Eric Carmen Was a Power-Pop Legend. Then He Vanished

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s soon as he answered his phone, Clayton Carmen knew he was getting bad news. It was March 2024, and by then, nearly a decade had passed since he had seen his father, Eric Carmen — the power-pop trailblazer and Raspberries frontman best remembered for the hits “Go All the Way,” “All by Myself,” and “Hungry Eyes.” Clayton’s stepmother, Amy, was on the other end of the line. The 27-year-old hadn’t seen her since his high school days, when Clayton knocked on the door of the house that Amy shared with his dad in an attempt to finally reconcile their differences. Carmen and Amy responded to the overture by closing the curtains, calling the police, and reporting a trespasser.

“I remember going, ‘Oh, boy, if you’re calling me, I can’t imagine this is good,’” Clayton says. “She told me, ‘Your dad died yesterday.’”

Eric Carmen’s brother, Fred, received a similar call from Amy. Fred hadn’t communicated with his older brother since 2016, even though they were as close as siblings could be for the first 55 years of his life. Fred blames Amy for inspiring a series of lawsuits that separated Eric from his brother, his son, and 24-year-old Kathryn Carmen, Eric’s only other child. He had some questions.

“I said, ‘Was he sick? Were there issues?’” Fred says. “She said, ‘No. We went out to dinner the night before and he seemed fine. We watched TV before going to bed. The next morning, I ran some errands while he slept in, like he always did. When I came home, he was gone.’”

“I’m not commenting on my husband’s death, but that is not what I said to Fred Carmen,” says Amy Carmen, who initially declined to be interviewed for this article, but eventually responded to a list of inquiries.

In search of more details about his brother’s passing, Fred says he phoned the coroner’s office in Maricopa County — Carmen had lived in Paradise Valley, Arizona — to ask for a copy of the autopsy report. He was told it wasn’t available, and later learned that Amy had filed a lawsuit against the police, fire department, medical examiner, and the county’s public-health office to prevent the report’s release, even to Carmen’s children.

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“We should all get the respect of being remembered for our accomplishments during our time here,” Amy says, “not the most personal moment in our lives — the time we leave this earth.” (Last September, a judge agreed with Amy, stating that the release of records relating to Carmen’s death would cause Amy and the estate “substantial grief and harm.”)

On Eric Carmen’s official website the day after his death, a vague announcement informed fans only that he had died “in his sleep, over the weekend.” Eleven months later, the exact cause of Carmen’s death at 74 is just one of many questions about his enigmatic life that linger. Why did the singer, fiercely private, go so public in his support of Donald Trump during his final years, posting furious MAGA missives that horrified many longtime friends and fans? Why did he almost completely abandon his music career after scoring worldwide hits in the late Eighties? What caused him to sever ties with his only children? And how did the family schism widen to the point that Amy is now accusing Clayton and Kathryn of once plotting their father’s murder, in one of multiple lawsuits Amy has been involved in following Carmen’s death?

In an attempt to answer these questions, I spent the past six months reporting on Carmen’s life through interviews with family members, his former manager, close friends, bandmates, and fellow musicians who drew a lifetime of inspiration from his work. The complex portrait that emerged varies wildly, depending on who’s doing the telling. His bandmates and friends who stayed with him to the end describe Carmen as a kind and generous suburban dad, happily retired, madly in love with Amy, and shattered by the loss of his relationship with his kids. His brother, children, and ex-wife, Susan, describe a bitter, paranoid conspiracy theorist haunted by the past, lost in the face of shifting musical tastes, hopelessly addicted to alcohol, and manipulated by Amy to turn on his family.

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Amy strongly denies turning Carmen against his children, and claims they wanted nothing from their father besides his money in the last decade of his life. “I loved Eric and stood by him through the tough times, unlike his brother and his children,” she says. “Eric had every reason for wanting to be estranged from [his family]. But please, be sure to blame the new wife.”

The one thing nobody disputes is that Carmen was a perfectionist and musical genius. “After he died, I saw he hadn’t made music in over 25 years,” says Steven Van Zandt. “I was like, ‘Goddamn!’ It’s such a shame, because I can tell you as a writer, performer, arranger, and producer, his records were some of the greatest ever made. They were right at the top. Right at the top.”

The Final Days

The final arc of Eric Carmen’s life began in 2014, when he came across the Facebook page of a former NBC-affiliate meteorologist in Cleveland. It was Amy Murphy, who was then living in Arizona. Carmen, still in Cleveland at the time, began an online and then in-person courtship with Amy, ultimately marrying her in 2016. “I received a Facebook direct message from him,” Amy said at Carmen’s memorial service last year. “It simply read, ‘Did you know you were my favorite weather girl when you were in Cleveland?’ ”

Before long, the couple moved into a new house together in Cleveland. From the start, Carmen’s children, Clayton and Kathryn, didn’t take to Amy. “The comparison I always make is to The Parent Trap. I always think of her as the evil stepmom/girlfriend,” Clayton says. “When my dad was around, she was very smiley, happy, and sweet. But my sister and I knew from the very beginning that she was really, really, really bad news.

