Karen
Carpenter died on February 4, 1983, after steadily poisoning herself with
ipecac syrup, which she was using to try to maintain her weight while
struggling with an eating disorder.
From the
outside, Karen Carpenter looked like a rock star. She played the drums as one
half of the band The Carpenters and had what Paul McCartney called “the best
female voice in the world.” But away from prying eyes, she struggled with body
image issues. Karen Carpenter’s death in 1983 marked a tragic conclusion to her
struggle with anorexia nervosa.
By that
point, Karen’s anorexia had dovetailed with her rise to fame. She and her
brother, Richard, had charmed the nation as the sibling duo behind The
Carpenters, but their stardom came at a steep price. Karen, unhappy with how
she looked, turned to extreme measures to lose weight.
She hired a
personal trainer, meticulously counted calories, and stopped eating altogether.
Her weight plummeted to 90 pounds, concerning her fans and family alike. But
though Karen sought medical and therapeutic help over the years, she continued
to struggle with her eating disorder.
By the
1980s, Karen seemed happier and healthier but had secretly turned to even more
extreme measures to avoid gaining weight. Unbeknownst to her doctors or loved
ones, she’d started taking daily doses of ipecac syrup, which induces vomiting.
It slowly ate away at her heart.
And on Feb. 4, 1983, Karen Carpenter died at the age of 32. Her official cause of death was “emetine cardiotoxicity due to or as a consequence of anorexia nervosa.” In other words, Karen, in her desperate battle with her eating disorder, had poised herself to death with ipecac syrup.
Inside The Rise Of The Carpenters
Born on March 2, 1950, in New Haven, Connecticut, Karen Carpenter was surrounded by music from the beginning. NPR writes that Karen’s older brother Richard was a music prodigy, and People notes that Karen was able to teach herself percussion by playing chopsticks on barstools.
When their
family moved from New Haven to Downey, California, in 1963, Richard and Karen
sought to make it as musicians. They formed a trio with a friend — with Richard
on keyboards and Karen on drums — and even won a “battle of the bands” at the
Hollywood Bowl. When their music was deemed “too soft,” The New York Times
reports that the trio became a sibling duo.
In 1970,
Richard and Karen were signed to A&M Records as “The Carpenters.” This
marked their rise to fame — but also the beginning of Karen’s anorexia.
As The
Guardian reports, Karen had turned to dieting before. After high school, she
had used the Stillman water diet to drop 25 pounds. But in 1973, Karen
allegedly saw a photo of herself taken at a concert that she found
unflattering. She became determined that she needed to lose more weight.
Perhaps it
seemed harmless to her at the time, but her subsequent eating disorder would
lead to Karen Carpenter’s death a decade later.
Karen Carpenter’s Struggle With Annorexia
As The
Carpenters became bigger and bigger following hits like “(They Long to Be)
Close to You” (1970), “Rainy Days and Mondays” (1971), and “Top of the World”
(1972), Karen Carpenter started to shrink.
After hiring and firing a personal trainer — she didn’t like how building muscles made her heavier — Karen started trying to lose weight on her own. She exercised with a hip cycle, counted calories, and mapped out her intake of food, according to The Guardian. Before long, she lost 20 pounds.
Though her friends and family praised how she looked, Karen wanted to lose even more weight. She started avoiding food altogether, concealing her eating disorder by moving the food around her plate as she talked, or offering tastes of her meals to others until there was nothing left for her.
Before long, Karen’s anorexia started to impact her music. The Guardian writes that audiences gasped when they saw her emaciated frame, and The New York Times recounts that The Carpenters had to cancel their European tour in 1975 because of Karen’s “nervous and physical exhaustion.”
Despite the clear warning signs, Karen’s eating disorder only intensified. She turned to laxatives to lose weight — taking dozens at a time — and prompted concern from the public. In 1981, an interviewer even asked Karen about her eating disorder directly, though the singer demurred.
“No, I was just pooped,” Karen said, per The Guardian. “I was tired out.”
By then, however, Karen seemed to know she needed to change. She left her husband, who some saw as abusive and after her money, and attended therapy in New York City. In September 1982, she was hospitalized after feeling dizzy, and seemed to improve under the close watch of doctors.
Returning to Los Angeles in December of that year, Karen seemed to finally be in a good place. People reports that she seemed energetic and happy, and was planning on writing her own songs for the first time.
“I have a lot of living left to do,” she told a friend, according to People.
Tragically, Karen Carpenter died just two weeks later.
How Karen Carpenter Died At The Age Of 32
On Feb. 4, 1983, Karen Carpenter woke up at her parent’s house in Downey, California. She went downstairs, turned on the coffeepot, and returned to her room. At around 9 a.m., according to People, Karen collapsed.
Her mother, Agnes, found Karen nude on the floor, her nightgown over her body as if she’d been about to get dressed. Though EMTs were able to detect a faint pulse, leading them to believe that The Carpenters singer had “a good chance to survive,” she suffered from cardiac arrest on the way to the hospital. Karen Carpenter died at 9:51 a.m. at the age of 32.
According to an autopsy report, the 5-foot-4 singer weighed just 108 pounds.
In March 1983, UPI reported that Karen Carpenter’s death was caused by “chemical imbalances associated with anorexia nervosa.” Specifically, she’d suffered from a condition called “emetine cardiotoxicity,” or a slow poisoning of the heart.
According to The Guardian, that revealed that Karen had been slowly poisoning herself with ipecac syrup, which induces vomiting (and is usually for poison or drug overdoses). It would have helped her maintain her weight, but at a price. The syrup also eats away at the heart muscles.
