Little Girl Blue the Life of Karen Carpenter Free Download
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CHOPSTICKS ON BARSTOOLS
UPON MOVING to Downey, California, Harold Carpenter started his job as a lithograph printer in the nearby city of Vernon at the Container Corporation of America, where he worked double shifts to earn extra money for his family. Although Karen was upset to leave her friends in New Haven, the Carpenters never regretted their decision to relocate. California was a land of opportunity in many ways, and just as they had hoped, Richard was busy within two weeks of their arrival. Downey also allowed the Carpenter family to maintain a quiet, middle class, suburban way of life, not unlike their New Haven beginnings.
down the Santa Ana Freeway, turn off on San Gabriel, make a couple of rights, and you're in Downey, a right-wing, unpretentious suburb of the sprawling conurbation that makes up Los Angeles." According to British journalist Chris Charlesworth, "It's where the homes are neat and tidy, where the kids graduate from high school, go to college and [play] football so that bruises will stand them in good stead later in life. It's where the moms and dads go to each other's cocktail parties once a week and where they eat TV dinners during the Million Dollar Movie on Channel 9. It's safe and sound."
Waiting for their New Haven house to sell, the Carpenter family struggled to maintain mortgage payments on the East Coast while renting an apartment in the West. "They were all just struggling like the rest of us and trying to get by," says Veta Dixon, who managed the forty-three-unit Shoji complex, located at 12020 Downey Avenue. "The Carpenters were just wonderful, wonderful people. We loved them immediately, and the kids, too. They lived upstairs on the right in #22."
The family soon moved across the breezeway to #23 when a larger apartment vacated. There they lived directly above a police officer for the City of Downey. When the musical vibrations penetrated the floor, he soon complained to the managers about the sounds coming from upstairs. "Do I have to listen to that piano day and night?" he asked.
"Yes," Dixon claims to have replied, "and if you don't like it you can move out! One of these days you'll be paying big money to see them and hear their music."
Driving around Downey one sunny afternoon, Harold pulled the family car into Furman Park on Rives Avenue to ask for directions. A park groundskeeper by the name of Nip noticed the Connecticut plates and asked if they were new to Downey. Agnes began to tell of her prodigy son and how his talents led them to Southern California. Karen and Richard, embarrassed by their mother's boasting, slumped deep into the backseat of the family car. Nip told the Carpenters that Furman Park's gazebo was the site of a weekly talent show held every Sunday afternoon. At first opportunity, Richard entered the talent show performing "Theme of Ernest Gold's Grammy for Song of the Year in 1961, and a 1923 Zez Confrey piece called "Dizzy Fingers." He also accompanied Karen singing "The End of the World," a hit for Skeeter Davis in the spring of 1963. Singing with a light, pure, head tone, Karen had an airy quality to her voice, much like other girls her age. There were no signs of the rich, smoky alto register to come.
As he left the stage that day, Richard was approached by Vance Hayes, the choir director at Downey Methodist Church. In need of an interim organist, Hayes felt the young pianist would be well qualified based on the performance he had just witnessed. Having little experience on the organ, Richard was hesitant to accept the offer, but Hayes would not take no for an answer. He began the following Saturday playing for two weddings at fifteen dollars each. Playing for the weekly church services, Richard was responsible for preludes, offertories, and postludes. He often improvised, disguising melodies from his favorite Beatles tunes, even up-tempo numbers, like "From Me to You" or "All My Loving." In his words, he would "church them up." Karen was never far from her brother in those days. She would be in the back of the church or singing in the choir and notice melodies from the Beach Boys, the Beatles, and Burt Bacharach.
A reporter with the local Downey Live Wire newspaper heard of the new young organist at Downey Methodist and felt the story would make for a pleasant human interest feature. Along with a photographer, the reporter came to the family's apartment and took Richard's picture next to the family's black Baldwin Acrosonic, one of the few large items they had been sure to move across the country that past summer.
