RASPBERRIES RETURN HOME Concert At The Cleveland Agora: July 8, 1974 By Anastasia Pantsios   The last time I heard the band back in January shortly after their personnel change, the band and audience mutually destroyed each other with preconceived hostility. The band was full of nasty little digs and put-downs of the audience. Lead singer Eric Carmen stated emphatically that Cleveland audiences are the worst in the world and urged me defiantly to go ahead and print that. The audience that night certainly ranked right up there.

It was bound and determined not to like a single thing the band did. The audience had a lousy time and so did the band. Isn't that what rock and roll's supposed to be about?
 
How the Raspberries actually played that night was totally beside the point.
 
How surprised I was when I started talking to people who planned to go to the Agora concert, and they all planned to enjoy it! And I was still more surprised when the audience's response to the group, though decidedly lukewarm, was also decidedly not hostile. And part of the laid-back response may have been due to the heat which sapped both band's and crowd's energies. In talking to more than two dozen people after the concert, I only found one who did not like the band at all. The group even got a slightly forced encore. For the Raspberries in Cleveland, that's like some other group getting ten.
 
The feeling expressed by many people was that the band had changed radically and now was worthy of a smidgen of serious consideration, but that simply isn't true. The Raspberries never were the Mickey Mouse band everyone thinks they remember. When Jim Bonfanti and David Smalley, now of Dynamite, were in the band, the band was younger, less cohesive and less sure of where it was going, and therefore much less intense than it is now, but it was never the giggly bubblegum group worthy of the scorn heaped upon it. I have fond memories of rocking and rolling to the Raspberries a year or two years ago.
 
The major difference in the band now is that its creative force is being channeled properly and therefore has much more impact. The band used to be guilty of digressions that opened them up to misinterpretation. Like many young bands, they were too eclectic, and the first two albums were lighter than the band was really meant to be.
 
Probably the worst thing that happened to the Raspberries was that they became critics' darlings for those critics who were seeing the salvation of rock in a return to the young-and-innocent days of the Merseybeat. The group's earlier recorded material provided some justification for this and they became known as a neo-Beatles band. Labels like that have very sticky glue. The trouble was that, unlike other critics' darlings like 10cc, Big Star, Stories and Blue Ash, the Raspberries could be a punchy live band who should have been liked by the people, not just by critics looking to bring back 1964.
 
So what does the band sound like now?
 
It's a full-sounding straight-ahead rock and roll band with many evident influences certainly, but with an overall tone that is uniquely theirs. They've veered away from ballads and melotrons, though they do some slower, but fully arranged numbers. The group has a big, grand instrumental sound topped by Eric's magnificent yelling. Wally Bryson's guitar playing is tense, nervy and terribly right, full of the kind of chords that bite the back of your neck. Michael McBride, who was hurting the group in January with his klutzy drumming, is still heavy but controlled. Scott McCarl does a good job on bass and has a fine voice. In any band that didn't have Eric Carmen in it, he would naturally be the lead singer and good at it, too. But the Raspberries do have Eric Carmen and he is possibly one of the best rock singers performing today. He screamed through most of the Agora concert, but nobody screams better, and he did show that he is capable of modulating and using his voice expressively. The band also uses sideman Jeff Hutton on piano, and his sound is a constant and valuable asset to the band, so much so that I can't understand why he isn't a full-fledged member of the group.
 
Most of the material the group performed came from their last album and their upcoming one, plus they did that old favorite "Go All the Way." They were much looser in their approach to the songs than I had expected and in some places, this detracted from the effect. Unfortunately, one of the places was at the beginning of the set with a dragged-out intro to "I'm a Rocker" that was not as terse and dynamic as their earlier version. But they certainly are showing that they are able to do more than spit out three-minute pop tunes.
 
For their encore, the group did "All Right Now" which connected them not only with their Free influence, but also with their past as a Cleveland bar band. Name one that doesn't do it. They showed that they are just as capable of jamming as anyone and it had some nice moments, but really! When is some band going to make it big and come back and do "Smoke on the Water" as an encore?
 
So at last the Raspberries caused their own home town to have a reasonably nice time though according to the band's road manager, Rusty Petrone, the crowd was "unappreciative snobs who deserve to be shit upon" and it is his hope that the band becomes a mammoth success and then thumbs its nose at Cleveland, though he concedes that the group probably wouldn't do this. As for who it was that didn't like the concert, well, I'm not gonna tell you.

Exit / August 7, 1974