RASPBERRIES ARE BLOWING
Bringing 'Smartness' Back To Rock

By Loraine Alterman

Helena Rubenstein hold on to your pots of glitter and eye goo. Balanciaga keep your bugle beads. There's an improbably named group out of Ohio who appear on-stage wearing matching suits, shoes and shirts, frown on facial hair and have the same barber clip their top hair neatly alike.

What's more they've got a top ten single "Go All The Way," a first album climbing into the top twenty and are set to embark on a six-week American tour with the Hollies this month and go to Britain and Europe next spring.

Raspberries could be the start of a new revolution blasting away showers of sequins with smartly tailored rock 'n' roll.

Probably the most outrageous thing Raspberries has done so far is issue an album that, thanks to Capitol Records art department, smells like an approximation of their namesake. Better Raspberries than Three Dog Night coming out with a fragrant album. But reactions have been mixed.

As bassist, pianist and leader Eric Carmen points out: "We just read a thing where in Canada some woman walked into a record store, smelled our album and fainted. They took all of our albums out of that store."

The next album, which the four boys have just completed in New York's Record Plant, won't smell or sound the same. "The direction that we have on this new album," explains Eric who has the looks to become a teen heart throb, "is more rock 'n' roll than on the first album. The first album had a lot of ballads and orchestration and we wanted to try to eliminate a little of that because it was very plush and that's not exactly where Raspberries is at.

"Also we wanted to be able to perform the number…on-stage a lot closer to the way they sounded on the album which was not a problem, but it wasn't easy on the first album because some of the cuts use strings and horns as an integral part of the songs rather than just as background. We wanted to do stuff on this album that would be closer to our single 'Go All The Way.'"

It's very much on Raspberries minds that they sound on-stage as they do on record.

"That's what people come to hear I think," says lead guitarist Wally Bryson who wrote the single with Eric. "If you hear a record you want to go and see the group do that record, not that record plus 15 minutes of incredibly long, drawn-out boring fuzz-wah."

Eric, Wally, rhythm guitarist Dave Smalley and drummer Jim Bonfanti have been together two years playing around the Cleveland, Ohio area. Through the machinations of the record business, they were heard by producer Jimmy Inner who got record companies interested in selling the group.

Representatives from about eight record companies flew to Cleveland from both east and west coasts and sat in what the boys describe as a "little dive" called JB's. Eric recalls: "We played down there, it was hot and sticky, the kids really liked it, a bidding session among the companies ensued and Capitol won."

The band's premier album, named after themselves and containing all original material, came out in March, but nothing much happened until "Go All The Way" began to click recently. Capitol had released another cut, "Don't Want To Say Goodbye," as the first single but it was five minutes long and no disc jockey wants to play a five minute long single by an unknown group.

Melody Maker / October 28, 1972