Information found on this page has been furnished by Julie Winton.
When you're on tour, the whole world looks Motel Green. The Cincinnati motel room that houses Richard Carpenter, one half of the hot singing team that has dared to put romance back into Pop, is no exception. The sun beats down at a muggy, unrelenting 90 degrees.The air-conditioner is stuck on fast-freeze. The ever-present TV set, its big eye blank now, stares out over a roomful of depressing furniture and obscenely oversized beds.
Richard sips iced tea and takes a tranquilizer. His sister Karen just grouses. They are feeling travel-worn, homesick and apprehensive about tonight's concert, one of 15 one-nighters in the last three weeks.
The motel-green telephone rings, and Richard trips over his half-opened suitcase to grab it. This time it is not an irate conductor in Minneapolis or a booking agent in Kansas City; it's Agnes, the original Carpenter, calling from the family home in Downey, CA. Only the news is not sunshine. Her voice crackles over the phone. Ma Carpenter is giving her now-famous offspring a motherly piece of her mind.
Richard wilts into the motel-green bedspread as Ma Carpenter reads an angry letter from a fan who had brought her family to a concert in Hershey, PA, last week and was dismayed that the Carpenters did not sign autographs after the show. Richard is sputtering, "But Mom..but mom.." What Mom doesn't know is that it was pouring rain in Hershey, a thousand kids were about to rush the car, and they're lucky they weren't run over. Karen is just plain furious: "We're practically the only group in America that signs autographs, and we nearly get killed every time we do it."
Minutes later, an anguished and dutiful Richard is calling Hershey, apologizing and promising to send autographed copies of the Carpenters three albums. The woman, only slightly molified, lays it right out there, "Richard," she says, "we were very disappointed with you in Hershey." Karen is wild: "This is incredible! Could you just see Mick Jagger apologizing for not giving an autograph?"
In fact, there''s probably no one else in the whole hard-nosed world of pop music who would have made that phone call except the Carpenters. But it is this honest, eager-to-please folksiness that separates the Carpenters from the Jaggers. They want everybody to love them. It is their richly harmonized, romantic music that makes them as sweetly unique in the world of rock as Love Story in the world of contemporary literature. Arriving just last year in the Top Ten with Close to You and We've Only Just Begun, the Carpenters have already collected Grammy Awards as the best new artists and as best contemporary performance by a vocal group of 1970.
The telephone call over, the Carpenters manage to get it together, hop in a rented car and head for the bowling alley. As we walk in, a few of the Ohio Mayflower set give Richard's long Prince Valient haircut a hostile look. Karen laughs, "Why don't they understand that we're just two kids from Downey who like to take showers?"
To hear them tell it, life is one long series of comic chases through motel corridors, practical jokes and the general stuff of a college spree amongst the entourage of 15 musicians and equipment. In Lansing, MI, for instance, the horseplay climaxed in a dressingroom water-balloon fight that left the entire group soaking wet minutes before curtain time.
Here in Cincinnati, the game has been to elude three teen-age girls who have been following them cross-country ever since they played Carnegie Hall a week previously. Richard, hardly a lady killer, is befuddled by the relentless fans: "Everybody else in the music business meets a chick for one night and she's happy, they're happy. But me, I've got this whole troop that won't go home. What am I supposed to do?"
Unlike many of their middle-America counterparts, Karen and Richard are so immersed in their music that they are socially and politically uninvolved. "Sure, we think the world's a big mess," says Richard, laying down a sharply breaking hook. "But we couldn't get seriously into politics now because we're too busy."
It may be part of the secret of the Carpenters success that many listeners are taking refuge in nostalgia for better days gone by, love stories, and love songs. "For the kids to make Number 1 records with their romantic sound, when the rest of the music scene is still heavy rock, amazes even me," Sherwin Bash, their unflappable veteran manager, told me later. "A song like Rainy Days and Mondays is the kind of thing Sinatra might have done when he was doing songs like Violets for Your Furs! It's instant nostalgia. The Carpenters music may never be put in a time capsule, but the people certainly love it now. There's a pretty girl and a young bright-eyed boy doing pretty things they love and that's all we're talking about."
