Little Girl Blue (11 page)

As the Carpenters rehearsed furiously on A&M's soundstage and the medley began to take shape, Herb Alpert came through with a lead sheet for a lesser-known Bacharach-David song entitled “They Long to Be Close to You,” first recorded by Richard “Dr. Kildare” Chamberlain in 1963. The song was also arranged by Bacharach for
Make Way for Dionne Warwick
the following year. Alpert had been given the tune several years earlier as a possible follow up to “This Guy's in Love with You” but disliked the “sprinkled moondust” lyric and set it aside. Richard considered Alpert to be a great A & R man but felt the song would not fit in his plan for the medley, which was ultimately narrowed to include “Any Day Now,” “Baby It's You,” “Knowing When to Leave,” “Make It Easy On Yourself,” “There's Always Something There to Remind Me,” “I'll Never Fall in Love Again,” “Walk On By,” and “Do You Know the Way to San Jose.”

The lead sheet for “They Long to Be Close to You” remained on Richard's Wurlitzer for several weeks. Though it was not suited for the medley, Richard saw its potential as a stand-alone song and with Alpert's urging began to construct his own arrangement. Alpert owned a copy of Warwick's recording but would not let Richard hear it. Aside from two piano quintuplets at the end of the bridge, he wanted nothing to influence Richard's concept.

Three very distinct arrangements of “They Long to Be Close to You” were put to tape, the first with Karen singing in a style similar to that of Harry Nilsson. The result sounded too contrived and was
forcibly accenting the word “you.” For the second attempt Alpert suggested Jack Daugherty bring in pianist Larry Knechtel and drummer Hal Blaine. “I was Herb's drummer with the Tijuana Brass,” Blaine explains. “He had a lot of faith in me.” Alpert felt Karen's drumming lacked the muscle of competitive Top 40 records and knew Blaine would add the desired power for this recording. Agnes Carpenter did not agree. Karen, barely twenty, and Richard, soon to be twenty-four, still lived under her roof, where she kept close tabs on all their activities, both personal and professional. When she got word that Karen had been replaced by Blaine, she let him know of her displeasure. “I've seen so many drummers on television,” Agnes told him, “and Karen's as good as any of them.”

“Karen is a wonderful drummer,” he explained. “The problem is she doesn't have the studio experience that some of us have.”

This did little to appease Agnes, who was quick to praise her daughter when put on the defensive, but Blaine was not concerned with the parents. He was confident knowing Karen was happy having him in the studio, and that was all that mattered to him. “She had a lot of respect for me,” Blaine says. “We had an instant professional love affair because she knew everything I'd done, and she loved what I was doing on their records.”

Although Blaine went on to drum on this and numerous Carpenters records, Knechtel's piano performance proved too forceful for the mood of the song. Richard returned to the keys for a third and final approach. “Hold it, Richard,” Blaine interjected during his first Carpenters session. “Where are you going with this tempo?” This stunned Richard, who was accustomed to calling all the shots in the studio.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“Well, are we going to play the beginning tempo or the middle tempo or the ending tempo? You're kind of running away with it after the intro.”

After several attempts with the same result, Jack Daugherty cut in, asking, “Well, what do we do about this?”

Blaine suggested using a click track, which is essentially a metronome marking time in the musicians' headphone mix. Like many artists,
the Carpenters considered click tracks to be stifling, often resulting in robotic music. They finally gave in after Blaine explained it to be a reference tempo that need not be followed at every moment of a song. “After that,” Blaine says, “they wanted all their songs done with click track.”

Herb Alpert was pleased with the third version of “They Long to Be Close to You,” and as the recording began to take shape, excitement over the new creation spread throughout A&M. Breaking studio protocol, A&M staffers interrupted sessions and pushed open the doors to studio C to ask, “What is that?” When engineer Ray Gerhardt cranked studio monitors to what he often referred to as “excitement level,” the reaction was overwhelming for all involved. “
Thank God it didn't fit
in the medley,” Karen recalled of the song. “That was an instant thing from the minute it hit tape. It was really wild.”

Despite the fuss, there was talk of releasing “I Kept on Loving You,” a recording with Richard's lead vocal, as the A-side. Sharing both recordings with Frank Pooler's choir, Karen and Richard conducted an informal poll of their college friends. “They played both sides of it for them to see which one they liked best,” Pooler says. While “I Kept on Loving You” was radio friendly and consistent with other hit songs of the day, “Close to You” refused to conform to Top 40 trends. As a result, Pooler explains, “The choir applauded more for ‘Kept on Loving You.'”

Nichols-Williams compositions like “I Kept on Loving You” were frequently appearing as album cuts and B-sides around this time, but the songwriting duo had been hopeful to get an A-side with this second Carpenters single. “It was almost a joke that we'd die in anonymity and never having a hit single,” Williams says. “All I wanted was for ‘I Kept on Loving You' to be the single until I heard ‘Close to You.' They put ours on the B-side, and it was one of the greatest free rides of all time. They were both really fine records, but ‘Close to You' just proved to be magical.”

I
N EARLY
1970, advertising agent Hal Riney hired Beach Boys' lyricist Tony Asher to write a jingle for the Crocker Bank of California.
After Asher broke his arm in a skiing accident he recommended Roger Nichols and Paul Williams for the job. “It actually turned out to be something very different,” Williams recalls. “Almost all commercials up to that point had pitch. They had copy, like ‘come to our bank' or whatever. For this one they just wanted to show a little short movie of a young couple getting married and riding off into the sunset. They asked Roger and me to write a one-minute song that would accompany that movie.” With a budget of three hundred dollars and less than two weeks to write and record the song, Riney provided the songwriters with a bit of inspiration—his own slogan for the soft-sell campaign: “You've got a long way to go. We'd like to help you get there. The Crocker Bank.”

