Like all the beautiful, true things that move us, I couldn't explain how Emitt Rhodes's feeling reached mine and the two became one: it's always a mysterious blend, an emotional potion hard to break down into ingredients and grams and test tubes. Only a few others had ever 'spoken' to me that way. I only know that as soon as I heard him, I recognized him, I thought 'ah, right, it's true...', but without trumpet blasts or archangel announcements, without blaring fanfare: quietly, in an intimate and respectful hush, modest and special.

The speaker is Cosimo Messeri, a young Tuscan director and son of Marco Messeri of "Le vie del Signore sono finite". In "The One Man Beatles – Cercando Emitt Rhodes", presented at the Rome Film Festival and nominated for Best Documentary at the 2010 David di Donatello Awards, he recounted his journey following the trail of Emitt Rhodes, the cult American songwriter who vanished from the scene in the 1970s after releasing just four albums.

"The One Man Beatles" is the story of an encounter. More than that, it's the story of how music can become a way to connect with a man's soul. And of how, even when all seems lost, an unexpected turn can always call life into question again.

Rummaging through the bric-a-brac of a Roman street stall, Cosimo Messeri stumbled upon Emitt Rhodes's music for the first time: an old vinyl record that landed in his hands almost by chance, the crackle of a turntable needle, and that subtle falling-in-love that signals a connection with no escape - one that forces you to go looking for its source.

So Messeri decided to find out what had become of the man capable of giving life to such candidly crystalline songs.

It's not actually that hard to disappear from the world. Just close your front door, unplug the phone, cut yourself off from everyone. And little by little you end up forgotten. But music - that's different. Once it's in circulation, it never stops forging seemingly impossible bonds. It spreads as if by osmosis, from one heart to another.

Strange rumors circulated about Emitt Rhodes. Some said he'd gone mad, that he only talked to his plants, that he'd become an ice-cream man or a postman. In fact, all it took to find him was to look in the phone book.

Then again, Rhodes had always been a loner. All his records were made within the walls of his parents' garage in Hawthorne, on the outskirts of Los Angeles, with nothing more than a few microphones and a four-track Ampex recorder. But his music isn't some kind of lo-fi ante litteram for voice and guitar: it carries a fragrance that's pure Beatles, melancholy wrapped in sugar paper.

It was impossible for it to be lost to oblivion.

"Ever find yourself running, running, running away

Ever hear yourself crying, crying, crying to someone

Won't you look down from Heaven, won't you prove you are real?

With your questions unanswered, never knowing the truth?"

The screen is dark. A voice recites some lines. They speak of running away, of hiding. Old grainy home movies flicker by like the echo of a lost time.

They used to say Emitt Rhodes didn't even exist. They said he was just a pseudonym used by the Beatles to release their songs after the split. Sure, that Paul McCartney-like timbre and his innate sense of melody seemed tailor-made to evoke the mirage of the Fab Four from Liverpool. But listen closely, and you can't mistake the heart beating behind those notes.

"Emitt perfectly embodies this ramshackle yet exquisite marriage, soft-spoken and pointed at once," explains Cosimo Messeri. "In his songs you can always hear where he comes from, his roots as a Californian kid, there's always that urge to laugh and sing without too many explanations, but at the same time they're ennobled by a noble, melancholy streak, detached yet heart-on-sleeve, like a penniless dandy. I've been told that as a young man Emitt used to go around speaking with an English accent. And maybe that's true for all of us, a little: we always want what we can't have…"

By the end of the Sixties, the young Rhodes had picked up the baton of the British invasion on the other side of the Atlantic with the sparkling folk-rock brew of the Merry-Go-Round. Then, however, having left the band behind, he chose to record everything in perfect solitude, playing every instrument himself: guitar, bass, drums, piano, keyboards… Just as Paul McCartney was doing at the same time.

