Eric Carmen

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Eric Carmen

Eric Howard Carmen (born August 11, 1949, in Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.) is an American singer, songwriter, guitarist and keyboardist.

His greatest success came in the 1970s, first as a member of The Raspberries (who scored a major hit with their song "Go All The Way"), then with his solo career, including hits like "All By Myself" and "Never Gonna Fall In Love Again".

Early life

Carmen had been obsessed with music since early childhood. At the age of two, he was entertaining his parents, Ruth and Elmer Carmen, with impressions of Tony Bennett and Johnnie Ray. By the age of three, he was in the Dalcroze Eurythmics program at the Cleveland Institute of Music. At six years old, he took violin lessons from Muriel Carmen, then a violinist with the Cleveland Orchestra.

Carmen grew up in Lyndhurst, Ohio. By age 11, he was playing piano and dreaming about writing his own songs. The arrival of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones altered his dream slightly. By the time he was a sophomore at Charles F. Brush High School, Eric Carmen was playing piano and singing in rock 'n' roll bands.

Though classically trained in piano, Carmen became a self-taught guitarist. At 15 years old, he started to take guitar lessons, but since the teacher's approach did not fit with what he wanted, he decided to teach himself. He bought a Beatles chord book and taught himself to play guitar for the next four months.

Tenure with The Raspberries

Carmen became serious about being a musician while attending John Carroll University. He joined a band named Cyrus Erie, which recorded several unsuccessful singles for Epic records. Cyrus Erie guitarist, Wally Bryson, had been playing with friends Jim Bonfanti and Dave Smalley in one of Cleveland's most popular bands, the Choir, which scored a minor national hit in 1967 with the single "It's Cold Outside".

When Cyrus Erie and the Choir collapsed at the end of the 1960s, Carmen, Bryson, Bonfanti and Smalley teamed up to form The Raspberries, a rock and roll band who were amongst the chief exponents of the power pop style. In 1975, after the breakup of The Raspberries, he started his solo career, de-emphasizing harder rock elements in favor of soft rock and power ballads which were already the hallmark of Carmen tracks on Raspberries albums.

In 2004, Carmen, along with original Raspberries members Jim Bonfanti, Wally Bryson and Dave Smalley, reformed the band for a series of sold-out live performances in cities across the United States. Carmen has stated that he planned to write new harder-edged songs for the band to perform in the same vein as those which the Raspberries performed in the 1970s.

Solo career

His first two solo singles were chart hits in 1976. Both were based on melodies by Sergei Rachmaninoff: "All By Myself," based on Piano Concerto No. 2 hit #2 in the United States and #12 in the United Kingdom, where it would be his only charting hit; "Never Gonna Fall in Love Again", based on Symphony No. 2 reached #11 (Hit #1 for 1 week on the Adult Contemporary chart). Two years after its 1975 release, the album was certified Gold in 1977 for sales of 500,000 copies. "That's Rock 'N' Roll" was also a #3 hit single for singer Shaun Cassidy.

Carmen's second album came out in the summer of 1977 after a year-long delay, and featured such backup players as Burton Cummings, Andrew Gold, Bruce Johnston and Nigel Olsson. It spent 13 weeks in the Billboard Top 200, peaking for two weeks at #45. It produced the Top 30 hit "She Did It," but the title track, "Boats Against The Current," only managed to scrape the bottom of the chart. A third single taken from the album, "Marathon Man," became his first solo single not to hit the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Shaun Cassidy again made the Top 10 in 1978 with Carmen's "Hey Deanie."

Carmen followed up with two more albums (and declining chart fortunes, though the single "Change of Heart" broke the top 40) until 1980, before temporarily withdrawing from the music industry. Five years later, after Mike Reno and Ann Wilson topped the charts with the Carmen-penned ballad "Almost Paradise," he resurfaced on Geffen Records with a second self-titled album and a further top 40 hit, "I Wanna Hear It From Your Lips." A track from that album, "Maybe My Baby," later became a country hit for Louise Mandrell.

However, it was a few more years before Carmen made a real pop culture comeback with two songs: first with hit from the 1987 movie Dirty Dancing, "Hungry Eyes" written by John DeNicola & Franke Previte, and then with the self-penned "Make Me Lose Control." Both songs became Top 5 hits on the music charts. However, Carmen did not follow these hits with a new album.

The year 2000 saw the stateside release of I Was Born to Love You, which had been released in 1998 only in Japan as Winter Dreams. Carmen eschewed the use of a band on the recording, playing most of the instruments and programming the drum parts himself. The album did not find a large audience, but Carmen has continued to enjoy success placing songs with other artists over the years.

Personal life

Carmen has taken a laid-back approach to music for most of the past decade, working only when the mood strikes him. He moved back to Northeast Ohio from Los Angeles a few years ago, supporting his wife, Susan, and their two children, Clayton and Kathryn, with songwriting and publishing royalties from his past hits.

Discography

The Raspberries

Solo Albums

Solo Singles

External links

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