Little Girl Blue (14 page)

Along with Roger Nichols, Williams went into the studio as the Carpenters' recording of “Rainy Days and Mondays” was taking shape. There they listened as Bob Messenger tracked his saxophone solo. “I think my face just fell off my skull,” Williams says. “That's the greatest record I've heard of one of my songs. From the harmonica intro to the last notes it just made me crazy. When Karen sang it you heard the sadness and the loneliness. For me, listening to her sing that song is almost like a bridge from what was contemporary to the roots of the emotion, back to a Billie Holiday kind of thing. It's just a classic.”

As good as “Rainy Days and Mondays” was, Nichols says Karen preferred another of his and Paul's songs she had recorded. She wanted “Let Me Be the One” to be the next Carpenters single. After hearing their arrangement of “Rainy Days,” Nichols pleaded, “‘Rainy Days and Mondays,'
please
!” He hoped they would hold off on “Let Me Be the One,” at least temporarily.

In the summer of 1971 Paul Williams treated his mother to a European vacation. He remembers she was not impressed with the desolation
she saw in Germany and was pleasantly surprised to see beautiful flowers in all the window boxes as they crossed into France. Just then, “Rainy Days and Mondays” played over the car radio. “It was the first time we'd ever heard it on the radio, and my mother started crying,” he says. “I was hearing Karen singing ‘talking to myself and feeling old,' and the woman who gave me the line—the woman who raised me—was sitting behind me, and she didn't even know. Once I told her she laughed and said, ‘Oh, I don't talk to myself. You're crazy!'”

“Rainy Days and Mondays” was held out of the #1 spot by Carole King's double A-side single featuring “It's Too Late” and “I Feel the Earth Move.” Perhaps a double A-side featuring both “Rainy Days” and “Let Me Be the One” would have pushed the Carpenters to the top of the chart. Instead, the latter never saw release as a single. According to Williams, “Let Me Be the One” has never been a hit, despite its popularity. “It's one of those songs that everybody's recorded, but it's never been a single. It was used very briefly by ABC-TV in 1976. ‘Let us be the one you turn to / Let us be the one you turn to / When you need someone to turn to / Let us be the one.' It evolved through the years to a whole ad campaign.”

In hopes of getting another potential hit song recorded by the Carpenters, Williams set out on his own to write a song specifically for Karen and Richard. What resulted was a Top 10 hit, not for the Carpenters but for Three Dog Night. “I wrote ‘Old Fashioned Love Song' for the Carpenters,” he says. “I'd heard that one of my songs had gotten on the charts again and just went gold, so I said to this girl I was dating, ‘The kid did it again with another old-fashioned love song.' I sat down at her piano and in about twenty minutes wrote ‘Old Fashioned Love Song.' It's real simple. I ran in and did a demo of it and sent it over to Richard, and I don't think he even listened to it all the way through at the time. They didn't love it as I had figured they would so I sent it to Three Dog Night.” Later rethinking their dismissal of the song, Karen and Richard performed it in a medley with Carol Burnett on her television series in 1972.

A
RRIVING HOME
relatively early after a recording session at A&M Records, Karen went to bed while Richard sat down to watch
The Tonight Show
with Johnny Carson. The musical guest was newcomer Bette Midler, performing a song about a groupie who longs for one more tryst with her rock star. Originally titled “Groupie,” its roots go back to Rita Coolidge, who gave songwriter Leon Russell the basic idea for its theme. Coolidge joined Russell and the song's cowriter, Bonnie Bramlett (of Delaney and Bonnie), on Joe Cocker's
Mad Dogs and Englishmen
tour where she performed it. By tour's end it had been renamed with the simple yet dramatic one-word title: “Superstar.”

Although Karen had heard “Superstar” on a promo copy of the
Mad Dogs and Englishmen
live album, Midler's performance was Richard's first exposure, and he immediately heard its potential. It was understated and backed only by piano, a contemporary twist to the classic torch song style. He was especially taken with the song's hook, perhaps even catchier than that of “Rainy Days and Mondays.”

Don't you remember you told me you loved me baby

You said you'd be coming back this way again baby

Baby, baby, baby, baby, oh, baby

I love you, I really do

As Midler's “Superstar” came to an end, Richard ran through the house and bounded up the stairs. “I've found
the tune
,” he told Karen.

“That's nice,” she said after hearing the song.

“
Nice
?”

This was one of only a few times Karen was known to have objected to a song selected for her by Richard. But even in this case, she eventually agreed to record “Superstar,” although she did so begrudgingly. It was only after hearing the finished product that she heard what Richard had in mind all along. According to Frank Pooler, “Richard was the brains behind the Carpenters. Karen did what she was told.”

Karen's vocal track on “Superstar” was her work lead, the first “take” to familiarize the other musicians with the song. Not only that, she read the words from a paper napkin on which Richard had scribbled
the lyric as the session began. Knowing the song would never find a place on Top 40 radio stations with the lyric “I can hardly wait to
sleep
with you again,” the Carpenters opted for the more radio friendly “
be
with you again.” The song's publishers were delighted with the word change and told Richard how that singular line had kept numerous artists from recording the song.

