The upcoming EC-50: A Celebration of Eric Carmen’s Musical Legacy concert that takes place on Tuesday, Nov. 25, at Lakewood High School will celebrate the 50th anniversary of Carmen’s first solo album. It’ll feature the members of the Eric Carmen band as well as the Lakewood Project and the Lakewood High School Orchestra. Guest vocalists will perform as well, and the concert will feature some 22 Carmen songs.
“Our idea was to do the show we all believe [Carmen] would have done in 2025 with all the instrumentation we have to recreate the sound on those records,” says producer Stephen Knill, who played with Carmen in the early 1970s, over lunch at Root Café in Lakewood. “He did play with one once in Japan, and he got to play with an orchestra for the Arista 15th anniversary. It was for a TV show, and he did a minute of [his hit single] ‘All by Myself.’ When he passed away, I was thinking about him, and I just thought, ‘It’s the 50th anniversary of his album, and we need to do something for it.’ All of us stopped playing with Eric at some point, but that’s just how music works.”
Knill says he knew from the start that he wanted to do the show in Carmen’s hometown of Cleveland, and he took inspiration from Frank Amato’s Christmas Jam that takes place annually at the Music Box and features veteran Cleveland musicians.
A Lakewood High graduate, Knill realized it made sense to collaborate with the Lakewood Civic Auditorium with both the Lakewood Project electronic orchestra and the Lakewood High (acoustic) Orchestra together. At points during the show, there will be 45 musicians on the stage. Knill says that proceeds from ticket sales will go to the school’s orchestra program.
Born in Cleveland, Carmen famously played in the Raspberries, one of Northeast Ohio’s best known musical exports. The group made its first record in 1970 and had a huge hit with “Go All the Way,” a power-pop number from their 1972 self-titled debut.
“The Raspberries were always struggling because Eric has this idea that he wanted to go back and be like the Beatles and put us in suits during the progressive rock era,” says Knill. “They couldn’t get arrested except as a teeny bop band, and they weren’t teenagers. [The record label] Capitol held contests like ‘win the Raspberries rolls.’ They were Free fans, and they liked hard rock. There were two sides to the band. There were ballads and hard power-pop.”
For its fourth album, 1974’s Starting Over, the group banked its success on the single “Overnight Sensation (Hit Record).” It didn’t turn into the smash hit that the band had hoped for.
“It just wasn’t happening,” says Knill. “Eric’s producer decided it was time for Eric to go off and do something different. Eric had already had some ideas. He wanted something that was going to be an amalgamation of what he did but he was in love with Beach Boys harmonies. The Raspberries had some songs like that, but it wasn’t their forte. He wanted people who were master students and he wanted more instrumentation. He wanted keyboards, for example.”
The Eric Carmen Band then came together, and Carmen released his self-titled debut in 1975.
“We were nervous about recording, but we went to the studio early and played Who songs prior to recording, and that helped our nerves,” says Knill.
The group made that album, and it yielded the song “All By Myself,” a seven-minute ballad with a Rachmaninoff piece in the middle. “All By Myself” became a major hit.
“We did some warm-up dates at places like the Agora, but we had an agent who was also the agent for the Beach Boys,” says Knill. “He put us on Beach Boys dates. He put us on a run of 15 to 20 Beach Boys dates. And then, he put us on the road with the Sweet, which was an awful match. We were on the road with them in January. It was in ice hockey rinks. We got to places that had boards on the ice, and the grand piano was going out of tune. The Sweet audience was more of a hard rock audience, and we didn’t mesh well. The Beach Boys tour was a dream; the Sweet tour was a nightmare.”
Despite the circumstances, the group gelled, and Carmen got long well with everyone in the band.
“He wasn’t a prima donna with us,” says Knill. “He welcomed our suggestions musically, but at the end of the day, he decided what we would do.”
Knill and Co. finished the first tour in 1976. Rehearsals were about to start for the second record, but Carmen wanted a bigger sound more like Elton John. The makeup of the group shifted, and Knill and Carmen mutually agreed that Knill would leave the band
Carmen would have a long and illustrious career as a singer-songwriter up until his death last year. Knill took on work at various record labels, including MCA.
Looking back at Carmen’s legacy, Knill says the music holds up because Carmen wrote “great songs.”
“The melodies are incredible,” says Knill. “Eric was a tremendous melody and chord writer, and his lyrics were really good too. I like to say Eric wrote about two things: love and sex and his need to be a highly successful pop star. The problem is that with the exception of ‘Go All the Way’ being in Guardians of the Galaxy, people don’t remember the music. But we’re introducing the orchestra kids to this music, and they are going, ‘This is amazing stuff.’”
Subscribe to Cleveland Scene newsletters.
Follow us: Google News | NewsBreak | Reddit | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter
Related
Jeff Niesel
Source link