REVIEW: Emitt Rhodes—Mirror (1971)

Another lost 70s classic worthy of investigation.

It's not often you find an album as good as this that hasn’t been reissued since it came out over 50 years ago. The reason I’ve been drawn to Mirror, though, is on account of the recent reissue of Emitt Rhodes’ proceeding album, which itself got its first-ever vinyl reissue since its release 55 years ago!

So great was that, I couldn’t just leave it there. The story goes that 20 year-old Emitt was such a hot talent that his label Dunhill signed him on a six album deal. Sounds good? Except those six album were expected at a rate of two a year, which The Beatles managed most years, but with three world class songwriters in the mix.

Emitt must have optimistically signed the deal thinking it was within his supreme abilities to rattle off 20 songs a year, no problem. But given he was the sole composer, played every instrument, and even recorded it by himself, he simply gave himself a herculean task beyond mortal men.

By the time Mirror came out in July 1971, he was already slipping behind schedule, and without adequate promotion really possible (and few stations that interested), it slipped out of sight and was in the bargain bins long before it had a chance to grab anyone’s attention. And this on the back of the relative commercial failure of his debut solo album. It must have been crushing.

But he did manage some airtime, at least, as the rare footage below demonstrates. As the first comment on the video asks:

“How does someone with that face, that voice, those songs, those arrangements, those playing chops, those home recording skills somehow get shunted aside by the music industry? It boggles the imagination.”

Whatever the reason (crappy record deal, unwillingness to ‘play the game’, a very non-"rock star” image of that time), it still “boggles the imagination” that he hasn’t really had his day in the sun since. Similarly talented overlooked singer-songwriters (and bands) have been written about to death and even had their tear-jerking biopic (Searching For Sugarman, anyone?), but Emitt’s work remains curiously obscure even by hipster music fan standards. I’ll repeat—Mirror has not been issued on vinyl since an Italian pressing in 1975 (even its 2002 CD issue was Japan only). That’s crazy.

Although it’s not quite at the magical all-killer no-filler level of his incredible solo debut of the year before, there are a stack of great cuts on this record. Side 2 opener Really Wanted You positively bursts with melody, and has such a great groove about it. Sure enough, it was picked as the single, but history tells us it failed to chart, which is a travesty if you ever bother to pick through the songs that did trouble the charts at that time.

And it’s far from the only song that should be well known by now. In fact that track’s b-side Love Will Stone You is as good as any ‘piano man’ song of the period. He really did it all, always embellishing his tracks with killer guitar licks, sweet harmonies, great lyrics and serviceable drumming. He was also a handsome devil, in an understated way. How did nobody see the massive potential here?

There was a darker side to his work emerging underneath his endlessly melodic tunes. Better Side Of Life offers a fair indication that things weren’t especially rosy in his personal life. “You don’t have to be alone to feel alone,” he laments. On Really Wanted You he admits “I was dying inside babe”. On the title track: “Hollow empty face, with one side dark, one side light…The mirror always knows—the mirror always shows”. Standard introspective songwriter territory, sure, but in his case the pervading gloom was already there, and surely a contributory reason he ended up giving up entirely for over 40 years.

An interesting aside about a few of the tracks on this record is the finger picking techniques you hear on Golden Child Of God and Side We Seldom Show. Sound familiar? Any Beatles scholar will note the similarities to John’s Dear Prudence and Julia—a technique that Donovan taught John during their trip to India in 1968.

And while he dials down the “One man Beatles” approach that was so prevalent on the solo debut, his inner Macca still comes through here and there on jaunty ditties like opening track Birthday Lady, and even more so on Bubble Gum The Blues/I’m A Cruiser, which is part White Album, part Abbey Road outtake in almost all ways. Brilliant on its own merits, but also probably one of the silly reasons folk elected to ignore him back in his time.

But check out My Love Is Strong and Take You Far Away on top of all the other great tracks on this record. Check out the great playing. The supreme vocals. The melodies! And weep at how this young man was rudely passed over in his time, but celebrate that these things can live on long after they’re gone.