The Burt Bacharach Discussion Forum

I know Karen and Richard did very well with "Close to You," and had a standard BB/HD medley that they both recorded and did in concert; but I was wondering what everyone on the board here thinks about how an album of BB/HD originals, produced by Burt, would have worked. I know it's unlikely that Richard would have gone for it, but at least hypothetically, do you think her voice would do well with his music? There are some songs I'm not so sure; but others, like "Here I AM," "One Less Bell to Answer," "This Girl's in Love with You," "Whoever You Are, I Love You," that I would love to have heard her sing, with Burt's arrangements. Does anyone know if there was ever talk of the two of them doing an album after she went her own way for a while, apart from Richard?

Another interesting "hypothetical topic" ............. Karen certainly possessed a beautiful and distinctive voice which could have worked well on many additional BB compositions if she were able to work cooperatively with Burt as her producer. .............. Difficult to identify just what songs might have been suitable without once again listening closely to many of her songs done with Richard. ............. My only problem with much of the Carpenter's work is that it was just "too easy listening"/"sing-a-song" for my taste!

Steve,
I bet Karen would have done a beautiful version of "The April Fools"
The voice of an angel..........sadly missed.

"blue"

"blue"
I would add to that: "Dream Sweet Dreamer" - which would have been well suited for Karen - I still do not understand why that recording by Dionne was never included on one of her Scepter LP's - instead it was relegated to a "B" side of a 45 single!
ron

Ron,
I fully agree with you, one of Burt and Hal's most "criminally" underrated songs !
Dionne's version is fantastic.........it should have been a huge hit !
And it would have been "tailor-made" for Karen...

"blue"

I feel it would have never happened unless Richard Carpenter had total and complete control of the production process...very doubtful Burt would have been able to work with Richard; both are "in control" however Richard took it to another level alltogether. And, this begs the question and I'd be interested to hear a response on this...why didn't Burt work with Karen after he and Dionne had their falling out? Burt certainly had the opportunity and didn't and why didn't Burt work with Karen after Close to You? He worked with others when he and Dionne were a team...the lovely and talented Jackie DeShannon comes to mind. Bacharach and Carpenters even recorded for the same label. I tend to agree that Karen's voice was beautiful but if there were tension and drama in her voice Richard certainly produced and homogenized that all out of it and much of Bacharach is about a tension and counterpoint in the music which Dionne seemed to "get" and I don't think Karen was nearly as subtle a vocalist as Dionne. She did not have the range or the chops that Dionne had but probably would have done well on some tunes Burt wrote. And aside from a few tunes like Rainy Days and Mondays, Richard kept Karen firmly entrenched in the MOR genre. Dionne always had a following from Joan Baez and Alice Cooper to Glen Campbell to Janis Joplin...she ran the gamut from MOR to R & B to Rock to Pop to anything in between...she crossed over most genres. The Carpenters never seemed to completely break out of the "brother/sister novelty MOR" act. Karen was struggling to come into her own as a solo vocalist when she died but it always seemed as though Richard was somewhere in the background controlling her. I think Bacharach chose not to work with the Carpenters for a reason.

In the tragic absence of Karen Carpenter, how about the next best thing (or better ?) - KD Lang ?

A couple spontaneous thoughts...
A&M had a weirdly conservative marketing concept for the duo. Richard usually hated the album covers the company imposed and was told to "learn to love it". The brother/sister emphasis provided an almost Lawrence Welk-like sexlessness that opposed the erotic expression of "soul" or "rock". It`s also unlikely that the company encouraged any ideas to experiment with the formula.
I wonder if the label`s contemporaneous signing of Paul Williams had something to do with Burt`s subsequent absence. Williams and Roger Nichols` songs were nearly as popular as Close to You and were also being covered by everyone from Steve Lawrence to (ugh!)Three Dog Night.
Nichols had also recorded for A&M with his Small Circle of Friends.

Blair, you are so on target with the sexlessness of Karen's interpretations imposed by the confines of working with her brother and A & M's marketing department...a sexy, romantic tune would have been sort of creepy. Come to think of it, although I don't care for Dionne's 1963 demo of Close to You, there is a sexy, romantic quality to Dionne's voice that Karen never had. And although I like the Carpenters version of Close to You, there was nothing really sexy about their interpretation. And you are right in A & M's marketing strategy was to keep Karen especially sexless and androgynous. And that sexlessness is the anthesis of Bacharach. I for one can't imagine in a million years Karen tackling Here I Am...Dionne was so sensually playful in her interpretation...one critic said it had to have been recorded while Dionne was in a bubble bath. Dionne, Dusty and even Jackie DeShannon were beautiful, sexy women who had lived (at least in their songs) and that certainly came across in their Bacharach interpretations. Karen was a woman as well but A & M promoted her as a tomboy drummer...hard to get sexy after she was promoted as "sexless". A & M also marketed Bacharach as MOR which he was definitely not.

