Karen Carpenter Part 1 with Carolyn Kendrick

Long ago and oh so far away, Carolyn and Sarah fell in love with Karen Carpenter when they saw her drum. We examine her meteoric rise. 

CONTENT WARNING: Karen Carpenter died in 1983 of complications from an eating disorder. Most of our eating disorder discussion will take place in Part II, but we never quite get away from the topic here either. Please listen with care.

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Transcript

Sarah: Karen Carpenter had no access to TikTok. Just think about it.

Welcome to You’re Wrong About, I'm Sarah Marshall. And today we are talking about Karen Carpenter with Carolyn Kendrick, my producer, who you don't really get to hear from very much. Carolyn was last hosting on You’re Wrong About for our November bonus episode last year about Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors, and the rumors about Rumors. 

And this episode, and the one that will come after it, are a continuation of that conversation about pop music, what it is and what it means to us. This is part one of a two-parter on the life of Karen Carpenter. Both of these episodes have big trigger warnings for eating disorders and everything that goes with them and the problems of fame. 

In this episode, we are taking an outside approach and looking at Karen Carpenter's meteoric rise as a pop star, along with her brother Richard, in the band Carpenters. Or The Carpenters, as they are called by basically everyone. And we will end our story in 1974 during the period of the height of their fame. And then in part two, we're going to come back and try and get the best look that we can at Karen Carpenter's life from the inside, from the beginning and until her death. 

If you need more things to listen to this week, and I'm pretty sure you do, our great friend of the show, Josie Duffy Rice, has a new podcast premiering January 18th, this Wednesday called Unreformed. Please check it out. It's more great work by someone whose work we always need more of. Thank you for listening. Happy New Year. 

Welcome to You’re Wrong About. I'm Sarah Marshall, and with me is Carolyn Kendrick, who also, you're wrong about. Hello, my other half. 

Carolyn: Hello, You're Wrong About part one.

Sarah: I am so happy to be doing this episode with you. And this is also the first episode we're doing in 2023. Hello? Hello, baby New Year. 

Carolyn: A little baby New year.

Sarah: You and I did a bonus episode a couple months ago talking about Fleetwood Mac, which I would say is one of our shared loves. And literally probably the third thing we ever talked about.

Carolyn: Probably. Yeah. I would say that was one of our original bonding moments, not the episode, just in our friendship.

Sarah: But I remember like walking down this not really meant for pedestrians road in Nashville, as they all are talking about Fleetwood Mac with you. And that's my first Carolyn memory. And you are just an incredibly talented musician and I honestly just feel like if you want to understand someone who's talented in an unearthly way, you just ask someone else who's like that. So today, all that's to say is that today we're talking about Karen Carpenter.

Carolyn: Oh my gosh.

Sarah: Yeah. Tell me how you feel about that. I am thrilled.

Carolyn: I am so thrilled. Can I tell you my associations with Karen Carpenter? 

Sarah: Yes. Oh my gosh, please. 

Carolyn: So my father is a drummer, a professional drummer. And so my first instruments growing up, like I grew up playing a drum set. And my dad would always say, “If you keep practicing, you could be like Karen Carpenter, but be careful.” And I didn't know what that meant. I don't know why he just assumed that I knew her personal backstory, which I obviously didn't. 

And then, so I haven't really learned much other than just like the bare bones of her story. Because it’s like when you know there's something behind the door, but you're not ready to fully take it in yet. I think if I was going to feel safe to learn the story from anybody, it would be from you. So I'm very excited about this.

Sarah: I'm so excited, too. That means so much to me. And I'll also say that I first learned the story on a VH1 Countdown special hosted by Mark McGrath. And I do think that I'm going to do a better job than Mark McGrath, although he also had only two minutes and was just reading what they gave him.

Carolyn: I'd put my money on you, too, for this moment.

Sarah: How do you feel about the music of Karen Carpenter? And like when you were a kid and your dad would say that to you, did that have a musical resonance to you at the time? 

Carolyn: I am very familiar with her drum playing because I've watched a lot of videos of her playing drum set. But other than their top hits, I don't have a deep knowledge of the Carpenter’s music.

Sarah: One of the things this is reminding me of is when we talked about Fleetwood Mac om our bonus episode about the making of Rumors, what I think is one of the kind of weird problems Fleetwood Mac has where they're so good at what they do that I think that their music can seem less substantial than it is because it goes down so easy, right? You can be driving along and listen to Secondhand News, and not really have a sense of it as something that was orchestrated so obsessively. 

Because I think this is true of any art, right? It is the hardest thing imaginable to make it look easy. And then if you make it look easy, people won't realize how hard you've worked. But that's the whole point. 

Carolyn: Yeah. It's made to be palatable. You could zoom in however close you wanted to on these songs.

Sarah: And what are the first songs that come to mind when you think of them? 

Carolyn: I definitely am familiar with some of their Christmas hits. But Please, Mr. Postman, Yesterday Once More.

Sarah: I think I love Yesterday Once More, partly because it just immediately goes for you. It starts with, “When I was young, I'd listen to the radio waiting for my favorite songs. When they played, I'd sing along. It made me smile.” And this also embodies the key thing with the Carpenters I think too. Which is that these are all great songs, and the lyrics are for the most part dumb. If I say that to you, it's just okay, me too. Everyone does that and that's not a particularly poignant memory or observation. And yet it is like this deeply sad song. 

It's like that song, Those Were the Days, My Friends, which was also big in the sixties. It reminds me of a lot of ABBA where you're also hearing this very honed, very orchestrated, pure pop sound. And people are saying these sort of lightweight lyrics but are singing from this deep well of sadness somehow about it. And I also, once in a moment of hubris, tried to sing Yesterday Once More at karaoke. Because I was like, I'm an alto. And not like that, I'm not.

Carolyn: That's funny. Her voice reminds me a little bit of Judy Garland right now. 

Sarah: Yeah. There's something to me that's so special about Karen Carpenter's voice Because to me, here's just the aesthetic paradox of the Carpenters and then the path that I took and have seen other people taking with them. There are two Carpenters, actually. There's Karen and her brother Richard, but of course we're focused on Karen today. And at the same time, everything she does her whole life is very connected to what Richard does and what they do together. 

