Don’t Want To Say Goodbye

An Ode To Eric Carmen by Adam Marsland

Eric Carmen, lead vocalist/songwriter for power pop legends Raspberries and a successful solo artist, passed away in early March. After reading longtime indie pop rocker and current YouTube host Adam Marsland’s personal and heartfelt memories of his musical hero on Facebook, I asked if I could share a version of it here. I think it says a lot about the influences that shape artists, and the lifelong relationships we have with the music that most inspires us.

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It's midnight in a hotel room in Phnom Penh and instead of sleep, I am going to embark on my longest-ever post, to explain why there wouldn't be a musician named Adam Marsland—or at least not the one some people know and tolerate—without Eric Carmen.

I grew up in a small town in upstate New York, and my musical tastes were first formed by a red transistor radio that was glued to my elementary school ear—the thrilling sounds of the electric pop music of the 1970s. I didn't know anything about who was making those sounds until I was 12, when I first learned that a guy named Elton John made a high proportion of the records I loved, and soon after that, that the “‘surfin' and cruisin’” Beach Boys actually had a fascinating slew of little known later albums that did the same thing for me in a different way.

That is about the time I started writing songs (badly) and playing piano and guitar (badly) and trying to form some sense of my own musical identity. One thing quickly became clear: I was a fish out of water in small town, upstate New York in the early '80s. My musician brother loaned me a lot of records for my musical education, which was useful, but I quickly grokked that not only were he and I vastly different people, but he and I had vastly different musical tastes.

Likewise, the stoner aesthetic still ruled in my high school and while rock music may not have moved on from the '70s, pop music certainly had.

I liked a lot of what was on the radio at that time, but I hadn't found anybody yet that I truly related to like Elton John and The Beach Boys, so I started actively searching for artists that sounded like them, or would give me that same reaction. Through reading music books and vague awareness of one or two of his songs, I had an idea that this Eric Carmen guy might possibly be in that wheelhouse.

I remember very well going to Bennett's, the small town grocery that was one of two places to sport a small rack of the latest hit and remaindered LPs. Flipping through the albums, I found a cut out of Carmen’s solo album Boats Against The Current. It was selling for $3.99 or something.

The credits on the back of the album thrilled me—this guy played piano AND guitar. That was a big deal to me because in small town New York in the early '80s, that's what I wanted to do and you were not SUPPOSED to do that. The only person around who played multiple instruments himself was my brother, and he caught a lot of flak for being too big for his britches (yeah, even more than me!).

In those band-centric days, it was frowned upon unless your name was Stevie Wonder. I was under a lot of pressure from people to just stick to piano and not develop on guitar. But I wanted to do both. And now, here was a guy that did both. This was HUGE. I had some backup now, a role model for my idea to be a multi-instrumentalist.

WOW. That record hit 16-year-old me right in the face.

One song in particular, "Run Away," seemed to speak directly to me and a desperate (and frankly, in retrospect, creepy) crush I had on a classmate of mine. I was so moved by this song that with it buzzing in my brain I walked to her house in the middle of the night—18 miles round trip, lasting until sunrise—just to look at it from a distance, and walked home. Yes, extremely creepy, but I stress I didn't knock on the door or anything, just made this futile gesture that only I knew about, so infected was I by the song's air of desperate romance. (Incidentally, said individual has re-friended me on FB 40 years later so I guess she's forgiven me for how batshit I was back then, for which I thank her if she reads this).

From there I moved to acquire more of Carmen's work. I don't remember which I got first, Raspberries' Best or his debut solo album, but holy shit! They both knocked me on my ass. Carmen's debut solo album was The Beach Boys record that they should have made in 1975 but did not, and I was especially blissed out by "Sunrise" which was pure Beach Boys for the first half, pure Elton John for the back half.

But nothing compared with "Overnight Sensation (Hit Record)" on Raspberries' Best. Nothing.

It did everything I ever wanted a pop record to do. It had movements that flowed. It built to a crescendo, receded, built again, with ever-cresting intensity. Each voice, each instrument, had a special place in the mix. Then the piano fade out...and the first time I listened, when the thundering drums came crashing back for that final, cacophonous, gorgeous fade out, I was so startled I remember flipping over a couch.

It was the greatest thing I'd ever heard. I played it over and over and over and over. I felt for years, and maybe still think, "Overnight Sensation (Hit Record)" is the greatest single record ever made. It's my "Be My Baby,” if you will. It simply is, for me, absolutely perfect; everything I ever wanted in one record.

Oh, but there's so much more.

After that I went searching for the original albums and Carmen’s other solo records, and that was a hunt back then. I remember I hit the jackpot in a dusty, barely visited music store with an LP section in Ithaca, which had 3 of the 4 original Raspberries albums in dust jackets, having sat there for 10 years.

