Dreamin' Wild

August 3, 2012 5:53 PM

On an empty plot of the family farm, [the father] built a state-of-the-art $100,000 recording studio. And in that studio, the boys recorded the newly reissued "Dreamin' Wild"...

"Baby," the standout track from Donnie and Joe Emerson's 1979 album, sounds remarkably current—in a retro kind of way—and has been covered a couple of times.

Promotional video from Light In The Attic Records.

Via rock ‘n’ roll snob.

posted by absqua (17 comments total)

Pretty sweet.
posted by brevator at 6:05 PM on August 3, 2012

The cover makes them look like castoffs from Jimmy DeFranco and the DeFranco Family, but the music is 70s power pop bliss.
posted by jonp72 at 6:14 PM on August 3, 2012

I'm really surprised by how much I enjoyed "Baby". It doesn't sound anything like I expected. Far moodier and murkier.

Thanks for that.
posted by One Hand Slowclapping at 6:17 PM on August 3, 2012

What an interesting story. And too true, pure 70's pop bliss. I love it. Endorsed by Ariel Pink! Thanks for the post.
posted by ashbury at 6:20 PM on August 3, 2012

I love forgotten band stories like this. My favorite is the band Death, which formed in 1975 and sounded like this...
posted by Huck500 at 6:37 PM on August 3, 2012 [2 favorites]

It's an accurate description of "Dreamin' Wild," an album whose eight songs feel like a time capsule found buried on a distant island. The album has no sense of the rock world outside of the farm: There's not a hint of punk rock on it, even though the Sex Pistols and Ramones had shifted the conversation a few years before it was made.

It may be hard to believe in 2012, but 1977 never happened in America. The youth music world in the early 1980s was still all about soft rock, hard rock, classic rock, an evolution of the sounds of the 1970s. If you were trendy you listened to yacht rock (Christopher Cross, Toto), if you were rough-n-tough you listened to heavy metal (AC/DC, Led Zeppelin). The TV show Freaks and Geeks got this exactly right. As the 80s went on, there were very, very underground American punk bands & scenes that popped up in small cities, playing (for each other alone) a kind of music far less radio-accessible than 1977. But the only sign of Punk in the US in the late 70s was a handful of goofy novelty acts -- which is how the Ramones were treated, if they were played at all.
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 6:44 PM on August 3, 2012 [10 favorites]

Nice find.
posted by a shrill fucking shitstripe at 7:10 PM on August 3, 2012

It may be hard to believe in 2012, but 1977 never happened in America. The youth music world in the early 1980s was still all about soft rock, hard rock, classic rock, an evolution of the sounds of the 1970s. If you were trendy you listened to yacht rock (Christopher Cross, Toto), if you were rough-n-tough you listened to heavy metal (AC/DC, Led Zeppelin).

I’m not so sure about this version of events. It seems like there’s been some revisionist history. There weren’t any punk bands as big as AC/DC or Toto because they were punk bands, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t a punk scene. I think it totally depended on where you lived. In parts of the country it was a big freakin deal. Maybe not in the late 70’s, but ’80 and later.
posted by bongo_x at 7:22 PM on August 3, 2012 [3 favorites]

Death is good. Baby not so much.

And the fact that Pitchfork gave the album an 8 is all I needed to know.
posted by photoslob at 7:24 PM on August 3, 2012

Spokompton represent.
posted by victory_laser at 8:05 PM on August 3, 2012 [1 favorite]

It may be hard to believe in 2012, but 1977 never happened in America.

OK, 1977 happened in America in 1970 with The Stooges' Funhouse, shit, they CREATED 1977. I realize that not many people listened to them, but they did exist, and the people who did listen REALLY LISTENED. Also, again, the Death link above is from 1975.
posted by Huck500 at 8:11 PM on August 3, 2012 [2 favorites]

Huck500: "I love forgotten band stories like this. My favorite is the band Death, which formed in 1975 and sounded like this... "

That Death record is one "lost classic" that really merits the term. My favorite song on it is "Where Do We Go From Here???".
posted by absqua at 8:21 PM on August 3, 2012 [3 favorites]

Light In The Attic is a GREAT label. They've just started a Lee Hazlewood reissue series that's going to bankrupt me at some point. Give them love and cash.
posted by mintcake! at 8:30 PM on August 3, 2012

1977 happened. In every way that counts, it absolutely happened.
posted by Aquaman at 10:39 PM on August 3, 2012 [1 favorite]

This is a great story and is getting a lot of play here in Spokane. Last week a local radio program, Johnson's Improbable History of Pop, interviewed the brothers but I cannot find a podcast.
posted by LarryC at 10:50 PM on August 3, 2012

A friend of mine has a place just like this--a recording studio in an old barn, on a (rather smaller) farm near Strasburg, VA. He'll host barn parties with several bands, any genre, whoever shows up--that scene is still out there. And he's just today listed the place for sale.
posted by MrMoonPie at 6:57 AM on August 4, 2012

That cover don't look so far off from John Cougar's Chestnut Street Incident.
posted by Twang at 1:53 PM on August 4, 2012