Carolyn: I just did a quick Spotify search to just look at what the last Carpenter's album was. And it's just Carpenters, not The Carpenters. 

Sarah: I know, it's Carpenters! But nobody says it. It's fascinating. And I also think that Richard Carpenter is cursed to never successfully name a band. Because he and Karen start performing together as a duo when they're in high school. Then they start a trio, which is sometimes credited as The Dick Carpenter Trio. And then they start a group called Spectrum, which fails to hit. And then he's like, “Carpenters, we're Carpenters”. And everyone's great. So the Carpenters, so he's Carpenters. That’s how I picture it, it's like the episode of Friends where Chandler is trying to change his name and he’s like, it's Clint! 

So yeah, but who are we kidding? And then it's weird because as a family, they are The Carpenters. Because this is Richard's curse where he's like, it's art. I'm a musician, we're Carpenters. And America is like, okay, so you're The Carpenters. You're like The Osmond’s and the Boones. And the Nixons.  

Carolyn: It’s interesting. It begs the question of, is who you are within the family structure of your group, is that always going to be the thing that people see first before what you're trying to present musically? 

Sarah: I know, and then it's even if they don't see it, then do you see it first? And is that decide how you behave? 

Carolyn: Yeah. Because truly up until this moment I always thought that it was just referring to their last name and nothing further. And here I am wrong about it.

Sarah: And here we are. Ah, and wouldn't you know. I remember just becoming bewitched as I think so many people have and so many women have, by watching Karen Carpenter. Who's herself, who in all of these TV specials and these recorded performances, all this video of her is performing not just an incredibly managed and produced and perfectly replicated performance, because that's what they were doing as well. But like specifically within that performing, this kind of impossible femininity. 

But Karen opens her mouth and the voice that comes out. Everyone has tried in their own way to describe Karen Carpenter's voice. No one will ever succeed. But it's just... Let's both try. To me it's a voice that feels like someone has taken a huge stockpot of honey and slow cooked it down to an inch thick on the bottom and that's the sound of her voice.

Carolyn: Yeah, that totally tracks. To me, it's the sound of if you're on a sheep skin rug in front of a fireplace and it's crackling, and maybe you're naked, or maybe not. Maybe not.

Sarah: Maybe you are naked. Yeah. 

Carolyn: That has something to do with her. 

Sarah: Maybe it's just like the ultimate in comfort. I don't know this, I'm excited to kind of hear what you think about this type of thing, because I love music and know so little about it. Did I ever tell you that one time in grad school I had this boyfriend who was constantly dismayed by my taste in music generally. I remember he was further horrified by the time that within this context I was like, does Mötley Crüe have a drummer? And he was like, yes. And then he brought it up for a long time after, for the rest of the relationship. So this is both how much I love and how much I don't know about music, is my point. 

Carolyn: Yeah. I feel like that's more an invitation to talk about Mötley Crüe rather than like explicitly asking like, you probably knew the answer, do they have a drummer? It's more so how about I asked this, and this is an opportunity to connect. And then therefore a person doesn't take it that way and then it's a missed opportunity. 

Sarah: It's true. 

Carolyn: I also feel like Karen Carpenter's voice, it's lower than average. I think people talk about her voice is if it's alto, but it's maybe even a little bit lower than an alto.

Sarah: It's a dark roast alto or something.

Carolyn: Yes, totally. It comforts you and it like wraps around you. And that's what I'm thinking about. You're in a textural experience that feels down to earth.

Sarah: Yes. And I love that you said that. Because another description that occurs to me is that it's the feeling of being the exact right temperature. Like perfectly cozy and warm. And I feel like she is incredibly consistent. 

This is a quote from Mary Gaitskill’s, Veronica that I read in 2014. I've actually compiled a little timeline of my life with Karen Carpenter.

Carolyn: Oh, that's great.

Sarah: So Mary Gaitskill writes, “The most popular singer was a girl with a tiny, stick body and a large, deferential head, who sang in a delicious lilt of white lace and promises and longing to be close. When she shut herself up in her closet and starved herself to death, people were shocked. But starvation was in her voice all along. That was the poignancy of it. A sweet voice locked in a dark place but focused entirely on the tiny strip of light coming under the door.”  

And this is also touching on something that was the first thing that I knew about Karen Carpenter. The first thing many of us know about Karen Carpenter. Which is in the same breath, she was a great musician, and she died of complications from an adult lifelong eating disorder. 

Carolyn: It's interesting hearing that quote about starvation always being in her voice, and then contrasting that with the story that you were just telling me about your dum-dum ex- boyfriend. Maybe I'm not hitting the nail on the head, but I think there is something that sometimes happens where women have connections to music. And then men sometimes take the meat out of that connection and then you're not able to fully sustain it publicly in that way. Does that make sense?

Sarah: Yeah. And Portland as a city does not have a lot of the problems that other cities have, but we do have a lot of truly serious issues. But one of the less serious ones that still is annoying is that growing up, coming of age as a young adult, music appreciation becomes somehow a competition for a lot of people. And it's always really weird when the culture that you consume is like if there's the right or the wrong thing to in some way or another. 

I don't know. I feel like I've spent a lot of my career defending the right to like things that people's boyfriends don't think they should like. If you grow up and you know that Karen Carpenter exists, but she just doesn't seem relevant to you, she's just the girl trapped in the Time Life commercials, whatever. Something changes when you find out that she was a drummer. And then something bigger changes when you see her drum. 

Speaking of someone who came from like a drum family, I don't know what I'm looking at. What's happening?

Carolyn: I think even if you had no knowledge of rudiments or what the drum set is or anything like that, you get the same feeling watching her that you get watching any of the drum greats from this period of time. Bonham, John Bonham from Led Zeppelin, and it's visually very impressive because she's able to play very quickly and that's great. But there's also just such a depth of groove and obviously such a connection to her body, which I'm sure plays into all of this. 