The next album that kicked me in the ass was Starting Over. Michael McBride's aggressive Who-adjacent drumming was a revelation. Until then, rawk music had alienated me. All of that was about repetitive riffs and guys with mustaches and socks stuck up their trousers who liked to taunt me in the locker room. I remember listening to two hours of Led Zeppelin on the radio after Jon Bonham died in 1980 and that shit did absolutely nothing for me.

I hated rock.

But here was this dude that just banged the shit out of the drums, and the band was just clamoring out of the speakers, but it was still melodic, harmonic, and beautiful. The Starting Over album was the first time I ever ‘got’ rock, that the sheer power and strut and force of aggression could still be something I related to if it was packaged in the right way.

The ballads hit me hard too. They were unabashedly flowery, and even syrupy at times, but they had so much passion and commitment. If I played you demos of my songwriting in my late teen years, you'd hear piano ballad after piano ballad after piano ballad. Because of Elton? Not so much. He more influenced my style of piano playing. The emo balladry was pure Carmen damage, and for 3 or 4 years that's mostly what I wrote, believe it or not.

A few years later, I was 20 and had made the fateful decision to move to Los Angeles, which was again something kids from upstate New York simply did not do.

It was completely and utterly out of my wheelhouse but once I had made the decision, there was no stopping me. For the year prior to my departure, I only slept four hours a night because every day after work I retreated to my basement studio to practice playing so I could be good enough to go toe to toe in L.A.

I had one big problem—though I desperately wanted to sing, I could not. I especially could not sing high. I had a stubborn baritone that was completely out of place in the shrieking world of late '80s hard rock. So I hit upon a solution, inspired by Brian Wilson's singing along with the Four Freshmen to increase his range. I made a 90 minute mix tape of Eric Carmen—a guy with huge range and melodic scope and real rock savvy—and I sang along with it every freakin’ night for months. My best musician friend called the process "Carmenizing."

And although I was still years away from becoming a decent singer...my range DID increase. I added a full octave. It wasn't always pleasant to listen to, but I got the notes, figured out how to do crossovers, acquired a head voice. The odd, strident and occasionally maddening falsetto singing I later brought to Cockeyed Ghost that people mistook for me imitating Paul Stanley...it was Carmen all the way, baby.

In years to follow I learned I had much better upper register tones in me if I sang in different ways, but I can still scream and sing with force and authority and loudness up there, and that's all from imitating Carmen's caterwauling, octave-leaping vocals.

Then I was in L.A., 1990, and I remember someone gave me this list of celebrity phone numbers. I thought it was a joke.

I saw Eric Carmen's name on the list. I went, ‘Yeah right!’ and dialed it. An answering machine picked up. "Hello, this is the Carmen residence..." Shocked and a little terrified, I hung up. What was I going to say?

Then it was 1993. I had just gotten the at first shattering, but then liberating advice from pre-fame Rivers Cuomo (of Weezer) to ditch my retro obsession and get with the '90s. Once I internalized that advice, and understood how the pop sensibilities I loved related to the indie music of the time, a flood of creativity followed. I started meeting new like-minded bands, including Wondermints, who I'd heard about already for a year as people were always comparing my music to theirs (universally unfavorably, I might add!). My songwriting and singing were now finally starting to gel however, and when Carmen himself began managing Wondermints, I found an opening.

I approached Eric's partner Trisha Daniels (or maybe she approached me, but I doubt it) and she encouraged me to give her some music. She passed it on to Eric who listened to it—ERIC LISTENED TO IT!—and passed on the word that I should write some more songs and send them in. (The unspoken part undoubtedly being "because these ones suck, but I'm too nice to say so.”)

However, in my oh-so hungry and eager state at the time, I took this as a thread to follow. I immediately went into my garage at my then-new pad in Reseda and wrote an entire album's worth of new songs right then and there. I demoed them with the help of guys from my old band—Rob Cassell and Robert Ramos, who would later join Cockeyed Ghost, and Justin Fisher of Shufflepuck—and dubbed it "Here Comes Eric's Tape," a pun modeled on the rejected demo called "Here Comes Eric."

I sent it right along to Eric via Trisha, and heard nothing back. But regardless, I now had a completely new slate of songs that would become Cockeyed Ghost's first set list when they debuted a few months later. Eric's encouragement gave me the motivation to come up with all those tunes.

A few months later, I finally met the man, who was at a club catching Wondermints. And what happened? He walked up to me, extended his hand, and said, "You must be Adam Marsland!"

Well, phuuuuck.

Flash forward a few more years and Cockeyed Ghost are now an established L.A. band and the ex-Raspberries are doing club shows (without Eric) as The Elderberries.

I engineered an opening slot and demanded to introduce them....and then a horrible thought hit the pit of my stomach. I went up to Wally Bryson and said, "Honestly, I'm terrified of you guys watching us because you'll hear how many of your songs I ripped off." Wally chuckled and said jollily, "That's OK! Eric ripped off everybody!"