“I’m sure she thought this was a harmless thing she was doing, but in 60 days she had accidentally killed herself,” Steven Levenkron, a psychotherapist who’d treated Karen explained in a radio interview, according to The Guardian. “It was a shocker for all of us who treated her.”
The Aftermath Of Karen Carpenter’s Death
Karen Carpenter’s death at the age of 32 brought new attention to anorexia, which most people at the time didn’t know much about.
“Anorexia nervosa was so new that I didn’t even know how to pronounce it until 1980,” The Carpenters band member John Bettis recalled, according to Time. “From the outside, the solution looks so simple. All a person has to do is eat. So we were constantly trying to shove food at Karen.”
Time notes that, in the era of Twiggy, Karen Carpenter’s death revealed that it was possible to be too thin. It also inspired doctors and therapists specializing in eating disorders to push the Food and Drug Administration to ban over-the-counter sales of ipecac syrup.
“We think 30,000 or more young girls are abusing a drug that was not known until very recently as an abusive drug,” Carpenter’s therapist, Levenkron, told The New York Times. He noted that some people consumed four bottles a day and estimated that “Between 50 and 250 bottles could be fatal.”
Karen Carpenter’s death also prompted many to ask why she had developed anorexia in the first place. Many have noted that anorexia is, at its roots, a method of control. Rumors suggested Karen had grown up with a controlling mother who doted on her brother, and that her brother controlled the trajectory of their band. Some have speculated that Karen started restricting her eating habits because it was the one thing she could manage herself.
Ultimately, Karen’s motivations remain known only to her. But what others have acknowledged repeatedly since her death is that Karen Carpenter was a singer taken too soon. She had, Paul McCartney declared according to NPR, “the best female voice in the world: melodic, tuneful and distinctive.”
Sadly, when Karen looked in the mirror, that wasn’t enough.
Karen Carpenter, The ‘Carpenters’ Singer Killed By Anorexia At The Age Of 32. By Kaleena Fraga; Edited By Maggie Donahue. All That’s Interesting, January 30, 2023
“Karen Carpenter had interested me for a long time,” Gordon writer in her memoir Girl in a Band. “The Carpenters were such a sun-drenched American dream, such a feel-good family success story like the Beach Boys, but with the same roiling darkness going on underneath,” she said, adding: “Obviously Karen Carpenter had a strange relationship with her brother, Richard, a great producer but also a tyrannical control freak. The only autonomy Karen felt she had in her life she excepted over her own body. She was an extreme version of what a lot of women suffer from – a lack of control over things other than their bodies, which turns the female body into a tool for power – good, bad, or ugly.”
Gordon explains that, while she might not have always gravitated towards the sound of The Carpenters, she felt a powerful magnetism in Karen. “I always found Karen’s voice incredibly sexy and soulful. She made every word and syllable her own, and if you listen to those lyrics, you go, Wow. But at the same time, was there any band ever more white-bread than The Carpenters.”
It was also the power of Todd Haynes’ underground film Superstar, a no-budget biopic of Karen’s life made completely using Barbie and Ken dolls, that affected Gordon and her views on Carpenter. While Sonic Youth were making their major label debut with the 1990 album Goo, Gordon decided to pay tribute to Carpenter in the song ‘Tunic (Song for Karen)’. The song depicts Carpenter playing the drums and making famous friends in heaven while reflecting on feeling like “I’m disappearing, getting smaller every day / But I look in the mirror and I’m bigger in every way.”
“I could make up a lot of reasons why the song was called ‘Tunic’,” Gordon explains. “The most obvious is that Karen was so thin from starving herself that her clothes hung on her bones like flowing biblical robes. She couldn’t make peace with her own body’s curves. She would never get the love she craved from her mother, who favoured her brother, or from her brother himself.”
“Their approval meant everything,” she continues. “How was she not the quintessential woman in our culture, compulsively pleasing others in order to achieve some degree of perfection and power that’s forever just around the corner, out of reach? It was easier for her to disappear, to free herself finally from that body, to find a perfection in dying.”
Sonic Youth would also contribute a cover of ‘Superstar’ to The Carpenters’ tribute LP If I Were A Carpenter in 1994. Gordon finishes her analysis in Girl in a Band by sharing an open letter she wrote for a magazine back around the time of ‘Tunic’ and Goo‘s release.
“Dear Karen,
Thru the years of The Carpenters TV specials, I saw you change from the Innocent Oreo-cookie-and-milk girl next door to hollowed eyes and a lanky body adrift on a candy-coloured stage set. You and Richard, by the end, looked drugged – there’s so little energy. The words come out of yr mouth but yr eyes say other things, ‘Help me, please, I’m lost in my own passive resistance, something went wrong. I wanted to make myself disappear from their control. My parents, Richard, the writers who call me ‘hip-py, fat.’ Since I was, like most girls, brought up to be polite and considerate, I figured no one would notice anything wrong – as long as, outwardly, I continued to do what was expected of me. Maybe they could control all the outward aspects of my life, but my body is all in my control. I can make myself smaller. I can disappear. I can starve myself to death and they won’t know it. My voice will never give me away. They’re not my words. No one will guess my pain. But I will make the words my own because I have to express myself somehow. Pain is not perfect so there is no place in Richard’s life for it. I have to be perfect too. I must be thin so I’m perfect. Was I a teenager once? I forget. Now I look middle-aged, with a bad perm and country-and-western clothes.’
