When You Kiss Me I'm in Ecstasy

Eleven favorites from the expert pop pen of Eric Carmen

Looking back, I don’t really understand how I managed to make it all the way to 1987 without hearing a single note of The Raspberries.

It’s not like my folks didn’t occasionally tune the car radio to AM pop powerhouse CKLW during the band’s 1972-74 hit run, and it’s also not like I wasn’t hungrily absorbing every single thing I heard on oldies stations circa-1979 to ‘85. And it’s also not like I didn’t spend a big chunk of my youth within a three-to-six hour drive from their old Cleveland stomping grounds. And yet, The Raspberries — like the MC5 and the 13th Floor Elevators — were one of those bands I read about for years before I ever actually heard their music.

What I’d read about them back in the 1980s wasn’t particularly appealing, to be honest — it was all a lot of rock critic eye-rolling over them being “Second-rate Beatles clones in prom tuxes” or something of that nature. And once I put it together that Eric Carmen (whose maudlin mid-seventies ballad “All By Myself” always hit me like the dreariness of a hundred Midwestern winters) had been their frontman, any initial motivation I might once have had to explore The Raspberries’ discography pretty much evaporated.

Not that I could find any hard evidence of said discography’s actual existence. None of my friends owned any Raspberries records; neither did any of their older siblings. I would have certainly taken a chance on a Raspberries 45 or LP if I’d found one for pennies on the dollar at my local Amvets or Salvation Army, just because I regularly brought home all sorts of other seventies crap from those places (Hello, first four BTO albums!) on the off-chance that I might dig it on some level.

But even once I realized that they had been playing in a similar musical ballpark as other bands I truly loved — bands like Badfinger, Cheap Trick and the Sire-era Flamin’ Groovies — I could still never seem to find any Raspberries albums at any of the record stores I haunted. Were they all out of print? Were people hoarding them? Were The Raspberries just a collective hallucination? Had their back catalog been intentionally suppressed, just as Eric Carmen would claim was happening to his tweets 35 years later? It was all a big mystery to me.

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And then, late one night in the fall of ‘87, in the parking lot of a West Orange, New Jersey diner, my then-girlfriend turned over the ignition of her parents’ car just in time for me to catch the “Come on/Come on” part of “Go All the Way” on the car radio, and I knew in that instant that this was the big hit by those semi-mythical Raspberries. Sure, it sounded kind of like the early Beatles, but it was also weirder than that— it was more like someone had taken a 45 of “Please Please Me,” melted it together with 45s of The Who’s “Can’t Explain,” The Small Faces’ “Sha-La-La-La-Lee” and The Beach Boys’ “Kiss Me, Baby” and strained the whole throbbing, hormonally-infused mess through a sieve. I instantly loved it, and desperately wanted to hear more.

But due to the apparent Great Raspberries Drought of the 1980s, hearing more by the band wouldn’t actually happen until late 1989, when I finally plucked the above-pictured fifteen-song compilation from the bins at Midnight Records in NYC. The collection (a UK-only release) was oddly random in its chronology, and some of its selections definitely wouldn’t jibe today with my own idea of what constitutes “The Very Best of The Raspberries,” but its highlights were more than enough to turn me into a diehard fan. The 20-song Capitol Collectors Series CD comp that came out in 1991 gave me a fuller, more chronologically-ordered sense of the band and its evolution; and when the once-fallow used bins finally began to sprout Raspberries wax, I was gradually able to piece together their small but mighty four-LP discography, which I treasure to this day.

The Raspberries were a true band — each album featured lead vocals from three of its four members, and Wally Bryson’s lead guitar work was a massively important component of their sound. But there’s no question that the driving force behind (and in front of) them was guitarist/keyboardist Eric Carmen, a songwriter of prodigious melodic gifts and a singer who could easily go from Paul McCartney at his gentlest to Steve Marriott at his balls-in-a-wheelbarrow-iest over the course of a single song. So much of what’s passed for “power pop” over the years has been woefully short on actual guitar power or pop hooks, but The Raspberries at their best were the true apotheosis of the genre, in part because they had a frontman who knew how to combine gorgeous melodies and catchy hooks with amp-frying power chords and thunderous drums.

Eric Carmen’s music — both with The Raspberries and as a solo artist — has soundtracked a substantial portion of my life at this point, and I was saddened to hear of his too-young passing last week at the age of 74. While most of his solo work (like his Dirty Dancing comeback period) was a little too bland for me, he will always have a place in my personal Hall of Fame just based on the sheer perfection of Raspberries songs like “I Wanna Be With You” and “Tonight”.

(And yes, I do find it enormously sad and depressing that Carmen spent his final years on this planet retweeting Q-Anonsense and enthusiastically buying into the bullshit of a certain heavily-indicted former president. But if you’re thinking about leaving a comment to that effect, know that none of his later-in-life behavior remotely tarnishes the magic of his best music for me.)

Here are eleven of my favorite Eric Carmen songs — ten of which were sung by him, and one of which was sung best (as far as I’m concerned) by a certain Shaun Cassidy.