In the fall of 1963, thirteen-year-old Karen entered Downey's South Junior High as Richard, just shy of his seventeenth birthday, began his senior year at Downey High School and enrolled in the school band. "What can you play?" asked Bruce Gifford, the band director.
"Piano," Richard replied.
"Baby or grand?"
The two shared a laugh as Gifford explained he had no need for a pianist in his marching band. Richard went home and unpacked a trumpet he had purchased years earlier for four dollars at an auction. He attempted to play the instrument but to no avail. Luckily, the band director did not require an audition after Richard distracted him with a few impressive piano arpeggios. Outside of his teaching career, Gifford also led a nightclub band with his brother Rex. Richard was recruited and became the group's pianist for a short time, playing at dances, clubs, and weddings. He felt the group's sound was reminiscent of Louis Prima with Sam Butera and the Witnesses.
The Carpenter family's New Haven home finally sold in November 1964. Having tolerated cramped apartment living for a little more than a year, the family packed up and moved to a storybook house located at 13024 Fidler Avenue in Downey. To help offset the purchase of the new home and the higher cost of living in Southern California, Agnes Carpenter took a job running several mimeograph machines in the stockroom at North American Rockwell Corporation. The aircraft assembly plant, Downey's number-one employer, was responsible for manufacturing systems designed for the Apollo spacecraft program.
In the living room of their new home on Fidler, Richard finally had space for a larger piano. With money earned teaching piano lessons and playing the organ at church, in addition to the help of his parents, he traded in the spinet for a Baldwin Model L, a six-foot three-inch parlor grand. For a short period of time he studied piano at the University of Southern California.
ENTERING High School in the fall of 1964, Karen was just fourteen years old, an entire year younger than most of her classmates. Although Karen enjoyed playing sports, she did not like to exercise and detested the idea of running around a track every morning. So she paid a visit to band director Bruce Gifford, by then a family friend, who confirmed her participation in marching band would count toward a physical education credit. Karen also succeeded in opting out of geometry class in favor of joining the school choir.
Gifford presented Karen with a glockenspiel and a set of mallets and put her right to work in his marching band, where she marched in the percussion section alongside the drums. Karen quickly found the glockenspiel cumbersome. Additionally, the tone of the instrument began to bother her. She detected that it played a quarter-step sharp in relation to the rest of the band.
Rehearsing with the percussion section, Karen became increasingly intrigued by what classmate Frankie Chavez and the other drummers were doing. As in the Carpenter home, in the Chavez residence music was part of daily life. been playing the drums since he was three," Karen said, calling him "a Buddy Rich freak. He even ate the same food as Buddy Rich!" But Chavez denies this allegation. "No," he says, "I didn't eat the same foods as Buddy," but he admits that Buddy Rich certainly influenced his playing.
Karen marched with the glockenspiel for about two months, by which time it became evident to her that Chavez was the only drummer in the band who had a real passion for his music. used to march down the street playing these stupid bells, watching Frankie play his tail off on the drums," she later said. "It hit me that I could play drums as good as nine-tenths of those boys in the drum line, outside of Frankie."
Meeting with band director Gifford, Karen informed him of her desire to switch instruments. She wanted to join the drum line. finally had to talk him into it," she recalled. "At that time, no girl anywhere was in the drum line of a marching band in any school." This was met with a tepid response from Gifford, to say the least. "Girls don't play drums," he told her. "That's not really normal."
I ever heard was 'girls don't play drums,'" Karen later recalled. "That is such an overused line, but I started anyway. I picked up a pair of sticks, and it was the most natural-feeling thing I've ever done."
Karen saw Gifford's cynicism as a challenge. "Well, let me try," she told Gifford.
