Eric Carmen, Epic Songwriter and Unforgettable Crooner, Has Died
Patron saint of power pop succumbs at 74
Eric Carmen invented power pop.
When The Raspberries’ “Go All the Way” first blasted through AM radios in the Summer of 1972, an entire genre was born, a devil’s brew of rock ‘n’ roll’s sex and danger seasoned with pop’s earworms and hooks.
The Raspberries were a phenomenal band, and if all Eric had ever done was to call together his mates and put out a couple perfect albums … Well, for a Jewish singer-songwriter who just died as we prepare to celebrate Passover, it would’ve been enough for us. But Cleveland’s small-stature, huge-voiced, pompadoured troubadour invented an entire genre.
Eric Carmen did what almost no frontman of a chart-topping pop group ever has. He took his compositional complexity and superb piano skills, mapped them against his soaring tenor voice, and became both a great songwriter, whose compositions were covered by a ton of other artists and an occasional singer of others’ material, most famously the number one hit “Hungry Eyes” from the Dirty Dancing soundtrack. And he told me great stories about every single one of them.
Eric Carmen and I first became friends in the late ’90s. I was the editor-in-chief of a magazine called Green, which covered financial matters for young people. One of our best read sections was “The Money Shot,” which chronicled how marginally famous people invested and spent their dough. Pop stars nearing the ends of their career were overrepresented, because it was mostly me doing the asking.
Eric Carmen was one of my first asks.
At the time, I didn’t even know he was Jewish, but I knew he was from Cleveland, where my dad grew up. I asked him my usual litany of intrusive, obnoxious questions about how much of his fortune had been stolen or wasted on drugs, (a ton of the former, not too much on the latter, IIRC), and we developed a real rapport, even beyond the surprisingly deep connection a reporter and subject can feel after a 45-minute conversation. Discovering that Carmen was from the exact Jewish part of Cleveland Heights where my dad had grown up on Euclid Avenue was a small thrill. We traded memories of Corky and Lenny’s, and he even remembered Gildar Meats where my grandfather had been a kosher butcher a million years ago.
We would talk by phone or IM every few months. When Napster became a thing, I asked his opinion. “I hate ’em,” he told me from his screen name, which was “MrChow98” for some reason. “They’re pirates. They are using a new and unregulated technology to deny compensation for intellectual property to the people who created it.”
I asked if there was any merit to the idea that people who never heard “All By Myself” can now experience it and might then buy a Raspberries or Eric Carmen or even Celine Dion record.
“I suppose that’s possible, but there’s really no way to know,” he replied. “I’ll admit the idea is terrific but someone has to pay the artists and writers something for all the work and expense of producing the songs. The Boats Against The Current album cost $425,000 to produce. That money is charged back against the artist’s (my) account and said artist doesn’t receive royalty payments until that amount is recouped. I pretty much had to have a gold album just to recoup expenses on that one (I didn’t!).”
Eric Carmen was a special and rare songwriter. His musical knowledge went way beyond almost every contemporary, because he really studied and cared about classical music. When he wrote the epic and unforgettable ballad “All By Myself,” Sergei Rachmaninoff got a cowriting credit. But as any songwriter who has tried to imitate the success Procol Harum had with Bach’s “Whiter Shade of Pale” knows, it is much harder than it looks to turn great classical music hooks into pop gems. Eric Carmen did it with such croony perfection that he reached Number One, as did Céline Dion when she covered it 20 years later.
When Trump became president, Eric found himself in that weird purgatory the culture has built for conservative pop culture figures. Your choice is either to hide it, or wear it on your sleeve in combative “I’m Not Like Everybody Else” fashion. Eric, a sweet and very humble guy by nature, surprisingly chose combat. His twitter posts got increasingly strident and vinegar-y. Eric had come under the influence of an opinionated and beautiful former Cleveland TV weather lady named Amy Murphy, and became either more comfortable espousing his own strong views, or in the eyes of some of Amy’s detractors, he took to parroting her right-wing takes.
I don’t really have an opinion on that evolution, but for me, it winded up being such a fun relationship, because Eric would call me to bullshit about politics, and all I wanted to talk about was pop music. We would end up having hour-long phone calls, each trying to plumb the depths of the other’s expertise.
Around that time, my own interest in performing and writing rock music was experiencing a rebirth. I wrote a song that I thought had a chance of being a hit, and Eric was one of the first people I sent my demo. He told me he loved the song, especially the title, “I Saw Her First.” I told him it meant so much to me to hear that and remarked how I guess it was good to have a memorable title. He said never underestimate the value of a song title, it’s the most important thing. More than the melody.
