Fact #117068

Eric Carmen of Raspberries, interviewed by Johnny Black, 2 May 2006

CAN YOU CLEAR UP THE CONFUSION ABOUT WHO WROTE GO ALL THE WAY?
In terms of song copyright for publishing purposes, a song consists of the melody, the chords and the words. Everything else is arrangement.

So, if you asked Wally “Which words of the lyric did you write?” He’d say, “Well, I didn’t write any of the words”. If you then asked “What part of the melody that accompanies those words did you write?”, Wally would say, “Well, I didn’t write any of that melody.” Then if you asked which of the chords that support those words and that melody he wrote, he’d say that he didn’t actually write any of those chords either.

So now we’re down to the guitar intro. As it happens, I’m a pianist first and foremost, so pretty much everything I’ve ever written, even our hardest rock’n’roll songs like I Don’t Know What I Want, was written at the piano. Knowing Wally’s abilities on the guitar, I knew that once I had a song written and the time came to work it up, I’d be able to explain to him what kind of sound I wanted, what I was going for, and then Wally would try different things out and I’d choose the one I liked best. So, with Go All The Way, I sat down with Wally, and I played the intro chords on the piano, A-D-A, A-D-G, in that basic formation, and I asked him to show me some spots on the neck of the guitar where he might play those chords.

He tried it down low and it wasn’t right. Then he moved it up to the fifth fret and did it again but it still wasn’t right, but then he moved it up a little more and out came the lick I wanted to hear. I said, ‘That’s the one.’ It sounded great.

I have spoken with Wally about this and said if the question is ‘Did you play the hell out of that intro?’ the answer is ‘Absolutely’ but there’s a huge difference between playing something and writing it. By Wally’s logic, if I write a song and bring in a session guitarist to work out what the guitar intro should be, then that guy would get a co-writer credit. It makes no sense.

Then, at some point, Wally started to tell people that he was actually the co-writer of the song. I think that stems from a typo in the Capitol art department because on the back of our first album cover it shows Go All The Way as having been written by Carmen-Bryson. If you get the disc out, however, and look at the label, it just says E. Carmen, which is correct. It also says E. Carmen on the single.

I guess Wally just wanted to claim a little credit for what he did, and he did play that intro as well as it could ever be played. He also played a great guitar intro on the song Tonight, but he’s never claimed that he wrote it. This debate has raged on over the years and, to be honest, it has pissed me off, because it makes me out to be the bad guy who, surreptitiously in the night, stole away Wally’s credit. If that was true, I don’t understand why Wally stayed in the group. If someone stole my writing credit, I’d quit.

WHAT WAS THE INITIAL SPARK THAT INSPIRED THE SONG?
I was in the local drugstore and they had a paperback book section, and I was looking through them because you can often get inspiration for lyrics or song titles from books. As it happened, that day I picked out a book by an author called Dan Wakefield, the book was called Going All The Way. As soon as I saw that title something popped in my head and I realised it would be a sensational title for a song.

So when I got home I wrote that title down and set to work trying to figure out how to turn it into a song.

Now, sometime earlier, we here in America had seen The Rolling Stones on the Ed Sullivan Show and in the song Let’s Spend The Night Together they were forced to sing “Let’s spend some time together” instead. As a teenager I was horrified that they would make them change that lyric.

So, for me, a little bit of the challenge for writing a great pop song was to see how much you get away with, to artistically get your meaning across but do it in an obscure enough way so that they couldn’t quite pin it on you.

I was also a huge Beach Boys fan and, around the same time that Mick and Keith were being censored for Let’s Spend The Night Together, I was hearing a Beach Boys song, Wouldn’t It Be Nice, which talks about sleeping together but Brian got away with it, so I was wondering why that happened.

I came to the conclusion that when people looked at The Beach Boys and listened to their records, they looked and sounded like choirboys. They didn’t look menacing like Mick and Keith, so I thought that maybe if we sang our lyrics like choirboys, we’d get it past the censors. A lot of it has to do with who’s singing the song, their image, and their delivery of the lyric.