“My father was just a very manipulatable, paranoid, isolated person,” he continues. “And suddenly someone comes into his life and, instead of his kids, who will push back on him, she’s a sycophant. She’ll say yes to whatever he wants. She’ll agree with him on his zaniest, most deranged conspiracy theories. She was just what he wanted.”

Amy emphatically denies this categorization of their relationship. “I never asked him for anything,” she says. “Unlike the other barnacles in Eric’s life, I didn’t need anything.”

A page from Kathryn’s diary, dated Feb. 12, 2016, when she was 15, reveals her state of mind while living part-time with Amy and her father. “I can’t stop dwelling on how much I hate them,” she wrote. “Clay and I have discussed killing Eric and driving his Jag to California. Our plan sounds better and better … I got so angry tonight I couldn’t stop shaking. I can’t be responsible for my own actions at this point.”

“MY FATHER WAS JUST A VERY MANIPULATABLE, PARANOID, ISOLATED PERSON.”

Clayton Carmen

The diary entry was cited as evidence that Kathryn and Clayton were “planning Eric’s murder” in a recent legal filing by Amy’s attorneys. “Amy took multiple photos of my diary to drive a wedge into the relationship with my father,” Kathryn writes in an email to Rolling Stone. “These antics started as soon as she moved into the home. She would often comb through my brother and I’s rooms looking for anything that could harm a parent-child relationship. I am truly saddened that Amy would try to publicly misuse the private ramblings of a child who was experiencing so much heartbreak and pain at home.… Of course my brother and I never had any intention of causing physical threat to our father as she’s suggesting.”

In April 2018, Carmen and Amy left Ohio to resettle in Arizona, but withheld telling the other members of the Carmen family; they resisted any attempt by Clayton and Kathryn to reconnect, as well. “This was Eric’s choice,” Amy says. “Eric had no desire to reestablish contact with any of them. Eric’s legal counsel and all of his close friends know that they individually and collectively made his life a living hell.”

According to their close friends, Carmen was extremely happy in the final six years of his life, and even drastically reduced his drinking, a problem with alcohol that had plagued him for much of his career. “[Amy] was really good for him,” says Raspberries drummer Jim Bonfanti. “She was a different person than Eric, but she’s smart, and she really loved him. He was as happy as I’d seen him.” Bernie Hogya, who co-wrote the 2011 biography Eric Carmen: Marathon Man with Ken Sharp, echoes Bonfanti’s assessment. “I’d never seen him happier,” he says. “She really grounded him.”

The start of Carmen’s relationship with Amy happened to coincide with the political rise of Donald Trump. Carmen became one of Trump’s staunchest celebrity defenders on Twitter, especially when Covid began, which he saw as a conspiracy to undermine the then-president. “Unemployment skyrocketed, the ‘lockdown’ crashed Trump’s economy, teachers don’t want schools to open,” he wrote in one tweet. “People lost businesses they worked their whole lives for. All to hurt Donald Trump. We’re just collateral damage. And the REAL point is mandatory vaccination with an ID for all.”

When Joe Biden won the 2020 election, Carmen had a public meltdown on Twitter, slamming the “mainstream media.” “It is time to turn off the MSM, en masse,” he wrote when the networks reported Biden had defeated Trump. “Watch Newsmax and OANN … The entire MSM has called the election for Biden. Not surprising, since they were all part of it. Please, President Trump, do not concede.”

In the tense weeks that followed, Carmen started to tweet slogans associated with the fringe-right QAnon movement, like “the storm is coming,” along with absurd lies about Dominion and Smartmatic voting machines rigging the election, and fevered, Alex Jones-style declarations about an impending apocalypse. “I know all about ‘The Great Reset,’” he tweeted on Nov. 17, 2020. “I’m wondering how they intend to accomplish it. I’ve been thinking more along the lines of taking out the power grid and the financial system in one massive cyber attack. Whatever it is, it will make Covid look like a small bump in the road.”

Some of his friends did their best to ignore Carmen’s online outbursts. “When he went sideways politically, we just didn’t discuss politics,” says Van Zandt. “That’s what I do with all my friends when we differ. We may differ politically, but I don’t write people off that way. I’m like, ‘Hey, we see things differently politically, and that’s OK. Let’s not make that part of the conversation. We got plenty of other things to talk about.’”

Back in Cleveland, Carmen’s kids were aghast. “The most I can make sense of it is that he did struggle with depression,” says Kathryn. “He wasn’t religious, and I think he was almost vulnerable to that sense of belonging later on in life that Trump provided. Our jaws were on the ground as we saw everything unfold with his politics.”

“The more that Trump appeared on my TV, the more I would pick up on certain little things about him that reminded me of my dad,” says Clayton. “Just as much as you look at Trump as a textbook narcissist, my dad was a narcissist to the most textbook degree.”