And then there just weren't that many female drummers of this time. And in the same way that we were speaking to Stevie Nicks’ ability to kind of channel multiple emotions at once, you can feel that even though she's playing kind of a freak out drum solo, it's relatively fast and impressive in that way. There's also all of this depth and emotion behind it. 

Sarah: And also, she's singing the entire time. Which, I don't know very much, but I've never heard of another person who sings while drumming. It doesn't seem like it happens that much. 

Carolyn: It does happen some, but like Levon Helm being probably one of the more famous ones. And then Anderson Paak now these days. But it's definitely much harder than, at least in my opinion, singing and playing guitar at the same time.

Sarah: Which is also incredible that anyone can do that, and yet we see it so often that we just accept it. We're like, yeah, it's fine, people do it. And to me, I'm the kind of person where if you're doing a project, you're de-stringing green beans or something and you have two bowls in front of you, I'll always stop thinking about it and put the wrong thing in the wrong bowl. My hands don't like working independently of each other. They want in on each other's business, doing something different with each hand. Doing something different with your hands than with your feet, and then singing while doing it. It feels like you would have to have this total surrender to not thinking about it.

Carolyn: And it requires a lot of practice. It's a slow thing that you have to build up the muscle memory for. But it might have just come quickly to her. She seems like such a natural, I'm not sure how long it took for her to be able to do that.

Sarah: And so to get into backstory, Richard and Karen Carpenter are born in 1946 and 1950 respectively in New Haven, Connecticut. And their father is passionate about music, and both their parents are passionate about their musical abilities developing, but especially Richard. Richard seems to be, according to people who knew the family, according to Karen to be the favored child. He also shows a ton of promise and a ton of dedication when he's growing up. 

Karen has a social life and is a tomboy. And Richard is really focused on playing piano and starts studying at El School of Music when he's 14. I don't know, I think maybe pop music has become increasingly, as time goes by, something that's assembled by corporations. And so looking back, I feel like it's easy to assume that if you are such big, establishment, endorsed pop stars of the seventies, someone must have just seen you looking cute in a mall and decided to give you a singing career to go with it. But Richard is truly obsessed with music in a way that I think really obviously affects absolutely everything. 

Carolyn: I don't know anything about his personality yet, but the questions that are already coming to mind are the pressures of being the first child. What does that look like? If his parents wanted to be a musicians, were they channeling any of that into him? What kind of expectations did they have around him? And then if you're growing up in the sixties as a kid and then you're, let's see, it's like early seventies when he's beginning at Yale. 

Sarah: Early sixties still. So it's still, things have yet to get totally freaked out. But we're approaching, yeah. 

Carolyn: They've only just begun. But in that era of time, there isn't quite the like DIY scene that there is now. There's not the ability to just go to your Guitar Center and pick up something and then be able to make a record in two days. There has to be a lot of forethought around your musical trajectory and career. There's also a lot of pressure if you're in the conservatory scene, which is what Yale would've been. That's classical music. So it's very intense in the sense that they expect you to be very dedicated, to be able to make a career out of it.

Sarah: I feel like I have this lifelong fascination with grueling performing art school stories, as I think a lot of people do. Why else would Center Stage be such a classic.

Carolyn: Or Fame.

Sarah: God, I love Fame. And the whole Fame thing where it's like here you pay for your dreams in sweat. And this fantasy of just hard work perfecting yourself. I look back now and feel like you fall in love with the double-edged sword you can see in those stories. Because I think on some level, we understand that it's tantalizing to dream of perfecting yourself because it feels great. It's truly worth it to work really hard so you can have those moments where you're not thinking about what you're doing. 

And I have moments when I'm writing or when I’m on one on the shows when I feel like I'm drumming my little brains out and not thinking about drumming. There are so many reasons to do it, and one is that it feels amazing. And then there's also the folly of the fact that you'll never be perfect. And if you dedicate all your time to one part of your life, then other parts of it will potentially fail to thrive as a result. That's a risk of that kind of life. And ultimately, no matter how great you are, it's something you will get old decay and die. You'll get old if you're lucky. 

Carolyn: If you're lucky. 

Sarah: So that's what Fame's about. 

Carolyn: And so does Richard have overlapping themes with what you were just speaking to? 

Sarah: Yeah. I think in Richard as their careers progress he is, according to everybody and according to the music that we ended up with, the driving creative force. He arranges their music. He's the one who's obsessed with crafting these new projects within the recording industry. Where you're hearing a song that they've recorded,, and they're doing their lead vocals, and they're doing all their backing vocals and they're just in the studio thrashing it out. 

Something that they do that I love is they do a lot of wonderful, amazing, but when you first hear them, weird arrangements of very well-known pop songs, I think their first charting hit is a cover of Ticket to Ride. And would you like to hear that?

Carolyn: I would like to hear that. Yeah. 

Sarah: 3, 2, 1, go. It starts off very quiet. 

Carolyn: Yeah. It's much more of a ballad than I was expecting. Yeah, I would've thought that this is Chopin before I thought this was the Beatles.

 “He's got a ticket ride, and he don’t care”. 

Carolyn: Landed on the major seventh instead of the route. Interesting. Yeah. The only words I can think of to explain that feeling is that it's much more melancholy than the original. It doesn't have the dominant seven chord, so it feels less bluesy.

Sarah: So interesting. And then what were you saying about how she ended that verse? I didn't understand that at all. I'm very excited. 

Carolyn: Yeah. So there's different qualities of chords. So there's major and minor, which are the main ones that people have heard about. Major sounds more happy, minor sounds a little bit more sad. Then there's ways to combine those two qualities, and then add extensions onto them. If Major is red and– what are the primary colors? Red, yellow, blue?

Sarah: Um, maybe? That sounds right. Yeah. I'm really behind on color theory and music theory. I don't know where I've been. 

Carolyn: Let me look. Lemme just look it up really quick.  Yes. red, yellow, and blue. Okay. So let's say major is yellow and minor is blue. Then when you combine those and you get orange and green, the metaphor I'm using is when you have seventh chords. And that can mix and match emotions, and then it also provides structure and where you're going. And so she used more major seventh melody notes than dominant seventh, which is what the Beatles used. Because in the blues, the chords in blues are generally almost all dominant chords. And this were more minor and major seventh chords. 