Rhodes's debut solo album (now available as part of the comprehensive double CD The Emitt Rhodes Recordings [1969-1973]) is titled simply with his own name, like a perfect calling card. The year is 1970, and the horizon is full of promise for this twenty-year-old songwriter with American genuineness and a British spirit. Just listen to the opening "With My Face On The Floor" to be confronted at once with his two-faced nature: the buoyant piano line, the chasing guitar, the interplay of vocal harmonies… every note seems to deceive with lightheartedness. But meanwhile, the world is collapsing all around: she's gone, the door has closed behind her for the last time.

That's just how Rhodes's songs are: "they're heartbreaking lyrics set to a playful melody, and vice versa," explain the Bangles in "The One Man Beatles", longtime devoted fans of his music. "A wonderful combination."

The blossoming of "Somebody Made For Me" and the thoughtful delicacy of "Live Till You Die" speak of a belated spring, the skipping rhythm of "Fresh As A Daisy" and the colorful little theatre of "She's Such A Beauty" hover in a sunlit afternoon. The gentle intimacy of Harry Nilsson meets the shimmering pop primer of Todd Rundgren, pairing the brief arpeggio of "Lullaby" with the heartfelt unfolding of "Ever Find Yourself Running". On the cover image, Rhodes gazes out at the world through the frosted glass of a crumbling house: he seems hungry for the future, and at the same time imprisoned by reality.

"You must have for every raindrop a ray of sun

To get by, to live your life"

Suddenly, without introduction, the face of Emitt Rhodes appears. Framed by grey hair and a grey beard, marked by the weight of the years. In the background there's old live footage of the Merry-Go-Round, creating a disorienting effect of temporal distortion.

A music journalist had warned Cosimo Messeri from the very start of the journey: "even if you do find Emitt Rhodes, it'll be as if you never found him." But the young director wasn't discouraged, and set out on his trail, first of all through the testimonies of those who had known him.

"He was a quiet guy, an introverted genius," recalls stylist Janice Fortier. "He was very talented, simple and complex at the same time." "The first time I heard him," adds producer Keith Olsen, "I thought: this kid is astonishing, exceptional… The recording is terrible, but he's exceptional."

Emitt Rhodes was always a purist at heart: it's his greatness, and at the same time his curse. "He lacked the tools to defend himself," observes bassist Matt Malley. "He had an innocence that made him vulnerable."

His debut album barely has time to crack Billboard's top 30 before the record industry machine is already champing at the bit to devour him. Under the contract he'd signed with ABC/Dunhill, Rhodes was supposed to deliver six albums in three years — essentially a new record every six months, an impossible pace to sustain for a perfectionist like him. So Rhodes finds himself completing his new record, Mirror, under increasingly suffocating pressure.

The edges get squarer, the spirit sharper. "Really Wanted You" catches fire with a riff that recalls the swagger of the Stones, while "Birthday Lady" unspools breezily between piano and guitar. His musical bloodline seems to lead straight to the autumnal power-pop of Alex Chilton, and further down still to the tormented kaleidoscope of Elliott Smith. There's no shortage of softer shades either, in tracks like "Golden Child Of Gold" or "Side We Seldom Show", but the record fails to match the warm reception given to Emitt Rhodes.

To muddy the waters further, the Merry-Go-Round's old label steps in at the start of 1971 and releases the recordings Rhodes made right after the band's breakup. The American Dream is inevitably rawer and less fully realized than Rhodes's other solo work: between the romanticism of "Pardon Me" and the sorrow-banishing chorus of "Let's All Sing", a string arrangement wraps around the Merry-Go-Round classic "You're A Very Lovely Woman".

Failing to meet the terms of his record contract lands Rhodes in a damages lawsuit brought by his own label. It's little wonder the shadows loom even larger by the time his final album arrives in 1973, tellingly titled Farewell To Paradise.

The production's smoother edges lose some of the warmth and brightness of his earlier records: from the nocturnal atmospheres of "Only Lovers Decide" to the wistful harmonica of the title track that closes the album, what stands out most is "Warm Self Sacrifice"'s attempt to find a more mature vitality. But the road seems to have run out: "It took me a lot longer to make the third album, and they sued me for more money than I'd ever made..." Rhodes recalls bitterly. "I just thought: why do I want to keep doing this?"