I must ask you, Karen, who were your role models? Was it yr mother? What kind of books did you like to read? Did anyone ever ask you that question – what’s it like being a girl in music? What were yr dreams? Did you have any female friends or was it just you and Richard, mom and dad, A&M? Did you ever go running along the sand, feeling the ocean rush between yr legs? Who is Karen Carpenter, really, besides the sad girl with the extremely beautiful, soulful voice?
Your fan – love, Kim.”
The tragic song Sonic Youth wrote about Karen Carpenter. By Tyler Golsen. Far Out Magazine, January 19, 2022.
Hey what are you waiting for, feeding, feeding me
I feel like I'm disappearing, getting smaller every day
But I look in the mirror, I'm bigger in every way
She said,
You aren't never going anywhere
You aren't never going anywhere
I ain't never going anywhere
I ain't never going anywhere
I'm in heaven now, I can see you Richard
Goodbye Hollywood, goodbye Downey, hello Janis
Hello Dennis, Elvis and all my brand new friends
I'm so glad you're all here with me, until the very end
Dreaming, dreaming of how it's supposed to be
But now this tunic's spinning, around my arms and knees
I feel like I'm disappearing, getting smaller every day
But when I open my mouth to sing, I'm bigger in every way
She said,
You aren't never going anywhere
You aren't never going anywhere
I ain't never going anywhere
I ain't never going anywhere
Hey mom! Look I'm up here, I finally made it
I'm playing the drums again too
Don't be sad, the band doesn't sound half bad
And I remember mom, what you said
You said honey, you look so under-fed
Another green salad, another ice tea
There's a tunic in the closet waiting just for me
I feel like I'm disappearing, getting smaller every day
But I look in your eyes, and I'm bigger in every way
She said,
You aren't never going anywhere
You aren't never going anywhere
I ain't never going anywhere
I ain't never going anywhere
Goodbye Richard, gotta go now
I'm finally on my own, but Dan's got a gig
Keep the love lights glowing, little girl's got the blues
I can still hear momma say: "honey don't let it go to your head"
Sonic Youth - Tunic (Song For Karen)
Karen Carpenter was an icon. It’s hard to dispute that the silky-smooth-voiced adult contemporary singer lives on, in collective memory, as someone taken from earth far too soon. As the Carpenters, she and her brother Richard released ten albums together, which included classics like “(They Long to Be) Close to You,” “Rainy Days and Mondays,” and “Superstar.” They epitomized the gentle sound of ’70s adult contemporary. Her death of anorexia nervosa at only 30 in 1983 increased the public’s awareness of the disease, and the Carpenter family founded an organization to help raise money for research into it and other eating disorders. The Carpenter family, including Richard, remain very active in sharing and maintaining Karen’s legacy.
Karen’s primary symbolic function is as an icon of innocence and warmth, purity, and angelic talent; there is almost a religious quality to the saintliness her fans ascribe to her. Based on the outsized outrage the family has heaped upon Todd Haynes’ controversial cult film Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, you would think that the film subverts or destroys this image of Karen, or that it makes a mockery of her legacy.
It’s easy to see where someone would get that idea. The entire film is famously re-enacted with Barbie dolls, is structured more like a news magazine program than a documentary or biopic (complete with interludes explaining anorexia nervosa in 1988’s medical parlance), and uses loads of unlicensed music, clearly with no attempt at approval from the Carpenter estate. It’s a singularly strange vision, and one that skirts the boundaries of bad taste in its staging alone. However, watching the film, Karen’s character remains a bastion of purity, very in line with her public perception, and Haynes never questions her innate star power and brilliance. What the film does challenge is the Carpenters’ altruism towards Karen.
Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story opens with Karen Carpenter found dead, with a narrator asking how this could have happened at such a young age. The dread from this first scene, shot from the perspective of Karen’s mom as she finds a pair of disembodied legs in the bathroom and begins screaming, carries through much of the film and most directly informs the next scene, where Richard and his parents discuss finding a singer for his band 17 years earlier. Hearing Karen sing upstairs, they know they’ve found their lead singer — and thus begins a series of life events that are made possible, but not initiated, by Karen and her soaring voice. Haynes shows the recording of the first Carpenters single “Close to You”, and Richard is annoyed when Karen has a coughing fit; later, as the song is played in full, the imagery of Karen and Richard rising up the charts is juxtaposed with Richard Nixon and the Vietnam War. People want to escape the controlling and distressing realities of daily life through Karen’s voice, but there’s no escape for her.
The movie emphasizes how little control Karen had over her life, and lays much of its dysfunction at the feet of Karen’s domineering, manipulative family. They push her into her career, her living situation, and her charitable work. It’s notable that a portion in the middle of the film interviews multiple music professionals about Karen Carpenter, and one woman explicitly notes the manipulation inherent in her image and the falseness it projected. Superstar posits this was a feature, not a bug.
Karen’s relationship with food and her weight is just about the only thing she has any sort of ownership of, and her family’s insensitive and callous reactions only exacerbate her illness. Haynes shows Karen’s deteriorating state by shaving plastic off of the Karen Barbie doll and altering her clothes to show more skin. Even in the low-quality versions of Superstar circulating on the internet, it’s easy to see the negative turn the Karen doll takes as she tours with Richard, hardly eating while her brother berates her for it, far more worried about people’s reaction to her sickly body than her actual health. Sagely, the film shows a title card shortly after Richard and Karen get into a fight at a restaurant over her food intake, reading “The self-imposed regime of the anorexic reveals a complex internal apparatus of resistance and control.[…]Anorexia can thus be seen as an addiction and abuse of self-control.”
