Little Girl Blue

by Randy L. Schmidt

  Ferguson was impressed with the duo’s unpretentious demeanor. “You work with a lot of people, like Mama Cass. She was really tough to work with. The Carpenters were very nice to work with. There were no big problems, no egos involved or anything. They just liked to do what they did and were very closely connected in their work.” In addition to working with regulars Al Hirt, Patchett and Tarses, Mark Lindsay, and the New Doodletown Pipers, Karen and Richard were introduced to many popular entertainers during the eight days of tapings. Mac Davis, Jose Feliciano, Anne Murray, Helen Reddy, Dusty Springfield, B. J. Thomas, and the Fifth Dimension were among those booked as guests on the series. The Fifth Dimension and Carpenters traded guest spots, with Karen and Richard performing as part of that group’s Traveling Sunshine Show television special, which was also broadcast that summer.

  A review for Make Your Own Kind of Music in TV Guide detailed the gimmick that plagued the series: “Each number is introduced by the labored use of a letter of the alphabet. Twenty-six cringes a week. Did they have in mind a Sesame Street for adults? Possibly. But no adult over the age of nine will be either entertained or amused. . . . The musicians on this show are genuinely talented. Why didn’t they leave them alone?” Another review, this one in the Village Voice, denounced the series’s producers and detailed their mistakes, “like dressing Karen Carpenter in fashions only a little less sickeningly sweet than those worn by Trisha Nixon. By the second or third show it was beginning to look like a disaster area. The Carpenters, who are both gifted and likeable, deserve something better.”

  Despite the benefits of new friendships and professional associations, in addition to heavy publicity for their new LP, the duo’s first encounter with television left them discouraged with the medium. It would be another five years before they agreed to host another television show. Interviewed for FM100 some years later, Karen recalled the NBC endeavor as a mistake, saying they were “violently mishandled. Our TV exposure was disastrous. We realized it immediately, and we shied away from television.”

  6

  NOTHING TO HIDE BEHIND

  AT JUST five feet, four inches tall, Karen Carpenter was barely visible on stage when surrounded by her battery of drums. “The audience was rising out of their seats to see where this voice was coming from,” recalls Evelyn Wallace. “There was no one out front so they were asking, ‘Where is that beautiful voice coming from?’”

  By 1971, Karen’s drum kit had grown to include four melodic toms. “They were built on rollers, and you could roll them right into your four-piece or five-piece kit,” explains Hal Blaine, who, along with drum tech Rick Faucher, designed the set Karen used in concert. Howie Oliver of Pro Drum in Hollywood built the kit for her after she saw Blaine’s setup. “There are only three kits like mine in the world,” she explained in a 1974 piece for Melody Maker. “The other two belong to Ringo and Hal Blaine.”

  Blaine’s original set was designed in a way that the sound of each drum decayed with its pitch “bending” slightly at the end. “It started out with me using my timbales as tom-toms and tuning them down,” Blaine explains. “I loved that sound, and eventually I wanted an octave of them. I put together this drum set that everybody called the Hal Blaine monster because it was humongous. I knew nothing about design patents in those days, but I was a Ludwig drummer so I sent them all the dimensions. I was sure they’d call it the Hal Blaine set—like the Gene Krupa and the Buddy Rich, but they called it the Octa-Plus. Now that’s a fine name, but Ludwig didn’t even mention me. They did send me a thank-you letter.”

  One of Karen’s worst nightmares began to unfold during the summer of 1971, one that had been mounting since the Carpenters’ earliest concert engagements. “There is no balance, no center of attention,” wrote Lester Bangs, reviewing an appearance in San Diego for Rolling Stone. “Here are six people on a stage singing and playing various instruments, and your eye just keeps shifting from one to another without ever finding a nexus to focus on.”

  True, the in-person Carpenters were a disjointed group and in need of a focal point. The obvious solution was to bring the group’s musical focus out from isolation and into the spotlight. “Hire a drummer,” wrote one music critic in Omaha, Nebraska. “Why stick a lovely girl with a tremendous voice behind a set of traps and have her pump highhat cymbals and shoot an occasional rim shot when by rights she should be out front moving to the music while she sings?”

