Drag City producer and head of staff Rian Murphy is usually sparing with compliments, but mention guitarist Emmett Kelly and the floodgates open. “Oh yeah, what a star that kid is,” Murphy says. “His feeling for the music is really deep, and his playing is–I don’t want to say mature beyond his years, but I’m constantly surprised at how polished and classic his sounds are.”
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Kelly was born in LA into a musical family, the middle child between two sisters. His father drummed with a late-60s London psych group called the Majority–much of their output is collected on the recent RPM reissue Rainbow Rockin’ Chair–and met his mother, an Italian-American from Detroit, while they were both playing percussion for an itinerant hippie band in Amsterdam in the early 70s.
Kelly started playing guitar at ten, and though he’d grown up listening to his parents’ classic-rock albums, in junior high he graduated to harder stuff like the Dead Kennedys and Crass. “I was huge into punk,” he says. “Then I heard Sonic Youth, and that totally rearranged my head.” He started the first Cairo Gang, a noisy shoegazer band, while in high school in Reseda, California. His next group, Prophet 5, was offered a development deal after just one show–Zomba Records, a major indie that owned labels like Jive and Silvertone, wanted to see what it could make of the group. “We were kids,” admits Kelly. “We got in way over our heads.”
“He was already in shape, man,” says Youssefi, laughing. “He’s just an unbelievable player. I can’t imagine anybody with ears not wanting to play with him.” Kelly toured with Youssefi in January 2005, and after he introduced her to his roommate, writer Brian Torrey Scott, she composed and recorded a suite of songs for Scott’s play Detail From the Mountain Side with Kelly on guitar. The set will be released by Drag City in early February.
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