Karen’s trauma continues unabated. She collapses onstage from her illness, binge-eats, and gets into frequent arguments with Richard, even after she moves out. Her traumatic memories, represented by rapidly intercut and flickering showcases of spanking, California driving, and stick-thin Brady Bunch stars, take up more and more space in her life. She even pointedly asks at one point, “Do the Carpenters have something to hide?” Even brief hopeful moments end in despair — her new relationship and eventual marriage to Thomas Burris ends with a title card saying that they divorced after 14 months. Thankfully, a conversation with fellow anorexic Cherry Boone gives Karen the motivation to seek treatment, and she follows through. But it is too late at this point — Karen’s attempts to get better and get back to work on a tight timeframe have driven her to purge food with syrup of ipecac. This, Superstar implies, is what killed her.
The film drops this last reveal before transitioning to serene footage of a car driving through California, recontextualizing a backdrop of seagulls that earlier in the film announced the Carpenters’ arrival onto the pop culture scene with titles describing Karen’s death. Superstar offers no further answers or closure — the film ends on a shot of the Carpenters’ house with “Close To You” jittering out of time and dropping notes. The tension inherent in hoping someone will be kind to Karen for once and help her seek and maintain recovery is never resolved. The film also doesn’t reveal the feelings of the Carpenter family post-Karen’s death, leaving the 45-minute film as a reflection on how their insensitivity and pressures caused her death.
Obviously, the Carpenter family, portrayed as casually cruel and ignorant of Karen’s needs, was less than thrilled with this film, and the use of licensed music led to it being removed from circulation in 1990 after Haynes lost a copyright lawsuit. However, the film has endured, preserved and shared around, first through VHS copies, then continual uploads and re-uploads to YouTube, the film quality deteriorating and in some cases actively unwatchable (most of the title cards have blurry black text laid over already dark backgrounds). It feels like a lost relic.
It’s a shame that it isn’t more frequently seen, as it manages, despite the exploitative and sensational elements, to maintain its focus on Karen’s humanity and worth. The film is never unsympathetic to her, even as it voyeuristically shows her struggles. There is something wrong with the Carpenters, but Haynes assures us in Superstar that our view of Karen as an icon is correct overall. What the retellings of her life miss is Karen’s power, and Superstar demands that we pay attention and speaks to how the people in her life diminished it.
With over 100 million record sales to their name, The Carpenters were Superstars who defied an era that seemed contrary to their harmonious tones. Their success was a symbol of the all-American dream. Tragically that dream proved a short-lived fantasy as the harrowing truth came to the surface when Karen Carpenter died at the age of 32. The star became the first celebrity to succumb to anorexia nervosa. In part, pop culture contributed to this sad end and the discussion remains as pertinent as ever as NEDA and other organisations continue to raise awareness of the problems that perpetuate eating disorder conditions.
When Karen
Carpenter and her brother Richard first achieved major success in 1970 with
‘(They Long to Be) Close to You’, Karen was only 20 years old. In the
intervening years, the hair racing act of their rapid rise to fame began to
have a huge effect on her. In 1975, when the anorexia became unmistakably
apparent, Karen told biographer Ray Coleman: “[I was sleeping 14-16 hours a
day]. My mother thought I was dead. I normally manage on four to six hours. It
was obvious that for the past two years I’d been running on nervous energy.”
It was in
1975 that Karen was finally admitted to hospital. At the time she reportedly
weighed under 7st (<44Kg). Her obsession with her weight reportedly began
around 2 years earlier when unflattering pictures from a Lake Tahoe concert hit
the papers and left her distraught and seeking a diet plan. The issue was it
was already hard enough maintaining a healthy diet amid the hectic touring
plan.
A 1973
interview offered up a worrying portent of this. “When you’re on the road it’s
hard to eat. Period,” she once said. “On top of that, it’s rough to eat well.
We don’t like to eat before a show because I can’t stand singing with a full
stomach… You never get to dinner until, like, midnight, and if you eat heavy
you’re not going to sleep, and you’re going to be a balloon.” Karen’s
subsequent diet got her down to a healthy 110lbs, however, when friends
commented on how great she looked, warning signs rang out once more as she told
them, “Well, I’m just going to get down to around 105.”
While
hectic touring might have made a healthy eating habit difficult to maintain,
her bandmate John Bettis claimed it had a range of other impacts, and the era
complicated the prognosis. “Anorexia nervosa was so new that I didn’t even know
how to pronounce it until 1980,” Bettis recalled. “From the outside, the
solution looks so simple. All a person has to do is eat. So, we were constantly
trying to shove food at Karen… My opinion about anorexia is it’s an attempt to
have control – something in your life you can do something about, that you can
regiment. That just got out of control with her.”
It is also
claimed by those around her at the time and ratified on some rudimentary
levels, that Karen was trying to compete for her mother’s affections. Agnes
Carpenter doted on Richard but many commentators around the family at the time
claim that she did not give Karen the same level of affection.
All of
these factors created a whirlpool and in 1975, when Karen was admitted to
hospital, the subsequent cancellation of their planned European tour apparently
cost around $250,000. While Karen was afforded time to initially recover. There
was money to be made and despite being hospitalised in the Autumn, in December
1975, the band were back in the studio to record A Kind of Hush.
