Little Girl Blue (32 page)

Carole Curb affirms that having children seemed to be her ultimate goal in life. “Even though she had an amazing voice and was very driven, I think ultimately she just wanted to have a husband and kids and the white picket fence.” Childhood friend Debbie Cuticello agrees. “She wanted children desperately. She wanted a family, the little white picket fence, the dog, and the two-car garage.”

Until that time came, Karen lived vicariously through best friend Frenda Leffler, even climbing atop Frenda's hospital gurney on her way into the delivery room. Unbeknownst to everyone, Frenda was carrying twins. With the arrival of the second baby, Karen looked up toward the ceiling and exclaimed, “Thank you God! You sent one for
me
!” She settled for the title of godmother to babies Ashley and Andrew—the “kidlets” she would call them—and Ashley soon acquired the nickname Ashley Famous. She presented each with a silver dish that she had hand engraved with the message:
WHEN I COUNT MY BLESSINGS I COUNT YOU TWICE. LOVE, AUNTIE KAREN.

In anticipation of starting her own family, Karen mulled over names for her future children. It was decided that a son would be named for Richard but that everyone would call him Rick or Richie. For a daughter she chose the name Kristi.

F
ROM “(THEY
Long to Be) Close to You” in 1970 through “I Need to Be in Love” in 1976, every Carpenters single (not including B-sides) reached #1 or #2 on the Adult Contemporary chart, “
a streak that nobody
has come close to beating,” according to Christopher Feldman's
Billboard Book of #2 Singles
. On the pop charts the duo racked up a string of sixteen consecutive Top 20 hit singles and five Top 10 albums. They won three Grammy Awards in these six years and were presented with an American Music Award. But these amazing feats would do little to soothe the pains of the decline in record sales and popularity the Carpenters would experience in the latter half of the decade. The slope—particularly steep at home in the United States—was most upsetting to Karen, who seemed to take each success or failure personally. “
Each time you get
a hit record you have to work twice as hard to get another one,” she said in 1977. “This business changes every minute. If you don't spend all your time staying on top of it or thinking you're staying on top of it, you're going to be gone. And that's a full-time job.”

Though Karen and Richard were still very well known, and their concerts were a huge draw, record sales began to fall.
A Kind of Hush
eventually went gold but was not the commercial success of previous
Carpenters albums. Herb Alpert had hinted to Karen and Richard that the album was not on par with their earlier releases. Although Alpert could have held up production in favor of better material, the Carpenters were satisfied enough and pushed for its release.

Allyn Ferguson, who worked with the Carpenters in the early 1970s, witnessed the downhill slide of many artists, even legends like Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra. “It happens to everybody,” he says. “It has nothing to do with the people themselves. They're doing the same thing they always did. The public gets tired of them. It's a strange thing how the American public is not only fickle, but they respond to a lot of different things that are not musical at all, like the publicity and the attention that everybody's giving them. It's like a mob mentality. When the idol starts to have the image disappear, American fans just move on to the next one. That's a part of show business. We have a great term in showbiz—everybody's a ‘star fucker,' which means if you're not a star anymore everybody just turns their back. It's very fleeting, and there are tragedies. I think Karen was one of those tragedies, and I could name dozens of other people who can't deal with the fact that it's not like it used to be.”

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.”

A
FTER
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 first 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.