So, as I was writing Go All The Way, I had another idea which was that logically you would expect the guy to be trying to get the girl to go all the way but, if I switched it round so that the girl was asking me to go all the way? That makes me even more innocent. So I did that, I turned the lyric around and made it, ‘then she kissed me and said, please go all the way.’ I was just trying to push the envelope far enough that the kids would know what it was about but it wouldn’t be too offensive to get us pulled off the radio.

I figured that if the song got on Top 40 radio, it would be a massive hit just because of the title.

SO WAS THERE ANY ATTEMPT AT CENSORSHIP?
No. I actually anticipated a much bigger backlash than we got. After the record went gold and Top 5, Capitol threw a big party for us in New York. They presented us with the gold disc, and they had Murray The K there to declare himself the fifth Raspberry, and this girl came up to me and she said, ‘Oh, I just love your song, Please Go Away. So maybe we got away with it because people thought that’s what I was singing.

CAN YOU EXPLAIN ABOUT HOW THE SONG WAS SAVED BY A LIMITER?
We recorded Go All The Way at Record Plant in New York, and there was a gentleman called Roger Mayer, an inventor of all sorts of musical gadgets. He made some stuff for Hendrix. He had come to the studio one day and left this prototype of a new limiter he had built.

You have to understand that Go All The Way was a very difficult song to record. When I brought it in to the band, I explained, ‘Right, here’s what I want. It has to start off like The Who, but then Steve Marriott comes in and he’s screaming over the top of that and then when it hits the verse it has to sound like The Beach Boys doing Don’t Worry Baby, but the background vocals have to sound like The Left Banke. Then it goes back to The Who and Steve Marriott again. The guys in the band looked at me like I’d lost my mind.

It was a very difficult song to get all of this happening, although I had it all in my head, we just never got it right. I remember sitting in Record Plant begging Jimmy Ienner not to let the single go out the way we’d recorded it, because it sounded so weak and so lame.

That night, we all went home and Shelley Yakus, our engineer, started thinking about that Roger Mayer limiter. They had tried to use it on various other tracks but the compression was so violent that it just didn’t work on anything they tried.

For some reason, though, Shelley thought it might work on Go All The Way. So the next day when we came in, Shelley had stayed up all night. He’d hooked up the Roger Mayer limiter and, I don’t know if you know this but in America there’s a hot dog company called Oscarmeyer, so we used affectionately call that thing the Oscarmeyer because it was like you fed in this big thing at one end and out the other end came this little tiny sausage.

So when Shelley shoved the faders up, out of the studio speakers came our Top 5 hit record. We were just flabbergasted.

The limiter was used all the way through, and we also took the finished mix, tracks one and two, and we split track one over to track three and split track two over to track four, and it was tracks three and four that were going through the Oscarmeyer. Then we kept bringing up the level of those two totally compressed tracks underneath the original tracks. Then it was at the point where the Oscarmeyer tracks was equal to the original tracks that it all just happened.

If you look at Go All The Way on a studio meter, you’ll see that it pins on the first chord and never moves from that position until the end of the song. The limiter gave the song all the energy and drive that the original recording lacked. After that I used to go home and write songs with that limiter in mind. Now that I knew what it could do, I could write songs with holes in because I loved how it would suck the bass into those holes. It was a great thing.

WHAT WERE JIMMY IENNER’S STRENGTHS AS A PRODUCER?
Jimmy, first of all, if I had to compare him to someone, it would be Bill Clinton because he’s one of those guys that is so bright and so charming that you can’t help but like him, and want to be around him. He had been in doo-wop bands years before we knew him.

He was also very good at listening to a bunch of songs and knowing which ones we should record, and then he’d just go for a particular sound in the studio. He was much less concerned about whether a particular kick drum was sounding great than he was concerned about getting a performance. He had his own subtle forms of psychology that would keep the band rolling. We were young kids, I was 21 when we recorded that first album, and we did it in three weeks including mixing … Jimmy was a great psychologist and he could keep everybody in their bright spot so we could go in there and he’d get the best out of us.