Recent
studies into eating disorders among musicians by Marianna Kapsetaki and Charlie
Easmon in 2019 found that “eating disorders are prevalent in musicians and
possible risk factors are their increased perfectionism, depression, anxiety
and stress due to the demands of their job.” With long hours on the road and
the perceived presence of constant competition, problems are perpetuated within
the industry.
However,
even outside of the industry itself, external factors prove huge. For Karen,
these manifested when it came to her failed marriage to Tom Burris. Karen had
wanted to start a family but Burris only revealed after their wedding had
already been planned and fast-tracked that he had had a vasectomy. However,
although Karen didn’t want to go ahead with it, her mother sent her a stern
message that the show must go on. “The invitations have gone out,” she
reportedly said. “There are reporters and photographers coming. People magazine
is going to be there. The wedding is on, and you will walk down that aisle. You
made your bed, Karen. Now you’ll have to lay in it.”
This notion
of keeping up appearances for the sake of a PR standing sadly continues to this
day and is a sorry exemplar of how much we still have to learn about mental
health. If you compare the story of Karen’s tragic struggles and the tour
itinerary and discography of the band, the two are inconceivable.
This
whirlwind of ideals, mismanagement and a range of other problems are probed in
detail in the experimental film The Karen Carpenter Story. The film remains the
most innovative and striking music documentary ever made, as it parodies the
harsh realities of show business by using Barbie doll reenactments of scenes in
an allegory of the disposable consumerist ways that conspired against a
musician who deserved so much more.
The sad end for Karen came when she was happy and outwardly healthy in Los Angeles after a stay in a New York hospital had saved her life. However, her appearances in restaurants and return to everyday life masked the fact that she had now become reliant on a drug called ipecac that induced vomiting. Thus, although her weight was stable, she was determined not to gain any further pounds and the heart muscle thinning side-effect of ipecac abuse eventually killed her at the tragic age of 32. She was a star and a symbol of the progressive world of pop culture—sadly she also embodied the dark flipside of all that entails too.
The Karen
Carpenter Story and the sorry side of pop culture’s body ideals/ By Tom Taylor
. Far Out Magazine, March 2, 2022.
“Close to
You,” “We’ve Only Just Begun,” “For All We Know,” “Rainy Days and Mondays,
“Goodbye to Love,“ “Yesterday Once More,” “Top of the World”... These are all
part of the Carpenters legacy of exquisitely crafted and consummately produced
and performed soft rock classics that grow immeasurably year in and year out,
garnering new legions of followers to their musical magic.
An
extraordinary book called Carpenters: The Musical Legacy, by Mike Cidoni Lennox
and Chris May with Richard Carpenter, eschews the tragedy surrounding the band
with the untimely passing of Karen Carpenter in 1983, and instead focuses on
what really matters, their sublime catalog of timeless songs, songs graced by
her blue, heartbreak-infused voice and the picture perfect arrangements and
production by Richard Carpenter.
Richly
illustrated with over 200 images culled from Richard’s personal archives and a
dazzling array of rare ephemera, the book’s text is based on over 100 hours of
interviews the authors conducted with Richard. Join us for a conversation with
Richard Carpenter for a portrait of the Carpenters in song.
GOLDMINE:
Richard, in “Yesterday Once More” you regale the power of radio and memory and
nostalgia. What are your memories of hearing The Carpenters’ first giant hit
“Close to You” on the radio? Were you and Karen together when that happened?
RICHARD
CARPENTER: I remember we were together when we first heard songs from The
Carpenters, our first album on the radio, because the disc jockey Johnny Magnus
let us know he just loved the album and at a certain time in the early evening
he was going to debut it. As far as “Close to You,” I can’t honestly remember
whether we were together, but we probably were because we would go back and
forth from the studio in one car and we were in the car quite a bit in between
runs to the studio. So I would say so. The impact of hearing our music on the
radio is impossible for me to put it into words. There’s a feeling that you’ve
gone against what a lot of people on the way up said was going to happen, which
was not much was going to happen with our demo for one reason or another with
the sound. But we believed in it. And of course, Herbie Alpert did. And it was
like a vindication, if you will. It sounded really damn good for AM radio. Of
course, it was compressed when you go into the second verse and the rhythm, the
bass and the drums kick in, you could hear the kick drum being sucked in. But
that didn’t make all that much difference at least on AM radio.
GM: During
that period when Carpenters first hit it big, what vinyl albums were in the
heaviest rotation on both of your stereos?
RC: Well,
around that time, this would have been a little later, The Beach Boys Surf’s
Up, the newest Chicago albums and Paul McCartney’s Ram, without a doubt. There
was also Carole King’s Music album and before that, Tapestry, too. It came out
right around the time of “Rainy Days and Mondays.”
GM: There’s
an interesting photo of you and Karen from the early ’70s and you’re
photographed with your record collection and Karen’s holding and looking at the
inside of the Ballad of Todd Rundgren album. Do you remember if you and Karen
were fans of that Todd Rundgren album?
RC: Oh,
yes, very much. Todd is a talented guy. Some people said about my songs as well
that you think they’re going to make a certain turn, they’re going to go to a
particular chord change and it doesn’t go there and yet it makes perfect sense
when it does make the change, and (Burt) Bacharach’s music takes that far and
away. I mean, he’s the king of that and Todd Rundgren was the same way. It was
a different progression of chords, a different structure of the chords. It was
a unique sound.
GM: I’d
imagine his biggest album, Some-thing/Anything?, that followed the release of
Ballad of Todd Rundgren, an album with songs like “I Saw the Light” and “Hello
It’s Me,” would have been in your wheelhouse.
