Merry-Go-Round was basically Emitt Rhodes. They had a minor hit in 1967 with "Live". This 1968 release did not make the Billboard charts at all, tho did hit #5 at WKYC-Cleveland and #6 at WKLO-Louisville.
There was a song from back in the 60, that I loved so much, and after all the years, just could NEVER remember the title, or group...I often visit 60's web pages hoping to find that song....THIS IS IT!!! I finally found it. Many, many thanks!!! AND, I grew up, and heard this in Cleveland!!! This was even in the Top 100 songs of the years! Great song.
Emitt Rhodes is without a doubt a genius! The Merry Go Round's LP is fantastic and his solo albums are amazing especially the S/T one. I've loved him since I was 19! The Merry Go Round took me a little more time and is now one of my favorite records ever recorded.
As noted in Jimhamilton1's upload notes, it did chart all the way to #5 in Cleveland, where the inhabitants have always had great taste. No coincidence they put the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame there.
Indeed. When I bought a couple of the Joel Whitburn Charts books covering the 60s, I found that a lot of the really good stuff tended to chart much lower nationally than in Cleveland/Akron (I lived in between). And at 8:00 50,000 watts of WBZ would come sailing in from Boston. We had ourselves some good radio.
They had a minor hit with a song called "you're a very lovely woman" (later covered by Linda Rondstadt). A brilliant song that deserved MUCH more airplay than it got.
Someone didn't want Emitt Rhodes or any of his musical projects to be successful. How was this song, and many more of his songs,not an enormous hit? Capital Records probably didn't want him competing with their Beatles.
He signed a typically shitty recording deal with Dunhill Records that required him to release 2 albums per year. After Merry-Go-Round disbanded he wrote, produced, recorded and played/sang everything on his own (in his parents' house). When he couldn't deliver (who could produce that much quality stuff alone) they sued him for breach of contract asking for like $250,000 in damages. So he basically gave up that part of the music business. Really sad, but also a pretty common story of great talent versus the ruthless hit-oriented record companies.
Leave it to Emitt Rhodes to use The Beatles own musical language to articulate a reason they stopped touring. If more people got the joke, it would have gone top 10 on Billboard (Lord knows, this record was far better than half of what did make the charts at the time). One more reason that we are listening to this band well into the 21st century.
OK first 30 seconds I got curiously familiar shades of "Sgt Pepper"'s opening track, but then when I got to 0:31 and the"meter" of the lyric is exactly the same as "it was 20 years ago to day, sgt pepper taught the band to play" ? OK. I think we were all guilty of doing our own version of the Beatles back then. I was more blatant, (hey I was only ten in 1967) and actually wrote a song called "Pinky Emerson's Timeless Nuts And Bolts Band"
The late, great Emitt Rhodes sounds as British (and possibly as Beatle-y… nah, maybe too heavy to be completely Beatlesque) as he does on his solo material ❤