"You must live till you die

You must feel to be alive"

A white house, almost hidden among the trees. Red brick, a wooden gate. That's where Emitt Rhodes holed himself up after deciding to vanish from the scene — right across the street from where his mother lived. And it's there that Cosimo Messeri tracked him down, more than thirty years after his farewell to paradise.

Only a few faint signs surfaced in the meantime: in 1998 Rhodes took the stage at the Poptopia Festival in Los Angeles, and in 2001 Wes Anderson used one of his songs ("Lullaby") in the soundtrack to "The Royal Tenenbaums". But what happened during all those years?

Quite simply, something broke inside him. And life set him adrift, a prisoner within the walls of that house. As Messeri confirms, "the years of seclusion were without doubt the darkest period of his life to date, the most exhausting. In his eyes I saw years of resentment, of heartbreaking love, of pitch-black loneliness, of too much television and too little life. Usually you don't recover from blows like that — you sink to the bottom, you fade out: usually..."

In his bermuda shorts, polo shirt and sneakers, Rhodes looks like he's stepped straight out of a scene from "The Big Lebowski". "You're very bohemian..." Messeri teases him. "No, it's worse... I'm just poor," the old songwriter shoots back, with a touch of bitter self-mockery. He has a room cluttered with amplifiers, instruments, cables, microphones, mixers. He never stopped playing — he only stopped playing for someone else.

The Tuscan director follows him discreetly, almost delicately, recounting the experience of this encounter without artifice. It brings to mind another documentary devoted to a seemingly "lost" songwriter: "You're Gonna Miss Me" by Keven McAlester, centered on the story of former 13th Floor Elevators frontman Roky Erickson. There too, the shadows of a life are approached with a quiet sense of restraint. And there too, it's the hope of a return to life that rises above everything else.

Emitt Rhodes doesn't have the eyes of a defeated man. "Lively, wry, open": that's how Messeri describes him. "Meeting Emitt, I found... a man! Which is the hardest thing of all... and I realized you have to be careful with men — they're capable of extraordinary things."

Rhodes sits down at the keyboard and starts singing. It's a new song. "When we arrived, Emitt had just started playing again with his new band: we resumed rehearsals, and it was only the second time the group had ever met, period. And so, maybe out of some kind of narcissism and fatherly pride, but mostly out of passion and unconditional love, I like to think that this fact — that people had set off from the other side of the world, had crossed the ocean just to talk to him, to spend a little time with him, out of love, exactly — I like to think that this somehow lifted him up, caressed him, that it was a shot of pure self-esteem, that it gave him a little more faith in himself and in the world. Only then will this work have had a reason to exist."

Cosimo Messeri tells it like this, the impossible rebirth he was able to witness, like a vision lifted straight out of Jim Jarmusch's "Dead Man": "I was looking for water in a desert, and at first that's exactly what it seemed like, a desert: scorching sand, a distant horizon, still air, never a shelter, the fear of vanishing with every step... Then one day I looked down between my shoes and saw a little plant: it was greenish, dried out, just asking for a bit of drizzle... but I didn't know what to do, how to do it... So some Sioux Indians came to my aid, and without saying a word, laughing hard, they started dancing like madmen, under the molten-lead sun; they danced and danced and danced... they wouldn't stop, so I thought: why not, and I started dancing too. And without doing anything more, the sky began to fill up and it started raining, more and more, until the cool water submerged us all and the little plant turned into a centuries-old sequoia, a wood, a rainforest. And I found myself living there, in that forest, and I wondered: but I wasn't here at first... where was I? And the desert was a vague memory, just a faded dream..."

In the half-light steeped in music, Rhodes speaks from the heart. "My life has changed now. There's you, these cameras..." He smiles through the pain like someone determined to exorcise the ghosts of the past. "It's time I got back to work." His gaze drifts far away. Toward a new day.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google