Sarah: What effect does that have overall? What does that do to us when we're listening to it? 

Carolyn: There are a few kinds of standardized pop chord progressions that people use over and over again. A very common one that doesn't happen in this song, but happens a lot on any radio station that you're going to hear, is a one chord, a six chord, a four chord, and then a five chord. You don't really need to know the ins and outs of it. But one is major, feels happy. Six is minor, feels sad, so it takes you to a different emotional place than the first chord. Four feels a little melancholy. It's major, but then it has some other associations with it as well. And then five is dominant and it feels a little bit bluesy. And it also is like your peak, where you're going to, and then it resolves back to one, generally speaking.

Sarah:  Wow. So it's like a hero's journey.

Carolyn: It's totally a hero's journey. Yeah. And so this version of Ticket to Ride messes around a little bit with when the chords change. When you change either the order or the length of the chords, then it makes the lyrics sound different, and it makes the melody sound different on top of it.

Sarah: It's so interesting. It feels like knowing how a recipe works and being like, we're going to hold back half of the shortening. 

So that's Ticket to Ride and that's them in the early phase of their adult career. So they're growing up in Connecticut. I also feel like it says everything that they are in, but not fundamentally of California. They're from Connecticut. 

Carolyn: What do you mean by that? That most artists of this time are in the LA scene and they're not part of that? Is that what you mean? 

Sarah: I hadn't even thought of that, but totally. Because they are out of time in this interesting way. And trying to perform when they're getting their start, trying to perform live shows in LA when they're just not doing the sound that people are getting excited about. This is the era of Jim Morrison honing his craft at the Whiskey-A-Go-Go. 

Carolyn: Yeah. They are a little bit more easy listening than I think the Zeitgeist was looking for at the time, maybe. I don't know what your average Carpenters listener would look like in 1974 or 1975 compared to now, but it feels a little bit like mature, if you will, I suppose. 

Sarah: In the years of its greatest success regardless of what it is or what's going on musically, I think it really gets marketed as and known as music that is a safe refuge for you if you're feeling scared of Jefferson Airplane. I don't know, it's like Hallmark movies. It's this apparently utterly apolitical thing. 

Carolyn: Totally. Which is interesting contrasting with videos of her drumming, because her drumming is so energetic.

Sarah:  So in 1963, a big year for America, the Carpenters moved to Downey, California, which is a suburb of Los Angeles. And of which I know nothing except that it is always referenced disparagingly. And that it's where Tom Waits and Lily Tomlin live in Robert Altman's, Short Cuts. I'm so curious, do you have Downey associations?

Carolyn: I'm from California and I live in Los Angeles part-time, and I don't know anything about Downey. 

Sarah: So I guess that maybe says a lot about Downey that like if it's in the LA area and you don't think you know things about it, then it has succeeded in feeling fundamentally like a generic suburb.  This is a strategic move. They're thinking about Richard's career. They're thinking about him developing as a musician.

Carolyn: And they move together. 

Sarah: They all move together. Yeah. Because the kids are still in high school. 

Carolyn: Oh, so their parents decide to move to Los Angeles to further Richard's career.

Sarah: Yeah. It seems like they're very hardworking, not super demonstrative, fundamentally un-frivolous people, or at least seem to see themselves this way. And so it seems like a major act of faith to move your family to the LA area, which has never had a positive reputation in the rest of the country as a place to bring your teenagers to grow up.

Carolyn: That's kind of a lot of pressure to put on your kid.

Sarah: Kids, I think, consistently know so much more than adults give them credit for. And specifically, I think they really understand how much pressure adults are putting on them, even if they can't articulate it. Kids know, kids are aware. And if you are staking your future on them, even if it's not something that you're saying to them the whole time, kids pick up on that. When I think about having kids, one of the stressors that occurs to me often is the fear of doing that. Because I feel like it happens to you without you even noticing it. 

Carolyn: Exactly. I doubt that his parents were thinking like, oh, we're putting pressure on him by making this big move. I'm sure they were thinking, our kids is into this, let's do something that helps him. 

Sarah: Yeah. And then there's just, there's so many levels of this because there's different businesses of shows, different ways to be a parent within it. If you have a child who's consistently getting paid well as a child performer in some way, then I think you have room to have motives a lot more nefarious than if you have a very talented 14-year-old who's making no money and who doesn't really seem like they're going to be making a ton doing like weird jazz arrangements of the Beatles. 

Carolyn: And so they move to LA. And then how quickly do Richard and Karen start working? And also what do the parents start doing while they’re there?

Sarah: So Harold Carpenter Richard and Karen's dad is a lithograph printer ,and he finds a job doing that when they move to the LA area. And so Richard continues his studies. He was a church organist around this time when he's in high school, which is very charming to me. And in 1964, Richard graduated high school and started college at Cal State Long Beach. He's also, as we're thinking about the sixties, Richard is the perfect age for the draft, but he's able to defer based on being a college student and can defer long enough to become a pop star. Which is always a good route to take if you possibly can. 

And 1964 is also a fateful year for Karen because she's going to high school in Downy. She starts playing drums, and her parents gradually save up enough money to buy her a drum kit. And before that she practices on a stool. 

Carolyn: Oh, that's sweet. I'm glad to hear that. There's a lot of conversation right now in the music education world about the gender politics of being in school band. Very often, at least like when I was growing up, if you are just an average kid and you go into band, basically what happens in fifth grade usually is they say, “Okay, you're going to try out all the instruments, and then you'll pick what instrument you want to do.” And you'll go in, you'll try the saxophone, you'll try the trumpet, you'll try the tuba, you'll try the drums, try all of it. And then you pick. But often band directors will be like, oh, you're really little, you're smaller, your hands that can't reach a certain length or you're not big enough to hold the tuba, which often is a gendered thing. If you're not large enough to do this, that will give you a more quote unquote “feminized” instrument to play. 

