitt Rhodes: ‘For me it’s one-four-five. It’s Pythagorean Theorum. For me it’s mathematics. I love Pythagoras. Everybody else in rock and roll loves Pythagoras, too, even if they don’t know it. It’s Pythagoras. You split the string in half and you get an octave. You split it into thirds and you get a third. I’m just telling you that Pythagoras was a wonderful guy. He lived a long time ago, nobody knows him and nobody cares. He gave us do re mi fa sol la ti do. Without him… somebody else would have had to do it. I love math. I love science. I love that stuff.’

‘But as it turned out, Rhodes was pretty much dead in the water careerwise at 24. A contract dispute raised the ire of his record company, and instead of nurturing a talented and potentially lucrative artist, they ended up giving Rhodes a royal rogering. Chewed up and spat out, Rhodes was burned out before his career really got started. While he’s flattered people still care about the music he made 30 years ago, being a self-described “has-been wannabe” doesn’t quite sit well with him.

 

 

‘Born and raised in Hawthorne, California, a bastion of power-pop thanks to homeboys The Beach Boys, Rhodes started with rock ‘n’ roll in his early teens, playing drums in a band called The Emerals. “My father was really nice,” Rhodes said. “He let me use the garage. Having a garage was, for a drummer, a really popular thing. Every band needs a place to rehearse and I had one.” The Emerals played the local circuit, including Hawthorne High School dances. It was at one of these dances that Rhodes had a run-in with one of his hometown’s soon-to-be princes. “Dennis Wilson broke my drum pedal,” Rhodes recalled over 35 years later. “He never paid for it or got me a new one. He just broke it and left.” The Emerals soon evolved into The Palace Guard, who had a minor hit single called “Falling Sugar.”

 

 

Emitt Rhodes: ‘We had the name first. I had green drums. Everybody was looking for any reason to pick a name. I had green drums so they called us the Emerals, and they spelled it wrong. It was seven of us and three of them were brothers. Don Beaudoin was the leader of the band. It was child abuse. D… B… was the same age as I was and he was abused by G… B… who ran the Hullabaloo and who was the head of Orange Empire Records. He fucked him. I was fourteen at the time and I knew, so I would imagine his brothers knew also and that his parents knew too. He was like the sacrificial goat so [we] could get that big plum job at the Hullabaloo. The Palace Guard didn’t write our music. I didn’t write it either. I wrote songs that the Merry Go Round did later, that were hits to some degree, but I didn’t write “Falling Sugar”. I have no idea who wrote that, but it wasn’t anybody in the band. That was all stuff that was put together by this guy G… B… who liked to fuck D… B… in the butt.’

 

 

‘Emitt was still the drummer, but he was looking to step out from behind the drum kit and into the spotlight. In 1966, he left The Palace Guard and formed another group with a long name (remember this is mid-60s L.A.) called The Merry-Go-Round. Instead of keeping time, Rhodes was now the guitar-playing frontman and songwriter. Retaining guitarist Gary Kato from his old band, the 16-year-old Rhodes recruited drummer Joel Larson and bassist Bill Rhinehart to complete the line-up.

 

The Merry-Go-Round

 

‘The new group quickly recorded what would be its biggest hit, a Rubber Soul soundalike called “Live.” Based on a demo of “Live” and another song called “Clown’s No Good,” A&M; Records signed The Merry-Go-Round and released “Live” as a single. After the song shot to number one in L.A., A&M; slapped together a bunch of demos and called it M-G-R’s debut album. Called simply The Merry-Go-Round, the album holds up surprisingly well considering the circumstances. “Gonna Fight the War” and “Low Down” are tough guitar songs that rival the best Buffalo Springfield, while more melancholy tracks like “You’re A Very Lovely Woman” and “On Your Way Out” out-Big Star Big Star more than three years before #1 Record. Essentially a garage “boy band,” The M-G-R nevertheless had a sophisticated sound, due in large part to Rhodes’ rapidly developing songwriting ability.

