Little Girl Blue

by Randy L. Schmidt

  The Carpenters largely blamed their wholesome image for the decline in interest in their music. The image issues that plagued the duo from their debut would likely have faded if allowed to do so, but the fact that both Karen and Richard were vocal about their frustrations only seemed to draw attention to their “Goody Four Shoes” personas. They had been called “milk-fed,” “squeaky-clean,” “vitamin-swallowing,” “sticky-sweet,” and “Pepsodent-smiling” ad nauseum. The 1974 Rolling Stone cover story was one of their first determined efforts to add some grit to their public perception and shed the myth that they were perfect angels. “The image we have,” Karen said, “would be impossible for Mickey Mouse to maintain. We’re just normal people.”

  Their quest for acceptance continued with a 1976 cover story for People Weekly in which they admitted neither was a virgin and both voted in favor of legalizing marijuana. “It’s no worse than alcohol,” Karen said. In Melody Maker she told Ray Coleman the story of a journalist who asked Richard if he agreed with premarital sex. “When he said ‘yes,’ the woman wouldn’t print it! We were labeled as don’t-do-anything! Just smile, scrub your teeth, take a shower, go to sleep. Mom’s apple pie. We’re normal! I get up in the morning, eat breakfast in front of the TV, and watch game shows. I don’t smoke. If I wanted to smoke I would smoke. I just don’t like smoking, not because of my image.”

  What came next was a backlash not unlike that against Tony Peluso’s fuzz guitar solo on “Goodbye to Love” in 1972. But they were prepared for the reaction and defended themselves accordingly. “It had to be done,” Karen told London’s Daily Mirror. “We had to shed the goody two shoes image. It was too much. We’re normal, healthy people. We believe people should be free to do what they want to do. Richard is thirty, and I am twenty-six. But the letters we got when we said we weren’t virgins read as though we had committed a crime. People must have been dumb to have believed that we were that good. I don’t drink because I don’t enjoy it much, but when Richard and some of the band boys cooled down with beers on stage there was an outcry. And when Richard was seen smoking an ordinary cigarette, the reaction was terrific. And when we said we thought pot ought to be legalized, in came a shoal of letters saying we were drug addicts. . . . We had to speak out and tell the truth about us as it is. It’s hell living like a pair of angels.”

  Like Karen, Olivia Newton-John had her share of image-related issues in the mid-1970s. “That ‘white bread’ image was something else Karen and I had in common,” Olivia says. “We never felt we were taken seriously as singers.” Newton-John was the occasional sounding board for Karen’s dismay and disappointment concerning the Carpenters’ decline in sales and popularity. “They’d had incredible success and then they were going through that slack period we all do,” she explains. “It’s part of life.”

  AFTER A Kind of Hush it seemed that both Karen and Richard lacked the energy and determination that had shined through on their earlier efforts. It also became more difficult to write and select material radio programmers and audiences wanted. “For the last three years there has been a definite resistance to our product, and I don’t know why,” Karen explained to Radio Report in 1978. “We’ve been doing our best to turn out the finest product we can. Richard keeps changing direction. We’ve covered practically every aspect that is capable of being put to disc with the exception of classical. We haven’t done that yet.”

  Experimentation, diversity, and perhaps even desperation birthed the Carpenters’ next studio album, Passage, released September 23, 1977. Billboard called it their “most boldly innovative and sophisticated undertaking yet,” pointing out that “the material constantly shifts gears from calypso, lushly orchestrated complex pop rhythms, jazz flavored ballads, reggae and melodic, upbeat numbers.”

  Passage opened with the daring “B’wana She No Home,” a Michael Franks tune with a vocal arrangement by jazz great Gene Puerling, the sound architect of vocal groups including the Hi-Lo’s and the Singers Unlimited. “B’wana” was one of several songs on the album that were essentially live recordings. “When recording, we usually begin with bass, drums, piano, and build from there,” Richard explained in the album’s liner notes. “But on several of these tracks, almost the whole thing was recorded live all at once. Certain pieces call for that.”

