Go All the Way

Carmen wrote it alone. He has said the Rolling Stones' "Let's Spend the Night Together" inspired it, and the title came from Dan Wakefield's novel Going All the Way, which he told the Cleveland Plain Dealer in 2014 he saw in a drugstore. He wanted an openly sexual lyric that listeners would understand and censors could not pin down, so he put the words in the girl's mouth, which he called a different approach. Bryson believed he deserved credit for the intro riff. Shelly Yakus engineered it at the Record Plant and used heavy compression from a prototype limiter. Jimmy Ienner produced, and the B-side was "With You in My Life". Wikipedia's song page also lists a drummer named John Hart, which conflicts with the album page; we do not use it.

It was released as a single in July 1972 and reached 5 on the Hot 100 in October, 4 on Cash Box, 3 on Record World, 5 in Canada and 14 in Australia, and 33 on the 1972 year-end chart. It sold over 1.3 million copies, their only gold certification, and the BBC banned it for suggestive lyrics. Medialoper's Jim Connelly called it one of the ur-power pop songs. Spin ranked it 91st in its 1989 list of the 100 greatest singles. Setlist.fm shows 27 performances across 77 setlists, the band's most played, and they played it on The Mike Douglas Show on November 13, 1973 and on Don Kirshner's Rock Concert in 1974.

Matthew Sweet and Susanna Hoffs covered it on Under the Covers, Vol. 2 (2009), the Killers used it over the end credits of Dark Shadows (2012), and Rick Springfield recorded it for the 2025 tribute Play On. It appears in Almost Famous (2000) and Guardians of the Galaxy (2014). We could not tell whether our upload is the studio single or a live version.