Eric Carmen, Raspberries frontman who sang Hungry Eyes, dies at 74

Publish date: 2024-07-28

Eric Carmen, who rose to pop rock stardom in the 1970s as the dapper frontman of the Raspberries, then reinvented himself as a romantic balladeer while singing Top 10 hits such as “Hungry Eyes,” from the film “Dirty Dancing,” and “All By Myself,” has died at 74.

His death was announced on his website by his wife, Amy Carmen. She said he died “in his sleep, over the weekend,” but did not share additional details.

A guitarist, singer-songwriter and classically trained pianist, Mr. Carmen drew on influences as varied as Rachmaninoff and the Ronettes, crafting lush pop songs about love, loss and the shamanic power of rock-and-roll.

With the Raspberries, the short-lived but influential band he co-founded in 1970, he aimed to combine the melodies of the Beatles, the power of the Who and the harmonies of the Beach Boys. The result, in short pop songs like “Go All the Way” and “Tonight,” was often catchy and hummable, even as the group’s idiosyncratic arrangements and soaring vocals alienated listeners looking for straight-ahead rock.

“Our music is based on fun,” Mr. Carmen declared in 1972, when the band released its debut album, “Raspberries.” “That’s the rock-and-roll we like — and it’s coming back good.”

Along with artists including Todd Rundgren and Big Star, the Raspberries helped give shape to the genre known as power pop, which took off in the late 1970s through bands including Cheap Trick and the Knack.

The Raspberries were a bit ahead of the curve and struggled to shed an image as an act that was almost defiantly uncool. Instead of waist-length hair and tattered jeans, band members sported clean-cut hairdos and matching white suits. Their first album featured a scratch-and-sniff sticker (raspberry scented, of course) that critics found passé.

Musically, their songs could be bold, if not exactly groundbreaking. Their first hit, the 1972 single “Go All the Way,” opened with a volley of cymbals and guitars, followed by sexually suggestive lyrics that got the song banned from British airwaves: “She kissed me and said / Baby please go all the way / It feels so right / Being with you here tonight.”

Mr. Carmen said he had hoped to circumvent the censors, and had better luck in the United States. “I thought, if we sing this like choirboys and put the words in the girl’s mouth, maybe we can slide this by radio. And it worked,” he recalled, according to Variety. The single sold more than 1 million copies and reached No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100.

The Raspberries went on to headline Carnegie Hall in New York and recorded Top 40 hits including “I Wanna Be With You,” “Let’s Pretend” and the wryly titled “Overnight Sensation,” in which Mr. Carmen announced his ambition to write a hit record with lyrics that were “non-offensive, but satiric too.”

Squabbling between the band members, including a dispute between Mr. Carmen and guitarist Wally Bryson over songwriting credits, contributed to the group’s breakup in 1975. “Critics liked us, girls liked us, but their 18 year old, album buying brothers said ‘no.’ We got frustrated and imploded,” Mr. Carmen wrote in a biography on his website.

Stepping out on his own, Mr. Carmen signed with the newly formed label Arista and launched his solo career later that year with “All By Myself,” a soft-rock ballad that featured a melody taken from the second movement of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2. The song became his highest-charting hit, peaking at No. 2, and found new life through covers by artists including Céline Dion, whose inescapable 1996 version also made the Top 10.

“It was the furthest thing from the Raspberries, and I wanted people to understand that’s not all I can do,” he told the New York Observer in 2017.

Mr. Carmen faded from view for a few years before the release of “Dirty Dancing,” the blockbuster 1987 film romance starring Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey. The movie’s soundtrack was helmed by producer Jimmy Ienner, who had worked with the Raspberries and persuaded a skeptical Mr. Carmen to record the song “Hungry Eyes,” written by John DeNicola and Franke Previte.

Featured in a scene in which Swayze’s character, a dance instructor at a Catskills resort, instructs Grey to lock her frame and avoid “spaghetti arms” while dancing, the song peaked at No. 4 on the pop chart and became a linchpin of the film’s best-selling soundtrack.

