In Memoriam: Eric Carmen (1949-2024)

Power pop architect’s conservatism may have created The Raspberries’ beautiful reaction to stuffy, “artistic” “rock” in the early ‘70s.

BOMP! BOMP! BOMP! 

BOMP! BOMP-BOMP!

BOMP! BOMP! BOMP! 

Oooooh, MAH-MA! Yeah!

It’s one of the most exciting intros on a rock ‘n’ roll record this side of The Kinks’ “You Really Got Me.”  (Remember? DUH-NUH-NUH-DUH-NUH! DUH-NUH-NUH-DUH-NUH!) It rose to Number Five on Billboard and saturated Top 40 radio in the summer of ‘72. In an age where rock with no roll was revered and The Real Thing was treated as retrograde trash, unfit of consideration as “art,” its ball-busting-yet-melodic glory and paean to teenage backseat horniness (actually told from a female point of view) got The Raspberries’ “Go All The Way” dismissed as “bubblegum.” Even Our Hero Lester Bangs, frequently as wrong as he was right, sneered at the Cleveland power poppers in print. 

 

We know better, don’t we Napalm Nation? With Wally Bryson’s treble-boosted powerchords and that hormonal wail permeating it, “Go All The Way” was as potent a reaction to bloated “rock” as David Bowie or the New York Dolls. Interestingly, the strong conservatism leader Eric Carmen flashed the last few years of his life — frequently dragging him into flame wars with fans disappointed in his ardent Trump support on Twitter — may have created Cleveland proto-power-poppers The Raspberries’ entire aesthetic. 

“Almost every band had hair down to their waist and beards and ripped jeans and they looked like a bunch of hippies, and I wanted to get as far away from that as I could,” Carmen told The Observer in 2017.

“Unfortunately,” he continued, “Capitol Records — bless their little hearts — they didn’t get that ‘Raspberry’ was the Bronx cheer. It was not four little fuzzy red fruits, it was somebody poking progressive rock in the eye. Rock critics got it and 16-year-old girls got it, but you know, the 18-year-old guy who liked Megadeth was never going to like the same record his sister did. So people tended to dismiss us at the time.”

Monday, Carmen’s wife Amy announced on his official website that he’d died in his sleep this past weekend of undisclosed causes. He was 74. 

Born Eric Howard Carmen in Cleveland, Ohio, on August 11, 1949, he hailed from a Russo-Jewish immigrant family. Growing up in Lyndhurst, a suburb on Cleveland's eastern side, shaped his early life experiences. Early on, it was recognized he was a musical prodigy.

“I started singing when I was 2,” he recalled in a 1991 interview at his website. “At two-and-a-half, my family saw a little talent in me and enrolled me in the Cleveland Institute of Music. I started in an elementary theory course for preschool kids. When I was 5, I began violin lessons with my aunt [Muriel Carmen, of the Cleveland Orchestra]. I absolutely hated violin. It was not an immediate gratification instrument. I only wanted to play piano. So I was a dropout at 6.

“Around age 11, I convinced my parents to let me go back to the Institute of Music and study piano. I went through seven years of classical training in four years.”

Simultaneously, he began composing his first original songs, looking to the lofty likes of  Elmer Bernstein, Leonard Bernstein, Henry Mancini, and Burt Bacharach and Hal David for inspiration. Then, in his mid-teens, England invaded the U.S. As Carmen put it, “After seeing The Beatles’ film A Hard Day’s Night, I dropped everything and immediately decided I wanted to do that!” 

“Somewhere around 1965, I decided, since there was no such thing as a portable keyboard, I was going to have to learn to play another instrument,” he explained. “So I taught myself to play guitar and then started playing in bands.” Equally, Carmen “spent my youth with my head between two stereo speakers listening to The Byrds and The Beatles and later on The Beach Boys.”