 

 

Emitt Rhodes: ‘My problem is “Live.” I’ve had friends tell me this; I don’t really know. The Bangles did it and they put it on compilations and I should have got paid for it, but my publisher sent me a statement saying I didn’t, that he took the rights to the song back or something. I look at the contracts I signed when I was a sixteen year old, it’s child abuse. My mother and my father signed with me. I just wanted to make music. My mother and father didn’t know any better so they just signed with me and I have contracts that say “for perpetuity.” “We own these songs for perpetuity.” Forever, and I’m going “oh, okay.” I was only fourteen, fifteen, sixteen years old and I didn’t understand.’

‘But by 1969 Rhodes, now 19, grew tired of the inevitable in-fighting that comes with being in a group. He wanted to make music for himself and by himself, so he set up a makeshift studio in a shed behind his parents house. “I bought myself a machine. It was an old four track machine, an Ampex,” Rhodes recalled. “It had huge knobs and giant meters. It was the size of a washing machine. It looked like something out of Flash Gordon.” With his brand new four-track, Rhodes began bashing out songs for his first solo album. His desire to record everything himself was practical because he didn’t have any money to hire musicians. Alone in the studio he was open to experimentation. “I was a drummer and I had a piano and I had a guitar and I just started there. The next thing I knew I wanted to play the violin and the sax and the flute and the harmonica and the banjo and everything. I’m a tinkerer. I would buy an instrument and an instructional book, and just play scales for an hour a day until I felt comfortable doing it. And then I would write parts. I was more of an arranger I guess.”

 

 

‘With only three mics, two mixers and his four track crowded in the 20 foot long by 10 foot wide shed, recording was a time consuming process. “I had the machine on one end and the drums on the other, and I’d press the record button and run over and sit down and put the phones on. It was pretty rudimentary.” As Rhodes assembled the record, he had no idea he was creating his masterpiece. “I was just doing the best I could do, writing what I thought was important at the time.”

 

Emitt Rhodes “Really Wanted You” 1971 Promo Film

 

‘In the middle of working on the album, Rhodes approached ABC/Dunhill with some instrumental tracks. The label signed him and paid Rhodes the princely sum of $5,000. When Emitt Rhodes was released in 1970, it charted at #29 and the single, “Fresh as a Daisy,” broke the top 60. Rhodes was hailed by critics as an artist to watch, and with the singer-songwriter movement just underway, his career appear to be on the fast track.

‘Maybe too fast. ABC/Dunhill wanted more product from their hot new star, and they wanted it soon. His contract stipulated that he release two albums every year, a feat The Beatles regularly pulled off in their heyday. But unlike the Fab Four, Rhodes was only one person doing everything himself. It was hard work and a lot of pressure for a guy still living with his parents, but ABC/Dunhill was less than understanding. As work on his second album Mirror dragged on for nearly a year, the record company suspended his contract and sued him. “I got in trouble,” Rhodes said. “I was being sued for more money than I ever made. It didn’t make any sense to me.”

‘Released in 1971, Mirror bombed, going to only #182 on the charts. While the record boasts some great songs, Rhodes had clearly lost his momentum. “I worked really hard, did the best I could, and I got in trouble. I mean, it’s like, what am I doing? What am I doing this for?” he said. “You have to get your dog biscuit after you rollover or sit up. Otherwise you don’t want to do it again … I burned out.” Another album, Farewell to Paradise, followed and did even worse on the charts than Mirror. At 24, eight years after he formed The Merry-Go-Round, Rhodes stopped recording. “There were lawsuits and lawyers and I wasn’t having any fun anymore. That’s it. Simple as that. I worked really hard and there was no reward,” he said.

 

 

Emitt Rhodes: ‘I believe in death. It works. It goes black and then you’re not there anymore. I’ve been there a few times. I’m against death. I believe in life. I have my own religion. I’m an atheist. I believe in life being the most important thing there is. Life is it. I believe everybody will agree that life’s important. I’ve been dead so I know what death is. You go black. Kind of whiteout really. Your brain works up until the time that it doesn’t work anymore. My afterwards is different than yours might be. My afterwards is I don’t have blood sugar. My brain dies. It’s like I can’t think anymore because I don’t have enough blood sugar for my brain to function anymore. The last experience I had is that I was lying in the middle of my room trying not to drown on my own saliva because I couldn’t swallow because swallowing means that muscle has blood sugar to do it. I was beyond that.’