RC: Oh yes.
Karen and I were both fans of Something/Anything?.
GM: I’m
very impressed with your work not only as a songwriter, but especially as a
producer and arranger. How in the world did you have the knowledge and
expertise so early on to create a picture-perfect record like Close to You both
as a production and in terms of its arrangement? Who were those producers and
arrangers that inspired you at that time?
RC: Karen
and I were both old souls. I just happened to hear “Close to You” yesterday on
the radio and I thought, what a remarkable record. It really is. It’s almost
the perfect record. There’s not much I would do to change it, and Karen had
barely turned 20 when she sang it and yet she was way beyond her years as far
as interpretation. I think some of it was in my DNA and that Karen and I were
old souls. But we had listened to a number of older recordings that my father
had in his record collection or that he’d buy as they came onto the radio in
the early ’50s and mid-’50s and all of that. So I think a lot of that
inspiration came from those records, and I need to thank him. The overdub
harmonies of Mary Ford, the Les Paul and Mary Ford records, it’s tight voicing,
and they’re overdubbed and of course, when “Tiger Rag” came out, it had the
biggest influence on me. I’d say that was 1950, maybe 1951, so I would have
been four and a half, and it had such an impact on me.
GM: Your
choices as producer and arranger on Close to You are stunning; every decision
you made was the perfect choice and to be able to do that so early on in your
recording career is remarkable.
RC: Well,
it is. When I got down to thinking about this because I was not only in charge
of selecting or writing the material but then arranging it. And the arranger is
the unsung hero of the business because you could have a proven singer and a
proven song, let’s say, or a song that will prove to be a big hit and if it
doesn’t have the correct arrangement, it’s not going to go anywhere. Yes, we listened
to so many different things and Close to You is definitely influenced, even
though I never heard Burt’s (Bacharach) arrangement until after ours was done.
That’s why it has Bacharach-ish influence.
GM: In
terms of creating those lush harmonies that you and Karen would do on a song
like “Close to You,” can you run us through the process you employed to build
those trademark Carpenters harmonies?
RC: Well,
on the first album, we used eight tracks, so we were severely limited because I
wanted to do all these over-dubbed vocals. But starting with the Close to You
album, we had 16 tracks, but we still have to do a lot of bouncing. What we did
on a typical Carpenter chord is like the end of “Close to You.” It’s four-part
harmony, and we triple it. So there are 12 of us singing the four parts. The
opening chord of that is an inversion of D flat major seven. Because we didn’t
have that many tracks with Karen and I singing together on the outer harmonies,
so she’d take the top, I take the bottom and get it until we were satisfied and
then double it, and then triple it, and then go into the inner two harmonies,
which we call BGs, background. So BG one was the outside harmonies and BG two
was the inside harmonies. That’s how we worked it. But think about that record.
I also wanted some strings on it. I wanted the overdub trumpets, Chuck Findley.
Of course, we had the track and there’s a little bit of Wurli (Wurlitzer)
electric piano near the end and of course, we quickly were running out of
tracks.
GM: Were
you, Hal Blaine (drums) and Joe Osborn (bass) cutting live?
RC: Yes,
but only the rhythm track.
GM: Were
you able to nail a track fairly quickly?
RC: Fairly
quickly. Except when one came along that took a little more con-centration or
attention.
GM: Do you
recall a Carpenters recording that was more challenging to get a really great
basic track?
RC: Yes,
“Close to You.”
GM: Why was
that challenging?
RC: It’s a
very deceptive song and a very deceptive arrangement. The whole thing makes it
sound like it’s an easy song, and the trouble with that one is it was so strict
with timing and rhythm. It was very easy to start rushing and ultimately, you
never want to admit that you need the click track, but on several of them you
do and that was one of them. We finally said,
“OK, we need a click track,” so “Close to You” took around 40 takes to get that basic track with bass, piano and drums, but that was an exception.
GM: Your
collaboration with lyricist John Bettis on “Goodbye to Love,” “Yesterday Once
More,” “Top of the World,” among others, worked very well. What was the
inherent magic of your collaborative work, the spark that fueled the
creativity?
RC: We were
introduced to each other in 1966 by our university choir director. The director
knew that I was writing pop songs and I had met John briefly and knew that he
was writing songs, too. But to me, his lyrics were the special thing, and I
thought we could work well together, which we did in the formative years, and
then he took off for parts unknown before the Carpenters hit. And then we did
and I wanted to be writing some songs. So of course, publishing at A&M
Records were saying, “Well, how about working with Paul Williams or some of our
other writers?” And I said, “I know this guy. I feel we work well together, and
I need you to find him for me. We didn’t know where he was. I think he was up
in Northern California or Central California, but the people from A&M
tracked him down and brought him to L.A. and he signed with them. And it’s a
good thing I have an actual talent to see certain talent in other people.
GM: An
example of that is “Goodbye to Love.” Can you share its back story?
RC: I was
watching The Late Late Show or The Late Show and there was a Bing Crosby movie
from the early ’40s called Rhythm on the River. And in it, he plays a ghost
songwriter and he’s ghosting for a famous songwriter — this is all fic-tion.
He’s played by Basil Rathbone, and Basil Rathbone’s character was going through
a dry spell and Bing, the ghost songwriter, was taking care of that. But they
kept referring to Basil Rathbone’s biggest hit in this movie and it was called
“Goodbye to Love,” and you never heard the song “Goodbye to Love” in the film.
