Eric Carmen, who became an icon of power pop as the frontman of the Raspberries before achieving even bigger hits as a solo artist in the 1970s and ’80s, has died at age 74.
The news came in a message from his wife, Amy Carmen, on the singer’s website.
“It is with tremendous sadness that we share the heartbreaking news of the passing of Eric Carmen,” she wrote. “Our sweet, loving and talented Eric passed away in his sleep, over the weekend. It brought him great joy to know, that for decades, his music touched so many and will be his lasting legacy. Please respect the family’s privacy as we mourn our enormous loss. ‘Love Is All That Matters… Faithful and Forever.'”
The latter quote from Carmen’s wife is a callback to the song “Love Is All That Matters,” from Carmen’s 1977 solo album “Boats Against the Current.”
No cause of death or exact date of Carmen’s death has been given.
Carmen first rose to fame with the Raspberries’ breakout hit, “Go All the Way.” After the band broke up in the mid-’70s, he established himself as a successful solo artist with “All by Myself” and “Never Gonna Fall in Love Again.” His run of hits continued into the ’80s with the “Dirty Dancing” song “Hungry Eyes.”
The Raspberries’ influence was cited by rockers as diverse as Bruce Springsteen (who contributed to liner notes for a reunion live album), Kurt Cobain, KISS and Mötley Crüe, even as Carmen eventually became better known as an adult-contemporary staple.
The Raspberries charged out of the gate with “Go All the Way,” an iconic, pop-leaning rocker of Carmen’s that married a Who-like electric guitar riff to Beatle-esque harmonies. It reached No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100, either driven by or held back by — depending on one’s take — the controversy over the sexualized lyrics, still unusual for Top 40 radio in the summer of 1972.
Helping pave over some of the possible suspicion of the suggestive words: a seemingly clean-cut image that had the quartet wearing matching suits, a la the early Beatles, a determinedly outdated look that had its own kind of cool among fans.
“When I was writing ‘Go All the Way,’ I’d seen how the Stones were forced to change their lyrics to ‘Let’s spend some time together’ on Ed Sullivan,” he told this writer in a 2004 interview. “And I was listening to‘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.”
The group struggled to achieve a follow-up hit despite a run of still highly regarded singles, with “I Wanna Be With You” peaking at No. 16 and the sublime “Tonight” only reaching No. 69. The band’s fortunes rose again, if not quite to top 10 level, with “Overnight Sensation (Hit Record),” a No. 18 hit in 1974, off what turned out to be their final album, the not-so-prophetically titled “Starting Over.”
By then, the band had ditched the matching suits and was going for a slightly rougher image, even as some pop fans struggled to determine whether the Raspberries were a bubblegum or hard-rock act — or one that straddled both worlds.
“We thought that we were being radical,” Carmen told the audience at a Raspberries reunion show in 2004, “but FM radio thought we were being reactionary.”
When Carmen went solo, he cut out a lot of the rock ‘n’ roll riffing and focused more on balladry, starting with “All by Myself,” which reached No. 2 in 1975.
“Never Gonna Fall in Love Again” fared well as a follow-up, hitting No. 11 on the Hot 100 and rising to the top of the adult contemporary chart. He did not revisit the top 10 until “Hungry Eyes” rode the “Dirty Dancing” phenomenon to a No. 4 peak on the Hot 100 in 1987. “Make Me Lose Control” rose one notch higher than that, as a No. 3 hit the following year.
Carmen never again charted a single after the 1980s, nor did he release any studio albums after 1984’s “Eric Carmen,” with one exception, 2000’s Rhino release “I Was Born to Love You” (originally released only in Japan) in 1998), which found him reuniting with songwriting collaborators like Dean Pitchford and Diane Warren.
Raspberries cultists were in for a treat when the band gave in to decades’ worth of reunion pleas and got back together, briefly, in the mid-2000s. A 2005 concert at L.A.’s House of Blues was released as the live album “Live on Sunset Strip,” for which Bruce Springsteen contributed a quote to the liner notes. Another show from that reunion, recorded at the House of Blues in Cleveland, was issued in 2017 by Omnivore as “Pop Art Live.”
”People used to ask me ‘Why don’t you guys get together and just play one gig?”’ said Carmen in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. ”Because it takes the same amount of preparation for one good show as a six-month tour. I never wanted to be the guy to put this band back on a stage and pop everyone’s bubble and have them go home saying ‘Oh, they weren’t that good.'” It didn’t help that things had ended acrimoniously back in the day, with a reported parking-lot fight. “But 30 years have passed, and everybody is a grown-up now, with a life.”
“Go All the Way” experienced a resurgence when it was included on the first “Guardians of the Galaxy” soundtrack in 2014.
In 2000, Carmen joined Ringo Starr’s All-Starr Band on tour, performing his biggest solo and Raspberries hits as well as sitting in with the performer whose band had provided a template for much of his musical life.
In recent years, as he held back from releasing new music or performing in concert, fans communicated with him on social media — sometimes combatively, given his conservative political views — until he withdrew from Twitter a few years ago.
He married his wife, Amy Murphy, in 2016.