At the same time, if things weren’t going well, he could also take somebody down a couple of pegs. Or he’d say something to the drummer that he knew would make him mad so he’d hit the drum harder, like, ‘Hey, you sound like a cissy out there. Are you gonna try to hit that drum or something?” Whatever he needed to do, he would play that little game to get the best performance.

DID GO ALL THE WAY BREAK OUT OF CLEVELAND?
No. I don’t think any of our records started in our home town. We had a big following but Cleveland Radio was very oriented towards progressive rock, and we hated all these bands noodling around on flutes for ten minutes. That stuff was just boredom to me. We saw ourselves as marauders banging on the gates of bloated, over-indulgent prog rock.

But radio at the time felt we sounded too much like what AM radio used to sound like. They didn’t get what we were doing. They thought we were retro when in fact we were way beyond that, right on the other end of the spectrum trying to bang down those Jethro Tull records and bring it back to three minute pop songs.

We’d grown up in the mid-60s when you could turn on the radio and hear one great song after another – The Beatles, Beach Boys, The Who, The Four Tops, The Temptations. Then about 1969 when the format changed and FM became the big thing, it seemed to me like the song was pushed into the back seat and it started to be all about technicians, about , ‘Gee, listen to this guy play guitar!’

I used to say, well, if you’ve heard Clapton play a ten minute solo and you’ve heard Hendrix play a ten minute solo, and heard Jeff Back and Jimmy Page, how many lesser guys do you really want hear playing extended guitar breaks. I really didn’t want to hear a guy who was a tenth as good as Jimi Hendrix playing a solo.

So we were about getting away from all that. A lot of rock critics got what we were doing, and sixteen year old girls got it, but their eighteen year old brothers were still buying Jethro Tull albums and going to concerts, they didn’t get it.

It just wasn’t cool to like a band that looked like your little sister might like them.

SO WHERE DID YOU GET RADIO PLAY?
New York and Boston were the first markets that played any of our records, because they got it. To this day that’s still the case. When we played New York on our last re-union tour it was like Beatlemania. It was so cool, such a huge ego boost. Jon Bon Jovi came to the show, Little Steven came to the show. I guess Springsteen was the one who gave Jon Bon Jovi his Raspberries album when Jon asked him for songwriting hints. Right after we did those shows, Springsteen went out on tour and he was dedicating songs to us the first three nights of the tour.

DID YOU EXPECT IT TO BE A MAJOR HIT?
My feeling was that if we could actually get it on the radio, it would be a big hit, just because of the title which was controversial enough … when I was in high school, The Who released Magic Bus and I would see all my classmates walking down the corridor before school started in the morning and they’d go, “Yo … Magic Bus!” Now, I don’t think any of us had any idea of what that song was about but to a bunch of high school kids, it sounded kinda dirty and so it became like an anthem to us, where you would raise your arm up and punch the air and go, “Yo … Magic Bus!’. I wanted to write a song that would be just like that.

So I figured that if Go All The Way got even a glimmer of radio play, kids would start to talk about it. I figured that even if it didn’t get played it might get banned and then maybe the album would sell.

WHAT DID IT DO FOR YOU TO HAVE THAT HIT?
It was a great thing for the band. To be just 21 or 22 and have a huge hit like that with our second record. To me personally it was validation. I’d always thought I could write songs and when it went Top 5 it was like, ‘Hey, I can do this!’

WHY DO YOU THINK YOU COULDN’T REALLY FOLLOW IT UP UNTIL YOU BECAME A SOLO PERFORMER?
There were so many things in play, things we didn’t even find out about until years later. We spent the six months after that record was a hit playing stinking barns to a couple of hundred people a night. It was like the management thought, ‘Well, it’s between New York and Providence so, yeah, we’ll book ‘em in there.’

