Welcome back my friends to the flamboyance that never ends! Greetings pop pickers and please be welcome to another edition of Fabulously Flamboyant Friday – our occasional Campari and soda-drenched probe into the rainbow and glitter world of contemporary – and in this case very un-contemporary – popular culture. For tonight, dear reader, we shall travel (once more) back through the mists of time, for the first of a short and mercifully occasional series that considers some of the most embarrassing of my many musical guilty pleasures*
* this episode contains absolutely no Phil Collins – Guaranteed!
First of all, I accept no blame in this matter. It’s all my kid sister’s fault. She kept playing the bloody records and eventually they wormed their way under my skin, with the antibiotic-resistant infection they subsequently caused remaining with me for life.
Back in the sensational soggy ’70s, when I was an equally soppy student, heavy metal, heavy rock and prog rock were pretty much my musical religion and, on the surface at least, the rock music scenes of the ’70s and ’80s were my temporal cathedrals of tinnitus and excess volume. And yet here I am, decades later, a decrepit and broken-down relic of a bygone age, still harbouring the shame of my youth – my guilty pleasures from that far-off time.
So it’s high time we took a trip to the confessional, time to fess up to at least one of the many musical sins I’ve spent most of my adult life carefully hiding from my peers. Because, discreetly tucked away at the back of my LP collection, hidden so that none might know, is a pile of albums that point to the love that dare not speak its name: the guilty pleasure I now sheepishly admit – I adore the Carpenters.
There. I said it. Please feel free to mock – ‘er indoors most certainly does. I’ve spent years trying to explain it away as irony, or nostalgia, but none of those excuses hold water. The truth is much simpler: Karen Carpenter’s voice still stops me in my tracks, and Richard Carpenter’s arrangements still sound like the most wholesome, satisfyingly musical architecture ever built upon the softest and floppiest of soft and floppy soft rock – a naff genre against which I have oft railed (in this very organ, in articles wot I ‘ave wrote).
It started, as these things often do, with a sibling. In my case, my kid sister. She had all their bloody records. While I was busy destroying my hearing with Machine Head (endlessly twiddling the knobs on my cheesy little guitar amp, desperately trying to make it sound like a Marshall stack as I played along), she was playing Masquerade; while I was playing Close to the Edge, she was playing Close to You. I pretended to hate it. I probably sneered, and I’m damn sure I made all the required jokes about easy listening, elevator music and songs fit only for Kenny G fans. And I wasn’t alone: I remember a critic at the time, almost certainly in Sounds, Melody Maker or NME, saying that if you could teach white bread to sing, it would probably sound like Karen Carpenter.
But something about that voice kept leaking through the wall and getting under my skin. Karen didn’t belt it out. She didn’t scream. She didn’t really raise her voice much at all. She simply sang, like an angel, with a warmth and precision that felt almost unreal. Additionally, even in their brightest, sunniest songs, there was an undertow, dark shadows moving beneath the surface, a melancholy that even a soppy idiot student like me could detect, even if I didn’t yet have the vocabulary to articulate what those songs were stirring within me. But still I sneered and still I mocked.
It wasn’t that I had problems with ballads per se. Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Free, Led Zep – they all produced some absolute corkers. Those rare moments when the volume, attitude and aggression dropped away to reveal an emotional space where something human and wounded remained. After a while, I began to realise that Karen Carpenter seemed to live there permanently.
For the uninitiated, Richard and Karen Carpenter grew up in New Haven, Connecticut, before their family moved to Downey, California, in 1963. Richard developed into a prodigious arranger and a fine ivory tinkler; Karen became the reluctant star with the voice of an angel and the soul of a drummer (she started out behind the drums and remained a very fine player, long after the industry decided she should stand at the front). They formed a trio in the mid-sixties, The Dick Carpenter Trio, and cut some jazz-influenced material that frankly got them nowhere.
