Long before the term “classical crossover” was invented, Eric Carmen, who has died aged 74, showed everybody how to do it with his 1975 single All By Myself. An international hit that reached No 2 in the US and 12 in the UK, it borrowed the melody from the second movement of Sergei Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No 2 in C minor for its verse, and for good measure included a classical-like piano interlude.
Proving that no musical idea need ever go to waste, Carmen also revisited Let’s Pretend, his 1973 Top 40 hit with his band the Raspberries, and reworked it for the chorus of All By Myself.
His first solo single, it was the biggest hit of Carmen’s career, and in 1996 the song was born again when Celine Dion recorded it, sending it soaring up charts around the world.
In 1976 Carmen followed it up with a second smash, Never Gonna Fall in Love Again, which went to 11 on the US chart. Once again, Rachmaninov was partly responsible, with Carmen quoting from the composer’s Symphony No 2. Both singles were taken from his debut solo album, Eric Carmen, the most successful of his six solo outings and which reached 21 on the US album chart.
He enjoyed another brace of Top 30 hits with She Did It (1977) and Change of Heart (1978), but it was not until 1987 that he had another massive success with Hungry Eyes. This was from the soundtrack of the movie Dirty Dancing, and though it was not one of Carmen’s own compositions, he was invited to sing by the producer Jimmy Ienner, who had worked with the Raspberries. Once again this was an international hit, and reached No 4 in the US.
Carmen had enjoyed previous film-related success in 1984, when the song Almost Paradise from the movie Footloose, which he wrote with Dean Pitchford, reached No 7 in the US, performed by Ann Wilson and Mike Reno. In 1988 another Carmen-Pitchford composition, Make Me Lose Control, gave Carmen his last big hit when it reached No 3 in the States.
Born in Cleveland, Ohio, into a family of Russian-Jewish immigrants, he grew up in Lyndhurst. He displayed musical leanings from an early age, and by the age of two he was doing impersonations of Tony Bennett and Johnnie Ray for his parents, Ruth and Elmer Carmen.
At two-and-a-half he was enrolled in the Cleveland Institute of Music’s Dalcroze eurhythmics teaching programme, and by the time he was six he was being taught violin by his aunt Muriel Carmen. “My dad’s sister was a prodigy on the violin and viola,” he wrote, “and played with the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra for 43 years under the great George Szell … I used to sit on stage with them while they rehearsed.”
Music was in his veins. Aged 11 he began learning piano, and was soon writing his own songs. He became infatuated with Leonard Bernstein’s musical West Side Story, but even this paled beside the impact of the Beatles and the British invasion. While attending Charles F Brush high school in Lyndhurst, he began playing with a variety of groups, and learned the guitar to go with his keyboard skills. After enrolling at John Carroll University, he became singer and frontman of the band Cyrus Erie.
A turning point came when the guitarist Wally Bryson joined, having previously been with the popular Cleveland band the Choir, who had had a big local hit with It’s Cold Outside. Carmen commented that “my ultimate ambition as a high school kid was to either become a member of the Choir, or have a group like that myself”.
Bryson and Carmen were both huge fans of the British groups the Who and the Small Faces (they played the latter’s Tin Soldier as an encore), and by late 1968 Cyrus Erie were Cleveland’s biggest band. They signed a deal with Epic Records, but were cursed with unsympathetic producers, and after Bryson’s departure the group disintegrated.
Carmen then reunited with Bryson, plus the Choir’s drummer Jim Bonfanti and bass player John Aleksic to form the Raspberries in 1970. The group achieved its classic lineup when Aleksic was replaced by Dave Smalley, and they released their debut album in 1972.
This spawned the US No 5 hit Go All the Way, a slightly odd mixture of a slashing guitar riff with a middle-of-the-road melody (as Bryson said, “after the power of the intro, the verse sounded like a Bing Crosby song”). But Carmen was pleased that he had managed to make the song sexually suggestive without triggering an airplay ban. “I wanted to write a song with an explicitly sexual lyric that the kids would instantly get, but the powers that be couldn’t pin me down for,” he said.
It was the Raspberries’ biggest hit and sold more than a million copies, though they scored two more US Top 20 entries with I Wanna Be With You (1972) and Overnight Sensation (Hit Record) in 1974.
Fresh, the second of their four albums, was the most successful, reaching 36 on the US chart. The group were proud to wear their 1960s influences on their sleeve, but this left them struggling to overcome an impression of being teenyboppers too much under the Beatles’ influence. The way Carmen saw it, the Raspberries were a reaction to rock’s increasingly grandiose pretensions. “By the end of the 60s, it was all about bands like Jethro Tull noodling on flutes, or inferior guitarists playing 10-minute solos under the delusion that they were as good as Jimi Hendrix,” he snorted.
“We reacted against that by writing melodic three-minute pop songs.” Subsequently, the Raspberries would be cited as an influence by many major artists, including Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty and Axl Rose of Guns N’Roses.
They played their final show in May 1975. By then Carmen had written a new batch of songs with which to launch a solo career. He signed with Arista, whose boss Clive Davis he considered “the most artist-orientated individual, as opposed to the more bureaucratic type”. In November that year he released his first solo album.
Carmen’s first two marriages, to Marcy Hill, then to Susan Brown, ended in divorce. He is survived by his third wife, Amy Murphy, a former broadcaster whom he married in 2016, and by his children, Kathryn and Clayton, from his second marriage.
• Eric Howard Carmen, singer and songwriter, born 11 August 1949; death announced 11 March 2024
