Eric Carmen, whose plaintive vocals soared above the crunching guitars of the Nineteen Seventies power-pop pioneers the Raspberries earlier than his mushy rock crooning made him a mainstay of Nineteen Eighties music, has died. He was 74.
His demise was introduced on his website by his spouse, Amy Carmen. She didn’t give a trigger and mentioned solely that he died “in his sleep, over the weekend.”
The Raspberries, which fashioned in Cleveland, burst onto the American rock scene in 1972 with their self-titled debut album, that includes a raspberry-scented scratch-and-sniff sticker and their largest hit: “Go All the Way,” a provocative music for its day, sung from the perspective of a younger girl.
Dave Swanson of the web site Final Basic Rock known as it “the definitive power pop song of all time,” because the rising fashion, recognized for grafting shiny ’60s-era vocal harmonies onto the heavy guitar riffs of the ’70s, would come to be known as.
“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,” additionally launched in 1972, can be its highest charting, at No. 36. It featured two Prime 40 hits, “I Wanna Be With You” and “Let’s Pretend.”
The band, recognized for its matching fits and clear picture, was dismissed by some as passé.
“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,” Mr. Carmen mentioned in a 2017 interview with the Observer.
The band did earn some important acclaim and cachet: John Lennon was photographed carrying a Raspberries shirt. Its affect on rock music would solely develop over time.
After the band broke up in 1975, Mr. Carmen went solo. He swerved into mushy rock, shortly scoring a success single with “All by Myself,” which peaked at No. 2.
Within the Nineteen Eighties, two of his largest hits got here from soundtracks. For 1984’s “Footloose,” he co-wrote “Almost Paradise,” which was recorded by Mike Reno and Ann Wilson, and he wrote and sang “Hungry Eyes,” from 1987’s “Dirty Dancing.” “Make Me Lose Control” reached No. 3 in 1988.
Mr. Carmen’s songs can be lined by artists as various as Shaun Cassidy (“That’s Rock ’n Roll”), Celine Dion (“All By Myself”) and John Travolta (“Never Gonna Fall in Love Again”). In 1989, he started showing with Ringo Starr and his All-Starr Band.
The Raspberries reunited in 2004. A present from that tour was featured on a 28-song stay album in 2017, “Raspberries Pop Art Live. The liner notes have been written by the filmmaker Cameron Crowe, who featured “Go All of the Approach” in his 2000 film “Almost Famous.”
Mr. Carmen was sanguine concerning the influence of the Raspberries.
“Rock critics got it and 16-year-old girls got it, but you know, the 18-year-old guy who liked Megadeth was never going to like the same record his sister did,” he mentioned within the 2017 interview, earlier than recounting the primary time he met Bruce Springsteen.
“I walked in his dressing room before a show and he was writing out the set list and we both 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” all I listened to was Woody Guthrie and the Raspberries’ best hits.’”
