GO ALL THE WAY Making It With The Raspberries By Mike Saunders I've heard disc jockeys turn blue on the air from the embarrassment of stating the title of the song, "Go All The Way," and the name of the group…the Raspberries.

Now what sort of dorky name is that? Just at a time when the Revolution had supposedly cleaned up all our music, made it fit for human consumption, along came groups like Grand Funk to corrupt the kids. And then their progeny! Not only that, but now from the other side of the fence, the Raspberries—no regard for vibes, no mellowness, none of the things that made our counterculture what it is today. What's a respectable 1972 DJ to do? Just when you're getting hip, smoking dope on the job, learning how to talk slower than the speed of sound…Shit.

Besides, it's obvious that these Raspberries are out-and-out reactionaries, utilizing Beatles riffs from the dark ages back before the Grateful Starship discovered rock in 1967.

Another early sign, and a good one, was that rock critics by and large hated the Raspberries. The sticker affixed to the group's LP seemed to be the problem—yes, that sticker. If you can't judge a record by its sticker…Now really. You have to remember, there were people who hated the Troggs. Spoilsports beyond conception of the imagination.

Among the confusion (and the reaction that this group might be lame cuz they sounded awfully commercial and might have Top 40 hits and stuff), one thing got lost: the Raspberries are really really good. Ask any aficionado of lightweight English pop, and they'll inform you that the Raspberries' two and three-part harmonies are near perfect for the genre, and secondly that the group's songwriting shows a thorough assimilation of Beatles derived rock in all its many forms. Plus, in Eric Carmen the Raspberries possess one of the finest lead voices ever heard in the style. Add everything up, and you've got a Top 10 single and hit album the first time out, and quite possibly the most promising group to emerge in the vein since Badfinger. Ask the Raspberries what's going on, and you learn the following:

How long have you been together?

ERIC: Two years. I was in only one band before the Raspberries, and that was Cyrus Erie. We recorded two or three terrible singles for Epic. Wally, Dave, and Jim were all in The Choir, who had a semi-hit with "It's Cold Outside."

DAVE: Forming the Raspberries was a logical outgrowth of our previous experiences. If you don't count the James Gang, the Outsiders were the only group to ever make it out of Cleveland, and sometime shortly after that, the local rock and roll scene died.

How much original material had each of you written before your first album?

WALLY: About 50-100 songs each; Eric, Dave, and myself. Some of the tunes on the album were written just a week or two before it was recorded. As a bar band we couldn't play original material, we had to do Beatles and Stones stuff. So it was a big thing getting to record our own material.

How did you (Eric) learn to sing like that?

ERIC: From having sung in groups 6 or 7 years, with my first obsession having been trying to sound like Paul McCartney. There were times in my singing career when I was Roger Daltrey, at times I was Stevie Marriott, and for one brief period I was Robert Plant. But Paul McCartney was the biggest influence, and my own style developed out of that.

When will there be a second Raspberries album out?

WALLY: We just finished recording it. We do much more rock and roll on our new album because we're much more of a R&R group than our first LP indicated.

ERIC: With the first album, we wanted to demonstrate a variance of styles. Some songs wound up orchestrated, and we had trouble reproducing them on stage. Because we don't want to wind up like the Bee Gees, toting a 30-piece orchestra around, this time we wanted to have more songs that would be good stage numbers.

What do you think of Badfinger?

DAVE: They're really good. They sort of have an advantage, being from Liverpool and being on the Beatles' label.

ERIC: I love their albums, because they sound just like the Beatles. We played on the bottom of a local bilI featuring Badfinger about two years ago, when we'd just been together three months, and they were really trying then—I thought they were just about the best rock and roll band I had ever heard.

WALLY: It floored us that you mentioned the Left Banke before we started the interview. Although they only had two hits, they were a heavy influence on both Eric's group and the one Dave, Jim, and I came out of.

What were you saying about the Hollies earlier?

WALLY: That I liked the old Hollies best, back when Graham Nash was with them. Blaring harmonicas and stuff.

Can you reproduce your recorded vocals outside of the studio?

DAVE: Yes, we really sing like that.

As far as vocals go, what did you think of the mid-60's Beach Boys?

ERIC: Tremendous. Now there was a group.

WALLY: You can't say enough about some of the things Brian Wilson did, really. Our own Jimmy lenner is a tremendous producer. But Brian Wilson…he was both a one-man group and a super-producer all in one.

What sort of stage act do you want to have?

DAVE: We don't like audiences that sit oil their asses stoned... Ideally, we'd like to help bring hysteria back to rock and roll shows.

Finally, do you see your success as symbolizing anything in particular?

ERIC: That a tender teenage sex-oriented song can still make it…if it has a good melody.

The Raspberries' success also attests to the durability of Beatles influenced rock, a phenomenon with a diverse and fascinating history. It all started in 1964 with the Beatles, of course, who like the Hollies had patterned their group harmonies largely after the Everly Brothers. The main effect was that group vocals were brought into white rock in a way never before really tapped—the Fab Four proved that their vocal harmonies could be just as exciting and inspiring as the buzz-bomb instrumental work of, say, the Yardbirds or Who. The excellence of the Beatles' early albums through Rubber Soul hardly needs to be reiterated here, and the Hollies' early work (particularly such LPs as In The Hollies Style and Hear! Here!) has been hugely underrated.

Phonograph Record / October 1972