đ„ 50th 50th Anniversary Celebration - West Coast*
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Here's the text of the whole article. (Someday the Times link will break.) I had to take out a handful of pictures due to the limitations of the site...it was hard to pick out which ones to delete!
Yesterday once more: The feel-good sadness of a Carpenters fan convention
By RJ SMITH
MAY 16, 2019
Jeffrey de Hart is standing at the edge of a driveway in Downey. Not just any driveway, but the one before the ancestral home of the Carpenters. The two-story tract house, these days with several concrete deer frolicking in front, is recognizable from the photograph on the cover of the duoâs 1973 âNow and Thenâ album, with siblings Karen and Richard sitting in his cherry-red Ferrari parked on their street.
On this sunny April afternoon, two busloads of Carpenters fans are taking pictures in front of the house. They are in the middle of a four-day Carpenters convention, centered at a midsize hotel in Thousand Oaks, and are celebrating the music of the Southern California pop duo that sold over 100 million albums. Loosely pegged to the 50th anniversary of the groupâs 1969 signing with A&M Records, the convention features tribute concerts, panel discussions with Carpenters historians and sidemen, and daylong field trips to âfamousâ locations in Carpenters lore.
De Hart, 59, is remembering a kid who stood on this same spot four decades ago.
âI was a troubled youth, I guess,â he says. Heâs got short grayish-blond hair and a gentle grin. âMy father was abusive and there were all these other issues going on.â He was 9 or 10, living in a small West Virginia town, when the Carpenters began recording. An older brother introduced him to their 1970 breakthrough hit â(They Long to Be) Close to You,â and pretty soon, it was over for him.
âI decided I had to study music and become Richard Carpenter. I wanted to play, write, produce. I was determined to do it all, just like he did.â
Inspirational stories flow freely. A mother and son from Arkansas, who sang hymns together in their church and today sing Carpenters songs outside it. A schoolteacher from Florida, hoping to spread the word about anorexia nervosa, the affliction that led to the congestive heart failure that killed Karen in 1982 at age 32. The farm girl from Saskatchewan who heard the music on her transistor radio and performs it today on stages all over the world. All told there are about 150 people present, coming from Belgium, Japan, Mexico and around the United States. Bringing them to Southern California was a need to share and, OK, overshare how and why the Carpenters matter.
Toni Lee from England holds up the "Now & Then" album art that features the Carpenters' Downey, Calif., home, as she stands in front of the house on April 25, 2019. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)
Which is funny, because not even their fans look at the group as anything like the voice of a generation. During their recording career, they became famous for making America feel good at a time when there was so much to feel bad about. The Vietnam War. The struggle for civil rights. Watergate. Wistful soft-rock â the Carpenters, Bread, James Taylor, Carole King, that guy who sang âFeelingsâ â was a balm in troubled times.
The Carpentersâ sunny affirmations (âTop of the World,â âSingâ) were sweet enough to give you an ice cream headache. Their midtempo songs and ballads, though â âWeâve Only Just Begun,â âGoodbye to Love,â âOnly Yesterday,â âRainy Days and Mondaysâ and especially their version of the Leon Russell/Bonnie Bramlett composition âSuperstarâ â were often transportive, thanks to Richardâs exquisite skill as an arranger, but most of all because of Karenâs contralto, which had an extraordinary relationship to the microphone and rarely seemed to be showing off â it just richly is, finding the right places to go.
âI donât think even she realized how great she was,â says Michelle Berting Brett, a classically trained singer who brought her show of Carpenters songs to Downey for the celebration. âShe made it sound so effortless, with these incredibly long phrases â the breath that girl had was incredible.â
The Carpenters perform on the BBC "In Concert" series in 1970. (Tony Russell / Redferns)
You could dive into their sound but never the people who made it. The image Richard and Karen projected flowed from the reassuring music, but also from the way they looked: remote, powerful, satisfied. Fairly or not, the imagery stamped them for the rest of their lives as not-rock, not-counter anything, as cultural figures in a California lineage that included Ayn Rand, Ronald Reagan and Mike Curb. âI donât even like milk,â Richard once sneered in Rolling Stone. When you have to disavow milk, the gig is up.
By 1972, they were visiting Nixon in the White House, where the president gave them White House golf balls and had them sing for German Chancellor Willy Brandt. They were, the president said, symbols of âyoung America at its best.â
For years after their last official album (1981âs âMade in Americaâ), their music hung in the air like an omnipresent mist: gently wafting from Lite FM stations and doctorsâ waiting rooms, from karaoke bars and piano lounges, and from wherever weddings receptions were held. It took Generation X to cast the Carpenters in a new light, to manipulate and critique the groupâs bruised banality in ways old fans might not have appreciated.