Eventually, under the guidance of Herb Alpert at A&M Records, Karen was prised from behind the kit, prodded to the front and persuaded to take centre stage. Their debut album, Offering, later retitled Ticket to Ride, didn’t set the world on fire, but it did OK and included a strikingly slow interpretation of the Beatles song that eventually became the title of the album.
That early recording already reveals the method that would remain in place for the majority of their career: a composition enters Richard’s workshop and emerges with its structure revised and its emotional proportions altered. In this case, the Beatles’ chirpy forward motion becomes something suspended and uncertain. Let’s be blunt here – this is a very young and inexperienced Richard Carpenter at his workbench. As a result, the arrangement on display does feel like a cocky young craftsman proudly displaying his shiny new tools of the trade. But the central relationship is already in place: Richard builds the room; Karen makes you believe somebody lives within. And sometimes that someone is terribly lonely.
Their big breakthrough came in 1970 with a Burt Bacharach and Hal David song that a fair number of artists had already declined: (They Long to Be) Close to You. Allegedly, that song began life as a jingle in a banking commercial. This pleases me greatly. Some musicians might find inspiration in ancient mythology, life on the road or dangerous excess, but if one of the greatest middle-of-the-road romantic ballads came to prominence through the staid and stuffy world of financial services… Well, for the Carpenters, that seems wonderfully appropriate.
Anyway, banking jingle or not, Richard and Karen recorded it, it climbed to number one on the U.S. singles chart and the floodgates opened: We’ve Only Just Begun, For All We Know, Rainy Days & Mondays, Superstar, Hurting Each Other, Goodbye to Love, Top of the World, Yesterday Once More, Please Mr. Postman, Only Yesterday, Masquerade – the list goes on. Between 1970 and 1975 they were virtually unstoppable on the U.S. charts and did very well in a stack of other territories as well. Awards, accolades, silver, gold and platinum albums – they all began to pile up.
In an era that gave us hard rock, glam rock, folk rock, progressive rock, Kraut rock, the first stirrings of punk rock and so much more, the Carpenters seemed to occupy a parallel universe of polished melancholy and perfect harmony. Richard’s arrangements were their secret weapon – lush without being syrupy (well, alright, they very often were syrupy), sophisticated without being showy. He knew exactly how much space to leave around Karen’s voice, and when it worked, the results could be magical.
Karen’s voice remains the decisive event. People reach for “velvet”, which is fair enough. Her lower register has genuine warmth and weight. But the real miracle is her astonishing breath control and her impeccable phrasing. She rarely sounds as though she is demonstrating technique. You seem to hear a person thinking, hesitating, but with composure and control. And it’s the composure and control that make the vulnerability possible.
As mentioned above, Karen’s musicianship also extended to the drum kit. If you watch the surviving early performance footage of Karen wielding her drumsticks, her economy, assurance and obvious pleasure in thumping the tubs shine through. Clearly, she was very happy behind the kit – a fine drummer with a remarkable singing voice. To the surprise of many, she once finished ahead of Led Zeppelin’s John Bonham in a poll of top drummers. Karen finished in 10th place and John in 11th, in the 1975 Playboy readers’ poll of best drummers (Buddy Rich was the winner). Apparently Karen was a touch embarrassed by this and Bonham’s feathers were not unruffled.
And of course the Carpenters did achieve a teeny bit of rock ‘n’ roll credibility with Goodbye to Love, from their 1972 album A Song for You. Richard composed the song (with his writing partner John Bettis) and decided it needed a couple of fuzz guitar solos. Tony Peluso was brought in to do the necessary and the rest is history. The song was a huge hit and Tony’s plank-spanking outro became legendary (certainly one of the first guitar solos I went to the trouble of learning note-for-note, knob-bothering once more, as I tried to recreate Tony’s warm and fuzzy sound using only my extreme lack of talent and some deeply inadequate equipment). Many have credited Goodbye to Love as a pivotal moment in the subsequent development of the all-conquering power ballad. I remember the first time I heard that song on the radio; it was like discovering your sweet old granny could ride a Harley – and did it bloody well!