Although the director was doubtful, he agreed to let Karen transition to the drums. First he assigned her to play a pair of cymbals, which was not her goal but did bring her closer to Frankie and the other drummers. Chavez was in charge of writing and developing drum cadences for the group, and his goal was to have fun and encourage listeners to move or dance. "They were funky and syncopated and kind of infectious," he says. "We were having such a great time that Karen wanted to play the cadences with the drum line, so she left the cymbals and started playing tenor drum." Never one to settle short of her goal, Karen aspired to play the snare drum during parades and the halftime shows at football games. According to Chavez, "the most interesting parts were assigned to the snare drums, so that's where she ultimately ended up. That was the conduit to playing drums."
Immediately at ease with the snare drum, Karen spent countless hours rehearsing before and after school. At home she assembled the kitchen barstools and even a few pots and pans to simulate a drum kit. Her father's chopsticks served as drumsticks. Karen began playing along to LPs like the Dave Brubeck Quartet's Time Out and Time Further which were filled with difficult time signatures like 9/8 and 5/4. "They liked to play jazz," Chavez recalls. "Richard was a huge Dave Brubeck fan, and Karen and I both loved Joe Morello. They liked everything from Brubeck to Beatles. I remember being at their house and the Beatles' Rubber Soul had just come out. I remember sitting around listening to 'Norwegian Wood,' and we were all saying what a great production the album was and how great the songs were. Karen and Richard were good students of the art form."
Karen also sought the guidance of Frankie, with whom she may have been smitten. "There wasn't a romantic interest on my part," Chavez says, "but I always felt there may have been on hers. I had a girlfriend at the time, so Karen and I just became very good friends." Karen's only steady boyfriend during her high school years was a clarinet player by the name of Jerry Vance. Although the two dated for several years, most recall the relationship to have been nothing serious and more of a "buddy" situation than a romance.
As for Karen and Frankie, they too remained "just good buddies," he says. "She had that little tomboy streak to her and used to talk like a beatnik. I loved that she would talk like a jazz player. What developed was a very good friendship and a mutual interest in drums and music. She'd come over after school and we'd talk drums. She always had a ton of questions about playing so we used to talk about the most effective ways to hold the stick, traditional grip versus matched grip, stick control, playing technique, drum styles. We'd talk about different drummers and listen to jazz records and big bands. Karen took to drumming quickly, and it was very natural to her. She showed great ability, had good timing, and kept getting better and better. She ended up being one of the better snare drum players in the drum line in no time."
Given Karen's track record with musical instruments, her parents were skeptical. They were quite sure it was just another passing fancy. Additionally, Agnes and Harold were already struggling to pay for Richard's new Baldwin. But thanks to his urging, their parents agreed to invest in a basic drum kit for Karen. Karen loved the sound of Ludwigs and wanted them because two of her favorite drummers, Joe Morello and Ringo Starr, played Ludwigs exclusively. Agnes wanted Richard's input, and he felt Ludwig drums would be a good investment since they were known to have a higher resale value than most other lines.
On a Sunday afternoon the family drove to the San Fernando Valley with Frankie Chavez in tow to the home of a music teacher who dealt instruments on the side. They settled on an entry-level set that was dark green with a yellow stripe around the center of each piece. Karen contributed some of her own savings to assist with the three-hundred-dollar purchase. "Ludwig makes a great product," Chavez says. "It was a good move." And with that purchase Frankie became Karen's first drum teacher. Although the rudiments of drumming, time signatures, cadences, and fills came naturally to her, she wanted to know more. "A lot of what she picked up early on was influenced by what she heard on recordings," Chavez explains. "As her interest in certain portions of the art of playing came up, I would try to teach her the concepts and answer her questions."
Karen soon began studying drum technique under the tutelage of Bill Douglass at Drum City on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood. Douglass was a well-known jazzer who played with the likes of Benny Goodman and Art Tatum. "Bill was well respected and a great teacher," says Chavez, who also studied with Douglass for eight years. "We used to play on practice pads reading concert music. Bill had Karen reading very complex material and thought she had become quite a reader." The lessons continued for the next year and a half.
