I've been breathing easy lately as the Grim Reaper appeared to have taken a bit of a holiday. Sadly, he's back, and in the space of 24 hours he took two big names from the world of music, and far too soon.
It was Khayem who alerted me yesterday morning to the sudden death of World Party's Karl Wallinger. What a shock. Like K, I got rather aggravated by various lazy headlines highlighting The Whole Of The Moon in his obituary... great song, obviously, but Wallinger neither wrote nor sang it, although he did play keyboards and sing backing vocals, and may have come up with the synth line, at Mike Scott's request to play something that sounded like Prince. My point is, Wallinger wrote far more songs on his own (including the Robbie Williams hit She's The One), but none of them are as universally recognised as The Whole Of The Moon, so didn't quite provide the story hook the headline writers were looking for. Still, I was surprised by how many of my non-muso friends posted tributes to Wallinger on the Book of Faces... he was obviously better known than the lazy journalists realise.
Mike Scott called Wallinger "one of the finest musicians I've ever known", and our own John Medd called him "a songwriter's songwriter." 'Nuff said.
While I expected an outpouring of love for Karl Wallinger, I wasn't surprised to see Eric Carmen's death go unnoticed by the blogosphere at large... though for me, it's just as big a loss.
Carmen will primarily be remembered for his huge 80s power ballad All By Myself, later converted into a nice little earner for his retirement years by Canadian Megalodonna Celine Dion. I'm sure it's a song you all have an opinion on, and I doubt it's a favourable one in most cases, but I have to admit... long before it was adopted by Bridget Jones and Joey & Chandler in Friends as a symbol of sad-sack loneliness, this is a song I used to sit and have a quiet, self-indulgent cry to in my teenage years. Please don't judge me.
(Classical musos might me like to point out that the verse from All By Yourself is based on the second movement of Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor, while the chorus... well, we'll get to that.)
Those of us who grew up in the 80s will also remember Carmen for his contribution to one of the biggest soundtracks of the era. Dirty Dancing might not be Citizen Kane, but if you were a teenager in 1987 (I was 15), it probably made quite an impression. Nobody puts Baby in the corner!
However, neither of those tunes represents Eric Carmen's greatest achievement in popular music. That came many years earlier, when he was the lead singer of seminal* 70s power pop band, The Raspberries.
(*With apologies to those of you who don't appreciate the over-use of this word in contemporary music criticism... but if you ask me, it's valid here.)
Of the Raspberries distinctive sound, Carmen once said, "Pete Townshend coined the phrase [power pop] to define what the Who did. For some reason, it didn't stick to the Who, but it did stick to these groups that came out in the '70s that played kind of melodic songs with crunchy guitars and some wild drumming. It just kind of stuck to us like glue, and that was OK with us because the Who were among our highest role models. We absolutely loved the Who."
The Raspberries went on to influence the next generation of American hitmakers, including Springsteen, Tom Petty, Guns 'n Roses and Kiss... plus many of their own power pop successors, like The Posies, Fountains of Wayne, Weezer and Silver Sun. A bunch of my favourite artists right there... and they all owe a debt to Eric Carmen. Rest in peace, fella.
Oh, and the chorus to All By Myself? It was a reworking of this old Raspberries tune, written back in the glorious year of 1972.
