Raspberries – Go All The Way

Eric Carmen wrote a hit so suggestive the BBC banned it — then sold 1.3 million copies of it in America, the only Gold single the Raspberries ever earned.

In the summer of 1972, a band of clean-cut Cleveland kids in matching stage suits put out a single that the BBC refused to play. Go All the Way sold more than 1.3 million copies in the United States anyway, reached number five on the Billboard Hot 100, and became the only Gold record the Raspberries ever earned. The band that looked like they’d been sent by central casting to reassure your parents had just written one of the most quietly subversive singles of the decade.

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The Raspberries came out of the wreckage of two locally beloved Cleveland bands, Cyrus Erie and the Choir. Singer and songwriter Eric Carmen and drummer Jim Bonfanti built the group in 1970 around a shared conviction that had gone unfashionable: that the three-minute pop single, in the tradition of the Beatles and the Beach Boys, was worth taking seriously in an era chasing longer, heavier, more self-important rock. Guitarist Wally Bryson and bassist Dave Smalley — the latter just back from a tour of duty in Vietnam — completed the classic lineup. Their demo reached producer Jimmy Ienner, a bidding war followed, and Capitol, the American label of the Beatles and the Beach Boys, won them.

The debut album arrived in April 1972 with a raspberry-scented scratch-and-sniff sticker on the cover, a piece of gimmickry that did the band’s serious-musician cause no favors. But the songs inside were built with real care, and none more than Go All the Way. It opens with a Bryson guitar riff so muscular it startles — a hard-rock body slam that then folds into one of the sweetest pop choruses of the year. That collision of crunch and melody is the whole power-pop idea in miniature, and countless bands, from Cheap Trick to the Knack, would spend the rest of the decade chasing it.

How the censors got beaten

Carmen has been candid about what he was doing. He wanted, in his words, to write something explicitly sexual that teenagers would grasp instantly but that the authorities couldn’t quite pin down. His inspiration was the Rolling Stones’ Let’s Spend the Night Together, another single that had run headfirst into broadcasters. His solution came from studying the Beach Boys: on Pet Sounds, Carmen noticed, they slipped racy sentiments past the censors through sheer melodic sweetness and their wholesome image. So he put the forward line in the girl’s mouth rather than the boy’s, a small inversion that made the whole thing land differently. The BBC banned it regardless, which throttled its chances in Britain. American radio embraced it, and the record climbed to the Top 5 on all three principal US charts — number five on Billboard, number four on Cashbox, number three on Record World.

It was the band’s second single and their commercial peak. The parent album only reached number 51, and the Raspberries quickly became known as a singles act — a run of finely made hits including I Wanna Be with You, Let’s Pretend, and Overnight Sensation (Hit Record) that never quite translated into album sales or the critical respect Carmen felt the group deserved. The tension told. Smalley and Bonfanti left after the third album, and by 1975 the Raspberries were finished, Carmen departing for a solo career that produced All by Myself and, later, Hungry Eyes.

What the group left behind kept growing in stature. The power-pop label that critics attached to bands like Cheap Trick and the Knack traces straight back to the template the Raspberries built, and Go All the Way is the record most often held up as its founding document — three minutes that argued melody and force were not opposites. Eric Carmen died in March 2024 at the age of 74, his standing as one of the great American pop craftsmen long since secure. The riff he and Bryson opened with in 1972 still does exactly what it did then. It startles first, and then it sticks.