A Musical Prodigy

There’s no denying the musical talent of Eric Carmen. Even before he entered kindergarten, the Cleveland Institute of Music recognized something in the boy. His aunt, Muriel, was a world-renowned viola player in the Cleveland Orchestra, and it was clear her tiny nephew, who loved to hang out in the theater whenever she rehearsed, soaking up the music like a sponge, inherited her gift. “He was playing piano before he could walk,” says Fred Carmen. “I could bang my spoon on a steel bowl and he’d go, ‘C-flat.’ He literally had perfect pitch.”

When Carmen was just three and a half, the Cleveland Institute of Music offered him an enrollment. (To this day, by all accounts, he holds the record as the youngest student in the 104-year history of the organization.) It didn’t take him long to master a multitude of classical instruments, including piano and violin, but he switched to guitar as a 14-year-old after seeing the Beatles perform on the The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964. “I took guitar lessons at the same time,” says Fred. “It was very frustrating for me, because I was going through one book every three months. He was going through three books every three days. He just had incredible natural talent.”

His proficiency on guitar helped him stand out in a school where he very much felt like an outsider. “He had a complex about being the Jewish kid with very curly hair,” says Kathryn Carmen. “He saw the Beatles with their straight British cuts. He really, really wanted that hair. And I think he just became obsessed with trying to get it straight.” (Getting his hair just right was a lifelong quest. By the late Eighties, he toured with a large suitcase devoted solely to hairbrushes and sprays.)

In the late Sixties, Carmen became a local teenage legend for his ability to take complex songs like “Walk Away Renee,” “Sloop John B,” and “The Kids Are Alright” and re-create them onstage. He played in various bands at Hullabaloo clubs and bars all across Cleveland and the surrounding suburbs, eventually teaming up with the cream of the local scene: drummer Jim Bonfanti, guitarist Wally Bryson, and bassist Dave Smalley. They called themselves the Raspberries, not after the fruit, but the slang term for blowing air out of your mouth as an angry retort. “Eric knew exactly what he wanted the band to be,” says Bonfanti. “He wanted us to have something different and special. He was on a mission.”

A big part of that mission was eschewing the excesses that had crept into rock by the early 1970s. To Carmen, pop music peaked around the time of the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds and the Beatles’ Revolver, and he had no interest in drum solos, 10-minute songs, or anything that felt even remotely like prog. “I remember Eric saying, ‘You won’t hear any flute solos in this band,’” says Bonfanti. “We wanted to be the next Beatles, which was a pretty lofty goal.”

They took at least a step toward that goal in 1972, when they released their self-titled debut album on Capitol Records, the same label as the Fab Four. Carmen, Bryson, and Smalley, all still in their early twenties, each came to the sessions with songs they’d written on their own, but Carmen’s stood out, especially “Go All the Way.” Inspired by the Rolling Stones’ “Let’s Spend the Night Together,” it’s a three-and-a-half-minute blast of guitar and layered vocal harmonies, with lyrics told from the perspective of a young woman urging on her boyfriend. “He heard the whole thing in his head,” says Bonfanti, “and he relayed what he was hearing to us.”

“Go All the Way” slowly climbed the Billboard Hot 100 through the summer and fall of 1972, eventually peaking at Number Five. But Capitol had no idea what to do with the Raspberries. The first LP came with a sticker that smelled like a raspberry when you scratched it, and they were marketed to tweens in magazines like Tiger Beat. Their first tour was sponsored by Carefree Sugarless Gum and played largely to high schools. “The label never figured us out,” says Bonfanti. “And our big mistake was not finding the right manager. We handled everything ourselves, and that sort of screwed us.”

The Raspberries’ second LP, Fresh, hit just seven months after the first. On the cover, they look like an early disco band in matching white suits with giant black-tab collars. Once again, all the best songs were Carmen originals, notably “I Wanna Be With You” and “Let’s Pretend,” both power-pop classics that pulsate with a Brian Wilson sense of sorrow and yearning.

The critics, however, were underwhelmed. “After listening to this for a month,” sniped Robert Christgau, the so-called dean of American rock critics, “all I remember is three songs.”

Van Zandt says the reaction was unfair. “The Raspberries were like the Who meets the Beatles,” the E Street Band guitarist says. “And now when you look back, you realize they were inventing power pop.”

But by 1973, just one year after “Go All the Way,” the Raspberries were falling apart due to personality conflicts, poor management, and differing musical visions. When the dust settled, Bonfanti and Smalley were out, and Carmen and Bryson limped forward with two new bandmates, bassist Scott McCarl and drummer Michael McBride, to cut the optimistically titled Starting Over in 1974. Even then they weren’t on the same page. “He was really into the Beach Boys,” says Bryson. “I didn’t see the point in that. I didn’t think you could beat the Beach Boys at their own game.”

HE TOURED WITH A LARGE SUITCASE DEVOTED SOLELY TO HAIRBRUSHES AND SPRAYS.

With his Capitol deal on the line, Carmen poured everything he had into a new song, “Overnight Sensation (Hit Record).” It had been two very long and frustrating years since he’d had a genuine hit record, and the five-and-a-half-minute mini opera was a plea for recognition told from the perspective of an outsider — which is most decidedly how Carmen felt. At 25, he was in danger of becoming a one-hit wonder.