He was learning how to construct pop songs. All those lessons came to bear in Cyrus Erie, who grouped in 1967 without Carmen. He came in late in the year, ostensibly to play drums, but his guitar/piano/singing abilities were all too strong to ignore. Sadly, one of Cleveland’s bigger local bands, The Choir — who’d had a huge regional hit in “It’s Cold Outside,” later covered by Stiv Bators — had done just that. Carmen got his revenge, recruiting Choir guitarist Wally Bryson for Cyrus Erie. Deep into 1968, they cut a killer, early Who-style 45 for Epic, “Get The Message,” Bryson’s Townshendian guitar work driving it hard. Eventually, other Choir members were drafted into Cyrus Erie, including drummer Jim Bonfanti, paving the path for The Raspberries in 1970. Former Choir singer Dave Smalley returned from Vietnam, hefting a bass guitar for the new band.

 

With Carmen’s natural talent and conservatory training, combined with three ex-Choir members having years of experience playing together, it was a given The Raspberries solidified quickly. Producer/manager Jimmy Ienner proved a formidable ally in the studio after the band inked with Capitol Records. Oddly, Carmen had to fight to have “Go All The Way” issued as a single.

“I never understood why Capitol had chosen to release ‘Don't Want To Say Goodbye,’ instead,” he recalled in 1991. “It kind of flew in the face of all of the logic in the record business at the time. So, when they eventually pulled that back and decided to release ‘Go All The Way,’ I thought, ‘All right. Come on!’”

Could it have been the explicit nature of the lyrics? Carmen admitted there may have been something to that.

”When I was writing ‘Go All the Way,’ I’d seen how the Stones were forced to change their lyrics [to “Let’s Spend The Night Together”] on Ed Sullivan,” he remarked in Overnight Sensation, a Raspberries biography. “And I was listening to [The Beach Boys’] Pet Sounds, where Brian Wilson is talking about sleeping with his girlfriend, but in an innocent way, and getting away with it. I thought, ‘If we sing this like choirboys and put the words in the girl’s mouth, maybe we can slide this by radio!’ And it worked.”

Indeed, it did. It worked all the way to Number 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 that summer of 1972.

“And when it took off, I can tell you, it was a very exciting thing,” Carmen exclaimed. “I mean, I was a twenty-two year old kid, hanging out at the beach here.” 

 

They had other hits: “I Wanna Be With You,”  “Let’s Pretend.” Everyone from Cheap Trick to Kiss to Nirvana have declared them an influence — even Mötley Crüe. Bruce Springsteen told Carmen the whole time he wrote his album The River, he listened to two cassettes — compilations of Woody Guthrie and The Raspberries. John Lennon was even photographed wearing a Raspberries t-shirt!

The Raspberries broke up in 1975, paving the way for Eric Carmen, solo balladeer. No, “All By Myself,” “Hungry Eyes” and the like are not my favorite music. But they are a lot of people’s idea of something great. And it’s not like they suffered in craftsmanship or anything. But it’s not like these records were “Overnight Sensation,” either. And they sure as fuck weren’t “Go All The Way.”

Yeah, it was annoying seeing the man aggressively promote Cheeto Mussolini online. It made me block him at Twitter. It prevented me from enjoying “Go All The Way” for a little bit. But goddamn it, when you hear those Raspberries records, you just wanna punch the sky, get drunk on Boone’s Farm, and kiss the one you’re with! Which is the function of all great pop music. It rearranges your molecules and makes everything alright for the three minutes you’re spinning that 45 and singing along!

For one brief moment in the mid-’00s, The Raspberries lived again. The original lineup toured, augmented by three additional players cleverly named The Overdubs, and sounded like the first time you heard them on the radio. And it was glorious.

 

Does it get any better? R.I.P., Eric Carmen.

TOMORROW: In Memoriam: Mojo Nixon (1957-2024), Or “The Life And Supremely Weird Times Of Neill Kirby McMillan, Jr.”

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