If you saw this LP sitting in a milk crate with a yard sale price tag on it, you’d probably get a good laugh at its awfulness. And depending on your personal level of irony-laced hipsterness, you might even buy the record and bring it home thinking it’s going to be so-awful-it’s-funny.
But fuck your irony! Because Donnie & Joe Emerson not only make for a fascinating personal story, but their 1979 home-recorded album “Dreamin’ Wild” was recently reissued and is worth checking out. These long-forgotten brothers are actually amazing songwriters and musicians.
The Emersons were created on a family farm in the tiny town of Fruitland, Wash. The boys’ father, Don Sr., set them up with a recording studio and made them promise they’d play only their own songs. The resulting album is a fantastic mix of funk, soul and AM-radio yacht rock. It all sounds a bit like the story of The Shaggs, but without the borderline-unlistenable eccentricity.
Pitchfork recently reviewed the reissed/remastered Emerson album and gave it a very solid 8.0:
And unlike the Shaggs’ endearing/excruciating Philosophy of the World, Donnie and Joe can sing, write songs, and play. In between logging, fence-post digging, and other farm chores, the boys practiced nonstop and put Dreamin’ Wild to tape with little idea of what was happening in popular music (they barely even knew how to load a reel of tape in their studio) other than what emanated from the radio. Listening through, you catch glints of Smokey Robinson, Hall and Oates, the Commodores, Bread, Pablo Cruise, Boz Scaggs and Chuck Mangione amid the AM bullion. Blue-eyed soul, meandering funk (see “Feels Like the Sun” which encourages you to “sing or play a musical instrument along with the boys”), and landlocked yacht rock are evident. Yet the wide-eyed and utterly sincere vision of a 17-year old Donnie stuns.
It’s a shame that the the brothers never really broke out. Without the support of any record label, the farm boys couldn’t find many radio stations willing to play their stuff. Today they’d have Twitter followers and blog hype from Stereogum but breaking out of Fruitland was a whole lot tougher in the supposedly good old days of record labels.
Here’s a mini-documentary that follows up with the now-middle aged Emerson brothers:
And here’s “Give Me a Chance,” my favorite track off the album, where the brothers Emerson sound like a proto-Black Keys playing bluesy soul-rock.
