“Go All The Way” Is A Sonic Treasure

by Kevin Burton

   My tribute to the late Eric Carmen continues today with a closer look at The Raspberries’ rocking masterpiece, “Go All The Way.”

   Carmen died in his sleep last weekend at age 74 according to his wife Amy. His songs, including “No Hard Feelings” and “Boats Against The Current,” which we looked at yesterday, will never die.

   Carmen was frontman for the Raspberries, who in 1972 released “Go All The Way”  on Capitol Records.

   My friends at Merriam-Webster dictionary define the noun hook in ten senses. Part of the first is “something intended to attract or ensnare,” and the eighth is  “a device especially in music or writing that catches the attention.”

   True enough. But I prefer the definition of singer-songwriter Bryan Masters who says the  hook of a song is “the cool part.”

   With its dreamy harmonies, sexy lyrics and straightforward rock and roll, “Go All The Way” has multiple cool parts, playing off one another.  

   Hey, “Go All The Way” was banned by the BBC. Just that tells you how cool it is.

   The song’s quirky-but cool construction was no accident. Carmen told SongFacts how he came to emphasize “the cool part.”

   “ I remember ‘Go All The Way’ vividly. The year was 1971. I was 21. I had been studying for years. I had spent my youth with my head between two stereo speakers listening to The Byrds and The Beatles and later on The Beach Boys – just trying to figure out what combinations of things – whether it was the fourths harmonies that The Byrds were singing on ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ – I must have worn out 10 copies of that first Byrds album listening to it over and over, and turning off the left side and turning on the right side trying to figure out why these certain combinations of instruments and echo and harmonies made that hair on your arms stand up.

   “I did the same thing with Beatles records, and I tried to learn construction.”

   “Then I went to school on Brian Wilson. That was a real breakthrough for me because he was doing things that I thought were so incredibly sophisticated before anybody was doing anything even close. The Pet Sounds album is, to me, the best pop album of all time. Brian introduced me to the idea of writing a bridge for a song that really had nothing to do with the verse and chorus.”
   “In the early days, I spent a lot of time concentrating on writing bridges that took you some place that you didn’t expect to go. Many songwriters wrote a song, the song’s in the key of C, it comes time for a bridge and they go to A minor. That bored me.”

   “Brian would go to E flat or somewhere strange, and he managed to do it smoothly. He also had a way of delivering you out of the bridge in such a way that you felt like maybe the song had modulated up a step, but you were really back in the original key. That, to me, was artwork.”

   “So when I sat down to write ‘Go All The Way,’ there were a couple things I had in mind. I thought, ‘What part of the song is it that people really want to hear? It’s the chorus.’ As a result of all that, ‘Go All The Way’ has a 10-second verse, and then the chorus is a minute long. I figured just to get to the chorus as fast as I can. That was the plan behind the song. I repeated that when I wrote ‘I Wanna Be With You.’”

   The bridge includes the call-and-response “come on” line that is cool just about wherever employed, such as in the Beatles “Please Please Me.” But the way Carmen uses it, it builds back up into the chorus like some kind of sonic orgasm. 

   I have always known there was something about this song, but never understood it until reading the story on SongFacts.

   There is a case to be made that this song is indecent. It is about a girl trying to convince a guy to ‘go all the way,’ meaning to have sex with him. Carmen told Blender magazine in 2006 that he was inspired by The Rolling Stones performance of “Let’s Spend The Night Together” in which Mick Jagger had to sing it as “Let’s spend some time together.”

   But this song, as is true of wide swaths of rock and roll, is not just young people with long hair being loud and rebellious.

   In college I used to go around making the case for rock and roll as poetry and art without knowing how to fully articulate it. With “Go All The Way,” I rest my case.