Perhaps the basic Carpenter appeal is this simple, but their musical development was anything but. It began with Richard's obsessive love of music that made him a jazz-piano whiz at age 16. As a high school student growing up in New Haven, Conn., he studied the classics at the Yale School of music during the day and was playing with jazz groups at night. "But all the time, I was listening to pop music," he recalls. "My 3 b's were really the Beatles, Bacharach and the Beach Boys."
Karen, one of few female drummers in the business, was an avid baseball fan until her senior year in high school when she was scheduled for an early morning physical-education class. "Running around at 8 o'clock freezing to death just didn't agree with me," Karen says. "So Richard arranged for me to get into the marching band as a substitute for physical ed. I couldn't play anything, so they handed me a glockenspiel. I used to march with the drum section and I'd watch this guy who was a Buddy Rich freak. He used to have the same set of drums, eat the same food, even get up at the same time as Buddy Rich. One day I heard the kid take a solo break that completely gassed me. From then on, I didn't want to do anything but play drums."
Starting out with a set of chopsticks and four bar stools, Karen paradiddled along with records at home and proved to be almost as natural a musical talent as Richard. When he heard her keeping up with the complex polyrhythms of Dave Brubeck's Time Further Out, weaving through 11/4, 9/8 and 5/4 time with ease, Richard joined her campaign to get a set of drums. Within weeks, she played with her brother for a local production of Guys and Dolls, and became a regular member of his jazz trio, along with a young bass and tuba player named Wes Jacobs.
Wes Jacobs became disgusted with the pop scene and took his tuba to the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. Karen and Richard retrenched with a new musical group and began 2 years of beating on record company doors.
"We formed a harmony vocal group with some guys that were in choir with us at Long Beach State College," Richard is saying. "It was about the same sound we have now and was called Spectrum. We used to play the Hoot night at the Troubadour every Monday, just for the chance of being heard by someone for 15 minutes. Wow, if you think we look square now, you should have seen us with our crew-cuts and blue-velvet jackets."
Richard cheerfully admits his group sounded a bit like Muzak when following some of the rock-sound machines they played with, like Steppenwolf. "But the kids liked our sound. Our big break was a date at the Whiskey-a-Go-Go in Hollywood, where the kids all sat and listened and dug us. Well, at the Whiskey, if no one's dancing, the management figures something's wrong. The owner threw us out and the group broke up shortly after that."
The breakup of Spectrum turned out to be a lucky break. Left with only their two voices, Richard and Karen created harmonies by blending with themselves on multitrack tapes. "Wow, we couldn't beleive the results," says Karen. "All of a sudden this 10-ton thing was born. This couldn't miss!"
They ran up a bill of $47,000 on a first album that made no impressive sales dent. Herb's confidence never wavered, and one day he played a Bacharach-David song for them that Dionne Warwicke had recorded without particular success. The song Close to You, which exploded for the Carpenters into two gold records. Since then, the Carpenters have had just one long musical blaze of success.
"The television show is very exciting for us," says Karen, "But introductions and comedy bits aren't really our thing; basically we're musicians." Richard would like to experiment more with musical innovations eventually. "There's so much you can do with the voice that I didn't think would be commercially cool to do just yet," he says. "I'd like to do a choral album like that vocal segment of 2001, tone clusters and radical harmonics."
But it's time to go. Richard underlines his point by throwing 3 straight strikes and, in high spirits, heads the rental car toward the Cincinnati Gardens.
The concert is a plague. They've been booked into this hockey rink where the stage is too high and there is a seven-second echo delay bouncing off the walls. Promotion has been weak, the dressing room smells like old ice skates and everyone is feeling low. But it's all part of life on the road. Once on stage, the Carpenters start singing, and suddenly that hockey rink is the most romantic place in the world. Afterwards, they sign autographs, just like Mom told 'em.
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Last changed: Thu Nov 2 15:07:33 EST 2006