As my pizza man Leo used to say(he is from the old country)
"Steve, Whatda you gonna do?:(hands up in air)
meaning: what can one do?
I think Karen Carpenter could have recorded the phone numbers in the yellow pages, and had a hit...
but she and Richard worked cloesly together and were a team...so I don't think Richard would have gone for an entire Burt production.....of course, good results would have occured..

That Phil Spector was able to get Tina to work with him alone was a quite a feat...

Steveo

Steveo...Ike Turner sure didn't want Tina to work with Phil and I often wonder how Phil Spector was able to pull that off and keep Ike out of the studio...River Deep Mountain High should have been huge but flopped when originally released...it has become, thankfully, a classic non-hit and better known now than it was in the 60s. Karen had a gorgeous voice but was, IMHO, stifled by A & M and her family. Unfortunately, by the late 70s her MOR image was so firmly entrenched that the solo work she did was aborted for a number of reasons and only four songs were recorded...such a waste. And, unfortunately, that tom boy image A & M saddled her with haunted her entire career...she was never allowed to be sexy.

Bach,
Well, when an act is so big..as huge as the Carpenters were..it difficult to change images..just as it was very difficult for THe Beach Boys to be thought of as anything besides creators of surf music...of course they were much more, and in time I think people saw this...but it created problems..when Brian and company decided to change gears and expand thier concepts...
IM afraid that the whole machine that created The Carpenters made it difficult to change an image,...but they were huge...and enjoyed great success for quite a few years...
It is a shame that a great talent like Karen did not have more time to explore these avenues..
But as the former posts speculate...we think of what mite have been along side of what was.

Steveo

I can hear Karen singing "Here I Am" in my head and it is giving me chills. Wow. I'm also hearing "Whoever You Are, I Love You" quite distinctly, and the one strong emotional element she consistently and exquisitely employed - that slight, aching vocal hitch - would have been devastating. Actually, I have to admit a grudging admiration for Richard's treatment of Burt's songs, and regret that there weren't many more of them. Alas, the direction they took in terms of repertoire after the earlier albums squandered to a tragic degree the time they had left ("On the Bayou", anyone?).

That was what was so great about Burt's working with Dionne and Hal during the years Dionne recorded with Scepter...Scepter had no publicity machine to speak of controlling every move the team made and controlling Dionne's image. They were able to work without those confines...and Dionne was able to cross over and appeal to everyone. Now, that would have never happened at Columbia or RCA had Dionne had recorded there...Burt would have had to work within the confines of the label's A & R departments. Karen and Richard Carpenter came along when the industry was changing and A & M had total and complete control over their product...unlike the hands-off relationship Dionne, Hal and Burt had with Florence Greenberg and Scepter and I believe that contol of Karen Carpenter never allowed her to explore the many directions Dionne, Burt and Hal explored with such creativity.

A new book about Karen Carpenter has been published without being filtered by Richard Carpenter and Team Carpenter....According to the excepts and reviews, the books does detail Karen''s story and offers insight into her relationship with her brother and her mother Agnes...apparently Agnes Carpenter was the mother from hell; monstrously dismissive of Karen and her talent and very cruel and cutting. I think it's fair to say that she only had eyes for Richard and never acknowledged Karen's talent or popularity as everything revolved around Richard. Richard apparently was very controlling and was very unsupportive of Karen's solo effort. He also seemed to resent that Karen became the superstar. The book points out that to this day, Richard often speaks of the failure of Karen's solo project with seeming relish although the author points out that Rolling Stone was generally very positive about the solo project.

Below is a press article appearing a few days ago about the new book:

Randy L. Schmidt’s admiration for the 1970s pop music icon the Carpenters started at age 13.
When he started writing his second book about the duo — the first is Yesterday Once More: Memories of the Carpenters and Their Music, a collection of articles, interviews, essays and reviews of the duo — Schmidt said he was really writing for children. Schmidt is a music teacher at Pecan Creek Elementary School in the Denton school district, and he’d used the duo’s music in classes.
“I started out interviewing her childhood friends,” Schmidt said. “I kept collecting interviews, and when that [children’s] book went by the wayside, I started to realize that there wasn’t anything devoted to Karen Carpenter.”
Richard and Karen Carpenter were siblings from Connecticut who became one of the most popular pop music groups of the 1970s. Though the pair was dogged by a squeaky-clean image and dismissed for saccharine songs, the Carpenters sold millions of records, scored Grammy Awards and earned a reputation among both critics and their peers for finely crafted, impeccably arranged music.