What happened instead to the Raspberries isn’t unique in rock history: Their influence wasn’t recognized until long after they ceased to exist. The band went on to inspire significantly more successful groups, like Cheap Trick and Kiss, and even motivate Bruce Springsteen to lean into pop when making The River in 1979.

“One of my favorite records that summer was the Raspberries’ Greatest Hits,” Springsteen said in 1998. “They were great little pop records. I loved the production, and when I went into the studio a lot of things we did were like that. Two-, three-, four-minute pop songs coming one right after another.”

Springsteen borrowed Raspberries song titles “I’m a Rocker” and “I Wanna Be With You” (both written by Carmen) and used them on new songs he cut for The River. “Bruce is not shy,” says Van Zandt. “He believes in my philosophy, which is you’re only as cool as who you steal from.”

The Birth of a Hit

Susan Carmen, Eric’s then-wife, happened to be in the Los Angeles studio where Celine Dion was busy making sure the Carmen family wouldn’t have to worry about money for a very long time. It was the mid-Nineties, and Dion was working with producer David Foster on songs for her hugely successful album Falling Into You. Susan was brought in by songwriter Diane Warren to say hello to Dion, having no idea that the French Canadian singer was recording vocals for “All by Myself,” Eric Carmen’s 1975 hit.

“Celine was having some difficulty with hitting some of the notes,” says Susan, who was married to Eric for more than 20 years. “David Foster came in and jokingly said, ‘If you can’t hit that note, Whitney’s two doors down.’”

That was all the inspiration Dion needed: She hit the note, and “All by Myself” became inescapable on Top 40 radio during the late Nineties. The recording made Carmen millions — money that went very far in the Rust Belt town of Cleveland. “Celine Dion did us a lot of favors,” says Kathryn Carmen. “I grew up very, very privileged.”

The story of “All by Myself” goes back to 1975, right after the Raspberries imploded and Clive Davis considered signing Carmen as a solo artist to his new label, Arista. His interest grew considerably once he heard a piano ballad Carmen had written about the loneliness he felt after the Raspberries split, drawing musical inspiration from Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 (so much inspiration, in fact, that the Rach­maninoff estate squeezed him for 12 percent of the song’s publishing). “All by Myself” “captured that feeling that everyone has had, at one time or another, and I purposely tried to keep the lyric very simple and conversational,” Carmen told biographers Sharp and Hogya. “Like I was talking to a friend, or just thinking out loud. I guess it all worked.”

The song reached Number Two on the Hot 100, and when the follow-up ballad, “Never Gonna Fall in Love Again,” hit Number 11, it looked as if Carmen was going to become a genuine pop star.

But much like what had happened with “Go All the Way” three years earlier, the brief flash of success was followed by a long period of turmoil and bitter frustration. The problem began when Carmen realized that Arista expected a second album of songs similar to “All by Myself.” “Clive said that ‘Once you go pop, you can never go back,’” Carmen told Sharp and Hogya. “I assume he meant that you can never be considered a ‘serious rock artist’ again. I wish he’d have mentioned that to me before I signed my contract, because if he had, I wouldn’t have signed with him.”

Carmen envisioned his second solo album as a grand artistic statement on par with Abbey Road — he even unsuccessfully attempted to recruit Beatles producer George Martin — and the songs he wrote told the story of a life filled with loneliness and heartbreak. He called the album Boats Against the Current, taking the title from the last line of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.

But working in London with producer Gus Dudgeon, who helmed Elton John’s best Seventies albums, Carmen failed to finish a single song. He returned to America with hefty studio bills and, according to Fred Carmen, an addiction to cocaine. “He stayed at my house for six weeks after that,” says Fred, “until we were able to get him back to normal.”

Carmen then headed to Los Angeles to produce the album himself, with musicians like Toto drummer Jeff Porcaro, guitarists Richie Zito and Andrew Gold, and Rolling Stones saxophonist Bobby Keys. The Beach Boys’ Bruce Johnston helped arrange the background vocals and coaxed Brian Wilson into the studio to sing on the Beach Boys-inspired “She Did It.” When all was said and done, Carmen had spent $400,000 (or a little over $2 million in 2025 dollars) on Boats Against the Current.

Hoping to make that back, Davis insisted on adding background vocals to the sparse title track to gear it toward radio, a move that horrified Carmen. Davis also tore up Carmen’s carefully crafted track sequence. “It’s completely backward from what Eric wanted,” says Hogya. “He said to me, ‘If you listen to it backwards, it’s my biography. It’s my life story. But if you listen to the way Clive decided to track it, it doesn’t make any sense.’”

Despite all of Davis’ meddling (or perhaps because of it), the album was a complete stiff, peaking at Number 45 on the Billboard 200. A 33-date tour was booked, including quick runs opening for Elvin Bishop and Hall and Oates, but half were canceled. Only years later would Boats Against the Current be recognized as a classic. “It has an overall kind of a melancholy to it that feels real and sincere,” says Brian Wilson bandleader Darian Sahanaja, who grew close to Carmen in the Nineties. “Like Brian did on Pet Sounds, he’s trying to capture this loss of innocence, and a yearning for acceptance.”