  Taking cues from the critics, Richard and the Carpenters’ management decided Karen’s drums were in the way and ultimately disconnecting her from the audience. “You can’t sing like that and hide behind a drum set,” manager Ed Leffler told her.

  Leffler and Sherwin Bash agreed Karen could be showcased more effectively at center stage. “Richard and I tried desperately to get her away from the drums,” Bash recalled. “She was very reluctant. The drums were kind of a security blanket for her. This was a chubby young lady who could hide some of that chubbiness behind all of these drums. She was kind of a tomboy, and the drums were traditionally a male instrument. She was kind of asserting herself in a certain way. The girl vocalist out front was a role that she wanted to achieve, but she was insecure about getting out there. She wasn’t sure she was slim enough, svelte enough, pretty enough, or any of those things.”

  In early 1971 Karen responded to suggestions that she should abandon her drums for a solo microphone in the spotlight. “A lot of people think that since I’m the lead singer I should be fronting the group,” she said. “I disagree because I think we’ve got enough chick singers fronting groups. I think that as long as I can play, I want to play.”

  According to fellow drummer Frankie Chavez, “There weren’t that many girls playing in the forefront at the time. It was a very unique thing that a girl could play and sing at the same time and do it well on both accounts. It wasn’t a smokescreen, she could actually play!”

  Richard avoided confronting Karen on several occasions, but their setup posed additional challenges when it came to the medium of television. It was difficult for camera angles, and much attention was needed in order to effectively present Karen and her drum kit for each sequence. During the filming of Make Your Own Kind of Music it was recommended that she stand to sing some selections. “Oh, no, no, no, no, no,” she told them. “I’m the drummer here.” But the directors were looking for variety in the sequences and felt watching someone sing from behind the drums was odd and would get old after a few numbers.

  “Karen wasn’t as concerned that people would be able to see her,” explains Evelyn Wallace. “It was that she was absolutely in love with those drums, and she just didn’t want to leave them. But she finally gave in. The poor kid didn’t know what to do.” Having been the group’s only drummer, Karen had played exclusively for the first two years of live Carpenters performances. It is no wonder she lacked confidence to step into the spotlight and was reluctant to embrace the role of “star” of the group. Richard had long been the musical prodigy, and she was his tagalong. “Karen was really an accident,” explains Frenda Franklin. “I don’t think the family really understood her talent. Nobody got it. Nobody thought she was a good singer. Nobody nurtured her singing. To them she was backup.”

  Allyn Ferguson, who worked with Karen on the set of the television series, says her poise and self-assurance took a dive when she was singing center stage without her drums. “Her confidence was sitting behind those drums,” he says. “It was a part of her, and she was a damn good drummer. When she was not behind the drums her confidence and her security just disappeared. She didn’t seem to care much for her own singing. When she had to do a solo out front she was very uncomfortable and showed no confidence. She didn’t know whether she was any good or not. She was not a stand-up singer in any way because she didn’t believe in herself that way.” For Make Your Own Kind of Music Karen lip-synched the musical numbers without even a prop microphone. With her hands free she made awkward attempts at gestures of emphasis and emotion.

  Wit
h the television series in postproduction, the Carpenters took a brief hiatus and drove the family’s Continental Mark III cross-country to visit family and friends on the East Coast in Baltimore and New Haven. It was during this drive that Richard finally spelled out to Karen the need for her to leave the drums. “You’ve got to get up,” he said.

  “I said to Richard, ‘Oh, no you don’t,’” she recalled. “It hurt me that I had to get up and be up front. I didn’t want to give up my playing. Singing was an accident. Singing seriously came long after the drums.” The two finally reached a compromise in which Karen agreed to step out front to sing ballads like “For All We Know” and “Superstar.” In return, she could remain at the drums to play on the more up-tempo, rhythmic numbers like “Mr. Guder.” Before leaving New Haven, Richard hired the band’s new drummer, longtime friend Jim Squeglia, whom he had once played alongside in a band called the Scepters during high school. Touring with the Carpenters, Squeglia would take on the stage name of Jim Anthony, his first and middle names.

