If Eric Carmen Didn’t Go All the Way, He Went Far Enough to Liven Up the Radio
Eric Carmen created a great radio record at a time when the music biz wasn’t quite sure what a great radio record should be any more.
Carmen, who died this past weekend at the age of 74, wrote and sang “Go All the Way” with his band the Raspberries in the spring of 1972. While he would later score bigger hits as a solo artist, with “All By Myself” in late 1975, then “Hungry Eyes” and “Make Me Lose Control” in late 1987 and early 1988, he never got better than “Go All the Way.”
Yes, the basic premise of “Go All the Way” can be found in approximately 2,729,208 other songs, even if you don’t count “Baby It’s Cold Outside.” Carmen gave it a fresh twist, starting with having the request come from his female partner.
In a 2017 interview with his friend Ken Kurson for The Observor, Carmen explained — not for the first time — how “Go All the Way” was musically designed to weave together elements he loved most from the bands with which he grew up: the Beatles, the Beach Boys, the Who and others.
“It was that back and forth between a rock band part of it,” he said, “and then it went to ‘Don’t Worry Baby” for the verse, you know. Or ‘Walk Away Renee’ for the chorus and then back to the Who. It was the contrast of all those sections.”
Like “Layla” or “MacArthur Park,” it was multiple songs in one, an intriguing concept that’s fiendishly difficult to execute. When Carmen went on the road one summer with Ringo Starr’s All-Starr Band, he told Kurson, Ringo said he would be taking a break when it was time for “Go All the Way.” “Too frantic for me,” Carmen recalled Ringo saying.
“People thought the Raspberry stuff was real simple,” Carmen told Kurson. “I remember I was trying to teach the band ‘Go All the Way’ and Dave Edmunds looked at me and said, ‘For God’s sake there is a f — — — chord for every word! I’ve never seen anything like this.’ ”
That may be an overstatement, but the result was a record that sounded great on the radio in the summer of 1972, whose №1 songs were “The Candy Man,” “Song Sung Blue,” “Lean On Me” and “Alone Again (Naturally).”
Like the early ’60s, the early ’70s are often accused of being a pretty lame wasteland for rock ’n’ roll and popular music. For the early ’60s, that’s an unfair rap. For the early ’70s, it’s a conversation. Some years ago Steve Kingston, program director for New York’s top-40 giant Z-100, was talking about countdowns and mused, “Did the ’70s even have a top 500?”
To be fair, the ’70s had slammed into a challenging crossroad. Since the early part of the 20th century, when ordinary people started to own record players and records supplanted sheet music as the financial engine of the music industry, two-sided single records had been the currency. An artist made a record, radio played the record, fans bought the record. The system worked.
In the late 1960s, that model shifted a bit. Thanks to those pesky Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix and that crowd, albums like Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band or Blonde on Blonde were attracting more of the attention. They were also cooler. The newly emerging FM radio band, in its early Wild West days, distinguished itself from traditional top-40 stations by plucking its playlist from albums, airing tracks that had no prayer of top-40 exposure.
It should be noted that anyone who thought progressive FM would smash the smug, insular, restrictive, outdated top-40 model got it wrong. Within a decade, most successful FM stations had become some version of top-40 themselves, with controlled playlists tailored to their specific format.
It turned out that’s how most fans liked their music. They didn’t want to hear “In-a-Gadda-da-Vida” or a 15-minute Ginger Baker drum solo or John Prine next to Blind Faith. They liked songs from their own musical wheelhouse that danced around in their heads. Which is pretty much what their grandparents wanted in the ’20s and their parents wanted in the ’40s. It’s a durable model.
Still, in the early ’70s some of the hippest artists were getting along fine without top-40 radio promotion. Perhaps most famously, Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” wasn’t released as a radio single.
So top-40 radio shrugged and played what it did get, which included music as durable as tracks from Carole King’s Tapestry and as excruciating as Terry Jacks’s “Seasons in the Sun.”
Pop radio has always had a range from really good to really bad, it should be noted, even in golden ages like the late ’40s, mid-‘50s, mid-‘60s or 1980s. In the ’70s, it seemed to have more lightweights, while the decade’s most enduring musical legacies, from Bruce Springsteen to hip-hop to punk and New Wave through the Americana movement, largely sprouted and flowered outside the world of top-40.
That’s why it was so pleasant when a group like the Raspberries created music — and not just “Go All the Way,” because singles like “I Wanna Be With You” and “Let’s Pretend” were good as well — that made you want to turn the volume on your car radio up rather than down.
A whole lot of artists loved the Raspberries, including some unlikely ones like Slash and Axl Rose of Guns ‘N Roses as well as Paul Westerberg, Courtney Love, Nirvana and maybe most famously John Lennon.
Carmen told Kurson that when he met Springsteen, Bruce told him that when he was writing The River, all he listened to was Woody Guthrie and the greatest hits of the Raspberries. Whether or not that was strictly true, Springsteen was a fan, contributing to the liner notes on a 2007 CD of live recordings from 1973 and 1974.
For a combination of reasons, Carmen kept a lower musical profile in the second half of his life. He did some recording and some performing. He reunited the Raspberries briefly. He also became known as an outspoken political conservative, which led to a series of online debates, discussions and arguments with civilians and fellow artists he saw as mostly liberal.
While he endorsed Donald Trump and embraced some views as controversial as QAnon’s, he maintained that he tried to keep the discussions civil and not personal. Steve Van Zandt tweeted at one point that he was not “feuding” with Carmen, regarding him as one of those friends with whom you don’t talk politics. At another point Carmen tweeted to Peter Frampton, “I love your music, Pete, but I would never presume to tell you, or anyone else, what network they should watch. I respect your right to disagree with me, and you should respect my right to disagree with you. That used to be the way things worked here in the USA. Carry on.”
In interviews, which focused almost entirely on music, Carmen spoke glowingly of his work and the Raspberries’s enduring reputation. Coming across as articulate and insightful, he explained things like the specific musical style he wanted from each member of the band, or how he was inspired to write “Boats Against the Current,” his favorite song, from a line in The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, his favorite author.
And he wrote a great Beatlesque single that was so frantic an actual Beatle was happy to let someone else play it. Even in the cloudy days of 1972, rock ’n’ roll always had rays of sunshine.