I won’t pretend every Carpenters record is beyond criticism. The sticky sweetness can become cloying, the immaculate polish too slick. Sing and Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft can both still make my toes curl in embarrassment (this is a guilty pleasure, after all) and much of their work still tests my tolerance for weapons-grade wholesomeness. But the misses make the achievements easier to distinguish and all the more enjoyable.
I also want to praise Richard Carpenter as a producer. 1975’s Horizon is an album I would happily place beside far more fashionably admired studio productions of the time. Richard has described the opportunities afforded by using a new-fangled, twenty-four-track studio. But you needn’t care about equipment to hear the spaciousness, the clarity and the gorgeous three-dimensional soundstage on the original vinyl pressing. The instruments have room to breathe; the voices have depth, and Karen’s presence is astonishing.
Critics often dismissed their material as lightweight. They were wrong. The songs were often about loneliness, disappointment, the quiet ache of ordinary life. True artists can take the personal and the private and make it resonate universally. In their best moments, both Richard and Karen could make that happen. Karen’s voice remains the centre of it all, and frankly there has never been another quite like it: warm, slightly husky, perfectly controlled, and capable of conveying enormous feeling with almost no visible effort. When she sang about rainy days and Mondays getting her down, you could almost feel the weight of the week settling on your own shoulders.
Of course, the Carpenters’ story has its shadows. The relentless touring, the substance abuse, the pressure to stay photogenic, the industry’s casual cruelty toward a young woman whose body was treated as public property. Karen’s struggle with anorexia nervosa became public knowledge only gradually, and by the time help arrived it was too late. She died in 1983 at the age of thirty-two. I remember hearing the news and feeling a strange, private grief that I didn’t quite know how to explain to anyone in my circle. The music business has always had a substantial body count: alcohol, addiction, overdoses, plane crashes, the usual rock-and-roll mortality tales. But Karen’s death felt different. Quieter. More ordinary. And because of that, somehow worse.
1981’s Made in America was the final studio album released during Karen’s lifetime. The subsequent temptation, of course, is to hear every sad Carpenters song as prophecy or foreshadowing. I guess some of that is inevitable, but I think it should be resisted. Karen was a wonderful interpreter, capable of imagination, humour, rhythmic confidence and pure joy. Her achievements as a singer and performer deserve recognition beyond the melancholy framework imposed by her early death.
As far as I’m concerned, the Carpenters made some of the most beautiful, carefully crafted, emotionally honest popular music of the twentieth century. Karen Carpenter possessed one of the great voices of her era, and Richard Carpenter arranged those songs with a precision and taste that still rewards close listening. What keeps drawing me back is the feeling that somebody has taken enormous trouble to communicate something plainly. Beneath all the overdubs, orchestration and polish, the best Carpenters records offer recognisable human needs: company, reassurance, even the soppy hope that, despite all evidence to the contrary, this time, your latest relationship might just work out.
As I’ve grown older, the secret of my guilty pleasure has become harder to maintain, chiefly because I no longer make much effort. There are only so many years a chap can spend defending a twenty-minute track about a giant armadillo with tank tracks and side cannons while pretending that three minutes of romantic gloss might damage one’s credibility. My affection for prog and heavy rock remains undiminished. So does my affection for Karen and Richard.
The Carpenters’ story is one of extraordinary success and quiet tragedy. Their songs keep turning up in films, in adverts, in the background of ordinary lives. Every few years a new generation seems to rediscover them and is startled by how good they actually are. The reissues keep coming. The documentaries keep being made. Because the truth is quite simple: they could be cheesy, they could be soppy, but they could also be magnificent – and you don’t get to choose the music that gets under your skin, soothes you soul, and decides to dig in and stay there.
Anyway, I think that’s probably quite enough of my rose-tinted wittering for one evening. So I shall say TTFN to one and all. May all your passages be salubrious and your puddles well jumped.
Goodnight and may your Frog go with you – Not Arf!
Featured Image: Kathleen Ballard, Los Angeles Times, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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