Eric Carmen, the voice behind hits like Never Gonna Fall in Love Again and Hungry Eyes, has died aged 74. No cause of death has been given. The rock singer led the 1970s power-pop group the Raspberries before embarking on a solo career.
The man’s music became a fixture in every music collection around love, like the song All By Myself (1975). He once said: “There's not nearly as much fuel in being happy as there is in being miserable. Being miserable is a great catalyst for songwriting…” The song was covered by Celine Dion in 1996 and has appeared in a number of films, like Bridget Jones’s Diary, when Bridget (Renee Zellweger) was alone and drunk on New Year’s.
Before recording All By Myself, he was busy with the Raspberries, which formed in Cleveland, and became an instant success with their self-titled 1972 debut album, featuring the song Go All The Way, which was sung from a young woman’s point of view. The song’s suggestive lyrics proved controversial for some radio stations on both sides of the Atlantic and was banned from airplay by the BBC. The song found a new lease of life when it was included on the first Guardians of the Galaxy soundtrack.
Eric Carmen in performance in 2014
The group’s second album, Fresh, also proved successful and it featured two Top 40 hits, I Wanna Be With You and Let’s Pretend.
After the Raspberries split in the mid-1970s, he embarked on a solo career and the first hit was All by Myself, based on Sergei Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No 2, and then came Never Gonna Fall in Love Again, which was based on a part of Rachmaninov’s Symphony No 2.
Soundtrack moments
The 1980s were kind to him and two of his biggest hits were made part of soundtracks. For 1984’s Footloose, he co-wrote Almost Paradise, which was recorded by Mike Reno and Ann Wilson, and he sang Hungry Eyes, from 1987’s Dirty Dancing. The other hit song from the era was Make Me Lose Control, which reached No. 3 in 1988.
Written by John DeNicola and Franke Previte, Hungry Eyes appears in the film Dirty Dancing in the sequence where Johnny (played by Patrick Swayze) and Penny (Cynthia Rhodes) teach Baby (Jennifer Grey) the dance steps so she can replace Penny in the annual Sheldrake Hotel performance. At one point during the sequence, Penny moves the needle back to the beginning of a record and the volume jumps up, which corresponds with the end of Johnny's dance instructions. Baby has taken Johnny by surprise and he is developing feelings for her. It’s a classic moment in Hollywood history.
Classical elements
The singer had a classical background, which he incorporated into his music. Before he turned three, his parents enrolled him at the Cleveland Institute of Music and by the time he was five, he began violin lessons with his aunt. But he wanted to play the piano. And at age 11 he went back to the Institute of Music to study piano.
His love for classical music can be seen in All By Myself. “The song started with the solo. It started four bars at a time. Eventually, over a period of two months, that entire interlude had been written. Then my quest was to put this in the middle of an actual song. Then it was a matter of trying to figure out what kind of song and how could I do it. I was listening to Rachmaninoff's second piano concerto and I heard the melody which I used for the verse,” he said in 1991.
His classical leanings can also be heard in the song Love Is All That Matters. He was watching a Leonard Bernstein concert where he explained classical music. “It was a lesson of how Bach established a melody in the first eight bars. Then basically, the melody was repeated continually from the beginning to the end of the song, just played in a different register on a different instrument,” he said.
After the 1980s, he faded from the charts but he continued to tour with Ringo Starr and the All-Starr Band in 2000 and again with Raspberries in 2004.
He is survived by his wife, Amy Murphy, and his two children, Clayton and Kathryn.