  Appearing on The Mike Douglas Show the following month, Karen announced her plans. “In the middle of our in-person show I’m going to go out front and do some tunes,” she said. “I’m never going to give up playing, no way. . . . I love it. I wouldn’t be doing it if I didn’t. People think it’s a gimmick. I don’t care what they think; it’s not a gimmick. It’s my instrument.”

  Out front, Karen was unsure of herself, to say the least. She was rigid, uncomfortable, and incapable of disguising her fears. “Petrified,” she recalled in 1976 of her initial reaction to the switch. “You have no idea. The fear! There was nothing to hold onto, nothing to hide behind. My drums, by this time, I had so many of them all you could see were my bangs. You couldn’t see the mouth, you couldn’t see the hands, you couldn’t see anything. We’re out on the road and we’re doing all the hits and the dummy is buried behind a full set of drums.”

  Frankie Chavez feels certain that it was torture for Karen to have been removed from her drum kit. “That broke her heart when she couldn’t do both from behind the kit and had to go out front,” he says. “It’s different being out front. I’ve done both, and being out front it’s as if your tether has been cut. There’s a certain joy you get from playing the kit that you’d miss if you were asked to not do it anymore.”

  “I didn’t know what to do,” Karen later explained. “My mouth still worked well, but I didn’t know what to do with my hands or whether to walk or stand still or sit down or what the heck to do. Before, everything was working. It was a cinch to play and sing and have a good time. But when I got out there, until I got comfortable with that, I just kind of planted myself and didn’t really do anything.”

  With each successive tour, Karen’s role as the group’s drummer lessened as new drummer Jim Anthony took over on more and more songs. “I understood her reluctance,” said Sherwin Bash, “but the moment we were finally able to get her out there it was all part of history. She loved being out front. She was basically the master of ceremonies for every show. She was the one that people watched. Richard never had the charisma to keep the audience’s attention. It didn’t matter. Even when he was speaking you didn’t take your eyes off Karen.”

  WATCHING TELEVISION late one night in the fall of 1971, Richard came across a 1940 movie called Rhythm on the River, in which Bing Crosby played the ghostwriter for a washed-up songwriter named Oliver Courtney. Courtney’s most famous song, “Goodbye to Love,” was mentioned throughout the film but never heard. Richard was immediately taken with the title and imagined an opening line of it as a potential song: “I’ll say goodbye to love / No one ever cared if I should live or die.” At that point his lyric stopped.

  Handing the song idea over to John Bettis, Richard and the group set off on a brief European tour. Writing of the song continued little by little with the choral ending written in London and additional work being done once they reached Berlin. “Richard didn’t have the melody completely finished,” Bettis recalled. “He had a verse or two but didn’t quite know how he was going to form it. It’s an odd melody with very long phrases. The song was tricky because of the phrasing.”

  Returning to the States with Bettis’s contributions, Richard sat down with “Goodbye to Love” and came up with a novel idea. In constructing the arrangement he imagined the unlikely sound of a melodic fuzz guitar solo. Jack Daugherty suggested they bring in an established session guitarist and recommended Louie Shelton or Dean Parks, but Richard was relying on Daugherty less and less by this time and chose to contact a young member of Instant Joy, a band that backed Mark Lindsay’s opening act for several Carpenters concerts. Karen phoned guitarist Tony Peluso, explained the project, and asked him to meet her and Richard at A&M’s studio B.

  Peluso was tall and thin. His hair was long and unkempt, halfway down his back. It seemed a mismatch at first. Even he was apprehensive and unsure the combination would work effectively. He could not read music but was a quick study, and when Richard gave him a chord sheet with instructions to play the melody on the first couple of bars and then improvise, the recording was complete in only two takes. The result was one of the first known uses of a fuzz tone guitar solo on a ballad. “When I got the record I actually cried the first time I heard it,” John Bettis recalled. “I had never heard an electric guitar sound like that and have very few times since. Tony had a certain almost cello-sounding guitar growl that worked against that wonderful melancholia of that song. The way it growls at you, especially at the end, is unbelievable. It may be my favorite single I’ve ever had with anybody.”