Nichols and Williams were busy with other projects and put this one aside until just before the deadline. “I came in that morning and was working on the tune,” Nichols says. “Paul came in a little after that, and within ten minutes he had written the first verse.” Williams grabbed an envelope and scribbled on the back:

We've only just begun to live

White lace and promises

A kiss for luck and we're on our way

Within a half hour they had written two one-minute jingles. After the original commercials aired, Crocker Bank executives wished to give copies of the song to their employees and asked the songwriters to make it a complete song. “We finished the complete song as an afterthought,” Williams says. “When we put all the copy together and added a bridge we had the song. You can see some imperfection in the rhyme scheme in the third verse. It doesn't rhyme like it's supposed to. ‘Grow' and ‘begun' don't rhyme like they should because that was actually the first verse of the second commercial.”

It was after a late-night recording session that Richard Carpenter caught the Crocker Bank commercial on television. Recognizing Paul Williams's lead vocal he figured it had to be a Nichols-Williams tune. “We got two phone calls right away,” Williams says. “The first was from Mark Lindsay and the second from Richard.”

Richard immediately went to the publishing offices on the A&M lot and picked up a reference disc of the demo. Playing it in their road manager's office, he was ecstatic to hear the bridge and third verse. He took the lead sheet to their next rehearsal where the group put together their arrangement. “
It was about borrowing money
, but for Pete's sake it was a great thought,” Karen remarked in a 1970 interview. “I compliment the bank for having that much awareness of what's going on.”

So taken with “We've Only Just Begun” were the Carpenters that they considered holding back the slated single release of “Close to You.” Something about “Begun” stood up and proclaimed itself a hit song, whereas “Close to You” seemed more of a risk. But since “Begun” was still in its embryonic stages and not even put to tape, the single release of “(They Long to Be) Close to You” went as planned for May 1970. Richard felt the title was too wordy and opted for this parenthetical variant. “What do you think it's going to do?” Alpert asked Richard as the two sat on the steps outside A&M Studios.

“As far as I'm concerned,” Richard said, “it's either going to be #1 or a monumental stiff. No in-between.”

“(
T
HEY
L
ONG
to Be) Close to You” entered the Hot 100 at #56, the highest debut of the week ending June 20, 1970. As the record moved up the charts, making stops at #37, #14, #7, and #3, the Carpenters set out to form a permanent “in person” band to travel with and support their live shows. Having recently been appointed principal tuba player with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Wes Jacobs weighed two significant opportunities. He could play pop music with the Carpenters or continue pursuing his own dream of playing tuba in a major orchestra. “
[Richard] called me, and
he basically offered me a lot of money . . .,” Jacobs recalled, “but I realized that I would play the same concert two hundred times a year while touring with the Carpenters instead of two hundred different concerts per year in a symphony. I chose the symphony.”

Karen and Richard returned to members of Spectrum in hopes of reassembling the original group to cover additional vocal harmonies. “We can't sing six parts,” they explained. “Would you like to come back?”

“No, thanks,” said Leslie Johnston, who was still singing lead for another group. “I knew that with the Carpenters I'd just be a backup,” she explains. “So they became famous and I didn't!”

Former Spectrum bassist Dan Woodhams did accept the invitation to join the group, as did guitarist Gary Sims following his return from
a stint in the Army Reserve. High-spirited college friend Doug Strawn was recruited to play multiple reed instruments. He also sang and had a great musical ear after years of experience fine-tuning chords in various barbershop quartets like the Dapper Dans, who had appeared on
Your All-American College Show
in 1968. Bob Messenger, the introverted and eldest member of the group, was equally adroit on bass guitar, saxophone, and flute. The group assembled was one of multiple talents with a common thread of determination to please Karen and Richard. Each would later learn that was not easy to accomplish, but they remained steadfast in their efforts nonetheless.

John Bettis was managing a club called the Babylon in San Francisco when a patron gave him a copy of
Cashbox
showing “Close to You” at #3 with a bullet. He immediately returned to Los Angeles but did not wish to sing with the group. Instead he signed on as a writer with Almo Publishing for a salary of seventy-five dollars a week. For years he would spend six days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, on the A&M lot. He likened it to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in its heyday, only smaller.

The new group spent months rehearsing daily on the A&M sound-stage, where they tweaked every nuance and worked to accomplish the optimal mix between microphones and instruments. For the singers, pure, tall, and unified vowel sounds and shapes were of prime importance for the desired blend. Each chord was isolated and tuned. Passages were rehearsed a cappella with each singer trying a different vocal part until the finest balance was achieved. For the earliest gigs, most of which were one-nighters, rented cars and a Ryder truck were the standard means of transportation. Karen, Richard, and the guys in the band would unload, set up, perform, tear down, and reload for each appearance. Family friend Evelyn Wallace was asked to set up a bookkeeping system to keep track of the group's earnings and expenses and began working from the Carpenters' home in order to set up forms, pay bills, and distribute any remaining money between Karen, Richard, and the band.

The Carpenters continued as the opening act in a series of shows for Burt Bacharach, including a run at Westbury Music Fair in New York and a week-long stay at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles. “
The five-member group is
at its best on whisper-like vocals on their hit and the Beatles' ‘Ticket to Ride,'” wrote
Los Angeles Times
music critic Robert Hilburn. “They were far less effective on up-tempo efforts like ‘Can't Buy Me Love.' The group received only fair response.”