I invited him to the White House Hanukkah party that year. He and Amy flew to Washington and we had a grand time. The two of them whooped it up and made a point of meeting all these people they thought were “Fox News famous,” and it was so fun for me and Melody to see them excited about politics in the same way I’m excited when I get to meet my pop heroes.
After the party, they took us out to the Trump Hotel for late-night steaks and cocktails. My friend Tony Sayegh joined us, and we shared the story of how Tony introduced me to Melody, since we’d gotten married the year before. While the five of us were talking, drinking, laughing, I was trying to explain to Tony—whose rock ‘n’ roll knowledge is not quite as encyclopedic as it ought to be—that he was sitting with musical royalty. But all of Tony’s friends, like Sarah Sanders and Hope Hicks, kept coming up to the table and instead of Eric acting like the rock star he really was, he was the wide-eyed fanboy of all these ladies whose names he’d seen on the chyron.
Eric and Amy told me that they believed Eric’s conservative public profile had prevented him from being nominated to the Songwriter’s Hall of Fame. If that’s true, it’s an injustice on par with the Greta Gerwig snub. Eric Carmen has written some of the most memorable songs in American songwriting history. Not just the few I’ve named here so far, but Shaun Cassidy’s hits “That’s Rock ‘n’ Roll” and “Hey Deenie,” the neo-classical “Never Gonna Fall In Love Again” (another of his Rachmaninoff-based unforgettable melodies), “On Broadway,” “Boats Against the Current,” “Love Is All that Matters,” “I’m a Rocker,” “Let’s Pretend” (listen to his vocal at the end of that one), “Overnight Sensation,” “I Wanna Be With You” (without which, the Rubinoos don’t exist), and a hundred more.
In August of 2020, during the loneliest ebb of the pandemic, Eric and I got into a deep conversation of the boringest kind — comparing the Fender Rhodes to the Wurlitzer 200A. He sent me a little heard version of his high school band Cyrus Erie playing “Ruby Tuesday.” He wrote to me, “Here it is, in all its 1968 or 1969 glory. I’m on a Wurlitzer electric piano (That’s all that existed at the time). Mike McBride is lead vocal and drums, his brother Bob (normally our bass player) is playing the recorder and Wally Bryson is playing bass. Not bad for a bunch of teenagers.” He threw in a winking emoji.
I’m gonna miss Eric Carmen because he was a close friend and a lovely human being. But the impact he had on a couple generations of songwriters in a number of different genres will live on. Eric shared with me some private stories about family members who had ripped him off and funny stories about how Bryson, the guitar player of The Raspberries, thought Eric was a pussy because the guitar hook of “Go All the Way” was so much heavier than the vocal hook. Such classic rock ‘n’ roll back stories, but there was so much more to this complicated, kind of tortured guy.
I will miss him, and today I’ll spin “All By Myself” and really feel it.
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Your article was so lovely about your friend. I agree with him about Napster. My music friends like Blues Traveler and the Spin Doctors and Suzy Vega, etc work HARD for their money. He was right. Napster are a bunch of thieves and that was his intellectual property. But the pictures were the best! I loved his music. I’m listening to him now. On iTunes which I PAY for!
Go All the Way is a schizophrenic song showing a mashup of two fabulous rock ideologies — but yet it works so damn well. Like a “hot fudge sundae” my husband says.
So glad you got to meet and befriend EC — he was complex and had a real musical vision.
This is fantastic. Great to know that Mr Carmen was a fellow Mr Chow fan! As a pop music obsessive I have also observed that he seemed a bit “tortured,” at least by the business attached to the music. But he could also be his own worst enemy, much like my favorite pop genius, Todd Rundgren, who refused to play by rules he could have observed in his sleep.
it’s too bad he didn’t get more out of his talent in the years since he lost his battle with Clive Davis. But he made a few records I could listen to ten times in a row without tiring of them. And have.
Excellent article! One correction, however. Eric didn’t write “On Broadway.” He performed it on his first solo album.
You are totally right. That’s a Barry Mann/Cynthia Weil gem, with an assist from Leiber and Stoller. Between those four and Eric, that’s five great songwriters represented on that one track! Thanks for the careful read.
Eric was a musical hero to me. When I first heard “Go All the Way” (I was 12yrs old at the time), I was instantly hooked. My love and passion for Raspberries has continued for 50+ years. Seeing and meeting the band during their reunion tours in the early 2000s, fulfilled a lifelong dream.