  Within weeks of the radio debut of “Goodbye to Love,” the Carpenters began receiving what amounted to hate mail from fans who felt the song desecrated the group’s image with the incorporating of a grungy-sounding guitar. “That was the first ballad ever done with any sort of rock and roll sensibility,” Bettis explained. “Aggressive electric guitar the way it was beginning to be used. There was a schism in instrumentation. It’s a watershed record, sonically, because Richard put two disparate worlds together. There was a legion of Carpenters fans that wasn’t ready for that, but I think it also garnered new fans.”

  By mid-1972, Peluso had accepted an offer to become a full-fledged member of the Carpenters’ touring band. As the entourage grew to fourteen, the need for adequate transportation was filled with the acquisition of two Learjets, aptly named Carpenter 1 and Carpenter 2, which were used to travel between one-nighters. It was on one such trip that Bettis came up with the song title “Top of the World.” According to the lyricist, “When I got in the plane and took off I thought, ‘Are we on top of the world now or what? Look at this!’ I saw the visual symbolism. I was at the top of the world. I took the title and wrote it with another guy, Kerry Chater. The song never came to be anything. Somehow Richard came in contact with the title again and remembered it from the airplane experience.”

  Resuming work with Richard, Bettis came up with what he considered to be “the best rhyme scheme I ever executed with the Carpenters. I don’t know whether anybody’s ever noticed, but that was a tricky rhyme scheme to keep up: ‘In the leaves on the trees / And the touch of the breeze / There’s a pleasin’ sense of happiness for me.’”

  The Carpenters recorded “Goodbye to Love” and “Top of the World” for what became their A Song for You album released in June 1972. Richard heard the title song on Leon Russell’s debut album and felt it would be well suited to their style. “A Song for You” is considered by many to be a contemporary standard and has since been recorded by a range of artists from Willie Nelson to Michael Bublé. The haunting melody and touching lyric combined for one of Karen’s finest performances, but, although figured to be a single, it was overlooked because of its duration; it was considered to be too long for Top 40 radio. Stephen Holden of Rolling Stone took notice and called it “far and away the album’s finest moment. It is a great song that is rapidly achieving the classic status it deserves, and Karen communicates its poignancy with
effortless serenity.”

  Also on the album was “Hurting Each Other,” which Richard first heard on KRLA in 1969. Incidentally, it was an A&M Records release by Ruby and the Romantics and one that he later came across in the stockroom on the lot shortly after having signed with the label. He played it, put it away, and was reminded of it again in 1971 while playing arbitrary chord changes on his electric piano during a sound check. His up-tempo-to-ballad formula (à la “Ticket to Ride”) worked again, and “Hurting Each Other” became the Carpenters’ next hit single. Nilsson’s “Without You” held the #1 spot this time as “Hurting” tried for two weeks to break through. It was the Carpenters’ fourth #2 single but the sixth in a string of #1 hits on the Adult Contemporary chart.

  Almost as random a discovery was “It’s Going to Take Some Time.” Richard first heard the song on a quad test pressing of Carole King’s Music LP played by the engineers installing the Carpenters’ new quadraphonic sound system at Newville in the fall of 1971.

  Roger Nichols and Paul Williams considered “I Won’t Last a Day Without You” to be a complete song with just two verses and a chorus, just as they submitted it to the Carpenters on a demo in 1971. They struggled to honor Karen’s last-minute request for an additional bridge and third verse. “We finally worked it out and went in and did the demo the day before they recorded it,” Nichols recalls. “They were screaming at us to get it to them and were upset with us because they were right down to the wire in the studio. What bothered me was that I heard Richard never even listened to the demo. He just looked at the sheet music and started changing it. It was kind of a sore point with me because he changed the melody in the bridge and the chord structure. After that, other people heard our version of the song—like Barbra Streisand and Diana Ross—and they all recorded the version as we had written it. I always felt that if the Carpenters had cut a better bridge it would have been a bigger song for them.”