  Passage spawned the debut single “All You Get from Love Is a Love Song,” one Karen felt was a surefire hit. “We thought it was really going to make it,” she said, “but it got hardly any airplay at all.” It was a strong album cut but not nearly as strong a single as they needed at this stage. Monitoring airplay became a focus for the Carpenters more with this album than any previous. Some at A&M even began resorting to payola, meaning that payments or incentives were given in exchange for placement on playlists and prominent airplay during a given interval. Even Carpenters fans were enlisted to assist and sent gifts as tokens of appreciation for helping monitor the number of spins a particular song was seeing on a particular station.

  Richard first listened to “Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft” at the urging of Tony Peluso on a 1976 album by the Canadian group Klaatu. “[He] wanted to do that more than anything in the world,” Karen recalled. “When we got done with it, it had turned into an epic. We figured out that we spent more time on ‘Occupants’ than we did our third album. That was a job. It was a masterpiece when Richard got done with it.” In addition to introducing the song to the Carpenters, Peluso reprised his role of a bemused deejay during the recording’s opening dialogue segment.

  For their endeavor, Karen and Richard brought in sixty-year-old Englishman Peter Knight, whose work on the Moody Blues’ Days of Future Passed album had impressed the Carpenters nearly ten years earlier. According to harpist Gayle Levant, working with Knight was a thrill for her and the other studio musicians. “He was a phenomenal arranger,” she says. “It was absolutely a joy to play his charts. Those magic moments happen when you hear a chart and you just know that you’re working with a man who is magic.” It was also Knight who arranged and conducted the orchestra on the Passage album’s other epic, the sweeping anthem from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Evita, “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina.” A&M’s Jerry Moss disagreed with the Carpenters’ decision to record “Argentina,” saying it was a socialist anthem, but Richard believed strongly that it was well suited for Karen and in no way meant to be a political statement. For many years, copies of the album produced and sold in Argentina omitted the selection.

  Contractual agreements precluded the Los Angeles Philharmonic from being credited as such, so liner notes humorously credit the “Over-budget Philharmonic” instead. With more than a hundred instrumentalists and an additional fifty in the chorus, the recording was done on A&M’s Chaplin Stage (and wired into studio D) before an audience of representatives from Los Angeles–area press and media. College friend and tubist Wes Jacobs was visiting Los Angeles and sat in on the colossal recording session.

  Although rarely complimentary of the Carpenters’ product or live performances, Robert Hilburn, rock critic with the Los Angeles Times, praised Passage for its “experimental touches that added refreshing character to their musical foundation. On their version of ‘Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina’ there’s a maturity to Karen’s vocal that was far beyond anything in the early years.” Hilburn obviously overlooked “Superstar,” “Rainy Days and Mondays,” “This Masquerade,” and countless others, but his admiration was better late than never. But on “Argentina,” there was a sense of depth and understanding. Like many of her recordings, the lyric was autobiographical when placed in context with the personal struggles she faced over the years.

  And as for fortune and as for fame

  I never invited them in

  Though it seemed to the world they were all I desired

  They are illusions; they’re not the solutions they promised to be

  “Sweet, Sweet Smile” was the album’s final single and one that took aim at the country music market. “This is the fi
rst time we’ve gone all out after a country hit,” said A&M’s assistant national promotion director Lenny Bronstein in an interview with Paul Grein. The song was also issued with “Reason to Believe,” “Jambalaya,” and “Top of the World” in a four-song promotional Country Collection EP sent to country stations and regional promoters. “We always try to get one country song on our albums,” Karen told Country Music magazine in 1978. “Not for any specific purpose but because we like it. We don’t go in and say we’ve got to record a song that will get on the country charts. We always just go in with what we like.” Although “Sweet, Sweet Smile” reached only #44 on the pop chart, it went Top 10 on the country chart and peaked at #8. The crossover success and interest from country radio led Karen and Richard to consider recording an all-country album for 1978, but the plan never made it past Jerry Moss, who reminded them that a hit pop album was their priority.