Carmen would never again have that much freedom in the studio. On 1978’s Change of Heart, he succumbed to Arista’s demands and added tacky disco sounds to many of the tracks — but bookended the album with the orchestral ballads “Desperate Fools” and “Desperate Fools Overture.” “The album starts and ends with this really sorrowful song about being in L.A. and being broken,” says Hogya. “That was a lament of him being forced to do what’s going to come in between those songs.”

Two more failed albums followed, and Carmen went into career hibernation. “The music business changed into something that he wasn’t familiar with so much, and didn’t love,” says Fred Carmen.

It took two of the most successful teen movies of the Eighties to bring Carmen’s career back from the dead. The revival began in 1983 when he co-wrote the Ann Wilson-Mike Reno smash duet “Almost Paradise” for the Footloose soundtrack, and continued in 1987 when he agreed to cover “Hungry Eyes,” written by John DeNicola and Franke Previte, for Dirty Dancing. The Patrick Swayze movie became a cultural phenomenon, and its soundtrack spent an astounding 18 weeks at Number One on the Billboard 200. To capitalize on the success, a Dirty Dancing tour was put on the road in the summer of 1988 that visited 90 cities in just three months.

Carmen hit the road with model Susan McClurg, whom he started dating after noticing her on a billboard in Cleveland, but the glamorous rock & roll tour she imagined quickly became a grind. “It was also really rough on his voice. Well before midway through, he was getting injections in his vocal cords because his throat was bleeding,” Susan says. “He got a little sloppy, too. He would have too much to drink, and he would forget the words to the songs. It wasn’t ideal.”

Carmen was forced to bow out, leaving him with bitter memories of life as a touring artist. But he did have a new song, “Make Me Lose Control,” that Arista released on a Greatest Hits package designed to cash in on “Hungry Eyes” mania. It became an even bigger hit. Momentum was starting to build again, but Carmen hit the brakes when he learned that Davis expected him to work with outside songwriters for his next album.

Two years passed, the alt-rock revolution was on the horizon, and slick pop hitmakers were falling out of fashion. Carmen all but vanished from the public sphere. After a few years of living with Susan in L.A. and attempting to write hits for others, he moved back to Cleveland to start a family.

“He just didn’t know where he fit in the pantheon of music stars anymore,” says Fred Carmen. “That frustrated him greatly, and he just retracted.”

The Unexpected Reunion

Unwilling to compromise his vision and bend to record-industry demands, Carmen turned his attention toward his family. His son, Clayton, was born in 1997, and Kathryn followed three years later. “To young kids, he was great,” says Susan. “He adored them.”

He took a brief break from suburban-dad duties in 2000 and hesitantly returned to the road after he received an offer to join Ringo Starr’s All-Starr Band, alongside Jack Bruce of Cream, Simon Kirke of Bad Company, and Dave Edmunds. Carmen worked meticulously to learn every nuance of the classic-rock set list. But his drinking problem, which Susan first noticed on the Dirty Dancing tour a dozen years earlier, had grown into a major issue on a tour that, according to a Starr dictate, was 100 percent dry. “Ringo was a tough taskmaster,” says Susan, who remembers Carmen’s manager David Spero calling her on a few occasions to warn, “He’s about to get kicked off the tour.”

“I think it was very important to Ringo to have everybody on the same page,” Spero says. “We had guys like Jack Bruce, who was obviously a heavy drinker. But he would go to a different bar than the hotel bar, and he would do it on his own. But you don’t bring it to work, and Eric brought it to work.”

The Ringo tour, including a triumphant hometown show on the Cleveland lakefront, lasted a mere eight weeks. When it resumed the following summer, Roger Hodgson from Supertramp was given Carmen’s role as the band’s keyboardist.

“HE GOT A LITTLE SLOPPY. HE WOULD HAVE TOO MUCH TO DRINK AND FORGET THE WORDS.”

Susan McClurg

Around this time, whispers of a Raspberries reunion were in the air, but bringing the idea to fruition took years of false starts and nearly hit the skids when Carmen made it clear that he wanted a larger share of the spoils. After months of rehearsals where he obsessed over every note, Carmen and the Raspberries finally booked dates in November 2004, at the opening of the House of Blues in Cleveland.

“I get goose bumps thinking about it,” says guitarist Paul Sidoti, who was plucked from obscurity for the shows by Carmen, three years before Taylor Swift hired him as her guitarist and bandleader, a position he holds to this day. “We were so excited. From the minute we opened with ‘I Want to Be With You,’ we were floating. You just felt the love in that room.”

The feedback from fans and the press was ecstatic, with many calling it one of the all-time-great reunion shows in rock history. For Carmen’s kids, it was their first real opportunity to see their father perform live. “We didn’t really understand how much people loved him,” says Kathryn. “It was mesmerizing. It was so funny to see my teddy-bear dad as a rock star.”

The one-off gig turned into a small series of shows in 2005 and 2007. “I remember going to the House of Blues in Hollywood,” says Sahanaja. “We all couldn’t believe we were hearing these songs live.”