And so there, there will be all of these subconscious pushes to be in certain sections, for example. So that's why a lot of flutists are female or things like that. And luckily that stereotype is breaking these days. But I'm very surprised that they were like, you know what, Karen wants to be a drummer, we're going to get her the drums. Kudos to them for that, because I think it was much less common than you might think. 

Sarah: Yeah. This gets into the weird thing of like, why is it so surprising to see a woman on drums or singing this romantic ballad while she drums or something. And there's so much gendered profession stuff that you really can't even be aware of all of it because there's so much. But yeah, I have a total association that women play the flute, and I never knew why. And it makes total sense that there's an explanation. And also, I never really thought about it. It's just like women play the flute, obviously. And then I have to assume that if you're a male flutist, it's like being a guy at Bennington, where you just have your pick of bachelorettes.  

Carolyn: Well, there is a stereotype that most male flutists are gay. But also, if I was like a young, gay kid and I was like, okay, who would I want to go hang out with? Maybe I'll hang out with the people I feel safe around. 

Sarah: Yeah. Maybe not the kid carrying around the tuba, who is probably the strongest child in this whole band based on typecasting. 

Carolyn: Based on the band teacher's credentials.

Sarah: Ah, band is so weird. I was a saxophone player in band for I think just one year. I never practiced, never learned a thing. All I remember is the taste of a wet reed. But it's a very powerful memory. 

Carolyn: If you're licking wet wood all the time, you will remember it. 

Sarah: So I do feel this connection with woodwinds people where I'm like, I've had a reed in my mouth. The taste, like I can feel it now. And my reeds got moldy because I didn't clean them properly. I've always been like this.

Carolyn: Oh my gosh. Okay. So Karen gets into the drums when she’s in high school.

Sarah: Yeah. And she very quickly displays talent, this is clearly her instrument. And this leads us to the Dick Carpenter Trio. And the performance, I think right now is traveling around the internet and helping people to see the Karen Carpenter behind Karen Carpenter and let's watch it. So this is 1968. This is Your All-American College Show. 

Carolyn: Really rolls off the tongue. 

Sarah: This is them at 17 or 18, and 21 or 22. Okay. 3, 2, 1, go.

*Recording Plays*

Carolyn: So here's what we got going. They're playing Dancing in the Street, which is a wonderful song, but not theirs. This is a cover. 

Sarah: Yeah. And I feel like this would've recently been a huge hit, and at least the one everyone knows is by Martha Reeves and the Vandellas. 

Carolyn: Richard is on the left, he's playing an electric piano. And then Karen is dead center of the stage, and she's got this kind of groovy background behind her with yellow, and she's wearing all white with a white headband that's pretty thick. And she's got these great bangs, across. And her drum set is silvery. And on her bass drum head it says, ‘Karen Carpenter’, not The Carpenters, not Carpenters, but Karen Carpenter. 

So something I'm already noticing is that she is using match grip, there's two different kinds of grip if you're a drummer as opposed to your standard grip. And then, sometimes you watch people play and they're so focused on what they're singing or trying to make sure that they're doing it right, that it doesn't feel natural, it doesn't feel like there's room for improvisation. But she's definitely locked in, and she's not stressed about trying to make it work. This obviously is very natural for her. 

Sarah: She's aware that she's on TV and everything, and then that seems to go away when she's playing.

Carolyn: Totally. 

Sarah: And so this is a time when they're the Dick Carpenter trio, that doesn't quite work out. They start a new band called, Spectrum, with a few other people. They're really much more jazz oriented in this period. That doesn't really lead to anything. They get signed by RCA. RCA doesn't particularly like what they're doing and is like, ugh, nevermind. And then you'll never guess. Herb Alpert saves the day. 

Carolyn: Really? Herb Alpert? Okay. How so?

Sarah: First of all, if you know who Herb Alpert is, the two things that I would first reference are Whipped Cream and Other Delights, the chart-topping mid-sixties album by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. And the song Spanish Flea, which I promise you know, even if you don't know that title. 

The record label A&M. The A stands for Alpert. So Herb Alpert signs the Carpenters, they release their first album. It does okay. Everyone else at A&M apparently is like, I don't know, Herb, I think we should let them go. And Herb Alpert's like, eh, let's give him another album. There's a special place in artistic heaven for people in positions of power who said, “Eh, let's give him another album.”

Carolyn: Yeah, let's just wait it out a little while.

Sarah: And so by this time it's 1970, the Carpenters have been in Downey for seven years. The kids have been in the music scene in the LA area for seven years cracking away at it. They won previously in 1966 the Battle of the Bands at the Hollywood Bowl. So they keep getting all these breaks, but none of them are the right break. Increasingly, I think that there are no big breaks. There's like a bunch of small to medium ones.

Carolyn: There’s just chisels opening cracks.

Sarah: Just a lot of chisels. If you feel like your break has passed you by, don't worry, there's 40. And somehow the break that opens up everything for them is that for their record company, this is not their idea, but the company decides that they're going to do a single cover of Burt Bacharach's, Close To You. 

Carolyn: I love Burt Bacharach. 

Sarah: So Richard does his own arrangement. The song is number one within two months, and it's the beginning of everything for them.

Carolyn: That makes a lot of sense. I feel like this pastiche of players that you're mentioning, Herb Alpert, Burt Bacharach, I didn't know that any of these people were connected, but all of them have the same general aesthetic. At least as how they're presented. Which might be the way that the labels were trying to present them as a genre at the time, but they weren't known as an easy listening genre at that point. They’re still firmly in, we are making pop music. 

Sarah: It is the epitome of elevator music.

Carolyn: Yes. Elevator music. There we go. I can see why it developed in contrast to the height of the rock and roll movement of the time. And so it makes sense that for people who either were a little too conservative to fully be able to metabolize that all the time, or for people who just wanted to break from that, I could see the through line between people who were interested in Sinatra in the forties and fifties. And then as they're getting into the sixties and they're getting older, they want the depth that comes with songwriting because I think there is a lot of emotional depth that you can get into without the politics of more sound, or like the wall of sound situation.