McCartney said it best: “Good artists borrow. Great artists steal.” But there's a lot of Raspberries DNA in Cockeyed Ghost records. A lot of it was unconscious, but when I realized it later (or when it was pointed out to me), it was like, ‘Oh shit. Yeah, there it is.’ We got accused of ripping off Cheap Trick a lot, but we almost never really did. Raspberries? Oh yeah. Big time.

Raspberries were SO important to Cockeyed Ghost that the precise recording where I transitioned from the old style to the new, and used the CG guys for the first time, was a cover of "If You Change Your Mind" for a Raspberries tribute album (which was rejected, as all my tribute submissions were in those days, for less adventurous candidates).

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So, let's go way forward to the night of Raspberries' epic reunion concert at the House of Blues which later formed the basis of their live album.

By then I was working as a legal secretary and actually had money, and when I saw the ad I went, "Well hey! I can actually afford to go!" So, I bought a ticket.

The next part of this story still amazes me.

By then I knew lots of people in the L.A. pop scene, but I hadn't pulled any strings or anything. I just had a general admission ticket like everybody else and I'm standing in line and this woman comes up and says to the guy right in front of me, “Hi! I'm from the House of Blues and we're giving away a backstage pass to anyone who can answer this question correctly. How many House of Blues locations are in the U.S.? Is it...?" And she gave four different multiple choice answers.

The thing is, I had just returned from a tour of House of Blues venues with Counting Crows and Stew, so I had a pretty good idea what the answer was, so I tapped on the shoulder of the guy and said, "Let me help you...it's..."

And the dude, in the most dickish way possible, hand-waved me away and with an arrogant tone pointedly answered the question by himself. And was wrong. The woman then moved on from him to me and, with a conspiratorial look on her face (because she thought the guy was a dick, too), asked me the same question. I answered correctly. And now, suddenly, I was gonna be backstage for the concert.

Upstairs I went, encountering a lot of people I knew and, if I'm completely honest, quite a few of whom did not like me for clique-y music reasons and were not thrilled to see me there. So, I kind of hung around, spent some time upstairs, but headed back down to see the concert, which was great as everyone will tell you.

After the show I meandered back upstairs, I think looking for the Wondermints guys to say hello. And there they were, hanging out with Carmen; I think someone gestured me into a seat and there I was too. And gradually, as the conversation went on, it somehow thinned out until it was just Carmen and me talking. We literally got so engrossed in the conversation that we were there gabbing until they closed the place and kicked us out.

I wish I could remember all we talked about, but I do remember going through all kinds of topics. I asked him why he stopped making records after 1980: "Because Clive Davis destroyed my confidence," he candidly replied. He bemoaned Jimmy Ienner as a producer for Raspberries for not giving the music enough heft. I asked him who he would have preferred: “Roy Thomas Baker,” he said without hesitation.

And so the evening went, just an unforced one-on-one conversation with one of my musical heroes. Shooting the shit. All for the best of reasons—because I was there as a fan, had pulled no strings whatsoever; I'd lucked into the pass and naturally fallen into the conversation.

I never met him again, but every now and then Darian and Nick from Wondermints—who went on to work with him on his final album—would tell me that Eric had said, “Hey! Say hi to Adam Marsland!” And I'd kinda smile and go, ‘That's pretty cool.’

Without Eric Carmen, I wouldn’t be the Adam Marsland that’s played music for the last 40 years.

And I take some comfort and satisfaction in knowing that even though what he did wasn’t fully appreciated in its time, seeing the tributes that came today reminded me that when you give something extra—when you buck the trend, straying from the pack—it can take an awfully long time for people to separate what you did from the expectation and projections they put on you.

I chose a version of that path for myself, and there are days I feel frustrated about it. But I chose it. Doing it that way was the whole point. And I do notice that as time goes on, it makes more sense to people. And that's the thing, see. People were hung up for so long on how Carmen wore his influences so blatantly on his sleeve—or later, why he did so many soppy ballads when he was a hard rock singer par excellence.

The answer? He wanted to play music he loved, and he loved all kinds of music. Back in those days, that wasn't an acceptable answer. You had to be this or that. But finally, all the bullshit falls away, and there it is. It's the right reason. And that's the kind of guy I wanted to be too.

When I picked up that LP in Bennett's 40 years ago, I saw a blueprint for what I could become. A path forward.

Thank you, Eric Carmen. For everything.

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Adam Marsland spent three decades dividing time between Los Angeles and touring the world as a singer, songwriter, producer, session musician, and leader of ‘90s indie pop band Cockeyed Ghost. He now lives in Southeast Asia and is creator/host of two long-running YouTube series, Adam Walks Around and Pet Squares: A Geek’s Guide to The Beach Boys. Marsland is also featured in the new oral history book, Generation Blue, and the Cockeyed Ghost song “Keep The Sun” is on the accompanying vinyl compilation.

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