Go All The Way (1972)

Performer: The Raspberries                                  Writer: Eric Carmen
Highest US Chart Position: #5                               Label: Capitol Records
Musicians: Eric Carmen, Wally Bryson, Dave Smalley and Jim Bonfanti

Eric Carmen was one of the most distinctive voices on the radio for me in the mid seventies, but I had little knowledge of his previous work with The Raspberries earlier in the decade. Like a lot of groups at the time, the artistic dominance of Carmen in the group led to tensions and a natural division that led him eventually into a solo career. Half of the band split off to form the group Dynamite, while Carmen and the remaining members soldiered on, completing one more album before being forced to fold in 1975. The group had been formed in Cleveland from the core members of two late sixties bands, but even then it was Carmen who was the catalyst of their success. The style of the group’s music, which would eventually be coined “power pop,” had evidently been thought of by Pete Townsend to describe the music of The Who. It made sense, as The Who played a much harder brand of music than The Beatles or even The Stones, but they were also light-years from “pop” music, a tag that even the Fab Four had outgrown by 1965. The label eventually came to represent a style of music that took as its inspiration the early Beatles and added the harder edge of later groups like The Who and Led Zeppelin, while still maintaining a melodic, radio-friendly sound. Power pop was bubblegum on steroids.

The Raspberries’ biggest chart hit, “Go All The Way,” actually demonstrates this bifurcated musical style perfectly. It begins like a stadium rocker, the drums playing a heavy backbeat and the guitar crunching a riff that sounds as if it had been passed down for generations, with Eric Carmen yelling “Mama yeah, woo!!” after the second time through. The bass and rhythm guitar come in repeating the same note underneath for two more times through while the lead guitar changes up and plays a variation on the riff four more times before everyone hits and sustains the last measure going into the verse. But when the verse begins, it’s as if another group is playing it. Imagine Kiss playing the intro, and Bread coming in to finish the song, and that’s what it’s like. Though to be fair, the word verse is probably a bit of an exalted expression for the single line that precedes the chorus. The title line means exactly what it says, as the song is about a woman begging for the singer to go all the way, an innocuous enough sounding phrase but definitely pushing the boundaries for the early seventies. Musically, the chorus is a wonderful melodic phrase that is incredibly pleasing to the ear and an exemplar of Eric Carmen’s considerable skills as a songwriter. The chorus is backed by call and response vocals and a percussive guitar part throughout. And again, the one-line verse is little more than a respite before gliding right back into a second chorus.

Halfway through the song it returns to the intro riff, and this time Carmen sings a real verse the way he should have done in the first place, with the lead guitar filling in between, almost as though it were a different song. The bridge is a series of repetitions of the words “come on,” a direct allusion to The Beatles’ “Please, Please Me,” with the background vocals responding in kind before the song heads into the final chorus. The guitar interlude between this and the final intro riff is like something from the late sixties, picking on an electric 12-string. But it all works, remarkably well in fact, and the hook is so infectious that it couldn’t help but be a hit record. The song was released in July of 1972, entering the Hot 100 at number eighty-eight. It climbed the charts the rest of the summer and into the fall, finally topping out at number five for two straight weeks in the beginning of October. The B-side of the single is “With You In My Life” by guitarist Wally Bryson, a far more traditional love song for the time, heavy on the two and four and a barrelhouse piano prominent in the mix with Carmen doing a poor man’s Floyd Cramer on the solo. “Go All The Way,” on the other hand, is a finely crafted--if somewhat schizophrenic--piece of power pop that not only seems ahead of its time, but has stood the test of time as a classic of the genre.