Eric Carmen, Raspberries frontman and All By Myself singer, dies at 74
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Eric Carmen sang on the Raspberries’ 1972 breakout hit, Go All The Way, before launching a successful solo career as a soft rock crooner.
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NEW YORK – American musician Eric Carmen, the rock singer who led the 1970s power-pop pioneers the Raspberries before reinventing himself as a soft-rock crooner who became a mainstay of 1980s radio and movies, has died. He was 74.
His death was announced on his website by his wife Amy Carmen. She did not give a cause and said only that he died “in his sleep over the weekend”.
The Raspberries, which formed in Cleveland, burst onto the American rock scene in 1972 with their self-titled debut album, featuring a raspberry-scented scratch-and-sniff sticker and their biggest hit, Go All The Way, a provocative song for its day, sung from the point of view of a young woman.
American writer and musician Dave Swanson of the website Ultimate Classic Rock called it “the definitive power pop song of all time”, as the emerging style, known for grafting 1960s-era vocal harmonies onto the crunchy guitar riffs of the 1970s, would come to be called.
“The opening Who-like blast leads into a very Beatles-esque verse, before landing in some forgotten Beach Boys chorus,” he wrote. “Thus was the magic of the Raspberries song craft. They were able to take the best parts and ideas from the previous decade and morph them into something new, yet familiar.”
The Raspberries’ second album, Fresh, also released in 1972, was its highest-charting, at No. 36. It featured two Top 40 hits, I Wanna Be With You and Let’s Pretend.
The band, known for their matching suits and clean image, were dismissed by some as passe.
“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,” said Carmen in a 2017 interview with British newspaper The Observer.
The band did earn some critical acclaim and cachet: Beatles singer John Lennon was photographed wearing a Raspberries shirt. Their influence on rock music would only grow over time.
After the band broke up in 1975, Carmen went solo. He swerved into soft rock, quickly scoring a hit single with All By Myself, which peaked at No. 2.
In the 1980s, two of his biggest hits came from soundtracks.
For 1984 movie Footloose, he co-wrote Almost Paradise, which was recorded by singers Mike Reno and Ann Wilson. Carmen also wrote and sang Hungry Eyes, from 1987 film Dirty Dancing.
Carmen’s songs were covered by artistes such as American singer Shaun Cassidy (That’s Rock ’n Roll), Canadian singer Celine Dion (All By Myself) and American actor John Travolta (Never Gonna Fall In Love Again). In 1989, Carmen began appearing with former Beatles drummer Ringo Starr and his All-Starr Band.
The Raspberries reunited in 2004. A show from that tour was featured on a 28-song live album in 2017, Raspberries Pop Art Live. The liner notes were written by American film-maker Cameron Crowe, who featured Go All The Way in his 2000 movie Almost Famous.
Carmen was sanguine about the impact of the Raspberries.
“Rock critics got it and 16-year-old girls got it, but you know, the 18-year-old guy who liked (heavy metal band) Megadeth was never going to like the same record his sister did,” he said in the 2017 interview, before recounting the first time he met American veteran rocker Bruce Springsteen.
“I walked into his dressing room before a show, and he was writing out the set list, and we looked at each other for a couple of minutes. I was very uncomfortable being on the fan end, so I felt a little stupid. But Bruce looked at me, and he goes, ‘You know, while I was writing The River (1981), all I listened to was Woody Guthrie and the Raspberries’ greatest hits.’”
He is survived by his wife and two children, Clayton and Kathryn. NYTIMES