  “I Just Fall In Love Again” was an obvious choice for single release from Passage, but it was too much in the vein of the traditional Carpenters love song formula, complete with oboe interludes and a fuzz guitar solo. They seemed to consciously move away from such predictability with this album, which incidentally contained no original material. Canadian singer Anne Murray, herself a pop-country crossover, had a Top 20 hit with “I Just Fall in Love Again” the following year.

  Passage was the first Carpenters album to be released without any photographs of Karen and Richard, a stark change from their usual smiling portraits. Even the trademark “Carpenters” logo appeared only on the lower portion of the back panel. Popular Los Angeles illustrator Lou Beach, commissioned to do the Passage artwork, was given the title and free reign. “I was exploring the limits of the new color Xerox machines,” recalls Beach. “That art came out of a session at the copy center. It was the best-paying record cover job I’d ever had.”

  While the Carpenters considered Passage to be a creative success, commercially it flopped, becoming their first album to fall short of gold status. Ardent Carpenters follower Ray Coleman had felt the duo’s two previous albums were inferior, but he proclaimed that Passage was an “indecisive” career low. “After all these years of admiring their excellence, we have come to expect something special from Carpenters albums,” Coleman wrote in his review for Melody Maker. “This one just will not do. . . . Karen’s melting vocals—always their most powerful asset—are lost when they tackle “Man Smart, Woman Smarter” and “Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina.” . . . It’s a tragic comment on such talent, but Carpenters fans can safely ignore this release; let’s wish them a speedy return to musical decisiveness.”

  Often accused of not allowing the Carpenters the necessary studio time to produce a quality album, former manager Sherwin Bash explained the duo’s need for patience once their records sales took a downturn. “Too many artists forget that you don’t have to do everything in five years,” he said. “But you can space it out and take your time. Take time to recharge those batteries and sit down and think about the next album. If you’re going to write it, you’re lucky to come out with an album every one or two years. In today’s life, even if it isn’t for three years the world won’t forget. The world doesn’t need another album, they only need great albums. I could never convince Richard of this.”

  Karen was fiercely proud of the material she and Richard recorded and was troubled by discouraging reviews, especially from those who had long been on their side. “In this business you’ve not only got to prove yourself but you’ve also got to prove them wrong,” she had declared in 1976.

  Luckily, the Carpenters’ presence on the international music scene was strong, with “Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft” becoming a huge hit in Japan and “Sweet, Sweet Smile” a smash in Germany. But the fickle American audiences left Karen and Richard scrambling to produce something they would buy. “We just don’t know what Top 40 radio is looking for,” Karen told Radio Report. “One minute they say they’re looking for a traditional Carpenters record. We give them one of those and they don’t want it. They say they want something different, so we give them ‘Occupants’ and they don’t want that either. We give them country and Top 40 again resists. If somebody would just let us know what the problem is, then we could take it from there. Everybody has a different answer.”

  Karen was unable to separate these professional discouragements from her personal life. She was so focused on achieving and succeeding in the outside world that her inner world and inner beauties were not valued. Although she claimed to want nothing more than a traditional family life with a husband and children, business came first. In fact, when interviewed in 1975, she told Ray Coleman that if it came to a choice between private life and fame, hers would be fame. “We’re very dedicated to our business,” she said. “Our life is our music, creating it. We try to do everything with as much perfection as we can. We have certain beliefs, certain loyalties to ways of doing things.”

  “She was very, very career conscious,” recalls Olivia Newton-John. “It was very important to her, she took it very seriously and she took it personally. I’d always had relationships and boyfriends. To me, my career wasn’t the be-all and end-all of life, but for her it pretty much was at that point.”

  “YOU ARE the Perry Comos of today,” Jerry Weintraub told the Carpenters. Yet another aspect of Weintraub’s visions involved bringing the duo into American living rooms via television. He felt this was a sure way to guarantee permanence for their careers. From specials featuring performers such as Como, Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisand, and Petula Clark to regular series starring performers such as Judy Garland, Tom Jones, Sonny and Cher, and Glen Campbell, musical variety shows were a staple of American television in the 1960s and 1970s.