After only two months of playing, Karen was convinced she had outgrown her first drum kit and by Christmas persuaded her parents to trade in the entry-level set toward the purchase of a show set identical to one belonging to Joe Morello—a 1965 Ludwig Super Classic in silver sparkle with double floor toms. She also asked for the all-chrome, top-of-the-line Super Sensitive Snare. At first her parents opted for the more economical Supra-phonic 400 but later gave in and purchased the Super Sensitive Snare, too. Bragging to friends about her son's piano talents, Agnes secured him the job of pianist for a local production of the Frank Loesser musical Guys and Karen packed up her new set of drums and joined Richard for their first instrumental performance together, an unlikely piano-drum duo accompanying the production.
Karen soon became the drummer for Two Plus Two, an all-girl band comprising Downey High School students including Linda Stewart and Eileen Matthews. "We wanted only girls because an all-girl band in those days was very rare," Stewart explains. She and Matthews carried their guitars and amps to school, where they would catch the bus to the Carpenter home for rehearsal each week. Karen recommended friend Nancy Roubal join to play bass. "Nancy came on board but did not have a bass guitar," Stewart says. "She did what she could on the bass strings of a six-string guitar. It didn't sound as good as we wanted, but we worked through that. The other problem we had was our amps were so small that Karen had to play softly. We were kind of a surf band, but one of Karen's favorite songs to play was 'Ticket to Ride' by the Beatles. None of us sang at that time, so I never heard Karen sing, but I never heard such a good drummer in my young life at that time." After only a few rehearsals Karen approached Linda and the other girls suggesting that Richard join the group. "I said no," Stewart recalls, "because I wanted an all-girl band. Boys were out." The girls were finally booked to play for a local pool party, but when Eileen's mother refused to let her attend, Linda became discouraged. "I was so upset I just broke up the band."
HAVING GRADUATED from high school in the spring of 1964, Richard enrolled at nearby California State University at Long Beach. In June of the following year he met Wes Jacobs, a tuba major from Palmdale, California, who was also a skillful upright bassist. met in theory Jacobs recalled in a 2009 interview. "It was obvious to me that he was a genius. Right from day one he could take all the dictation that the teacher could dish out; he would just write it out. . . . He wanted to do something jazzy. . . . We played, and it just clicked right away. Since I had considerable keyboard experience, I could look at his hands and read what he was doing. I could almost play along with him as if I were reading music. We really locked in stylistically. Within a short time, it was apparent that we had to do something musically, but we didn't know what. At one point he said, 'I'll tell my sister to learn how to play drums, and we'll have a trio.' Within three weeks she could play drums better than anybody that I heard at the college."
In actuality Karen had been playing a number of months by the time she teamed with Richard and Wes to form what became the Richard Carpenter Trio, an instrumental jazz group with the classic combo of piano, bass, and drums. Richard did all the arrangements, and by the end of the summer they were rehearsing on a daily basis, sometimes playing well into the night.
Financing a piano and drum kit, in addition to paying for music lessons, Agnes and Harold were barely making ends meet. Now the newly formed trio wanted amplifiers and microphones. Plus Richard felt a new electric piano would make their act more portable. Even so, a tape recorder took precedence, as this would allow the group to make demos. For several months Richard saved to make a down payment on a Sony TC-200 Stereo Tapecorder. The first recordings of the trio were made during the summer of 1965 in the Carpenters' living room at the house on Fidler.
Richard met trumpet major Dan Friberg, a junior college transfer, in choir during the fall of 1965. The two had several other classes together including music history and counterpoint, and Richard began to call upon Friberg when he needed a trumpet player for the trio's weekend gigs. "Karen was the drummer and didn't sing at all yet," Friberg recalls. "She was listening to Louie Bellson and Buddy Rich. Those were some of her idols. I remember going into her room at their house, and she had pictures on the wall of all these great drummers. Her goal was to be as good as they were. She was great then, by all I could tell, but not good enough for her." Friberg became a recurring soloist with the Richard Carpenter Trio. "We had a girl vocalist named Margaret Shanor," he recalls. "With Karen strictly drumming at this point, Margaret fronted the group."