 

 

‘Other than a brief moment in 1980 when he had a record deal with Elektra/Asylum that was eventually terminated, Emitt has stuck to recording demos in his home studio that will probably never the see the light of day. “It’s just songs,” he said of his demos. “It’s melodic. I like melodies that go from one place to the next. I like chords. I can’t say what (a new album) would sound like because I haven’t heard it yet.”

‘There was some excitement in the past year among Rhodes’ fans when the 50-year-old signed to the small indie label Rocktopia. Rhodes even started pre-production work on what would have been his first record in over 25 years, sorting through his collection of hundreds of demos, and he was planning on hiring musicians instead of doing everything himself. “I wanted to hire people to come play with me and just play producer and songwriter,” he said. “I’m an old guy now. I get sleepy at night. I have friends that play so much better than me (and) I just love listening sometimes.”

 

 

‘But his deal with Rocktopia ultimately fell through when the label ran out of money. Without an advance to finance a new record, Rhodes can’t move forward. “I have the desire to do it but I don’t know if I have the time,” he said. “It’s on hold at the moment, unless I find a way to support myself without working. I could win the lotto I guess.”

Emitt Rhodes: ‘I met this guy, an enthusiast. Wasn’t a great songwriter. But I liked him, so I thought, well, I’ll help him out and help him write a song. So he gave me this lyric, and I went over the lyric, and there was only one phrase in the whole thing that appealed to me, and that was, ‘Oh Lord, what’s a guy gonna do? What’s a guy supposed to do?’ or something like that. And it was about him waiting for his girlfriend who was upstairs talking on the phone to another girlfriend, and he was getting tired and didn’t want to go out, and anyway, it was complete nonsense, and I changed it to, ‘Oh Lord, what’s a man to do?’ and put it in minor key and sent him home and said, ‘Write some lyrics’. And he came back, and he had written, ‘How long I’ve anguished and set aside what little’s left of my foolish pride’, and I thought that that was so good that I wrote more to it. It all made sense to me; I saw the focus of it. So I kind of kept steering the lyric in that manner, and he would write more, and I’d send him home and he’d write more. Then every once in a while I’d throw a line in there, and then I used [with mock grandiosity] my superior ability in writing chord progressions to write what I thought was a real beautiful chord progression in its own right, even without a melody. And then I put a melody to it, so then I made it my song, you know. And then we went on from there and we did three songs, ’cause going to do just one didn’t seem right. He had this friend who had a studio in an office building, so we went into that studio and started recording. And we were like the first people in it, and I had friends come by and play, and stuff like that. And it was good for his studio, I thought. But this guy was just digging a hole for me to walk into. He handed me a bill. Some people are like, you know, they trip you, and then they call you clumsy.’

 

 

‘Today Rhodes still lives in the neighborhood where he grew up, in a house across the street from his parents’ old house. “I’m just trying to stay alive,” he said. “I have a small studio and I rent studio time … I’m not a rich person. I make a living.”‘ — collaged

“I was real fortunate. I had two parents who allowed me to make noise as long as it was outside in the garage. I made those records when I had no bills. I didn’t have a house at the time. I had very little bills and very little worries at the time. Music was pretty much the focus of my life, just making noise. Now it’s making noise to pay the landlord.”

 

Trailer: ‘THE ONE MAN BEATLES: The Emitt Rhodes Story’

Emitt Rhodes playing piano in ‘One Man Beatles’

EMITT RHODES – LOST PHOTOS AND MEMORIES

 

Emitt Rhodes Music
Official Emitt Rhodes @ Facebook
Emitt Rhodes Discography
Emitt Rhodes interviewed @ L.A. Record
Emitt Rhodes interviewed @ The LA Beat
Emitt Rhodes interviewed @ SCRAM Magazine
‘One Man Beatles’ @ imdB
‘The Emitt Rhodes Collection’
‘Emitt Rhodes Recorded At Home’ @ Tape Op

 

RIP July 19, 2020

 