  At first, Karen and Richard were unconvinced. Their 1971 summer series Make Your Own Kind of Music had been a disaster in their opinions, primarily due to a lack of control over the sketch material. “We stayed away from television for quite a few years until we signed with Jerry Weintraub, at which point he got us our own shows,” Karen said. “That’s really what we needed. We needed to have full control of what we wanted to put and present on television.”

  After negotiating a deal with ABC-TV program director Fred Silverman in 1976, Weintraub formed Downey-Bronx Productions with the Carpenters to produce their television specials and remained actively involved throughout the production. He attended most rehearsals and tapings, offered feedback, and made suggestions to director Bob Henry. “Jerry was always an extra set of eyes and ears looking out for Karen and Richard,” remembers Jerry Jaskulski, associate producer for several of the Carpenters’ specials. “Bob Henry was in charge overall, and they trusted him when it came to the visual presentation of the show. They were always kept aware of all planning and did have veto power if they didn’t like something. Richard was certainly in charge of making the musical decisions. Karen could be demanding when it came to her own performances, as she should have been. She also had a great sense of humor. The mere fact that she chose to play the drums shows that she enjoyed letting loose.”

  After three weeks of intense rehearsals with guest stars John Denver and Victor Borge, The Carpenters’ Very First Television Special was taped September 30–October 2, 1976. The December 8 airing came in at #6 for the week in the Nielsen ratings and garnered an offer from ABC-TV for additional specials on the network. For their 1978 holiday television special, The Carpenters: A Christmas Portrait, Karen and Richard were joined by legendary song and dance man Gene Kelly and other guests. “By the time we did that special they were certainly more relaxed and familiar with the routine,” says associate producer Jerry Jaskulski.

  Karen agreed, saying, “Each one, in our opinion, has gotten better because you grow. You learn very quickly in television how to do certain things and what you do and what you can pull off and what you can’t pull off. There are a lot of things that time doesn’t permit you to do the way you want to. If it were up to us we’d spend a week just recording, but you can�
��t do that with television. Luckily, we’ve come off as close to perfection as we have attempted. Some things we had to let go against our judgment. On the whole we’ve been real, real happy. We’ve had the opportunity to work with so many, many good people.”

  Guest stars on the television specials ran the gamut from legends like Ella Fitzgerald and Gene Kelly to Grade B stars including Jimmy and Kristy McNichol, Suzanne Somers, and John Davidson. While the comedic efforts were entertaining in moderation, the writing was poor to say the least. “The Carpenters should have demanded better scripts, guest stars, sketch ideas, and staging concepts,” wrote Paul Grein in a 1991 reassessment of the duo’s work. “If they didn’t have the power to make those demands, they should have.”

  Hindsight reveals a number of poor choices in terms of scripts and scenarios. Given Karen’s history with an eating disorder, it was a bizarre decision by producers to stage one of her song sequences in a kitchen wearing an apron. “I’ve found over the years the best way to get a party going is to make sure that people have enough food to eat!” From there Karen went from appliance to appliance, all the while singing and dancing—and baking. “The reason we chose to have Karen in a kitchen environment was to present her to be more like one of the girls,” Jerry Jaskulski says. “We wanted to show her as a typical family member and make it easier for the women in the audience to relate to her. Prior to that they had only seen her singing and playing the drums. We all knew Karen had an eating problem, but no one ever thought it would end so tragically.”

  Unfortunately the producers’ narrow-mindedness meant Karen usually portrayed one-dimensional caricatures during their television specials. Her dialogue lacked depth, and as a result she often came across as gullible or naive, at times even a little ditzy. Richard loathed the attempts at comedy and later regretted the emphasis on those sketches and their canned laughter over higher-caliber musical routines. But Karen was the star, and she seemed to enjoy these productions, which gave her the opportunity to sing, dance, drum, and even try her hand at acting, which sparked her interest in starring in a movie. “It’s something I would really like to do,” she said in 1978. “I love to act and sing. I’m not sure how or when but I’d like to do a musical.” In fact, Karen had hinted at this idea as early as 1971, evidenced by this A&M Records press release.