IT WAS not until 1966 that Karen came into her full voice. Although she had always sung in tune, her voice had lacked vibrato and any real depth or presence. It was mostly a light falsetto with a noticeable break between her lower and higher registers. can't really remember why I started to sing," Karen said in 1975. "It just kind of happened. But I never really discovered the voice that you know now—the low one—until later, when I was sixteen. I used to sing in this upper voice, and I didn't like it. I was uncomfortable, so I think I would tend to shy away from it because I didn't think I was that good. And I wasn't."
Karen deplored the sound of her tape-recorded voice at first but continued to experiment with her abilities as a singer. kind of corny to listen back," she recalled. "We had an original recording of one of Richard's songs that I'd sung, and the range was too big. I'd be going from the low voice to the high voice, and even though it was all in tune, the top part was feeble and it was different. You wouldn't know it was me. Then suddenly one day out popped this voice, and it was natural."
Richard soon introduced Karen to his college choir director, Frank Pooler, with whom she began taking voice lessons every Saturday morning. This would be the only formal vocal training she would ever receive. "We'd have a half-hour or forty-five-minute voice lesson," Pooler says. "She always had her drums with her in the car. From there Richard would take her over to study with Bill Douglass in Hollywood." The lessons with Pooler focused on both classical voice study and pop music. The first half was devoted to art songs by Beethoven, Schumann, and other composers. During the last half Karen would sing the new songs Richard had written. "Karen was a born pop singer," Pooler says. "She wasn't particularly interested in that other stuff, but she had to do it to get into school."
Unlike Richard, who practiced endlessly, Karen rarely, if ever, rehearsed between her lessons with Pooler. Concerned that their money might be better spent somewhere else, the Carpenter parents met with her teacher to inquire about Karen's progress. "The folks were very supportive of both of them, but they weren't rich. I was getting paid five bucks an hour for those lessons, and they finally came up to see if Karen was getting her money's worth!"
Pooler told Karen her voice was "arty" and "natural" and discouraged the idea of subjecting it to any sort of intense vocal training. heard this voice and he wouldn't touch it," Karen said in 1975. "He said I should not train it . . . and the only thing I did work with him on was developing my upper register so I would have a full three-octave range. . . . Something else you don't think about is being able to sing in tune. Thank God I was born with it! It's something I never thought about. When I sing, I don't think about putting a pitch in a certain place, I just sing it."
Becoming more confident in Karen's vocals, Richard began to feature her with their act and called less upon Margaret Shanor. The group's set strayed from jazz to Richard's pop-influenced originals and tried-and-true standards like "Ebb Tide," "The Sweetheart Tree," "The Twelfth of Never," and "Yesterday." No matter how much singing she was asked to do, Karen also seemed to consider herself first and foremost a drummer who just happened to sing.
Around this time Agnes Carpenter met Evelyn Wallace, a fellow employee at North American Aviation. The women became close friends when Agnes came to Evelyn in tears following a heated disagreement with another coworker. After Wallace was promoted to the division of laboratory and tests for the Apollo program, Agnes took over her old job. "Why don't you stop in and hear the kids?" Agnes would often ask Evelyn. "They practice after school every day."
But Evelyn always seemed to find some excuse. "I thought she was talking about little kids," she recalls. "Then I thought it might be that acid rock, and I couldn't stand to listen to that. Finally I couldn't keep saying no. I had to say yes." Reluctantly Evelyn agreed to join the Carpenters in their home for dinner one evening and to hear Karen and Richard rehearse. Proud to finally find a captive audience, Agnes called out to her daughter seated behind the drums. "Sing it, Karen," she said.
Wallace sat spellbound. "I had never heard a voice like that in all my life," she says. "What a beautiful, beautiful voice she had, and I told her when she finished, 'That was beautiful, Karen.' She thought I was just being nice."
