REUNITED RASPBERRIES
Go All The Way

The Raspberries, shown during their first show
November 26 at the House of Blues in Cleveland, are from left,
Dave Smalley, Jim Bonfanti, Eric Carmen, Wally Bryson.

By Ed Masley

It's just after midnight, and Eric Carmen is greeting the New Year by leading the Raspberries through a euphoric performance of "Go All the Way," the definitive power-pop single that launched the band's career while going all the way to No. 5 in the summer of '72. It's a stunning performance, nailing both the timeless hooks and the sexual promise that had made it a hit in the first place. And the way the crowd responds, you'd almost swear they were ringing in '73.

But it's really 2005, and the band has just finished its second performance at the local House of Blues since reuniting to play the club's opening in November. That show, which took all of four minutes to sell out the venue while bringing in Raspberries fans from all over the world, marked the band's first appearance in 31 years. The time before that was the set of "The Mike Douglas Show."

All that downtime has given the band a chance to shed the label-driven teenybopper tag the music always rose above, and to emerge as legendary figures, worshipped in the power-pop community while hailed by everyone from Courtney Love to Poison as a source of inspiration. Even Bruce Springsteen once admitted listening to their greatest hits while working on "The River."

At the time, though, Carmen says, "Our audiences were the weirdest audiences you'd ever seen. There would be 300 16-year-old girls packed up against the front of the stage, and in the back of the room would be the critics, and in between there was nothing. For the 18-year-old concert-going guys who were out buying Jethro Tull albums, it just wasn't cool to like the Raspberries. And so, the band suffered because of that."

But being out of step with—both ahead of and behind -- the times is ultimately why they mattered, reviving the hook-filled approach of the British Invasion they'd grown up on at a time when it just wasn't cool to be catchy. By the time the singer formed the band with members of The Choir (guitarist Wally Bryson, drummer Jim Bonfanti and bassist Dave Smalley), rock was all about extended solos. And extended solos didn't do a thing for Carmen.

"I liked the guys in Traffic individually," he says. "But when I listened to the records, I was bored. Some guy noodling around on a flute for five or 10 minutes just wasn't doing it for me. Give me Pete Townshend slashing away at his Rickenbacker any day. And Wally was of that same school. So Jim and I sat down and said 'Let's make a band. What is it that we want to do?' And I said 'Well, for me personally, I want to bring this back to where it started, which is make the songs the most important part of this vehicle.' "

And that's exactly what they did on such classic recordings as "Go All the Way," "Tonight," "I Wanna Be With You" and "Let's Pretend," all of which the band—the original lineup with four backing players fleshing out the sound—revisits at the New Year's show.

While Carmen and Bonfanti had been hoping to stage a reunion for years, it took the House of Blues to get the band together.

As Carmen says, "There's a certain myth that has grown up around the band over time, and I never wanted to put us up on stage and have it just be OK. From my standpoint, the last thing I ever wanted was to have us go on stage and have some people come and hear it and go 'Ehhh, they weren't that good.' It was very important to me that people walk away and say 'They were that good.' "

And being that good goes beyond rehearsing. If the sound is bad, he reasons, chances are, the audience will think the band is bad. But when the House of Blues called, Carmen knew from having played their venues on the Ringo Starr tour that the sound would be first-rate.

Which made getting the other original members to agree the only stumbling block. And not a small one. After all, it hadn't been the prettiest of breakups—one that Carmen blames on frustration "with where we were playing, how we were being handled and the level of acceptance at that time. We were making good records. Our last record [1974's Starting Over] was picked by Rolling Stone as one of their top records of the year. That album subsequently sold the fewest number of records of any album we had ever made.

"And the places we were being booked, it was just hideous. We'd be on the road for six months at a time, and we had a manager then who shall remain nameless, and he would book us anywhere. We'd play some grungy club somewhere to 400 people, and we shouldn't have been there, and it wasn't the right place for us, but hey, it was somewhere between Boston and Providence, so, from a routing standpoint it was, sure, we'll plug that in. So night after night, we were out there banging our hearts out, and the level of acceptance was just not there."

By Starting Over, Bonfanti and Smalley were gone.

"Their level of frustration," Carmen says, "was 'OK, the stuff that Eric was doing that worked in the beginning isn't working now, so we should change the concept of the band.' And I said, 'It's not the concept that's not working. It's what's happening around us.' And you're 22, 23 years old, and people start going at each other, and it isn't pretty."

Which is why Bonfanti wasn't optimistic when the House of Blues first called in June.

"I really didn't think we'd be able to do it, for us to be able to get it together and move on, whatever, and actually work on this show," he says. "It took about seven weeks of conversations between us, trying to find out where issues were, resolving the issues and getting things settled so everybody was happy and satisfied."

By September, the band was starting over once again, relearning songs they hadn't played in more than 30 years.

"We had gone through some tough times between us," he says. "So the first week was probably the weirdest. Weird is maybe not the right word, but we hadn't really been together much for a long time, and we'd just patched up all of what was wrong between us."

But there was a sense of instant camaraderie. And now, he says, "it's grown beyond what any of us, I'm sure, would have thought."

They're in Chicago next week, and there's talk of a House of Blues tour. But whether this reunion lasts, Bonfanti says, "It's been a very good thing for us. And from my point of view, if we didn't play again but we've now rekindled all our friendships, it's a total success. We're starting to really become the band that we are."

Pitsburgh Post-Gazette / January 5, 2005