*

p.s. RIP Bernadette Mayer ** Dominik, Hi!!! My pleasure on the books front, natch. My brain cells wither in sympathy. Briefly, thank goodness. Oh, I was thinking about pomegranates, I don’t know why, and how delicious their seeds are and how hard it is to crack them open, and how that makes the seeds sort of like jewels in a safe or something, and I got excited, and, yeah, I’m weird, ha ha. If you actually did find that poor globe, that’s very sad. I did quite like the ‘in front of a liquor store’ detail though. Hugs. Love telling a joke that everyone who hears it agrees is the perfect joke, G. ** David Ehrenstein, Lucky him! ** Sypha, I’ve never read Grant Morrison. I know, I know. A friend whose opinion I trust spent about twenty minutes the other day telling me how completely terrible that new Cormac McCarthy novel is, and it seems hard to believe. ** _Black_Acrylic, The one time I visited George Eliot’s grave it was festooned with admirers’ gifts. Lots of cigars for some reason. Ooh, a red splash. Like a rolling horror movie prop? ** tomk, Hi, Tom! ‘Summer’ is pretty great and kind of devastating. You good? What’s up? ** Jamie, Enthusiastic Wave, Jamie. No, not consciously. I’ve been to Ostend. When I was living in Amsterdam. There was an art exhibition there, as I recall. Outdoor sculptures. On a beach? Nice, man. Obviously I’m thrilled you’re putting your life in danger of excess eeriness on behalf of your novella. No, I didn’t see art. I’m Mr. Plans Thwarted Dude of late. But it was okay. Did some productive Zoom interviews for film crew positions and walked around and went ‘brr’ frequently. Safe trip to Ostend, by train? How eerie is it? Abridged love, Dennis. ** Dom Lyne, I tend to think weird-positive is the ultimate positive. Life being just plain old weird at the best of times. Ooh, hidden messages, much less to yourself. That’s very exciting to think about. Dom and Dahmer sitting in a tree k-i-s … Ha ha. We’re going to shoot the film around the LA area. Most probably in the desert-ish part, Joshua Tree and that sort of hood. It’s in English. Minnie is a really good name. I can’t explain why though. Love from the city that thinks it invented love, Dennis. ** Ian, I really liked the new Lambert. Well, duh, I guess. Reading is kind of the ultimate antidepressant, I think? No that you’re depressed, of course. xo. ** Ahh! Licks James, Wow, that was a pretty paragraph, thank you! ** Autumn Glint, Yours was too, just a little edgier. Consider my wad yours. ** Brian, Hi. I used to really like Blanchett in films, up until just after the ‘LotR’ period. I only like Swinton in Jarman’s films where she wasn’t ‘acting’. Yes, the urge to adapt Berlin is just dumb. It seems safe to assume that whoever wants to adapt that book doesn’t really get its greatness. Needing and struggling to get employment is a big stress eruptor for sure. Everything to do with needing and not having money is the absolute pits of being alive. Is there some official way to kill off an eating disorder? I guess there must be. That sounds nerve wracking. Dealing with and worrying about that, I mean. There’s nothing banal about the things that are problematizing your life, man. In fact it could probably be argued that having no problems is banal, I reckon. Right, Thanksgiving, I keep forgetting. It’s tomorrow, right? Big giant meal across the table from the most familiar faces of all. Enjoy that (if I’m right). My week should be okay: some events, some meetings, some work (on Gisele’s new theater piece), some … something. ** Tea, Ah, shit, sorry. I have yet to know whether I enjoy Mai-chan, but it sounds likely. I get pretty obsessive about my characters too, I guess just in a different way, but I always think of them as figurative shards of some idea I’m having, I guess. I think it’s about figuring out the dividing line between being hell bent and patient at the same time. Which I think is possible. If I am diagnosing my own writer state correctly. Hm. I hope your today is notably and markedly better. ** Right. I don’t often indulge my love of pop rock on this blog, but I am doing that today by restoring this post about the ‘cultishly’ revered pop rock auteur Emitt Rhodes, who sadly died between the time I originally made this post and now. Do find out if his stuff’s seductive powers work on you. See you tomorrow.