We were playing night after night in crappy places with bad sound systems. We’d get up there and scream our little hearts out every night, but they just weren’t the right places.

Our manager, for example, was given to us by the people who kind of controlled us. They said, ‘This guy is gonna be your manager,’ and the reason they chose him was because they could control him.

It wasn’t the mafia, but when we were young these people had signed us to a production deal that was pretty much unconscionable, and they didn’t want someone like Irving Azoff coming in and ripping up our contract and getting us a better deal. That was the last thing they wanted.

So they brought in these people they could control. They’d say look, we’re gonna give you this office and this salary and you can stay here as long as you don’t make waves. We, of course, knew nothing of that. We just assumed that these people were professionals who knew what they were talking about.

We’d be scratching our heads wondering why we had such hopeless management, but we figured there must be some reason even though he seemed like a jerk to us.

AND THAT CONTINUED TO THE END OF THE RASPBERRIES CAREER?
Yes, right to the end with different people, different managers, being brought in but if they had a spine they’d be thrown right out the door.

AND DID YOU MANAGE TO CHANGE THAT WHEN YOU BECAME A SOLO ARTIST?
As a matter of fact I did. I had a little meeting with the last guy who had been brought in to manage The Raspberries and I said, ‘We’re done.’ I’d inherited him by default when I became a solo act. He looked at me rather shocked.

I don’t want to sound like a complainer because over the years the music industry has been very good to me. It’s just part and parcel of what young musicians have to go through, because they don’t know. The business has been constructed by people to take advantage of the fact that you have all these nineteen or twenty year old kids who don’t know anything about the business and all they want to do is be given enough money to go and make a record. The business is constructed by business people and the deck is stacked for them. Unwitting twenty year olds come in and they sign a deal that they later regret because they just desperately want to make a record.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Wally Bryson of The Raspberries, interviewed by Johnny Black, 30 April 2006

You co-wrote the song with Eric Carmen. Can you remember how the song came about?
Eric saw a book in a store called "Going All The Way." He wrote the song as far as lyrics and melody. We collaborated on the intro guitar riff and the descending instrumental going into the guitar riff at the end of the song. All four of us (the band) were living in a house together on Marigold Drive in Mentor, Ohio at the time.
 
Are you able to pinpoint elements of the song that are yours and elements that are Eric's?
Eric wanted an intro with power like "All Right Now" by Free. As a huge Free fan, then and now, I played him a bunch of riffs and ideas. We decided we would try the chord formation I used when we played the bridge of "The Kid's Are Alright" by The Who. It's an A chord high up on the neck of the guitar with an open Low A.
 
How daring was that lyric considered at the time?
I've heard it was banned in England for suggestive lyrics. We were underground over there because that off-shore radio station would play it. A lot of people came up to us and said, "We love your song 'Please Go Away'."
 
Was there any resistance from the record company to the lyric?
None that I can remember. Capitol Records, later on our fourth album, thought that the song "Hit Record" sounded pretentious and changed it to "Overnight Sensation" much to Eric's consternation, and mine.
 
I've read several interviews in which you and Eric expressed concerns about the original sound of Go All The Way, which was much improved by the use of a limiter. Can you explain this aspect in a bit more detail?
 
The song was almost left off the album. It sounded flat. The track had no life. Jimmy, Eric, and I were at our wits end.  Engineer Shelly Yakus and Jimmy Ienner said they were going to try something. The limiter made it sound like we were playing live in an armory in Painesville (Ohio). It breathed life into the track and made all the difference in the world. We were amazed at the difference it made.
 
What were Jimmy Ienner's strengths as a producer?
Jimmy was a singer, performer, had a very high I.Q., and had a good sense about getting good performances out of the band, both instrumentally and vocally. He also was the first to try the scratch and sniff concept. He knew a lot about market analysis, etc. He was very much like a big brother to a band just starting out making their first album. He knew how to mix for the radio.
 
