This rocker (almost) named Eric Kaminkowitz had a thing for edible berries and inspired Bruce Springsteen and ‘Dirty Dancing’
Eric Carmen performs in Chicago, 1988. Photo by Getty Images
Eric Carmen, who died in his sleep earlier this month at age 74, was best known as the frontman for the early-1970s group Raspberries and as a hitmaking solo artist after the band split in 1975.
With Raspberries, Carmen is widely credited with helping have pioneered a new subgenre of rock music called “power pop,” along with contemporaries including Todd Rundgren, Badfinger, and Big Star. Power pop revived several elements of the best 1960s rock, including Beach Boys-style harmonies, Beatlesque hooks, and the “maximum R&B” guitar-based approach of the Who and the Rolling Stones.
Raspberries added a few unique twists to these influences, including Carmen’s expressive, near-operatic tenor vocals (at times reminiscent of Paul McCartney), complex chord changes, and the significant use of piano and saxophone in their arrangements. Early hits by the group, including “Go All the Way,” “Let’s Pretend,” and “Overnight Sensation (Hit Record),” exemplified their new approach.
While they enjoyed a good run of hits — several of which will be familiar to readers even if their titles alone do not garner instant recall — the Raspberries’ influence on other artists may have been their greatest legacy. Various commentators have found elements directly traceable to Raspberries in the music of Queen, Tom Petty, and Bruce Springsteen. “I Wanna Be With You” hugely influenced the Boss, who has paid tribute to the group in interviews on a number of occasion and who paid homage to them by “borrowing” the piano hook from the Raspberries’ “Starting Over” for his 1975 rock epic, “Jungleland.” “I Wanna Be With You” would have fit comfortably on Springsteen’s album The River (think “Hungry Heart”), and Springsteen’s incorporation of piano and saxophone as major elements in the sound of his E Street Band also mirrors the Raspberries’ approach.
The sophistication of Carmen’s songwriting and arranging with Raspberries and in his solo career, which boasted major international hits including 1975’s “All By Myself” and 1987’s “Hungry Eyes,” from the soundtrack to Dirty Dancing – which took place in the waning years of the Borscht Belt, the Jewish resorts in the Catskills – undoubtedly in part owes to Carmen’s musical education, which began in early childhood.
Before he reached age 3, his parents enrolled him in a music program at the Cleveland Institute of Music. By age 6, Carmen was studying violin with his aunt Muriel Carmen, who enjoyed a long, distinguished career with the Cleveland Orchestra. By age 11, he was taking classical piano lessons, but within a few years young Eric, like many music-minded youngsters of his era, switched over to guitar after seeing the Beatles perform on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1964. Aside from the Beatles, he once said his greatest musical influences were fellow Ohioan Henry Mancini, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and Leonard Bernstein.
Carmen was born Aug. 11, 1949, in Cleveland into an extended Jewish family that traced their lineage back to Russia. He grew up in suburban Lyndhurst, where years later he recalled, “I can remember every kid who made a crack about me being Jewish.” He told the Cleveland Jewish News that children on his street were friends with him until the day they learned he was Jewish, after which, in contemporary parlance, they ghosted him.
Carmen’s paternal great-grandfather immigrated to the United States from a shtetl in Russia. The family name went through several iterations: It was Kaminkowitz back in the old country but wound up being spelled Camingcovich by the time Jacob Kaminkowitz settled in Cleveland. Eric’s grandfather, Hector Camingcovich — who was buried in Parma, Ohio, in the Workmen’s Circle Cemetery — had an employer who could not pronounce his last name and took the liberty of shortening it to Carmen. The name stuck.
After working with previous bands, Eric Carmen formed Raspberries in 1970, and the short-lived group enjoyed instant creative and commercial success with its first two albums, both released in 1972. The group’s fourth and final album, Starting Over, came out in 1974, with the group already having gone through several personnel changes, and the next year the group disbanded. But by the end of 1975, Carmen was back near the top of the pop charts with his first solo hit, “All By Myself,” which was partially based on a figure from Rachmaninoff. A few months later, he scored big again with “Never Gonna Fall in Love Again,” like his previous hit, also based in part on a Rachmaninoff melody.
In later years, Carmen enjoyed seeing his songs recorded by a diverse array of artists, including Celine Dion, Jewel, Tom Jones, Shaun Cassidy, John Travolta, Babes in Toyland, and Motley Crue. In 2000, Carmen went out on tour with Ringo Starr’s All-Starr Band, closing a musical circle in his career by performing with a former member of the group that proved to be the most influential.
In a story in 2006, Carmen’s mother, Ruth, was profiled in the Cleveland Jewish News in an article about a group of mostly older women who regularly got together to play mah-jongg.
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