Director Todd Haynesâ short 1987 film, âSuperstar: The Karen Carpenter Story,â told a version of Karenâs life using Barbie dolls in place of actors. Haynes hadnât licensed the music he used, and nobody would show it commercially for fear of being sued, yet in its time âSuperstarâ achieved considerable underground status. It became a harbinger of themes Haynes has developed subsequently: Americaâs obsession with hygienic purity; the toll of gender roles and of fame.
Indie bands, as well, were rediscovering the Carpenters. âIf I Were a Carpenter,â a 1994 tribute compilation, featured covers by alt-rock acts like the Cranberries, Redd Kross and Sonic Youth, whose deadpan, dissolute version of âSuperstarâ took center stage. Karen performed it from the point of view of a fan who fell in love with a star one night at a show and now yearns for contact that comes only from the radio. The way Sonic Youthâs Thurston Moore frames it, the superstar was Karen, and the distance between the image and the tragic life echoes in waves of sadness.
Today, the Carpentersâ legacy is open for a new round of rediscovery and deconstruction. USC professor Karen Tongson, in her new book, âWhy Karen Carpenter Matters,â argues that she âmatters to people of color, immigrants, queer people, gender outlaws.â Last year, singer-songwriter Natalie Prass (who played Karen Carpenter on HBOâs âVinylâ) released âFar From You,â a reverse image of the Carpentersâ âClose to Youâ that restores distance and pain to the picture. On psych-soft rock band Weyes Bloodâs acclaimed new album âTitanic Rising,â singer Natalie Mering all but channels Carpenter, giving her an emotional autonomy she never had in her life. And in last yearâs deranged horror film âMandy,â a cult leader kidnaps a woman and forces her to submit to a Satanic inauguration. But first, he has a question for her: âDo you like the Carpenters?â Even today, Karen and Richard force us to choose.
âCloseâ call
Downey, about 13 miles south of Los Angeles, officially became a city in 1956. By then a growing aerospace industry had established it as a free-standing suburban enclave. Downey scored big in the pop-culture sweepstakes: It has the oldest surviving McDonalds and is the birthplace of Taco Bell. It was a hot-rod hotbed and home to musicians Dave and Phil Alvin, Metallicaâs James Hetfield and Weird Al Yankovic.
But it wasnât any music from Downey that affected the Carpenters sound; it was the orderliness and control of the place itself. After restrictive covenants were ruled unenforceable, real estate agents found ways to keep homeowners from selling to nonwhites. Then, in the aftermath of the Watts riots of 1965, whites fled many communities bordering Downey, but the city itself remained unchanged and unruffled, in large part because it had its own police and fire departments and school district, and was thus able to fend off integration for some years to come.
Agnes and Harold Carpenter, Karen and Richardâs parents, moved the family from New Haven, Conn. to Downey in 1963, in large part to continue Richardâs musical education. Once there, their kids created a sound out of various playfully high-toned California musics, including Burt Bacharachâs commuter romanticism, the go-kart go of the Beach Boys and the whiz-bang vocalizing of the Hi-Los and the Anita Kerr Singers. The sound and lyrics carried a nostalgic longing for the way things used to be almost from the moment the Carpenters started. Karen and Richard were in their 20s and wishing for it to be yesterday once more.
Fifty years ago, Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss, founders of A&M Records, were thinking of their future. âRichard knew how to get the most out of Karenâs unusual talent,â says Alpert. âHe knew how to ... not necessarily manipulate her, but how to work with her.â
Alpert remembers the moment when he put on the Infinity Gauntlet and snapped his fingers. It was 1970, and he had just brought Karen and Richard a Burt Bacharach/Hal David tune he thought would be good for them: âClose to You.â Alpert had already recorded the song. âI asked my engineer, Larry Levine, what he thought of my version. He said, âYou sound terrible.â So I put it away and gave it to Karen and Richard. And that was the turning point.â
Alpert also talked Karen, who viewed herself as a drummer more than a singer, into coming forward to become the face of the group. He brought in session musicians from the Wrecking Crew, including drummer Hal Blaine and bassist Joe Osborn, to fill out the sound that would define them.
By the second half of the 1970s, with the hits trailing off, attention turned more sharply to their wholesome image, how it might be gently recalibrated, how Karen might redefine herself. She would hit reset on a solo album, which Richard criticized and the label kept under wraps until 1983, after her death.
Listeners increasingly noted the sadness in her voice, maybe most of all when she sang happy songs.
âI compare her to Ella Fitzgerald,â says USCâs Tongson. âElla can be singing a sad song, but you always heard the smile in her voice. Well, Karen, she can be singing a happy song, but you hear the sadness in her voice. I think it mimics a kind of heaviness in ourselves.â
Karen and Richard Carpenter, right, in the studio in 1971. (Chris Walter / WireImage)
The happiest place
Singer-songwriter Jenny Lewis remembers where she was when she heard Karen Carpenter had died. She was 7 and living with her mother in the San Fernando Valley. Linda Lewis was a sometime lounge singer who emulated Karen: Today, if listeners hear Karenâs phrasing and diction in Lewisâ singing, itâs because she listened to her motherâs voice growing up.