Sarah: I feel like this whole episode we've been talking about balances in contrasts and false binaries to an extent. And I feel like one of the things at play here is that there isn't more or less emotion in different kinds of music, I think, necessarily. It's just how are you primed to receive it and how do you want to receive it? 

Some people want to get their emotional content from Grace Slick, who at this point is like singing in a primal scream. And some people want to get it from Karen Carpenter, who's singing in like the most controlled, rehearsed way you can imagine. And yet I think they can have the same effect on you. 

Carolyn: Yeah, absolutely. 

Sarah: The people who are marketing understand that part of the appeal is that they're this sort of sexless brother/sister duo who can be seen as very wholesome. Very much an antidote to what's happening in the rest of culture. And they didn't really ask to be that. They just were like, we just like jazz.

Carolyn: 1968, we're in like the height of drug culture becoming one in the same with youth culture. And this feels so far away from any kind of drug culture whatsoever. Maybe the top-down thing is okay, all of these kids are smoking their marijuana and doing their acid, and so we need to put some milk out there. 

Sarah: Oh, I love that. 

Carolyn: I don't know, for their parents to feel comforted or something.

Sarah: Yeah. You come home after a night of partying and there's like a Carpenter's album on your bed, suggestively. And also, as you say, that it occurs to me that yeah, these songs are like radically drug free and they're also really implicitly arguing that like emotions are surely enough. Surely you don't need drugs. You can have infatuation. 

Carolyn: You can have a bow who has birds around them. 

Sarah: And I can also see how it could feel like they were such a corporate product because it's hard to fathom ending up with such a sort of smooth, perfectly produced product because the artist wanted it specifically. I feel like you don't get that very often. 

Carolyn: Especially at this time. It's like the age of Aquarius and everybody's trying to figure out what individuality means, and what it means to be young and breaking boundaries. This feels like music very solidly of somebody who grew up with Connecticut in their blood. And I don't mean that in a derogatory way.

Sarah: Love Connecticut, love a Frank Pepe’s.

Carolyn: But it feels like you know how to express your emotions in a structure that is built conservatively. 

Sarah: Yeah. And that you have that freedom to be emotive because everything else is so locked into place. And that's an example of the industry not knowing what it needs, because nobody would've asked for her, nobody would've said, what if we find someone who just has this I don't know, just this voice that feels extremely knowing. When she sings, you feel like she knows everything. And we don't ask for that from women.

Carolyn: This is a great opportunity to say that nobody's going to ask you to do your art, but that doesn't mean that we don't need it.

Sarah: I think the fantasy of being wanted, or of getting your break in the art path of your choice, is connected to the fantasy of being validated. You want the powerful kind of parental, in a way, authority figure to come from the record label, the publisher, or the movie studio or whatever, and be like, yes, you are good. This is great, let's do it. You'll be accepted. You'll be validated. You will know that your art is worthwhile because someone will give you the gift of telling you that it's worthwhile. 

And I think that even bigger than the career fantasy is the fantasy of someone being able to supply you with that conviction as opposed to just having to make it yourself. But also you don't do it once, you have to keep doing it.

Carolyn: Every fucking day. 

Sarah: Every day. 

Carolyn: It was really shocking to me to become an adult and learn that things are not hard occasionally. Yeah. This is really showing my hand, but like my parents, especially my dad growing up, he would be like, life is going to be really hard. You're going to have to prepare for it. And I was like, yeah, totally. Everybody's told me that life is hard, I get it. There will occasionally, three to four times a year, be something really hard that I will overcome and then it'll be done, and I'll cross it off a checklist. 

It turns out that like the grueling day in, day out act of just being alive and having to create art in this particular landscape and be a human and be a woman and just like all of these things. Whatever your particular alchemy of circumstance is, it's hard every day, not just circumstantially difficult.

Sarah: Yeah. And the human condition is a motherfucker, baseline. Yes. I'm glad I'm not the only one who was shocked. 

Carolyn: I guess it shows that I had a pretty uneventful childhood. I'm sure there are plenty of people who knew that much sooner than I did.

Sarah: Yeah. It's good. We must have surprises for us along the way. 

Carolyn: You don't want to get all the spoiler alerts. You can't be too smart, too soon.

Sarah: So, Close to You becomes a number one hit. Suddenly, they're famous. Suddenly, after working for their entire lives, they're famous. The next goal, naturally, is to get another hit. Because if you have one hit, then you know, so what? It could do well for a while, but you want to establish longevity. You want to prove you're not a one hit wonder. 

So what follows is the origin story for We've Only Just Begun, which is one of my favorite Carpenter songs, and probably one of most people's favorites, if they have one. And the song exists in our lives now because Richard Carpenter was watching TV and a local bank ad came on playing a jingle performed by Paul Williams, who had also written it, which was, We've only Just Begun. And so he saw the jingle. He liked the jingle. He rearranged the jingle into a full-length pop song.

**We’ve Only Just Begun Plays**

I feel like I'm both someone who has become more cynical than I would like. And then as a result of that cynicism, sentimental stuff maybe works on me more. Because I'm definitely crying.

Carolyn: Yeah, no, I'm so sentimental.

Sarah: And also, again, like zooming out and looking at the times, I feel like it's very important for people to have music or anything else that creates this strong sentiment of optimism. 

Carolyn: Yeah. I'm sure that you would need that at the time too, maybe it's after Vietnam or right at the very tail end.

Sarah: This is like leaning towards the end, but it's like we're going to continue, this is 1970, so we're going to continue for a while. Yeah. Thinking about what it means to have a wedding in the late sixties, early seventies? If you're young and you're getting married, there's a good chance you're doing it because someone, your husband, your new, tiny, baby boy husband is going overseas to fight in a war that you don't fully understand why we're doing this. 

I don't know, having something as beautiful as Karen Carpenter's voice that's telling you to believe that you have your whole entire long lives ahead of you. I just care about Karen Carpenter so much. I don't know what to say. And then that's the beginning of their superstardom. All the doors are opening. We've had these hit albums. Now you have to keep touring. And it's very much like the Fleetwood Mac story or so many other stories where your success is complicated because what it means for them is there's no time off. There's no time away from performing. There's no time away from music. Yeah. 