LIKE MANY college music majors, trumpeter Dan Friberg directed a church choir on the weekends for extra income. At a church in Hawthorne he met Don Zacklin, a member of the congregation. "I was doing lead sheets for him," Friberg recalls. "He would bring me tapes of different artists that he had recorded on Sunday, and I'd write out lead sheets. He would send them in for copyright purposes." Zacklin encouraged Friberg to share some of his original compositions and recordings with his friend Joe Osborn, a business partner in a small record label called Magic Lamp Records.
Joe Osborn was one of the most prominent and sought-after studio bassists on the West Coast pop music scene in the 1960s. He frequently played in tandem with drummer Hal Blaine and keyboardist Larry Knechtel, an association known as the Wrecking Crew. The three were featured on numerous hits by the Beach Boys, the Mamas and the Papas, and many other popular artists of the late 1960s. "We were a bunch of guys in Levis and T-shirts," says Blaine, who first worked with Joe Osborn on the live Johnny Rivers at the Whiskey a Go Go album. "The older, established musicians in three-piece suits and blue blazers who had been in Hollywood all their life started saying, 'These kids are going to wreck the business,' so I just started calling us the Wrecking Crew."
As the spring semester of 1966 drew to a close, Friberg saw Richard on campus and told him of his upcoming audition with Osborn. "I've got a guy that wants to hear some songs that I wrote, but I need somebody to play piano for me," he said.
Richard agreed to accompany Friberg on the informal try-out. "It all goes back to that fateful night at Joe Osborn's in his garage with egg cartons on the wall," he says. It was April 1966. Both Karen and Richard traveled with Friberg and his young wife to Osborn's house, located at 7935 Ethel Avenue in the San Fernando Valley. The audition and recording session were slated for 1:00 since Osborn was usually in sessions each night until midnight.
Unbeknownst to Karen and Richard, Don Zacklin had asked Friberg to recommend other talented kids from the college to audition for Magic Lamp. So when Karen and Richard showed up, Zacklin and Osborn assumed they'd come along to audition, too. The brother and sister were befuddled but cooperative. "Karen ended up singing that night," Friberg says. "She sang and that was the end of me! To me, her voice was just like nothing else I'd ever heard before or since. It was just so distinctive. To think of all the times I saw her sitting behind the drums, never knowing that she could even sing. It's really weird the way things worked out because that night was what started the whole thing for them. If Richard had said, 'I'm busy,' I probably would have gotten somebody else, and they never would have met Joe."
Captivated by Karen's raw, husky voice, Osborn asked musician friend and drummer Mickey Jones to travel with him to Downey to see this "chubby little girl" perform. "We went to a small dinner house where we heard Karen sing," Jones recalls. "I was shocked. I had never heard a more pure voice in my life." Hearing Karen again, Osborn was won over. He told Mickey Jones he planned to contact the girl's parents. He wanted to record her. This was surely good news, but it did not sit well with Agnes Carpenter. She was set on the idea of her son becoming the family's famous musician. After all, they'd moved across the country in hopes of Richard getting into the music business, and now he was being disregarded in favor of his kid sister, a musical novice. "I know that Agnes was really, really mad about that," recalls Evelyn Wallace. "There are many piano players that are very, very good. But let's face it, all pianos more or less sound alike. All voices do not."
On May 9, 1966, Osborn signed sixteen-year-old Karen Carpenter to Magic Lamp Records' small roster of artists, which included Johnny Burnette, James Burton, Mickey Jones, Dean Torrence (of Jan and Dean), and Vince Edwards, best known as television's Dr. Ben Casey. Since Karen was not of legal age, Agnes and Harold signed on her behalf. Two days later, Magic Lamp's publishing division, Lightup Music, signed Richard as a songwriter in an effort to help reconcile Agnes's displeasure with Osborn having initially overlooked her son's talents. "Joe thought that Richard was a pain in the ass," Mickey Jones recalls. "Richard not only wanted to play the piano but to run everything. Joe did not want him around when he was working with Karen, so he made Richard wait outside the studio."
