You know a song has real pop culture significance when it’s still being featured in major movies decades later. Take “Go All the Way,” for example. The upbeat rocker was a big hit for the Raspberries back in 1972, when it went to #5 on the Billboard Hot 100. Then, years later, it made two comebacks via the silver screen: First, in 2000, it was featured in Cameron Crowe‘s iconic Almost Famous; next, the song appeared in James Gunn‘s 2014 blockbuster Guardians of the Galaxy…and it fit both perfectly.
Interestingly enough, it was a small screen performance that inspired the song. As Eric Carmen told HuffPost in 2014, “Go All the Way” might never have happened if he hadn’t seen the Rolling Stones perform “Let’s Spend the Night Together” on The Ed Sullivan Show.
“That was the inspiration for ‘Go All The Way,'” Carmen explained. “That’s really where it started. Actually, the very first concert that I ever went to was the Rolling Stones. They were my favorite from the very beginning. But I will never forget watching Mick [Jagger] wearing this psychedelic flower shirt rolling his eyes every time he went, ‘Let’s spend some time together.’ The Stones were so threatening, really, to America, to youth, and Ed [Sullivan] was a pretty conservative guy so he was not going to let them sing, ‘Let’s spend the night together,’ that’s just too suggestive, too racy for American television back then.”
“At the same time that this was going on I was listening to Pet Sounds thinking, ‘You know, Brian Wilson‘s getting away with murder, here, compared to The Rolling Stones,” Carmen continued.
“Just the lyrics of ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice?’ ‘We could say goodnight and stay together,'” he went on to point out. “Between the lines the Beach Boys were getting much more suggestive stuff on the radio, but no one batted an eye because they sounded like choir boys and they looked pretty harmless. When I sat down to write I remember thinking to myself, ‘I’ve got to write a song that’s suggestive, but I’ve got to present it in a way that we don’t end up like the Stones.'”
Finally, Carmen had the idea to flip the song from a male to female perspective.
“I saw the title ‘Go All The Way’ and I thought about how I would write it and I thought, ‘What does the girl say to the guy instead of the other way around? That’s much less threatening. That’s got a really nice twist on the story,'” he explained.
“So that was kind of how we did it. One of two things would happen, just based on the title: It was either going to be banned, in which case that would create some controversy and we would sell some albums, or it would be a big smash hit, just based on the title. It turns out it was banned in England, they wouldn’t play it at all, and in America it went top five.”
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“Go All the Way” ended up being the biggest hit the Raspberries would have, though it was quite an accomplishment; Spin magazine even included the song on its list of the “100 Greatest Singles of All Time” in 1989. Carmen went on to even greater success with solo hits including “All by Myself,” which peaked at #2 in 1976, and “Make Me Lose Control,” which went to #3 in 1988.
“The band split up and I had already started writing at least the beginning of ‘All By Myself’ while the Raspberries were still going,” Carmen recalled. “I started working on all these other new songs and somewhere in the back of my mind was the thought that I was not going to be writing for this band, my mind was opened up to the idea that I was writing not for these four guys but for whatever musicians I wanted. I could write much bigger harmony parts, I could write more sophisticated chord things that might not be appropriate for the Raspberries.”
Of course, Carmen’s solo hits ended up being in movies, too…but that’s another story for another day.
Related: 1966 Rolling Stones Hit, Written by a 22-Year-Old About Desperate Housewives, Is Still a Pop Culture Staple 60 Years Later
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