“Soundtracks are made all the time that die horrible deaths — even soundtracks for popular movies. But it turned out to be a great opportunity for me,” Mr. Carmen told the Los Angeles Times after the film’s release. “People hadn’t exactly been banging down my door to get me to do stuff. I was ice cold.”

A few months later, Mr. Carmen scored another Top 10 hit with the love song “Make Me Lose Control.” It was the second hit he co-wrote with songwriter Dean Pitchford, after “Almost Paradise,” a duet that Mike Reno and Ann Wilson sang for another hit dance film, “Footloose” (1984).

By then, Mr. Carmen was best known for his swooning ballads, not his sunnier rock songs, which found an audience even as critics often deemed them bombastic. As he noted in a 2007 interview with the website PopMatters, he was at “one point laughed at for making ‘Go All the Way,’ and then heralded for making ‘All By Myself.’ And then heralded for making ‘Go All the Way’ and laughed at for making ‘All By Myself.’

“It’s kind of a vicious circle,” he continued. “It comes down to: You can’t please everybody.”

Eric Howard Carmen was born in Cleveland on Aug. 11, 1949, to a Jewish family that traced its roots to Russia. He grew up in suburban Lyndhurst, Ohio, where he began taking violin lessons at 6 from an aunt who played with the Cleveland Orchestra. By 12, he was playing the piano and writing songs of his own.

Mr. Carmen briefly studied at John Carroll University, a Jesuit school in the Cleveland suburbs, before playing with the Raspberries, which evolved out of a band called Cyrus Erie. The group’s best known lineup featured Mr. Carmen and Bryson alongside bassist Dave Smalley and drummer Jim Bonfanti.

“You know all those fantasies about sex, drugs and rock-and-roll? I was living those fantasies,” he said in the Los Angeles Times interview, reflecting on his early years in the music business. “I was the crazy, obnoxious rock star. The drugs, the drinking, the wildness — to some degree that’s what I got into this business for.”

But he added that by the time he was hired for “Dirty Dancing,” he was just looking for a buck. “Forget the fame and glory. That’s kid stuff. Fools fall into that trap. You get your fill of it and get beyond it. Now I want the money. That’s what’s really important now.”

One of Mr. Carmen’s first singles as a solo artist, “That’s Rock ’n’ Roll,” became a Top 10 hit for teen idol Shaun Cassidy, who recorded a cover in 1976 and had another hit with Mr. Carmen’s song “Hey Deanie.” Mr. Carmen recorded eight Top 40 hits in all, including “Never Gonna Fall in Love Again,” “Sunrise,” “She Did It,” “Change of Heart” and “I Wanna Hear It From Your Lips.”

His marriages to Marcy Hill and Susan Brown ended in divorce. In 2016, he married Amy Hasten Murphy, a former Cleveland newscaster. Information on survivors was not immediately available, but he had two children, Kathryn and Clayton, from his marriage to Brown.

Mr. Carmen released his sixth and final studio album, “I Was Born to Love You,” in 2000 and toured that summer with one of his childhood heroes, former Beatles drummer Ringo Starr. A few years later, he and the Raspberries reunited for their first concert in three decades, leading to a 10-date reunion tour. The band later reached a younger audience with help from Marvel’s 2014 film “Guardians of the Galaxy,” which featured “Go All the Way” on its soundtrack.

“It was easy for people to be derisive about our music because they saw what we were doing as retro,” Mr. Carmen told PopMatters. “But we were like barbarians trying to crash the gates of the bloated progressive rock that we despised. A lot of people just didn’t get it. But over the years, it seems like they [began to] get it. Sometimes it takes a while, but now there’s a whole different kind of reverence for what we’re doing.”

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Eric Carmen, Raspberries frontman who sang Hungry Eyes, dies at 74