Any resentment between the two soon gave way to new friendships as Karen, Richard, and Wes Jacobs began spending hours on end at Osborn's studio. That summer Karen recorded several of Richard's original compositions including "The Parting of Our Ways," "Don't Tell Me," "Looking for Love," and "I'll Be Yours." She also played drums on the recordings, which featured Osborn on electric bass and sometimes Wes Jacobs on upright bass. Richard was on piano and the Chamberlin Music Master, a version of the Mellotron, both of which were popular analog synthesizers that provided taped string and woodwind sounds. Osborn used a Scully 4-track recorder and Neumann U87 condenser microphones to tape the sessions. Playback was done through Altec 604 studio monitors. When four tracks were complete, they were bounced or "ping-ponged" to his Scully 2-track machine, which condensed multiple tracks to two or sometimes even one. This process freed additional tracks for overdubbing and layering voices or instruments.
"Looking for Love / I'll Be Yours" (ML 704) was the first and only single by Karen Carpenter for Magic Lamp Records. Five hundred copies were pressed, and most extras were given to family and friends. "There was no distribution that I am aware of," Mickey Jones says. "It was mainly a tax shelter." Like most small labels, Magic Lamp did not have the means to promote their singles, and by late 1967 the company folded.
THE SUMMER of 1966 brought several milestones in the lives of Karen and Richard Carpenter. Shortly after having joined forces with Magic Lamp Records, the Richard Carpenter Trio made it to the finals of the Seventh Annual Battle of the Bands, a prestigious talent competition held at the Hollywood Bowl. The event was sponsored by the County of Los Angeles Department of Parks and Recreation and dubbed "a musical showdown under the stars." Open to nonprofessionals under the age of twenty-one, the contest began with hundreds of groups competing in five preliminary contests held around Los Angeles County. Acts were quickly narrowed to just three entries in each of the following categories: dance band, school band, combos, vocal soloists, and vocal groups.
On Friday night, June 24, the trio performed Richard's multi–time signature arrangement of Antonio Carlos Jobim's "The Girl from Ipanema" and an original whole-tone-inspired jazz waltz entitled "Iced Tea," an ode to their favorite beverage, featuring Wes Jacobs on tuba. From their introduction by master of ceremonies Jerry Dexter, the trio gained full audience attention before even playing a note. The sight of Karen sitting behind a drum kit with her hair piled high was definitely a novelty. remember when we walked into the Bowl there were twenty acts on the show, and I was still new to the drums," Karen later explained to Ray Coleman. "It took me a while to set them up. We'd only been together for like six months, and what was even funnier, I couldn't lift them. I couldn't move them, so I had to have everybody carrying my drums, and then I put them together. All the guy drummers were hysterical."
A lengthy drum solo in the middle of "Iced Tea" gave Karen an opportunity to demonstrate her technique. The enthusiastic audience responded with a roar of applause, cheers, and whistles, which even drowned out the music at one point on a recording of the evening's performance. "By then she had gone from having a good rhythmical sense and steady time—the foundation you want—to being a very good player," Frankie Chavez recalls. "She could make some male drummers stand up and take notice, and she actually could outplay some of them, too. She was that good. I thought she made very good progress for the very short time she'd been playing, and it's a credit to her musicality."
Despite having to play on a dreadful upright piano the night of the contest, Richard won outstanding instrumentalist. In addition to winning best combo, the trio took home the sweepstakes trophy for the highest overall score in the competition, beating out Gentlemen and Trombones, Inc. "They won!" Agnes Carpenter proudly exclaimed to Frank Pooler, phoning him the day after the Battle of the Bands. "It's the biggest trophy I've ever seen in my life. My God, they've got to be good!"