But the reunion burned out in April 2009, when the Raspberries agreed to play a lone date at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame on the weekend of the induction ceremony. Sidoti was helping Swift prepare for a tour, so the Raspberries hired multi-instrumentalist Paul Christensen to take his place. In rehearsal, he worked up a sax solo to play during “Overnight Sensation.” “Guess what happens when we get to that part of the song?” Bonfanti says. “Wally played a guitar solo over the sax solo. I looked over at Eric. He looked over at me. I knew it was done.” Bryson doesn’t recall this incident but does remember it being a very tense evening. “Eric’s ego could fill a stadium,” he says. “And he kept interjecting with suggestions at soundcheck. I told him to ‘shut the fuck up.’”

The Raspberries never played again. But two years before the Hall of Fame gig, there were already signs that things were not well with Carmen. “I went to see him after the L.A. House of Blues show in 2007,” says Sahanaja. “He was completely tanked. He kept talking and talking about how much he loved a song of mine. And I was so, so uncomfortable. I actually had to leave, because it was like, ‘I don’t like seeing you like this.’”

Down the Rabbit Hole

The headline on TMZ read “Hungry Bloodshot Eyes.” Below it was a two-and-a-half-minute dashcam video of Carmen in 2008 stumbling through a field sobriety test in Orange, Ohio, after running over a fire hydrant. When the cops showed up, there was a half-empty bottle of vodka in the front seat. His blood alcohol level was .23, nearly three times the legal limit.

It was Carmen’s second DUI in just two years, and a judge sentenced him to 30 days in jail. His marriage to Susan was in shambles. “He used coke early on,” Susan says. “By the time the kids came around, it was just alcohol. When we lived in L.A. [in the early Nineties, before they married], he went to Betty Ford. It was a condition of the marriage. He spent six weeks there, but he just couldn’t maintain it. And as soon as his father died in 2007, he just went off the rails.”

“I almost mark my time with him into two periods,” adds Clayton Carmen. “Before my grandfather died, and after my grandfather died. It almost felt like anything before then was just childhood. And anything after that point, I feel like I became so much more clearly and keenly aware of his problems that he has, with drinking obviously being a big one.”

Carmen’s brief attempts at Alcoholics Anonymous went nowhere. “He was a pretty stark atheist,” says Kathryn. “AA requires you admitting that there is a bigger force in play, and kind of taking a back seat and being humbled. And my dad couldn’t get with the program, quite literally. He didn’t believe in it.”

This all came to a head in 2007, when an inebriated Carmen caused the band to miss a flight to a show on the West Coast. “He kept losing his boarding pass,” says Bryson. “He was really out of it. It seemed a little immature to me to get so drunk.” According to Susan Carmen, this incident was followed by one of many interventions that ultimately went nowhere.

This is not an easy topic for Bonfanti to address today. “I did all I could to help him,” he says, wearily. “I supported him as much as anybody could. But it was hard.” (Amy Carmen doesn’t deny that Eric had a significant drinking problem before they met. “Eric claimed that the sadness and toxicity swirling around him during those years ‘would drive anyone to drink,’” she says.)

Carmen’s alcoholism was his family’s primary concern, but they were also worried about his mental health. Conspiracy theories had interested him to the point that Susan claims he once filed a Freedom of Information Act request to get materials about the Kennedy assassination from the Warren Commission. As time went on, they occupied even more of his time. He became especially fixated on chemtrails, the baseless notion that the government is using airplanes to add toxic chemicals to the atmosphere. “A jet would go over our house and leave a little white trail,” says Susan. “He’d look up and say it was an effort to sterilize people.”

“It was very hard to get him off of the topic of chemtrails,” says Fred Carmen. “I would show him the articles that debunked all of that stuff, but true believers are true believers. There was no talking him out of it.”

Chemtrails even came up around 2013, when Carmen worked with Sahanaja and his group, the Wondermints, on “Brand New Year” for the Essential Eric Carmen collection, which would end up being his final song. “I left the room to set up some mics,” says Sahanaja. “I came back and heard the word ‘chemtrails.’ Our guitarist Nicky [Walusko] was kind of a conspiracy guy himself, and they were getting real enthusiastic about it. And I had to say ‘Guys, we have to work …’”

THE HEADLINE ON TMZ READ “HUNGRY BLOODSHOT EYES.”

(Amy disputes the notion that Carmen was a conspiracy theorist and says she never heard him refer to chemtrails. “Eric was a voracious reader and was up on all current events, topics, and controversies,” she says. “He liked engaging in conversation about such controversies, but that did not make him a ‘conspiracy theorist.’ People who want to disparage Eric by claiming this most certainly have their own agendas in doing so.”)

Eric Carmen also refused any offers to perform live. “He could have been a huge casino act,” says Spero. “But he was afraid of failure. He was afraid he’d be playing in front of empty houses.”

Around 2005, Spero approached him with what he calls a “heavy-six-figures” opportunity to play “All by Myself” on TV in France. “I said, ‘Hey, four first-class tickets to Cannes, a week in an A+++ hotel, and a shitload of money,’” says Spero. “‘All you have to do is play “All by Myself” with an orchestra, and you will own the master. You couldn’t ask for a better deal.’ He wouldn’t do it.”