It was just referred to. And when I heard that I imagined, (sings words) ...
“I’ll say goodbye to love, no one ever cared if I should live or die...” I kept
the melody going and that’s where I ran out of lyrics and got ahold of John,
and we sat down together and finished the lyric. And right around the same
time, we met Tony Peluso, and he was the leader of a group that opened the show
for us on one tour. I heard him go into a guitar solo on one particular song
every night, usually a college gymnasium, and I’d hear him lay into his solo on
this particular song. He’s not just playing a lot of notes. It was
improvisation, but it was musical. And that’s when I got the idea about the
guitar solo for “Goodbye to Love.” Karen and I had a number of people around us
saying, “Why are you doing (this) with an un-known? Why don’t you just get
someone like Louie Shelton?” And I said, “Because nothing against Louie or
anyone else, but I like the way Tony plays, and I just think he’s the guy, and
he was the guy. We asked him to come to Studio B, and he sat out in the middle
of the floor. He had this little fuzz unit called a Big Muff that got just the
right sound that I wanted. He said, “I have to tell you, I don’t read music”
and I said, “I don’t need you to read.” And I said, “Here’s what I want.” I
gave him a chord sheet and I sang him the melody. This is not at the end. This
is the break in the middle of the song. And I said, “I want this much of the
melody” and I sang that much of the melody and then I said, “Take it with the
chords.” Tony got the whole thing with the exception of one spot near the end
of his solo in one take.
GM: With
that, you pretty much created the template for power ballads to have these
gonzo hard rock, fuzzed-out guitar solos.
RC: Yeah, I guess so. (laughs)
GM: You and
Karen were big Beatle fans. Carpenters famously covered “Help” and “Ticket to
Ride.” Tell me about when you and Karen met Paul McCartney at 10cc’s Strawberry
Studios?
RC: Well,
we were touring the U.K. in ’74, and we got a message from him that he was
recording with his brother, actually. They were recording the Mike McGear
album. And he asked if we would like to stop by? So, of course, we’d like to
stop by. So we stopped by (laughs) and just watched him with his brother Mike.
And then after a while, excused ourselves because of course, they were busy,
but it was really nice of him to ask. Paul complimented us and said some really
nice things about Karen’s singing, too.
GM: Knowing
Karen was not as confident as she should have been about what a wonderful
singer she was, didn’t she have a run-in with Paul’s songwriting partner in The
Beatles, John Lennon?
RC: Yes.
She told me about it on a phone call. She and her beau were heading into a
particular restaurant, Beverly Hills. John was coming out and in passing, John
said something to Karen, “a lovely voice, luv” or “a beautiful or a great voice
luv,” and Karen was flabbergasted. I spoke with her and said, “Karen, of course
all these people are going to tell you that you’re great because you are a
great singer!” I don’t think she ever realized just how damn great she was.
With Barbra Streisand, the same thing. They’re kind of bumping (into) each
other and she said, “I think you have a lovely instrument” or something to that
effect.
GM: “Rainy
Days and Mondays” is a classic Carpenters song merging beauty and melancholy.
There was a deep melancholy that Karen was able to bring into her singing.
Where do you think that wellspring of her ability to connect with the
melancholy comes from?
RC: It’s a
combination of you’re made of with your genes and of coming back to the cellar
where dad kept his music; that’s where we listen to music. And whenever I went
down there, if I wasn’t playing classical, she wasn’t all that crazy about it.
But if I was playing any other sort of record, she would come down and listen
to the records with me. Our dad had quite a diversification in the types of
music he liked. So she heard the older singers, the Nat Coles and Perry Comos,
and that all just sank in. She was a receptacle but a natural one. She was just
born to sing all this stuff. And as Tom Nolan wrote in his cover piece for
Rolling Stone magazine about her life, he said, out “comes that marvellous
voice live as it is on record.” And he said it was “youth combined with
wisdom.”
GM: You
forged a particularly close relationship with Herb Alpert of A&M Records.
It wasn’t just a co-head of the record label relationship. It really seemed
that he cared and connected with the ethos of The Carpenters. What was it about
that relationship that really flourished both in a professional and personal
way?
RC: Well, I
have to say, first off, Herb and Jerry Moss as heads of A&M were different
than just about any other one in that. If they signed an artist, they believed
the artist should do what he or she wants, with the exception of what he or she
thought was best for them. So you had quite a free reign anyway, but with us,
Herb heard the demo with all the vo-cals stacked and, of course, Karen’s lead,
and he just went half carte blanche. And even after the first Carpenters album
didn’t happen, and there were rumblings from other people at A&M, he said,
“No, I’m going to give them one more chance.” And that was one of the great
decisions of his life. (laughs) He believed in us big time, and it was
marvelous as a pair of young people that we were to be given carte blanche. He
didn’t say, “I don’t want you to waste money on strings, you’re a new act.” But
no, whatever I heard, we were allowed to do.
GM: Let’s
close with a hypothetical question. If you could be with Karen again, even or
an hour, and you were told you can you talk about things and you can play piano
and she can sing a few songs with you, what would you talk about and what songs
would you choose to have her to sing?
RC: Well, I
would once again let her know just how damn great a singer she was. One of the
songs I would do with her would be “But Beautiful.” It’s from one of the Bing
Crosby road pictures and went on to be a standard.
GM: And is
there a Carpenters song you would love to hear her sing one more time with you?