Gerald Wilson, Calvin Jackson, Jerry Goldsmith, and Bill Holman joined Leonard Feather, chief jazz critic for the Los Angeles as the official judges for the event. musical surprise of the evening was the Trio of Richard Carpenter," wrote Feather, describing the group's leader as a "remarkably original soloist who won awards as the best instrumentalist and leader of the best combo. Flanking his piano were Karen Carpenter, his talented sixteen-year-old sister at the drums, and bassist Wes Jacobs who doubled amusingly and confidently on tuba." The competition was later broadcast in color on KNBC Channel 4 in Los Angeles.
"The Hollywood Bowl performance was a great place to get exposure," Chavez says. "People that went there were oftentimes movers and shakers who could make things happen with a career. It was a good move." On the way to their car following the win at the Bowl, Richard was approached by a man who congratulated the trio and asked if they would be interested in cutting some records. Richard told the man they already had a contract but took his business card anyway. Once Richard realized it was Neely Plumb, prominent West Coast A & R (artists and repertoire) man for RCA-Victor Records, he quickly explained the contract was only a solo singing contract for Karen with Magic Lamp. Plumb (whose daughter Eve would go on to star as Jan in the classic TV series The Brady thought the idea of rock tuba might be the wave of the immediate future and wanted to spotlight Wes Jacobs.
The trio signed to RCA-Victor in September 1966 and soon cut eleven tracks, including instrumentals of the standard "Strangers in the Night" and the Beatles' "Every Little Thing." They also recorded "I've Never Been in Love Before" from the musical Guys and Dolls and a Richard original, "Flat Baroque." Although he was excited to see the trio signed to a major record label, Richard shared with Plumb his concerns over the rock tuba approach, which he knew had little potential, and even the powers at RCA agreed. Richard told them of Karen's voice and how she had been signed to a vocal contract earlier that year, but after agreeing to listen, the response was: "Just another folk-rock group. No thank you." RCA decided against releasing the trio's music, and the three soon left the label with a few hundred dollars and no record. They considered themselves to have been an artistic success but a commercial failure. was really great but we didn't really have that focus," Wes Jacobs recalled. "Karen wasn't singing, and the tuba wasn't going to sell records. There was a lot of talent, but we didn't have direction."
Back on the campus at Cal State Long Beach, Richard spent many hours in the music department practice rooms, where he was able to focus on his own music. As he did on occasion, Richard consulted Frank Pooler for inspiration, in this case in planning their holiday music set. "We're sure sick of 'White Christmas,' 'Silent Night,' and doing the same songs every night," he told Pooler, asking for suggestions.
"I don't know any new Christmas songs," he replied, "but I wrote one a long time ago."
Pooler had written "Merry Christmas, Darling" as a young man. In fact, he composed his original version in 1946, the year Richard was born. Twenty years later, in December 1966, Pooler shared "Merry Christmas, Darling" with Richard Carpenter. "[Richard] was writing tunes at that time," says Pooler, "and I knew that whatever tune he could write would be better than the one I had already written, so I didn't give him the tune. I just gave him the words." Richard said he would work on a new melody, and about fifteen minutes later he was finished. "Merry Christmas, Darling" was written by two teenagers a generation apart. It was among the earliest songs Karen sang with the trio and would provide them with many successes in the years to come.
UPON GRADUATION from Downey High School in the spring of 1967, Karen was presented with the John Philip Sousa Band Award, the highest achievement for high school band students, recognizing superior musicianship and outstanding dedication. didn't strike me as musically talented at first," band director Gifford later recalled, "but I've learned to give people time before judging their talent."
In a farewell message inscribed in mentor Frankie Chavez's yearbook, Karen praised his abilities as a drummer and thanked him for inspiring and guiding her talents.
Frankie,
Listen man, it's hard to believe it, but we made it. Anyway, it's been a gas in every sense of the word. I can honestly say that it wouldn't have been near as crazy without ya. I want to thank you for getting me interested in drums. I learned a great deal from you and I'll always owe it to ya. . . . Oh well, it's time to split so keep in touch in between gigs.
Love ya,
Karen '67
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