Old Enough to Forget

As a kid I'd belt out "All By Myself" whenever I heard Eric Carmen's song come on the radio. It was a huge song ... at least to me. For a long time that was all I knew about him. I was a product of AM radio and unless my older cousins or my cool Aunt and Uncle had it I was stuck in that tiny bubble.  The first time I saw a Raspberries record I was at my buddy Andy's apartment in the mid '80s and was sitting on the floor looking through his voluminous collection. Andy was a couple of years older than I was and back then he was on the local co-op radio doing his thing. The station didn't have a lot of bandwidth and I couldn't get it out in the suburbs, so I never got to hear him and his dulcet tones. Andy was cool, had a cool voice, and a cool record collection. He loved The Grateful Dead, Michael Nesmith, and thought commercial music was a cancer. His girlfriend, and one of my closest friends Lori and I happened to think Starship's "We Built Th...