Before Go All The Way, Capitol issued Don't Want To Say Goodbye as a single. Can you explain why the band felt that was a mistake?
We were very young and naive and looked upon THE BEATLES RECORD LABEL (CAPITOL) as all knowing and all seeing at the time. We all thought the first single should be up-tempo, but figured they must know what they're doing. We thought, and still do, that it was a great song, a great performance in a Bee Gees sort of way. We've been told that the song has been voted in the Top 100 songs in The Netherlands for for a number of years, including this year. So who knew? 
 
How did Go All The Way break out? Did it start as a local hit in Cleveland and then spread out from there, or did you get support elsewhere from the start?
We typically had more success outside of Cleveland initially. I'm quite sure it didn't start as a local hit in Cleveland and spread out from there. It was the other way around.
 
Can you remember where you were and how it felt the first time you heard it on the radio?
Throughout my career, whenever I heard one of our records on the radio, from The Choir, Raspberries, and beyond, it's always been a special sort of thrill. I don't remember exactly when I heard Go All The Way the first time, but I think the band was in the car on the way to a  gig and we heard it together. But I do remember hearing Don't Want To Say Goodbye on the radio for the first time. I was living in Eastlake, Ohio and it was one of those moments a musician lives for. Recently, just before the Raspberries reunion, Ravenna Micelli, a D.J. in Cleveland, played Don't Want To Say Goodbye one morning, and after not hearing it for 25 or more years, it sounded just as good and was just as special.
 
Did you expect it to do as well as it did?
No. I liked the power chords in the intro, but thought the song was trite. I thought after the power of the intro, the verse sounded like a Bing Crosby song. I was young and very opinionated at the time. Now, from this perspective, I'm able to appreciate it more.
 
How did the success of that song affect The Raspberries?
It was our only gold record. We had a band meeting at which I was told "You can't copyright a guitar intro," and my name was removed as a writer when it was released as a single. I, of course, protested loud and long, but eventually went along with the decision, stating at the time, "This is the beginning of the end of the band". So, in a way, it was the beginning of our success, and the beginning of our demise. And I have yet to write another song with Eric, but I do hope to change that in the near future, if the band isn't too mad at me for saying too much already...again. But that's the story.  


-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Eric Carmen (Raspberries) : I remember Go All The Way vividly. The year was 1971. I was twenty-one. I had been studying for years. I had spent my youth with my head between two stereo speakers listening to The Byrds and The Beatles and later on The Beach Boys just trying to figure out what combinations of things, whether it was the fourths harmonies that The Byrds were singing on Mr. Tambourine Man. I must have worn out ten copies of that first Byrds album listening to it over and over, and turning off the left side and turning on the right side trying to figure out why these certain combinations of instruments and echo and harmonies made that hair on your arms stand up.

I did the same thing with Beatles records, and I tried to learn construction. Then I went to school on Brian Wilson. That was a real breakthrough for me because he was doing things that I thought were so incredibly sophisticated before anybody was doing anything even close. The Pet Sounds album is, to me, the best pop album of all time.
Brian introduced me to the idea of writing a bridge for a song that really had nothing to do with the verse and chorus. In the early days, I spent a lot of time concentrating on writing bridges that took you some place that you didn't expect to go.
Many songwriters wrote a song, the song's in the key of C, it comes time for a bridge and they go to A minor. That bored me. Brian would go to E flat or somewhere strange, and he managed to do it smoothly. He also had a way of delivering you out of the bridge in such a way that you felt like maybe the song had modulated up a step, but you were really back in the original key. That, to me, was artwork.
So when I sat down to write Go All The Way, there were a couple things I had in mind. I thought, 'What part of the song is it that people really want to hear? It's the chorus.' As a result of all that, Go All The Way has a ten second verse, and then the chorus is a minute long. I figured just to get to the chorus as fast as I can. That was the plan behind the song. I repeated that when I wrote I Wanna Be With You.