RC: There
are two that, had she lived, we were going to redo because she was only 19 when
we did our first album, and I was 22, and in the next two to three years that
followed, our voices changed in that they weren’t as husky as they were
originally. That’s why she wanted to redo the lead on “Merry Christmas,
Darling” and “Ticket to Ride,” the remix from ’73 because she wasn’t all that
wild how husky her voice was. So there were two that happened to be
Bettis/Carpenter songs, and one that she wanted to redo. One of them was “Eve”
and that’s an album cut on the first album. Actually, the other one was on the
first album, which is called “Someday.” She mentioned it several times. She
wanted to redo them, and I wanted to redo them as well.
The Carpenters: Richard Carpenter on Beatles meetings, Karen's "old soul," more. Singer reflects on late sister’s stunning voice and legacy, plus early influences, hardest songs to record and more.
By Ken
Sharp. Goldmine Magazine, July 22, 2022.
In the summer of 1974, the Carpenters sat down with Rolling Stone writer Tom Nolan at Hollywood’s Au Petit Café for a cover story. Richard and Karen Carpenter, who had spent the past four years scoring massive soft-rock hits like “(They Long to Be) Close to You,” “We’ve Only Just Begun,” “Superstar,” and “Top of the World,” took the opportunity to vent to Nolan about the uncool, wholesome image that they felt the press had created for the sibling duo.
“This …thing they’ve built up, where it’s implicitly understood the Carpenters don’t smoke, the Carpenters don’t drink,” Richard said. “Never would swear. Never would listen to rock music. It’s like we’re Pat Boone, only a little cleaner. As if all we do all day is drink milk, eat apple pie, and take showers. I don’t even like milk.”
Richard can only laugh when the quote is read back to him nearly 50 years later. “Well, that’s what were described as,” he says. “It was the way we looked and our audiences looked. The rock critics, they didn’t like our audiences. It made the whole thing seem irrelevant, like we were nothing, and in no time at all, no one would ever remember us.”
The new book Carpenters: The Musical Legacy tries to show how wrong that was. Written by Mike Cidoni Lennox and Chris May, the massive, definitive biography chronicles the duo’s career in elaborate detail, based on more than 100 hours of interviews with Richard and full access to his archive. It aims to correct the legacy of the group, which is often overshadowed by Karen Carpenter’s death from anorexia in 1983.
“Between the TV movie [1989’s The Karen Carpenter Story] and a number of unauthorized documentaries and articles, that’s what a lot of the attention is focused on,” Richard says. “Not how successful we were and continue to be, nor Karen’s voice and how timeless it is. It gets pushed to the back. The two of us are underrated, to this day. And we sell a lot every year, all over the world — still.”
The book marks Richard’s second time authorizing a Carpenters biography, after 1994’s The Carpenters: The Untold Story by Ray Coleman. “Karen’s anorexia was much fresher,” says Lennox, “and he delivered what Richard calls ‘the anorexia book.’” Adds May: “He’s been down this road before, and he was very hesitant to do it again. We weren’t sure if we were going to get his blessing.”
That changed when Lennox and May approached Richard to write the introduction to their book. Lennox, a senior entertainment reporter at the Associated Press, and May, a music director and arranger, are both longtime Carpenters experts — they met online on a forum dedicated to the group. “He realized our hearts and background,” May says.
Soon, Richard was overseeing the entire project, and Lennox and May had gained his trust. “This was a book that intentionally didn’t want to dive into their personal demons, and we make that point really clear,” says Lennox. “After reading the first draft, Richard said, ‘You’ve really got to deal with Karen’s anorexia by the time you get to late 1973, and you have to deal with my use of Quaaludes.’ These were things that he knew. The word ‘authorized’ can be a very dirty word, and here we were trying to just focus on the music. He pushed us into things and kept us in the nonfiction section.”
Having full access to the Carpenters’ archives meant Lennox and May were able to provide an extensive history of the group. One chapter includes a Year in the Life, which maps out 364 days the duo spent in 1970 — from the release of their breakout single “(They Long to Be) Close to You” to their self-titled third album. Tour dates, television appearances, chart positions, and other major events are laid out in immense detail. This is somewhat rare, since many groups from that time don’t have detailed records of their tour schedules, let alone the dates of photo shoots.
“We were getting close to deadline,” Lennox recalls, noting they spent four years writing the book. “There was a substantial amount of their gigs [that] could not be found. We finally said, ‘Richard, we need a complete itinerary for the Carpenters.’ He went downstairs, and lo and behold, he brought up Karen’s itinerary, and in they were in [her] handwriting.”
The writers used more than 200 images in the book, some of which showcase Karen’s drumming. “She was a rare bird in that department,” Richard says. “She was way beyond a novelty. There are more women playing the drums now.”
More than anything, Richard says he really misses his sister’s company. “We definitely liked and disliked the same things — a real friend where you could talk about anything you wish and you don’t feel uncomfortable,” he says. It also pains him to think about the records the Carpenters could have gone on to make. “That’s heartbreaking,” he says. “I mean, she was only 32.”
Nearly four decades after Karen’s death, Lennox and May hope the biography will reintroduce the duo to a younger generation and rectify their legacy. “My hope is people will realize that the story of Richard and Karen Carpenter is not the most tragic in pop music — it is one of the most triumphant,” Lennox says. “This gray cloud will no longer loom over this incredible work. I think the last thing in the world that she would have wanted was for her death to define her life.”
Richard Carpenter Still Thinks the Carpenters’ Seventies Hits Are Underrated. By Angie Martoccio. Rolling Stone, November 19, 2021.
No comments:
Post a Comment