So I'm going to wrap up this episode before we come back for part two, talking about this Rolling Stone article from 1974 called, Up from Downey, which I love and have loved for a long time. 

Carolyn: Great title.

Sara: Right? This is an article by Tom Nolan, who is following the Carpenters around as they go on part of their kind of endless tour. And this is them in July of 1974, having been at this level of fame for about four years. They're millionaires. They have both lived with their parents into their twenties. When they first started getting checks, they bought a new house for the whole family to live in together. And they're at the point of, according to this writer, seeming to register that they have not grown up. 

This is 1974. So this year Karen is 23, 24. Richard is 26, 27, and they're still very much in a family unit and very much of a unit with each other. 

“Karen insists on the right to be normal, even though she is a celebrity known all over the world. But it is impossible for her or for her brother Richard, to regain the placid existence of their youth. At a back table in Beverly Hills La Scala restaurant, Karen described some conditions that would tend to make an ordinary life impossible for her. While everyone else at dinner, including her brother, was enjoying sumptuous pasta. She had before her a simple green salad and iced tea. She was, as usual, on a diet. ‘A lot of kids write and ask me for advice,’ Karen began. ‘Some of the things they ask are normal. How do you get into the business? How do you learn to sing? A lot write and say they were hung up on drugs, but since they've heard our music, they've gotten off of them. But a lot of kids who write have mental hang-ups. They're lonely. They want to know why their parents don't love them. Why do their brothers and sisters hassle them? They haven't had a good life at all, and they just live for our music. They ask for advice that I'm not capable of giving because I'm not a doctor. It's hard to tell someone how to live their life, even if you know them, let alone if you've never seen them. It's hard’, Karen goes on. ‘The ones that are really freaky, if you answer once and they write back, then I give them to our manager, Sherwin Bash. You can't really get involved. It gets too heavy. You have to handle each one in a different manner. When you're playing with personal feelings with someone who's that hung up on you’...”

Carolyn: That's such a loaded set of sentences. I feel like we're ready to pick apart any number of the themes that we've been talking about. Obviously with control, what does it feel like when you have people looking up to you? Pressures, the pressure of being seen, the pressure of being expected to make other people feel seen. 

Sarah: I know. A lot of the stuff is from the nineties, and there's a real sense of confidence that Karen started dieting and that was fine. And then she kept dieting and that was bad. And just this real belief that I feel like we're maybe just starting to challenge culturally in a big way. There's this podcast called, Maintenance Phase, I don't know if you've heard of it. 

Carolyn: Never heard of it. 

Sarah: That dieting is fine, but eating disorders are bad. But never the two shall meet and come on, you guys, come on. Often as a woman, it's when you stop harming yourself that people think something has gone wrong in your life. And again, this is like the work of performing femininity correctly if you're working the hardest at it when you make it look easy and when people think it's just what women are as opposed to what we're training ourselves to be. 

And then this article continues and talks about freaky stuff that happens to Karen. A guy walks on stage when they're performing in Houston. The police try to remove him. He says, “Don't touch me. I'm engaged to Karen Carpenter.”  He had a wedding ring and honeymoon tickets with him. “Another man who inserted himself memorably into Karen's life began his courtship with a letter which she received while they were playing Tahoe. Torturously scrawled like a five-year-old's mash note, it read. ‘Guess what? I've been waiting all this time to marry Melanie, but it looks like it's not going to come off. So you know who I picked to be my next old lady? That's right, Karen. You.’” 

Carolyn: As if she should be psyched. He's like, of course she'll be my bride. Melanie doesn't want me. Now it’s great luck for Karen Carpenter. 

Sarah: Yeah. Now it's my safety, Karen Carpenter. So they laugh this off. Richard and Karen, still living with her parents in Downey, noticed that there is a GTO parked outside that is of course driven by the man who wants to marry Karen. He says he wants to speak to Karen. When their father comes out, he says, “I really think she's busy right now.” And the guy in the car says, “Oh, she'll want to speak to me.” Mr. Carpenter says, “Why is that?” And he says, “All those songs she's been singing for the last four years, she's been singing them to me.”

Carolyn: Oh God, no. Come on. The ways in which Karen was in distress were invisible because she made them invisible, I suppose, but not that she made them invisible, but she is part of this fabric that is inherently abusive in the sense that performing femininity is just brutally difficult. But then the way that this guy is obviously unhinged is so noticeable. It's just interesting to see the ways that he's obviously not doing well, and I'm sure everybody at the time either laughed it off or oh, this guy needs help, right? Or at least that's my first instinct is to be like, this guy is obviously not, he needs assistance in some way and obviously distance from her, but then she's in chronic distress but silently. So she doesn't end up getting the help that she needs. 

Sarah: I feel like this really perfectly describes what I have learned in my entire life since, not just since puberty, but since anywhere near the run up to it. The understanding that you are responsible for every thought someone could have based on looking at you. Not only is it your responsibility to anticipate how they might want to harm you because of that, and therefore structure your entire life because of it. But also that you have to understand that everyone is going to see that as power. The more attention people pay to you, especially if it apparently has any connection to you being an attractive woman or any kind of woman. It's like saying that a lightning rod is powerful because the lightning goes to it. It's like the lightning rod is not actually creating- maybe this is a bad metaphor. I don't know how lightning rods work. 

Carolyn: I know what you're getting at. Yeah. The lightning rod is just existing, the destruction around it is not its fault. Even though it was the subject of the destruction’s fixation, right? 

Sarah: It’s like, wow, you created this big response in people, and you made that happen. And no, I was singing a song.  

Carolyn: Yeah. It's just so obviously all of the language of codependency and like how other people attribute responsibility to others in their lives, even though the only people that you can really be responsible for is yourself.

Sarah:  God, it is codependency. Maybe this is the year of, we already know it's capitalism all along, but is it also codependency all along? Probably 

Carolyn: This might be chapter two.

