Karen Carpenter was born on March 2, 1950; her brother Richard was born on October 15, 1946. Together, they were the pop duo The Carpenters. Her skill with emotional ballads and his talent for arranging combined to make them one of the most successful acts of the 1970s, often baffling critics who found their music bland and saccharine.
Richard began playing the piano at 8, and by 14, he was playing professionally and taking classes at the Yale School of Music. The Carpenter family moved from New Haven, Connecticut to Downey, California in 1963, expecting that Richard would have more musical opportunities in the Los Angeles area. He enrolled at California State University, Long Beach in 1964, where he met John Bettis, who became his songwriting partner.
At the same time, Karen was beginning high school at Downey High, where she took up drumming. With their friend Wes Jacobs on bass and tuba, they formed the Richard Carpenter Trio in 1965. The trio was jazz-oriented and played mostly instrumentals.
Karen joined Richard at Cal State Long Beach in 1967, and with some other CSLB students, they formed the band Spectrum. The group played some concerts in Los Angeles clubs, but at the height of psychedelic rock, there wasn’t much interest in Spectrum’s calmer middle-of-the-road sound, and the band folded after a year.
Karen and Richard officially became a duo and were signed by A&M Records. They released their first album, originally called Offering, in 1969, and their version of the Beatles’ “Ticket to Ride” was a minor hit. After their later success, the album was repackaged and released under the name Ticket to Ride.
After the disappointing sales of Offering, A&M’s founder, Herb Alpert, insisted that they be given another chance. The second chance paid off, as the duo went on a remarkable string of success. Between 1970 and 1976, their next 17 singles would all reach either #1 or #2 on the Adult Contemporary charts, and 12 of them were top ten pop hits.
Their 1970 album, Close to You, featured the #1 pop hit “(They Long to Be) Close to You,” a Burt Bacharach/Hal David composition; and “We’ve Only Just Begun,” which began its life in a TV commercial for a Los Angeles bank, and became the first big hit for songwriters Paul Williams and Roger Nicholls. Both songs have since been added to the Grammy Hall of Fame. The Carpenters won the Grammy Award for Best New Artist in 1970, one of three Grammy Awards they won during their career.
The Carpenters were so successful in the early 1970s that even songs they hadn’t planned to release as singles became hits. “Top of the World” was meant to be just an album cut on the 1972 album A Song for You, but after Lynn Anderson had a #2 country hit with her version of the song, the Carpenters decided to release their own version; it became their second #1 hit on the pop charts.
All of this success seemed to confuse music critics. Yes, they acknowledged, Karen had a remarkable voice, but the duo’s squeaky clean image (which even Karen and Richard grew tired of, and sometimes wished they could shed) was out of step with rock music of the era. Writing for Rolling Stone, Lester Bangs said they had “the most disconcerting collective stage presence of any band I have seen.”
By 1976, the magic was starting to fade. A Kind of Hush was their first album since Offering/Ticket to Ride not to go platinum, though the singles still sold well, with “There’s a Kind of Hush” and “Only Yesterday” both topping the Adult Contemporary chart. (That album isn’t available in our streaming collections, but those songs can be heard on this greatest hits collection.)
Richard and Karen gave their last live performance together in Long Beach in December 1978. The next month, Richard went into treatment for drug addiction, after which he decided to take the rest of the year off to recuperate. At the same time, Karen was struggling with health issues of her own; she suffered from the eating disorder anorexia nervosa, and Richard urged her to get treatment, but she denied that she had a problem.
Rather than join Richard on his hiatus, Karen spent late 1979 and early 1980 recording a solo album and was disappointed when A&M decided not to release it. (It was finally released in 1996). The duo reunited to record their final album, Made in America, in 1981; its most successful single was “Touch Me When We’re Dancing.”
Karen finally sought treatment for anorexia in early 1982 from a therapist in New York. When she came to Los Angeles a few months later for recording sessions, Richard worried that whatever treatment she was getting wasn’t helping; her weight was down to 90 pounds and her voice was weak. In September, Karen admitted herself to a hospital, where she spent eight weeks on an intravenous feeding tube. She checked out in November, declaring herself cured.
Karen made her last public appearance in January 1983 at a gathering of Grammy winners; she died on February 4, 1983, of various health complications as a result of her anorexia. Her sickness and death brought new public attention to eating disorders, helping many to realize how serious they could be.
Over the next several years, Richard released some posthumous Carpenters albums, collections of unreleased songs and performances from their TV specials. He recorded a solo album, Time, in 1987, with guest vocals from Dionne Warwick and Dusty Springfield.
In 1994, the Richard and Karen Carpenter Performing Arts Center opened on the campus of Cal State Long Beach. And in the 1990s, critics began to reconsider the work of the Carpenters. They gave credit not only to Karen's voice, but to the skill of Richard's arrangements, and the way he had absorbed and changed his major influences—the vocal harmonies of the Beach Boys, and the Mamas and the Papas; and the multi-tracked vocals of Les Paul and Mary Ford.
It became less embarrassing to admit that you liked the Carpenters’ music, so much so that an all-star cast of alt-rockers (Sonic Youth, Shonen Knife, and The Cranberries among them) released the tribute album If I Were a Carpenter. Other Carpenters tribute albums have been recorded by instrumental rock group The Ventures and jazz pianist Randy Waldman.
More of the Carpenters' music is available for streaming at Hoopla. Randy Schmidt is the author of Little Girl Blue (e-book | print), a biography of Karen Carpenter; Karen Tongson’s Why Karen Carpenter Matters (e-book) is a mix of biography and memoir.