Touring the Farm Where the Emerson Brothers Recorded Their 1979 Album BLAST FROM THE PAST Don Emerson, left, and his brother Joe, inside the studio on the family farm, where they recorded "Dreamin' Wild." More than 30 years later, the album is a cult hit. BY the time he was in his teens in the late 1970s, Donnie Emerson could play the trombone, clarinet, piano and guitar, and was writing and singing his own songs, musical gifts that took shape in a cabin set among the ponderosa pines on the Emerson family farm. In this part of eastern Washington, wheat fields roll for miles over hills and valleys, occasionally interrupted by a cluster of buildings and a gas station impersonating a town. In rural isolation, night after night, Donnie would play and record songs on a state-of-the-art TEAC eight-track, a machine as strange and rare here as a space probe. "I'd stay here until 10, 12 o'clock, coming up with ideas," he told a visitor one recent afternoon. Don, as he is now known by most people, had driven an hour and a half from Spokane, where he lives, to the farm on which he grew up. Wearing sunglasses - more as a psychic shield than anything else, it seemed - he paused before entering the cabin, as if contemplating the prospect of meeting his 17-year-old self. Inside, he perched uncomfortably on a frayed green couch beside his brother Joe. The one-room recording studio, which they call the Practice Place, looked as if it hadn't changed much in the intervening years, a time capsule covered in colored shag carpeting and filled with analog audio gear. Joe, who is older but played the loyal sideman role on drums, reminisced about their days as aspiring rock stars. "We weren't intimidated by any outside sources," he said. We hadn't been to a big city. We had no concept of the outside world. The world, to us, was here. Don added: "I would daydream and transpose things on my mind down on the piano. I would daydream all the time. It's the kind of flashback the brothers have been experiencing for months now, since "Dreamin" Wild," the album they recorded here and released themselves in 1979 as Donnie and Joe Emerson, has become an out-of-the-blue cult hit, rescued from obscurity by a music blogger. Will Louviere, a Bay Area record dealer and an early fan of the album, was mesmerized, he said, by the young Donnie's "stoney and hazy" voice. The music site Pitchfork proclaimed the album "a godlike symphony to teenhood." And Don read that another blog has pronounced "Baby" - a song so soulful it's as if teen isolation and yearning are embedded in its molecular structure - a classic. "Like right up there with "Stand by Me," " he said. Trippy, right? "It's amazing what you did accomplish in that short period," Joe said in his soft, encouraging voice. It was, like, you got all these emotions and you got to get them down. Now 53, with a balding dome and a brush mustache, Joe still lives on the farm, in a low-slung stone-and-wood house he built just steps from the Practice Place. Since graduating from high school, he has been working with their father, Don Emerson Sr., in the family logging business. But while Joe seems to be enjoying the calls from record collectors and the visits from music label people, Don is more wary about all the hoopla. At 51, he no longer has the feathered coif of his "Dreamin" Wild" days. His hair is short and flecked with gray, though he has the same stoney, hazy quality he had as a teenager. Intensely engaged one minute, he seems to drift off the next, lost in a private world. He is thankful that, as he put it, "If I died tomorrow, hey, man, someone got it." But having left Fruitland 30 years ago to pursue a career as a professional musician, an effort that has had mixed success at best, he is finding it baffling to be praised for songs he wrote as a teenager. "It's strange," he said earlier in the day, trying to explain his emotions. He stopped, looking pained. I feel like my life is all upside down. FRUITLAND is nearly two hours from the Interstate, and bordered by the Spokane Indian Reservation. The main drag consists of a road sign and a combination gas station-food market-post office.