Raspberries – Starting Over
My first awareness of the musical genius that was Eric Carmen came via the Bay City Rollers. On the Rollers’ 1976 album “Dedication” – the one with Ian Mitchell – the opening track is a catchy number called “Let’s Pretend”. One evening, 12-year-old me was playing the album when our baby-sitter – likely only a few years older than me in classic John Mulaney fashion – said the song was by Raspberries. “Who?” I wondered.
Now, before long, Carmen would become a big part of my musical childhood. Shawn Cassidy’s covers of “That’s Rock and Roll” and “Hey Deanie” were part of my 45 collection, as was Carmen’s own “She Did It”. He had other hits, of course – at times, “All By Myself” has been pretty much inescapable – and if I was then who I am now – and had access to a Spotify account – I absolutely would have given Raspberries a listen.
It’s a little more complicated now. These days, you can’t consider Carmen without acknowledging the bloated orange elephant in the room. Yes, he became a Trump supporter, and while I prefer not to dive too deeply into that foetid pool, I remember him getting into Twitter pissing matches with Peter Frampton and the always delightful Richard Marx, plus Amy Lofgren said he was “rabid”, and that’s good enough for me. It became even more complicated when Carmen passed away last week. His story has been written, and the later chapters have some clunkers, with no time for another edit.
For me, all of this makes Carmen another one of those litmus tests about separating the artist from the art. Some of those choices are easy – my life is no less, and probably a lot better, for not having the likes of Ted Nugent and Kid Rock in it. I do not miss R. Kelly, Woody Allen movies, “Dilbert” comic strips or “Love Connection” reruns. Michael Jackson is a bit trickier, and I just can’t quit Kanye. (I’m really hoping he gets some therapy. Redemption is still possible!) Carmen supported a man who has said and done awful things and is making it clear he’ll do much worse if he gets another chance. But this is about 25-year-old Eric Carmen, and I’m giving that guy a chance. So while he may have become a piece of shit in his later years, maybe he wasn’t a piece of shit then, or at least he had the decency to limit the damage caused by that shittiness to his inner circle. Either way, I tried to put the later version out of my mind while listening to this record. I needed a good long shower after, but I did it, because I am a serious person.
By the time “Starting Over” came out in September 1974, the band was running out of steam as a commercial force. Their single top 10 hit had been two years earlier, and their previous album hadn’t cracked the top 100 albums chart or produced a top 40 single. Strife had resulted in two of the four members being replaced over the previous year. They were clearly a band in transition, though they were in fact in their death throes: they never released another studio recording. But, as evidenced by its position on the Pazz and Jop, their collective creative juices still had one last blast of power pop to set free into the world.
Except it isn’t really a power pop record, is it? That’s how we usually think of Raspberries, but this is without a doubt a rock record, and more specifically a “rock band” record. There are songs about being on the road, about the pressure to succeed, about figuring out your path as an artist and as a person. And, of course, there are songs about romantic entanglements, where difficulties are often connected to that life on the road. It’s an album that is infused with the travails of the artist’s life, and the desire to have the freedom that comes with that but also the stability of success.
The lyrical content of the romantic side of this pairing highlights challenges in matters of the heart (the bitter I-don’t-want-you-back screed of “Cry”, or the delicate beauty of the album’s closer, “Starting Over”, which evokes the image of couples holding hands, swaying on the lawn at an open air show, as they explore a new love) and groin (the hoped-for threesome of “Hands on You”, the “please leave” afterglow of a drunken hookup in “All Through the Night”). But these are all secondary to the pull of creating music: to the thrill of hearing your song on the radio, of being on stage, of creating and dreaming. In the end, there are heartbreaks and failures along the way, but no one would ever willingly give up the rockstar life: the perks are too high to be lost in the noise of the lows. If there is an overarching theme, it’s freedom – to go where you want to go, do what you want to do, sleep with who you want to sleep with without commitment or consequences: the hippie ethos. The spirit of the Summer of Love still alive seven years later.
Musically, what stands out is that on a number of tracks – notably “Overnight Sensation (Hit Record)”, “I Don’t Know What I Want” and “I Can Hardly Believe You’re Mine” – the drums are prominent, not buried in the backbeat but crystal clear and as critical to the sound as any other instrument. Piano is also an important element, tinkly here, honkytonk there, and it lends a southern rock vibe to some of the tracks (“Party’s Over” could have been a Lynyrd Skynyrd B-side). Cribbing from other artists is frequent: there are sweet Beach Boys-esque harmonies on tracks like “Overnight Sensation (Hit Record)” and “Cruisin’ Music”, the goofy acoustic singalong “Hands on You” feels like a Beatles throwaway, and I’ll just have to take the word of the many, many, many more knowledgeable music writers who are hearing Elton John and The Who in these songs. Maybe what they are hearing is the sonically dense, epic feel of many of the tracks: it’s a busy record, the instruments sounding sometimes like they are competing with each other, but completely harmonious in its execution.
There isn’t a weak song here, and though “Overnight Sensation (Hit Record)” is justly praised as the record’s spiritual centrepiece, my favourite track is probably “All Through the Night”, with its dive bar chug and frank statements on the sexual mores of the scene: “Don’t you tell me your last name / I won’t recognize you after tonight” and “Now that I’ve already had ya / I’m gettin’ bored with the idle chitchat”.
Carmen wasn’t a one-man show – band mates Wally Bryson and Scott McCarl also contributed songwriting chops and lead vocals, and then there are Michael McBride’s epic drums – but he’s the person most associated with Raspberries, and the only one who had any sort of commercial success outside of the band. There is the kind of optimism that only the young have: he sings that he wants a hit record, not the money that might come with it. I suspect that if 2024 Eric Carmen had a time machine, he would have gone back and slapped his 50 years younger self. Hopefully, 1974 Carmen would have slapped him back twice as hard.
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