Karen Carpenter was the voice of the duo, with a soulful, effortless alto that is distinctive to this day. Carpenter died in 1983, her body ravaged by anorexia nervosa.
Schmidt decided he might be the person to tell Karen’s story. He would write Little Girl Blue: The Life of Karen Carpenter without Richard Carpenter’s authorization.

Yuval Taylor, a senior editor at Chicago Review Press — which published Little Girl Blue on Thursday — said he had heard about Ray Coleman’s authorized biography of the brother-sister team, The Carpenters: The Untold Story.

“I haven’t read it, but I’ve heard about it. I knew it was done with Richard’s consent, and I’d heard that there wasn’t much negative stuff about the family,” Taylor said.

The negative stuff? Schmidt learned in his research that a CBS television biopic about Karen Carpenter was initiated by the Carpenter family, but was plagued by demands for revisions that would soften the hard edges — especially when it came to Agnes Carpenter, the duo’s mother.

“As soon as I found out that Richard wasn’t going to be part of this, it’s like all of these doors opened up for me,” Schmidt said. “I was able to get interviews with some of Karen’s closest friends — she had very few people in her life that she was close to — and they were really ready to talk about Karen’s life. It was clear that they wanted her story to be told, and what was important to them was that Karen be treated well, treated with fairness.

“And that’s what I set out to do.”
Little Girl Blue turned out to be an appropriate title for the biography. Schmidt’s book reveals a profoundly gifted musician — a girl who started out playing drums and singing backup but who ended up eclipsing her brother with an unforgettable voice and a charisma that made her a star.


hmidt starts with the Carpenter family’s humble beginnings, with a working-class family that made big sacrifices to serve the eldest son’s precocious musical talent. Readers watch Harold and Agnes Carpenter do without so they can give Richard not only serious piano lessons, but a baby grand piano for him to practice on. Little Karen was a tomboy who preferred to play sports.

Schmidt’s book, through interviews with friends, industry executives and colleagues, follows the siblings through their studies into fame. Karen was coached to be a supporting player for her brother, he said.

“It was clear that the family’s mission was to make Richard a star,” Schmidt said. “When Karen started playing, it really was like she played drums in the Richard Carpenter Trio. When she started singing, it surprised everyone — even Karen.”

Little Girl Blue brings up the difficult family dynamics Karen Carpenter lived in. She seemed to crave approval from her critical, anxious mother, but was resigned to be shunted to the side, where she was expected to support Richard. The siblings lived with their parents in California until Karen was 25 and Richard was 28.

Karen returned home several times, and was married for a short time.

Schmidt said it was Karen’s voice that stood out for him.

“She approaches a song in such a simple way. She just sings it. There were no vocal acrobatics, no ‘everybody stand back and I’ll blow you away,’ even though she did blow people away. She was a master of phrasing. Great tonality. The warmth of her voice is really amazing.”

Schmidt said he has to give Richard a lot of credit for the singer that Karen became.

“I have to give it to Richard, there. He really knew how to surround Karen’s voice, to deliver it in a way that really brought out the best qualities of her voice,” Schmidt said.

The Carpenters might still be the butt of jokes about 1970s schmaltz as far as music fans are concerned — but the Carpenters’ peers still say otherwise.

“Yeah, it was popular to talk about how bad the Carpenters were, but they sold millions of records. Someone was buying them,” Schmidt said.

In the foreword to Little Girl Blue by Randy L. Schmidt, pop singer Dionne Warwick said Karen Carpenter is an indelible voice in the American popular music catalog.

“When I first heard her sing a song that I had recorded some years ago (‘Knowing When to Leave’ from the Broadway show Promises, Promises), I felt quite surprised that anyone would attempt this song, simply because of the complex time signature and range required to sing it,” Warwick writes. “She seemed to have no trouble riding the notes as they were supposed to be ridden, and I was impressed!”

Warwick was one of few people who knew that Karen was suffering from anorexia, which was misunderstood at the time. She recalls being able to get the singer to eat some soup and saltines at a time when no one else could cajole, pressure or force her to eat. Warwick said Karen seemed to be recovering at a Grammy Award photo shoot in January 1983.

“It was a joyous reunion,” Warwick writes, “and the first thing out of her mouth when she saw me was, ‘Look at me, I’ve got an ass!’ We laughed so hard and loud that the rest of the group took great notice, to say the least. We both agreed that she had a lot of living to do.”

Karen Carpenter died the next month. Warwick says in her foreword that Karen’s death was like losing a member of her own family.