No member of Carmen’s family had heard this story before, but they aren’t surprised. “We never went anywhere, really, because Eric didn’t want to travel,” says Susan. “He became very reclusive when we were in L.A. in the mid-Nineties, and then grew more intensive. We could never plan a vacation where he would ever have to get up before noon,” she adds. “No activities. He wouldn’t go to things at the kids’ school if it was in the morning.”

According to Clayton, Susan, and Fred, Carmen spent most of his daytime hours in his office trading stocks online or reading the fan forum on his official website, often posting himself. “That was the perfect scenario, because he could communicate with people, but he didn’t have to leave his chair in his office, and no matter what, at the end of the day, the focus always came back to him,” says Clayton.

To put it mildly, Clayton doesn’t feel that Carmen was a very good father. “There were just certain really classic all-American-dad things that I didn’t get from him that I did really want from him,” he says. “I would beg him to go outside and play catch with me, and most of the time it was like, ‘Oh, it’s too humid out, it’s going to mess up my hair.’ There was always an excuse. He was very, very different from your standard paternal, father-figure archetype.”

“There should be no mistake that he loved Clayton and Kathryn,” Fred Carmen says of his brother. “But I don’t think he really had a concept of what it was to be a parent.”

Estranged

By everyone’s account, Carmen and Susan’s divorce, which began in 2009, was brutal, stretching out for roughly a decade as they battled over money and custody of the children. They eventually reached a shared-custody agreement that left no one satisfied. “There wasn’t much communication between the two of them,” says Kathryn. “I was getting into that age where I was like, ‘Please don’t make me bring my duffel bag to school.’”

Carmen eventually moved into an apartment near the Beachwood Place mall on the east side of Cleveland. He tried to date women online, but it didn’t go very well. According to Clayton and Fred, he met a woman online named Nancy, who claimed to be decades younger than him. They spoke on the phone nearly every day for almost two years, often for hours at a time. But they never met, despite some close calls where she canceled at the last minute. “She concocted this whole elaborate story about how she had been a nurse in Afghanistan, and returned with some sort of rare illness that doctors couldn’t figure it out,” says Clayton. “My dad took it upon himself to do this research and identified some sort of rare disease that he thought she had. My sister and I basically told him for eight months, ‘You’re getting catfished.’ And he was completely in denial about it.”

“I remember printing out an article that said ‘Top 10 Ways to Know You’re Being Catfished,’” adds Fred. “She checked every box, and he refused to believe it.”

Not long afterward, Carmen met Amy, and as they dated and eventually married, he slowly became estranged from his brother, his ex-wife, and both of his kids. Fred Carmen says that was by Amy’s design. “The plan was to first pull me away from Eric and then pull the children away from Eric, so that she was the sole source of everything, and that she would control him,” he says. “To her credit, she was very effective. Again, Eric is a conspiracy theorist. She made him believe his entire family was engaged in a conspiracy against him.”

“We were excluded from their lives,” replies Amy. “As soon as everyone thought the money train had ended, Clayton, Susan, and Kathryn were all about getting whatever they could get.”

In the early days of the marriage, Amy says, she was a devoted stepmother. “I [tried] to include Clayton and Kathryn in our lives,” she says. “I was very happy to help both of them with their homework, and prepare meals. I straightened Kathryn’s hair before school, as she ate the breakfast I prepared for her, and I welcomed and taxied their friends. I helped Eric cover the ceiling of Kathryn’s bedroom with red and white balloons to surprise her on Valentine’s Day.”

Both sides of the Carmen family divide cite a wild party that Clayton threw at Eric and Amy’s house when they were out of town as a turning point in their relationship. “I should have had you charged with breaking and entering, and vandalism,” Eric wrote to his son in a 2018 email.

“From that point on,” says Susan, “neither Clay nor Kath could go over to the house unless they were invited. It was like they were strangers in their own home.”

At this same time, Eric Carmen filed a lawsuit against Fred, alleging mismanagement of his finances, improperly using money to provide care for their mother, and excessively charging him legal fees throughout the divorce period. Fred says he first got wind that this might be coming when Carmen and Amy were at his house for a party. “My nephew came to me,” says Fred. “He said, ‘You need to watch out for Amy. I just heard her say to my dad there was no way you could have paid for your new deck on your own.’ That was the kind of thing Amy was saying to him to make him conclude I was stealing from him.”

Amy says this is completely inaccurate. “I only saw Fred’s deck one time, and frankly it wasn’t that impressive,” she says. “I never told Eric or concluded that Fred ‘was stealing from him.’”

Fred denies any wrongdoing. They wound up settling out of court.

When Clayton graduated from high school and planned on enrolling at NYU, he says, he learned that his father wasn’t willing to pay for it. Per what Amy calls “a very questionable prenuptial agreement” with his ex-wife Susan, Eric had to provide tuition for an in-state school. But Eric wouldn’t pay for Ohio State, either, leading to a legal battle between the father and the son. “I never, ever, ever wanted it to come to that,” says Clayton, “but those were the options I was facing, and it was like, this isn’t little, menial shit, this is my college education, and this is something that gives me the basis to start the rest of my life.”