Sarah: It is codependency all along. This idea of this person made me feel this way. That's almost never the case. 

Carolyn: I'm interested to have that framework for now that we're getting into part two, thinking through the ways in which codependency framed the rest of Karen Carpenter's life.

Sarah: Ugh, you're good. I'm excited for that, too. With this guy, the guy who's hanging out in the GTO outside the Carpenter family home. He keeps hanging out there. He breaks into the house when the family is away. They call the police. He's in jail for 72 hours and then he's released. He goes back out to sit outside Karen Carpenter's house and the police, finally, to Karen are like, “Why don't you just go say ‘hi’ to him? He just seems to just really want to see you. So maybe if you go see him, he'll leave you alone.” 

Carolyn: Surely then he'll act rationally. That's what'll do it. 

Sarah: If you're a man, it can seem like a totally original thought to just give the person who's trying to control your entire life, just a little bit of the thing they want, just go say ‘hi’ to him. Just say ,‘hi’. This is when you get stabbed. This is your window for getting stabbed by somebody. 

Carolyn: Yeah. Just the oblivious nature of, okay, I identify with that man because I know what it feels like to want to talk to a girl. I'm sure that's what they're thinking. If I were that guy, I would want the cop to just say, yeah, just go talk to him. Because at the end of the day, the cops and that guy are on the same team. So they're complicit in this whole idea of her being responsible for everybody else's feelings as well. 

Sarah: Completely. I think about living in a culture today where there's a lot of literacy around how absurd and unhealthy that is, and then thinking about living in a time. Karen Carpenter had no access to TikTok. Just think about it. Eventually, apparently, he leaves on his own. Karen, to credit her emotional intelligence, the police want her to go say ‘hi’ to him, and she's like, the fuck I will. Although she probably didn't say those literal words. 

Carolyn: Our sweet Karen? Never.

Sarah: They talk also about letters that are scary in a different way, I guess I would say. Scary in terms of the weight of the responsibility, and so Karen says, “only the really important letters are handled personally. There was a 12-year-old girl in Utica, New York who was dying and who wanted a drum set. We got her the drum set. She was supposed to die a couple months before we played Utica, but she wanted to see that show so bad that she stayed alive for it. A few weeks after that, that was it. 

That also happened with a little girl in Notre Dame,” and it's just like… I'll let her say it. The quote goes on, she says, “It's weird to think you could have a meaning like that. For someone to make someone go on living, that's a hell of a responsibility. Someone loving something that much to keep them alive. It's a very strange feeling to think you could have that much power. I don't dig being responsible that way.” 

Carolyn: Wow. She is being made responsible for everybody else so much that it's probably impossible for her to be responsible for her own wellbeing in the way that she needs to focus on.

Sarah: Yeah, and I really have always been so struck by that idea of you're not complaining about it, you're not saying that it's a good thing if someone lives a little bit longer. But the fact of being the person who sings the songs that someone is able to, and I believe that this works, that there's a lot of hard and fast medical realities, but that despair takes a little extra time too. 

And I believe that you could, with all my medical knowledge of zero to negative, believe this story. And if it's not true, then Karen believes it, so it doesn't matter. That you make something that someone loves enough to stay alive longer in order to hear, and that when you go and do a concert, it's not just oh yes, we're doing a concert. The important thing is that we get out there and just have fun. No, they're dying children in the audience who have stayed alive specifically to see you do this concert.

Carolyn: The pressure of situations is not always intentional. And it's not like this kid was trying to put pressure on it by any means. But yeah, that's just incredibly difficult to navigate on a day-to-day basis when you have all of that piling up on your plate. 

Sarah: Yeah. And I feel like this is a crossroads moment. I just want to read to you what my friend Brianna wrote about discovering this Karen Carpenter freaking out on the drums video because it really moved me. At the start of Carpenter's career when they perform, Karen is performing behind the drums, she's singing behind the drums, she's drumming the drum parts in their songs. Over time, she gradually comes out more and more. And that's why our mental image when we think of her typically is of her standing there singing nowhere near drums. 

And of course there's reasons why this makes a lot of logical sense, you need a front person to look at. It's the same thing that we got by adding Stevie Nicks into the mix of Fleetwood Mac. You have a focal point, but over time, she is separated more and more from her drums and from her drumming self and that gets lost from her legacy. Brianna Bowman writes, “I believe the playful, expressive, funny, energetic Karen Carpenter that we see behind the drums was the more empowered version of herself. She radiates authenticity and strength, even eclipse for her health is clearly deteriorating. So many of these shows, a product of their time, treated as a novelty, as a party trick, rather than a real skill to be treated with respect. And one Richard Carpenter says, ‘people often ask why Karen plays the drums’, Karen, with the expressiveness that only seems to shine when she has drumsticks in her hand, replies in an imperfect Tamara of voice contradicting her voice as pure and wholesome reputation. ‘Why not?’ 

It lands as a joke, but I can only imagine some of the resentment that could be hiding behind that as well. Did anyone ask John Bonham why he plays the drums? Did anyone ask Phil Collins why he plays the drums? Has anyone asked Don Henley, Dave Grohl, Buddy Rich? If the roles were reversed and Karen had been on the piano and Richard on the drums, would anyone have asked Richard why?” I don't know. I hope that between now and the next one, people are inspired to go and listen. 

And to me, there's something so exciting about having this legacy of an artist that is an invitation for us to try and understand, to come to this work that remains of Karen Carpenter and try and understand who she was as she was functioning in a world, in an industry where all the incentives are for hiding yourself. 

Carolyn: Lovely. I cannot wait to go on the rest of this journey with you. 

Sarah: Me too. And one might say that we've only just begun one might,

And that is our episode for the week. Thank you so much for joining us for part one of the Karen Carpenter story. I'll see you back here for part two. Thank you so much to Carolyn Kendrick for editing this episode, for producing this episode, and for starring in this episode. Carolyn is one of my favorite musicians, generally, not people I know category. And she has some new music coming out soon. So keep your eyes open to quote American Psycho. Thank you for listening. Happy New Year. We'll see you in two weeks.