I was recently challenged by a high school classmate on Facebook to post photos of the covers of five albums that influenced my taste in music, over a period of five days. (No explanations, no reviews, just covers.) It was REALLY hard for me to pick just five albums (let alone resist explaining why I'd chosen them!), but I did it.
One of the albums I chose was "
Raspberries Best" a 1976 greatest hits album I'd owned in high school. I wanted to include an album that represented the power pop/garage band/new wave sounds I have always loved: tight harmonies, a hook-laden melody, a catchy guitar riff. It's a sound that dates back to the Beatles & the other British Invasion bands of my childhood (and I did have a Beatles album on my list), but I tried to think about what Beatles/British Invasion-influenced music I'd listened to and been influenced by myself as a teenager. I considered albums I'd loved in the late 1970s and early 1980s by Cheap Trick, The Knack, The Cars, The Bangles and The Romantics -- but decided to go a little further back to
Raspberries, power pop ensemble extraordinaire (whose lead singer,
Eric Carmen, went on to a successful solo career). :)
I've written before on this blog about Raspberries and my love of power pop, and how my interest in the band was rekindled. Likewise, posting about the album on Facebook got me checking out
Raspberries Facebook fan group, as I do periodically. I was tipped off there about a book on Amazon, available in Kindle format, about lead singer Eric Carmen, written by Bernie Hogya (who runs the Eric Carmen website) with Ken Sharp. Within minutes, I had it downloaded to the Kindle app on my cellphone (thus ending my COVID reading slump, for now anyway, lol).
"
Eric Carmen: Marathon Man" is your standard rock & roll biography about one of the most influential yet underrated musicians of the 1970s. Both Raspberries, his best-known band, and Carmen (as a solo artist and songwriter) had some fabulous hits and critical acclaim, but ultimately never achieved lasting success (albeit they have retained a loyal cult following to this day). In that respect, their story is reminiscent of another great power pop band of the same era, Big Star (which I wrote about
here).
Reading this book, I was reminded of another rock & roll memoir I read
earlier this year, "Good Lovin'" by Gene Cornish of the Rascals, another great band that never quite achieved the lasting fame it deserved. Unlike Cornish's book, there's not a whole lot of sex or drugs here. Like Cornish's book, there is plenty of rock and roll -- including the sadly familiar tales of internal band rivalries and rifts, clashes of egos, mismanagement, record company ripoffs and legal battles.
Both books were self-published. The benefit of self-publishing is that we get to read a story that we probably wouldn't have seen otherwise, about a great-albeit-lesser-known artist/band. The drawback of self-publishing is the lack of professional oversight. Like Cornish's memoir, "Marathon Man" is LONG (about 470 pages!!), rambling and occasionally repetitive, with some spelling errors that a good proofreader would probably have caught.
The writers did a very thorough job of researching their subject and interviewing Carmen and the members of all the bands he's played with over the years, as well as others he met and worked with along the way. There's plenty of name-dropping and cameo appearances by everyone from John Lennon and Joan Jett to Bruce Springsteen, Joe Walsh, Brian Wilson and Ringo Starr -- and Carmen pulls no punches in letting us know his opinions about everyone, both for better and for worse. (I was tickled to see him give props to Burton Cummings, the former lead singer of the Guess Who and an elder statesman of Canadian rock & roll, from my home province of Manitoba.)
But did we really need to read multiple, detailed versions of the same event from every person involved in it? (Some of the quotes go on for pages -- and it's not always clear whether they came from an interview at the time, or years later in retrospect.) Did we need to see complete tour schedules from 45 years ago? (This kind of material might be interesting to some superfans, but it could have been handled in an appendix at the back.) There's also a lot of very detailed technical explanations about (for example) what microphone was used on what track, what chords were used in what song, and how certain songs came together. Perhaps other musicians might appreciate this knowledge, but most of us simply aren't that interested in that level of detail.
On the flip side, while the level of musical detail in the book is exhaustive, there's very little content about Carmen's personal life, apart from some early chapters about his musical education and awkward school days. I recognize that people are entitled to their privacy, but a little more information might have rounded out the picture better. At one point, about halfway into the book, he mentions his brother and I thought, "Brother?! He has a brother??" Apart from names & dates, there's very little information about his two marriages (he's remarried for a third time since this book was written) and two children, although he does talk about how much he loves being a dad.
For all the book's flaws, though, it was still an interesting and revealing behind-the-scenes look at a great band, singer and songwriter. I especially enjoyed reading the final few chapters about the original Raspberries' reunion shows (2004-09). There's no explanation about why there haven't been any further shows since then (Carmen & the other band members are now all 70 or thereabouts), but it does end the book on a high note.
Even if you're not interested in reading this book, I would highly recommend finding and watching some clips from the Raspberries' reunion shows on YouTube (at one time, you could view an entire concert, but it doesn't seem to be there any more -- although I believe there's a DVD available...), and/or listening to the two live reunion show albums,
Live on Sunset Strip and
PopArt Live -- and/or the band's original four albums from the early 1970s, of course. Pure awesomeness. :)
Three stars on Goodreads.
This was Book #14 read to date in 2020 (Book #1 finished in May). I'm currently at 47% of my 2020 Goodreads Reading Challenge goal of 30 books, and am (for the moment, anyway...!) 3 books ahead of schedule to meet my goal. :)