The intensity and emotion in Karen's voice led many to assume she was an “old soul” and wise beyond her years. In a 1972 interview she explained how she delivered such a convincing performance on a song like “Superstar” though it dealt with subject matter she had never experienced. “
I've seen enough groupies
hanging around to sense their loneliness, even though they usually don't show it,” she explained. “I can't really understand them, but I just tried to feel empathy, and I guess that's what came across in the song.”

According to Frank Pooler, “When Karen sang, it sounded like she had experienced all this stuff. She couldn't possibly have experienced all that; she was too young. There's a difference between being a singer and having a fine voice. Good singers can have average voices, but there's something about the word communication. That she had. You felt like she was singing it for the first time and only for you.”

It was Rod Stewart's “Maggie May / Reason to Believe” single that held “Superstar” a spot shy of #1 this time. It remained at #2 for two weeks, a frustrating location for Karen and Richard and one they had grown accustomed to. The flip side, “Bless the Beasts and Children,” also charted at a respectable #67 and was nominated for a Best Original Song Oscar at the Academy Awards.

It seemed as though Bette Midler might have been miffed by the Carpenters' success with “Superstar,” the song she introduced to the duo, as she began to poke fun at Karen's goody-two-shoes image during her live act. “She's so white she's invisible!” she would say, but Karen took it all in stride, claiming that it was a tribute. Besides, as she pointed out, the gold record for “Superstar” was on the Carpenters' wall, not Bette's.

Midler curtsied sarcastically to Karen when the Carpenters presented her with a Grammy for Best New Artist in 1974. “Me and Miss
Karen!” she exclaimed. “What a hoot. I'm surprised she didn't hit me over the head with it!”

The two visited with each other at a Grammy after-party. “
We got along fine
,” Karen recalled in an interview later that year. “Bette said, ‘I don't know what I'm gonna do now that we're friends.' She's funny as heck. . . . She likes to pick on me, but I think that's just a good showbiz bit for her.”

Returning to the Grammys as presenter the following year, Bette recalled the event in her monologue. “It was only a year ago that Karen Carpenter crowned me the Best New Artist of the year,” she told the audience. “If that ain't the kiss of death, honey, I don't know what is.”

T
HE DAYS
of the Carpenters performing as an opening act were over. On May 14, 1971, they headlined a sold-out concert at New York City's legendary Carnegie Hall, where Karen and the group performed an already impressive set of their hits in succession. “Rainy Days and Mondays” and “For All We Know” received immediate and enthusiastic response from the audience, who knew their songs word-for-word. “
Karen Carpenter has one of
those magical voices,” wrote Nancy Erlich for
Billboard
in her review from Carnegie Hall. “There are maybe three of them among all the ladies in pop music that create a direct line of communication with their very tone. Words and music are secondary; there is always that quality that comes through.”

The concert was a homecoming of sorts, with family and friends from nearby New Haven in attendance. For most, this was their first reunion with the duo in eight years. Karen and Richard were honored with a party thrown at the home of their cousin Joanie and her husband, Hank Will. Though the guest list was small, the gathering became more of an event as word spread that the Carpenters were in town. Festivities were moved outdoors to accommodate a crowd of more than a hundred attendees. “I never really saw Karen as a celebrity,” says Frank Bonito, who visited with her that day. “Even when I attended her concerts, I enjoyed them, but it was the time backstage before the concert or at a party afterwards that I enjoyed most. We would just sit and talk
and catch up on each other's lives. Karen never flaunted her wealth and position. She actually downplayed it and was always sincerely interested in what was happening in my life. She wanted to know about old school friends and teachers, and she maintained a wonderful childlike quality about herself.”

The Carpenters' eponymous album, often referred to as the
Tan Album
(perhaps a nod to the Beatles'
White Album
), was released the same day as the Carnegie Hall concert. It was the first of a string of Carpenters albums to “ship gold,” which at the time indicated presales of more than a million copies. But just as Carole King held “Rainy Days and Mondays” out of the #1 spot on
Billboard
's Hot 100, her epic
Tapestry
LP shut out
Carpenters
on the album charts, too, where it peaked at #2.

Upon returning to Los Angeles, Karen and Richard began taping a summer replacement series for NBC Television the last week of May 1971. “Make Your Own Kind of Music” was a popular recording by Mama Cass and became the theme for this television variety hour that aired Tuesday nights in the eight o'clock time slot usually occupied by
The Don Knotts Show
. “Karen was a mic singer,” recalls Allyn Ferguson, who served as a musical supervisor on the series. He remembers her to be quite shy and says she sang very close to the microphone with a “tiny” voice. “She would have never been OK on a musical stage,” he says. “You would not be able to hear her at all if you were thirty or forty feet away because she didn't project at all. She understood how to sing on a microphone, and that brought a sort of intimacy to everything she did.”

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.