FRESH
Raspberries (Capitol)

By Mark Shipper

They're a monument to youthful exuberance, a triumph of pure adolescent joyousness over post-teen disillusionment, and maybe just the last straw it's gonna take to break the back of an obsolete and outdated culture whose mere presence has clotted up the environment for the past five years more than ten thousand Chevrolets ever could.

They're the Raspberries, and their great new album, Fresh is here and the time has never been riper.

You knew there was something special in this band, not because "Go All The Way" shot up to number one with such blinding speed, but because it became the record every top 40-jock starts his show with in every city in America for two solid months, and that's the loftiest goal any 7 inches of plastic can aspire to. Hell, anybody can make a number one song (even coma dealers like the Moody Blues and Chicago), but only when a record gets show-starter honors nationwide can it be considered a true achievement, an effort worthy of our highest praise.

Try it yourself and see if it doesn't sound incomplete to listen to Go All The Way at home on the stereo without a boss jock shouting "...THREE O'CLOCK IN LOS ANGELES..." (substitute your town) over those raunchy opening chords.

The essence of top-40 radio is vitality and zit ointment and that's why the Raspberries fit in so well—it's what they're all about. They're the first completely teenage-oriented band of the seventies and it's about time. Pity the poor 16 year-old who in pre-Raspberry days was almost, cruelly forced to listen to pretentious claptrap about how Jesus was gonna save us and how we're gonna have to get closer to the ground and back to the land. And if he was sharp enough to tune out the folk singers in self-pity city for Grand Funk Railroad, he still had to contend with their inane "brothers and sisters/stop the war " routine just to get at a little rock 'n' roll.

Right about here, some sociology major in Berkeley with patches on his levis even though there's no holes in them is bound to say ,"Wait a minute. Today's 16 year olds are different. They're concerned about peace and pollution. The care about the meaning of life and the quest for internal tranquility." Well, bullshit. I'm not gonna pretend to be sixteen anymore although, I'm just a few miles away from it physically (and about half a block away mentally) but I do know a lot of teenagers and they'll tell you the same thing I'll tell you: that guy in Berkeley is crazy!

Clockwise (starting at bottom left): Eric Carmen, Wally Bryson, David Smalley and Jim Bonfanti.

Is he trying to say that today's high school and junior high crop aren't primarily concerned with getting laid, getting high, getting the car off the old man, getting an electric guitar, getting a bullshit story together that's believable enough to his girlfriend's parents to let her stay out all night so they can sleep together when his parents go away for the weekend?

The key word here is parents. Attitudes and morals may change from generation to generation, but the one constant is parents, and every kid, no matter how liberated, has them. Even the dork in Berkeley has them, but the big difference is he doesn't have to live and deal with them and watch as they frustrate 88% of his desires and plans. And the 12% that's left over is usually spent figuring out ways to beat the morbid boredom that sitting in classrooms for six hours a day can present.

Now how much time does that leave for pondering the inequities of society and finding internal tranquility? Not a hell of a lot, but that's how it should be, 'cause it's the teenage condition and it's been around even longer than singer/songwriters. It's an institution and up until five years ago every rock 'n' roll song was aimed right at it.

Well, time marches on and things progress, and maybe an argument could be put forth that nobody ever made a law saying that rock 'n' roll was the exclusive province of adolescents. I'll go along with that, but the kids of the sixties who are now the young adults, of the seventies have been so goddamn greedy with the stuff, so insistent that it conform to their own refined level of taste that they've practically cut off the supply of music that today's junior high kid can relate to. I can only imagine how horrible it must be to get grounded these days, sent to your room where you turn on the radio only to find "Isn't Life Strange" waiting to drive you down through the floorboards.

Phonograph Record / December 1972