Get The Message

Carmen’s pre-Raspberries band Cyrus Erie was legendary in the Cleveland area — so much so that locals weren’t shy about telling The Raspberries that they kinda preferred Cyrus Erie. Sadly, the band only released one single, the B-side of which is “Get The Message,” a punchy mixture of The Beatles and The Who that sounds very much like a blueprint for Raspberries rockers to come.

Go All The Way

The Raspberries’ compression-drenched breakthrough hit — included on their self-titled, fruity-smelling 1972 debut — was their lone single to crack the Top 5. As with many of the band’s Carmen-penned rockers, “Go All the Way”’s first verse is almost absurdly brief'; it’s like a frantic scramble to open the condom packet before the teenage lust described in the song’s lyrics can be fully unleashed.

I Wanna Be With You

The first single from their second album, 1972’s Fresh, “I Wanna Be With You” only made it to #16 on the Billboard Hot 100, probably because it sounded a little too much like the recent “Go All the Way”. But for my money it’s a stronger song, even if the lyrics “If you believe that what we’re doing is right/Close your eyes and be still” always make me think of that infamous mid-’70s letter to Ann Landers about the woman who married a pervy mortician…

Let’s Pretend

The third single from Fresh, “Let’s Pretend” somehow stalled at #35, despite being an absolutely brilliant fusion of solo Paul McCartney and mid-sixties Beach Boys. Teen romance ballads don’t come much more perfectly aching than this one, folks; and if Carmen was no longer a teenager at this point, well, neither was Brian Wilson when he wrote “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”.

I Reach for the Light

Another fantastic slower number from Fresh, “I Reach for the Light” starts out in jaunty-yet-melancholy Paul McCartney/Emitt Rhodes territory — and dig Wally Bryson’s guitar solo, which certainly wouldn’t have sounded out of place on Abbey Road — before melting down in pure post-breakup anguish. He’s reaching for the light, but you can’t be blamed for thinking he’s actually reaching for something sharper…

Tonight

A sly re-write of The Small Faces’ “Tin Soldier” (with a little “Song of a Baker” thrown in) that’s further bolstered by Jim Bonfanti’s incredible drumming, the lead-off track of 1973’s Side 3 is probably my second favorite Raspberries song — and the fact that it only made it as far as the (however thematically appropriate) #69 position on the Billboard Hot 100 pretty much tells you all you need to know about how both behind and ahead of their time The Raspberries were. As with so many of Carmen’s teenage lust anthems, you can practically hear his nostrils flaring in priapic anticipation on “Tonight”… and you can kind of see ‘em doing that in this video, too.

On the Beach

I have to admit that I’ve never been a huge fan of The Raspberries’ big Beach Boys tributes “Drivin’ Around” and “Cruisin’ Music” — they always seemed both a little rote and a little too on-the-nose to me. Side 3’s “On the Beach,” on the other hand, sounds and feels like a more personal interpretation of that influence, and I love how it goes from the tense minor chords of the verse to the dreamy “all summer long” reverie of the chorus.

Ecstasy

My favorite Raspberries song? Definitely this one from Side 3. Bryson’s Pete Townshend-like power chords and Jim Bonfanti’s kinetic, Keith Moon-y drums alone would put it over the top for this Who fan. But even with that “Pure and Easy” breakdown section, “Ecstasy” is so much more than a mere Who knock-off, thanks to its gorgeous chorus, equally gorgeous guitar refrain, and another lusty, nostril-flaring vocal from Carmen. “Ecstasy” is absolute power pop perfection, and of course it missed the Billboard charts entirely.

Overnight Sensation (Hit Record)

The Raspberries’ big comeback record, “Overnight Sensation” (from their final album, 1974’s hopefully-titled Starting Over) made it all the way to #18, the band’s biggest hit by far since “I Wanna Be With You”. No doubt copious payola was involved in its success, though it’s also certainly true that — other than cocaine — seventies DJs loved nothing more than playing songs on the radio about songs being played on the radio. But “Overnight Sensation” also features absolutely jaw-dropping production from Jimmy Ienner — that moment where the chorus switches to AM radio fidelity and back still gives me goosebumps — and you can tell that Carmen means every word he’s singing about his single-minded devotion to achieving pop greatness.

Change of Heart

As I mentioned earlier, I’m generally not too hot on Carmen’s solo stuff. I have come around to the more Brian Wilson-y moments on his self-titled 1975 debut, but this 1978 single is the only solo hit of his that made any emotional impact on me, perhaps because it soundtracked an unrequited seventh grade crush I was experiencing around the time it hit the Top 20. I never so much as spoke a single word to that lovely young lady, but I still see her face whenever I hear this song — and if that isn’t pure pop magic, I don’t know what is.

That’s Rock ’n’ Roll

Teen idol (and all-around awesome dude) Shaun Cassidy had a massive hit with this song in 1977, but it would be another ten years or so before I realized that Eric Carmen had written it and recorded it for his own first solo album. So while I’ve sung and played various Raspberries songs onstage over the years, the very first Eric Carmen song I ever performed was this one, when couple of friends and I did an a cappella version of it — while brandishing classroom yardsticks like guitars, of course — at a sixth grade talent show. And if our reception was considerably colder than the one Shaun received for this Grammy Awards performance, well, that’s rock ’n’ roll.

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