Years change view on the Raspberries
More than 30 years after the band broke up, members are finding they had more fans than they thought.
By DAN MACINTOSH
POPMATTERS.COM
“We thought that before any of us die, this would not be a bad time to do it,” says Eric Carmen in describing why the Raspberries chose 2005 to mount a 10-date reunion tour. The last stop on this trek, at Hollywood’s House of Blues, was recorded by Mark Linett and recently released as a two-disc set by Rykodisc entitled “Live on Sunset Strip.”
Perhaps Carmen’s recent jaunt with Ringo Starr’s All-Starr Band gave him new urgency to reunite the band. After all, only Starr and Paul McCartney are left from The Beatles, making any Fab Four reunion out of the question.
Unlike The Beatles, the Raspberries weren’t together nearly long enough to get sick of each other. They released only four studio albums, the last one ironically titled “Starting Over.” But rather than being crushed by the weight of personality clashes — an all-too-common cause of death for many rock bands — Ohio’s Raspberries quickly realized their unusually melodic rock just didn’t fit well in the midst of the overblown ’70s progressive rock age.
“The Raspberries was formed as kind of a reaction to prog rock, which we didn’t like.” Carmen says. “‘Let’s bring some songwriting and harmonies back to music.’ And we did that. And the idiots that we were, we actually had hits, which is the absolute kiss of death. Rock critics seemed to get what we were about. The 16-year-old girls seemed to get it. But their 18-year-old album-buying brothers, who were listening to Jethro Tull, didn’t get it; didn’t want it.
“So eventually our sense of frustration caused the band to implode, which we did in about 1974. We had banged our head on the wall long enough and said, ‘This isn’t going to work.’ And I guess we weren’t the only ones that felt that way. From what we read, Big Star and Badfinger were kind of feeling the same way.”
These days, the Raspberries are viewed as a groundbreaking band. The music they made, along with Big Star and Badfinger, inspired oodles of great modern acts. But while the critics picked up on this quartet’s rare beauty — as did Bruce Springsteen, who wore out his Raspberries cassette tape — the wider public did not.
“It was easy for people to be derisive about our music because they saw what we were doing as retro,” Carmen says. “But we were like barbarians trying to crash the gates of the bloated progressive rock that we despised. A lot of people just didn’t get it. But over the years, it seems like they [began to] get it. Sometimes it takes a while, but now there’s a whole different kind of reverence for what we’re doing, which didn’t happen at the time.”
Carmen is sometimes surprised by the Raspberries’ unusual fan demographic.
“Some of our biggest fans are musicians, which you would have thought in 1972 that the musicians would have really been big fans of Jethro Tull [instead], not these lightweight Raspberries,” he marvels. “When I was on tour with Ringo, we had Jack Bruce, the bass player/singer of Cream, who was their head songwriter; we had Simon Kirke on drums, who was from Bad Company and Free; the great rock guitarist Dave Edmunds; and Ringo and me. We were sitting in a room one day doing an interview and the interviewer said to the band, ‘Whose songs were hardest to learn?’ And without a second beat, the entire band wheeled around and pointed at me: ‘Eric’s!’ I think Dave Edmunds said, ‘There’s a [bleep]ing chord for every word!’ He’d never seen anything like that when I tried to show him ‘Go All The Way’. ‘I’ve got to sing and play all these chords and remember all this stuff?”’
The Raspberries play a style that has been termed power-pop. As a genre, it’s difficult to define. It’s not like reggae, for instance, where you quickly recognize a distinctive beat. Nor is it like big band where it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing. You just know it when you hear it, but that doesn’t help novices appreciate it.
“Well, you know Pete Townshend coined the phrase,” Carmen says. “Pete Townshend coined the phrase to define what The Who did. For some reason, it didn’t stick to The Who, but it did stick to these groups that came out in the ’70s that played kind of melodic songs with crunchy guitars and some wild drumming. It just kind of stuck to us like glue, and that was OK with us because The Who were among our highest role models. We absolutely loved The Who.”
The Raspberries cover The Who’s “I Can’t Explain” on their new live disc, even though they’d never recorded it in the studio.