Amy says that Clayton never took his academic career seriously; he was once penalized by the school’s Committee on Academic Misconduct (Clayton doesn’t deny this: “I fully fucked up,” he says). She provided an email Eric sent to his son regarding college housing. “Right now the only achievement I’m interested in is you getting good grades and graduating in eight semesters,” Eric wrote. “We are talking about your college education. The education for which I am paying.”

Clayton’s tuition bill remained a point of acrimony. He claims that Eric and Amy instituted grade minimums, and forced him to live in the cheapest dorm and use the skimpiest meal plan. “The two of them really terrorized me for my first couple years of college and made me jump through hoops,” he says. Amy scoffs at this. “If begging Clayton to sign up for classes or for on-campus housing, so their father could pay for them on time, is making someone ‘jump through hoops,’” she says, “then [he has] a severely skewed view of the rest of the world today.”

Armed Guards at the Memorial

The details of Carmen’s death remain shrouded in mystery, but some of his friends weren’t surprised when they heard the news in March. Says his former manager Spero: “He didn’t take care of himself. Towards the end, he’d gained a lot of weight.”

Fred and Clayton say they heard similar stories from Amy about him taking too many vitamins in the final weeks of his life, and essentially overdosing on them. “Amy said Eric was taking 200 supplements in the morning and 200 vitamin supplements at night,” says Fred. “And he had lost 11 pounds because he was taking Ozempic.” (Amy doesn’t deny her husband took supplements, but says, “I never told anyone that Eric took ‘400 supplements a day.’”)

When Clayton and Kathryn asked about a memorial service, Amy was initially vague. They learned the details secondhand: She had organized a private ceremony at the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix for April 20, 2024. “Please,” read a note attached to the invitation, “do not forward or share details of the celebration with anyone.” To make sure Clayton, Kathryn, and Fred wouldn’t come, she stationed armed guards outside the doors.

“At what point does a person take a step back and say, ‘OK, I literally hired armed guards to keep my deceased husband’s children away from attending their father’s funeral?’” says Clayton. (“I chose to have a beautiful but private celebration of Eric’s life,” says Amy. “I unapologetically did not invite anyone who was disparaging or hurtful to my husband.”)

The bad blood continued on Aug. 8, when the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame held “Eric Carmen Day” and posthumously awarded him a key to the city of Cleveland. For the first time in years, Amy was in the same room with Susan, Clayton, and Kathryn. “Kathryn had been told she’d have time to share some remarks she wrote,” says Clayton, who recently took a job at the talent agency CAA, in the music brand-partnerships division, “but Amy threw a tantrum backstage and delayed the ceremony by 45 minutes, so my sister and I watched from the crowd without any acknowledgment and had to watch Amy speak and accept the award on my dad’s behalf.” (Amy says that any delay in the ceremony was not due to her, and claims it was the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, not her, that opted to pull Kathryn from the program at the last minute.)

Nobody in attendance had any idea there was backstage rancor. Heartfelt video testimonials were delivered by some of the biggest names in rock & roll: Kiss’ Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons, Van Halen’s Sammy Hagar and Michael Anthony, Cheap Trick’s Robin Zander, John Oates, the Beach Boys’ Al Jardine, Foreigner’s Lou Gramm, Peter Frampton, Clive Davis, and others. “I only wish he were here to accept this award and to see this amazing crowd of people who loved him and loved his music,” Amy told the crowd, fighting back tears. “Although, I have all day felt him with us in spirit.”

The word that comes up most often when people talk about Eric Carmen is “perfectionist.” He was a perfectionist when it came to crafting songs in the studio, refusing to settle for anything less than the music he heard in his head. He was a perfectionist when playing live, insisting on months of rehearsal prior to every tour, where he instructed every musician on exactly how to play their instrument and their parts. And when things didn’t go exactly his way, Carmen preferred walking away to accepting anything short of his exact creative vision.

It was an attitude that produced stunningly brilliant pop music that will endure for generations. It also caused him to abandon his career, and retread inward in the latter years of his life. But despite all of the heartbreak he left behind, on both sides of the Carmen family divide, his loved ones are working, some with help from therapists, to focus on the good times and his enormous gifts.

“Eric was, on balance, generally, a good person,” says Fred. “There were things that Eric did that made you scratch your head or say ‘That’s just not the way you should be handling this stuff.’ But did he have a bad heart? No, he didn’t have a bad heart. He had a good heart.”

“His God was music,” says daughter Kathryn, who is in the process of finishing up her schooling and working as a buyer for a clothing store. “He told me music was the only connection to something divine he ever had in his whole life. I would watch him sit at the piano and just lose himself. I got to see so much of that. And I do feel so, so lucky. Despite the past seven or so years, I wouldn’t trade any of it for a normal childhood.”

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Senior writer ANDY GREENE attended the Raspberries’ 2007 concert in New York. He considers it one of the greatest reunion tours in rock history.