Did Prog Rock kill Raspberries, Badfinger, Big Star?

Eric thinks so.

Here's a great interview: http://www.popmatters.com/pm/features/article/47713/all-by-himself-no-more-an-interview-with-eric-carmen

I can certainly appreciate their frustration, but others found a way to compete on the radio.

I know these guys weren't known for long form songs, but lots of the prog bands had great commercial success when they pared it down in length into bite sizes like the Raspberries.

I think it may be more accurate to say they didn't fit well on long form FM radio playlists.

 

I don't believe prog rock killed Raspberries anymore than I believe that punk killed prog. Times and taste simply change.

 

Hey, I like both the Raspberries AND Jethro Tull!.....

 

Because, of course, no prog bands did any songwriting or harmonizing ever.

 

The Raspberries died a sudden dead because people got tired of their boring and redundant teen anthems.Comparing them to Badfinger is laughable.

 

Within 8 months , I had bought both Tull's "Aqualung" and Badfinger's "Straight Up", when they came out. It wasn't any kind of conflict of interest for me!

 

What a lot of b.....t

 

Sorry, but I don't agree with that at all.

"Overnight Sensation" a teen anthem?

Most of The Raspberries downfall was internal with musical differences within the band and poor promotion from Capitol. Picking "Crusin' Music" for a single instead of "Play On" was a real boneheaded move if there ever was one.

 

I've got to agree in that the Raspberries were not in the same class as Badfinger.

 

Meh. Prog rock killed prog rock. Disco, radio and changing tastes were nails in the coffin.

 

Yes.

That too.

 

Yeah, I don't ever remember Prog Rock ruling the airwaves. There were great pop singles all through the early seventies. The Guess Who and Three Dog Night didn't seem to have a problem. Of course, I didn't know there was a line drawn between these groups until the revisionist journalism of the 80's to the present.

 

As much of a Rasperries fan I am, I'm disappointed that Mr. Carmen would offer such a silly point of view. Another prog hater who never actually listened to it, it seems.

 

I never really got into prog much in the 70's. That didn't happen till mid 80's for me. But I did buy ELP's Love Beach when it came out. Memory serves that it had short length tracks and I enjoyed a couple of the songs.



Those fashions never did for me. I didn't have enough chest hair.

 

At least he admits that they were critical darlings. I read how good they were in the rock 'n' roll press, then I heard the record and disagreed, and went back to records I did enjoy, of which there were plenty. There's really no shame in making records for 16 year old girls to enjoy, and he shouldn't feel hurt because records which appeal to 16 year old girls don't necessarily have universal appeal. He should have stuck to appealing to his core audience and not worried about their older brothers.

I read an interview with Zappa once where he said he knew who his core audience was - 13-18 year old, smart, Jewish males. If other people happened to like the records, fine, but he didn't particularly care one way or the other - he was making records for that audience, and he knew what they liked and that he'd screwed one up if they didn't like it. Eric could have learned something from Frank, maybe he wouldn't be so bitter.

 

No, what's laughable is taking two excellent bands, each with their own different strengths, and pitting them against one another in a misguided effort to make one "better" than the other.

Until the day I die, I'll never understand some people's obsessive compulsion to do this. I also have a hard time understanding someone who likes Badfinger but doesn't like Raspberries. But if that's your thing, fine...why not just leave it at that? What is the point of putting one band down in the foolish belief that this will somehow elevate the other?

I also agree with a subsequent poster. If you think Raspberries did nothing but record "boring and redundant teen anthems," you obviously haven't listened to them in a long time. It may be instructive to remember that Rolling Stone -- not a publication known to have much of an interest in "teen anthems" at the time -- made Starting Over its Album of the Year in 1974.

 

I have great respect for Eric Carmen, but I think he's overly simplifying things here.

People are gonna like what they like...you can't make them like something that doesn't speak to them. It may be true that Raspberries' success on the charts and their initial appeal to teenage girls worked against others being willing to give them a chance -- particularly when their music matured on their final album.

But that's just the way it is...in any case, if someone's own musical tastes are that severely dictated by what his or her friends think of them, it's time for that person to take up another hobby. I'm not sure, as an artist, that I would want the approbation of a listener who was that shallow.

I was 20 years old and DJ-ing at an "underground" radio station in 1972 when Raspberries hit. That didn't stop me from singing their praises...when I did a show at the end of the year on which I played the ten best Top 40 hits of the year, "Go All the Way" and "I Wanna Be With You" were among them. I just liked good music of any kind. I always wondered what Eric and Wally must have thought when I went backstage after the first show of theirs I saw -- in full shoulder-length center-parted hair, mountain man beard hippie mode -- and told them how great I thought they were!

Eric is also soft-pedaling the forces that caused Raspberries' demise...they were more personal than they were musical. And he certainly shows no understanding of the problems Big Star and Badfinger went through.

 

I remember an article in Mojo (the one on cult bands) where, I think it was, Alex Chilton said that the Ten Years After/ Zeppelin sound was what was really popular around the area and no one had any interest in what they were doing...of course the band had a ton of problems but a regional success probably would have smoothed over lots of them.

 

The early seventies were a potpourri of musical sounds and styles.
The era was like a big musical salad - everything tossed together, yet distinct. I had the Raspberries first LP and one or two 45s along with singles & LPs by Yes, Emerson Lake & Palmer, Jethro Tull, and probably more.

 

Quite! No need to look further than that.

 

I'm sure what Carmen was referring to was only a part of the whole story. Disliking prog is equitable to liking pop. He could as easily have stated that they limited themselves to what they liked.

This is the problem with discussing anything music history. Fans and musicologists have this intense need to understand every last step in a band's metamorphosis, from beginning to end. They read into it whatever they need to to satisfy their own sensationalistic desires, from understanding Paul being out of step on Abbey Road to Carmen's offhand statement about prog. It is interesting, but needs to be taken in context.

I am soooo tired of arguments sans substance regarding rock history. Carmen was there. His words should be taken as his view of truth for that fact alone. And whether you like the Raspberries or not should not even be a consideration.

I personally thought the quote somewhat enlightening. And, yes, I do and did like the Raspberries.

Frank G

 

Is there any surprise that the Raspberries and Bay City Rollers audiences thinned out when they turned 15?

 

No offense, Lord, but this statement is misguided on a number of levels.

First, to equate Raspberries and The Bay City Rollers shows an ignorance of the music both made. Raspberries recorded 100 percent self-written material and played all the instruments on their records.

Secondly, to believe that Raspberries' audience consisted of only sub-15-year-olds shows an ignorance of musical history. Because some of their material appealed to teenage girls did NOT mean that said appeal was limited to them.

For many of us who grew up with The Beatles and so much other great 60s music, Raspberries (along with Big Star, Blue Ash, Badfinger, et al) were musical salvation in an era when rock was becoming increasingly self-important, self-indulgent and boringly bombastic. They definitely carried us through to the time when punk provided a much-needed correction.

 

Not if in my opinion one of the two ''excellent'' bands is not so excellent,and certainly no effort needs to be made to prove that Badfinger is the better of the two.

I have a hard time understanding this statement.To me they're two very ''different bands''.Obviously neither you or Mr.Carmen thinks so.

People have been trying to elevate The Raspberries into something they're not for the last 30 years.

That's the kiss of death right there.

 

Well said. I was under 15 at the time the Raspberries were big. I loved their quasi-Beatles-ish / Badfinger sound, the driving guitars and rock riffs, the melodies, and so on. I never considered them even remotely to be a teeny bopper group like the Bay City Rollers.