âMy mother was very upset when she died,â says Lewis. âAnd she was about 100 pounds herself. She looked exactly like Karen Carpenter.
âI feel Karen through her â a skeletal figure standing on a stage in front of people, petrified, self-conscious and afraid,â says Lewis. âI have immense empathy and love for Karen. An amazing drummer, a beautiful voice, a beautiful woman. How could you want more from her than what she gave?â
Fans of the Carpenters visited the Downey, Calif., high school the musical siblings attended. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)
By the middle of the decade, photographs showed a singer who looked starved. Her marriage was falling apart. She was down to 77 pounds and moved to New York to receive treatment. She told interviewers she loved hamburgers and began taking massive amounts of laxatives, a thyroid medication and a drug that induces vomiting, all to get rid of what she ate.
In moments of stress, her mind would take her to Disneyland. âShe was a big admirer of Walt Disney and Mickey Mouse,â says Greg Kuritz, one of the organizers of the Carpenters convention. The Carpenters loved Disneyland. Before they signed to A&M, Richard sang on the Magic Kingdomâs Main Street, U.S.A. in a vest and straw hat; their âPlease Mr. Postmanâ video was filmed at Disneyland. In her home, Karen had shelves of Mickey Mouse memorabilia.
During the fan convention, a day tour of Carpenters landmarks includes the old A&M studio, the Walk of Fame and Hollywood Bowl. The bus then drives to a Woodland Hills Costco parking lot. From there, the assembled fans take a long walk to Pierce Brothers Valley Oaks Memorial Park, Karenâs final resting place.
âWe had some flowers made to put at her crypt,â says Kuritz. âThe florist shaped the vines like Mickey Mouse ears.â
Finding home
A Carpenters fan from Maine, Jimmy Iovine (not the record executive) remembers the ways young fans might hide their ardor in the interest of seeming cool. As a teen in the 1970s, he had a friend with a big album collection. One day Iovine pulled out his friendâs copy of Rick Derringerâs hard-rock classic âAll-American Boy,â and out slid the Carpenterâs greatest hits, tucked inside the sleeve. It was like reading Mad magazine behind your math textbook, only in reverse.
Later, when he became a career Navy man, Iovine would guardedly drop a few references to his favorite group with the guys, seeing if anybody responded favorably before tipping his hand.
Slowly things changed. âAfter Karenâs death, people revisited the music,â he says at the convention hotel in the Valley. Many rounds of âCarpenters Bingoâ have just been played.
âThere was a re-evaluation, and critics softened their edge. It kind of became OK to be a fan. I donât think people hide their affections for them anymore.â
One of the Carpentersâ greatest songs was an outlier, âCalling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft,â a seven-minute sci-fi opus that sent a playful message to aliens everywhere to come home to Earth. The whole convention, in a sense, had been making a call of its own, to fellow fans around the world and to Richard Carpenter himself, who, as Carpenters50th.comâs homepage took pains to point out, is not affiliated with the gathering. (He also declined an interview for this story.) It was no accident the celebration is minutes away from Richardâs home. Word goes out: If Richard were to drop by, it would be on Saturday night, during a panel discussion featuring session musicians, producers and historians.
Jeffrey de Hart wanders the banquet room all evening, keeping spirits up, moving from table to table. After first hearing the Carpenters in his small West Virginia town, De Hart had gotten a paper route to pay for his own piano lessons when his father refused to. He longed to be where they were: musically, geographically. A year later, he discovered he was a prodigy and began teaching students of his own. By the time the Carpentersâ album âHorizonâ came out in the summer of 1975, he discovered something else. âI realized I was coming of age in a conservative family and I did not fit in, so I ran away from home.â
He hitchhiked all the way to Downey. âI didnât know what else to do,â he says in a quiet voice. âIt was a mission, really a pilgrimage, I guess, though I didnât think of it that way then. Then it was just an escape to find my identity.â
He rang the doorbell. The president of the Carpenters Fan Club answered the door and kindly explained that Karen and Richard were on tour in Japan.
Carpenters fans pose for a group photo in front of the band's original home, in Downey, part of a tour offered by the Carpenters convention. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)
âWhat did I just do?â he asked himself. But he was in Southern California, and the experience of being there, in communion with the Carpenters, was the start of a new existence. A few years later he came out to friends and some family; eventually, he came out to his parents.
Today, De Hart is a paralegal based in Washington, D.C. On one level, he believes it was âHorizonâ that set him on his path: âTheir most sonically correct and advanced production techniques, perhaps even Richardâs peak at his songwriting prowess, was what inspired the journey,â he says.
But in a larger sense, it was the wholeness of the band, the sadness, the promise of Downey, that pulled him out of West Virginia and into a community of Carpenters fans and beyond. âIt just turned my life around. It allowed me to discover my own true self.â
By the end of the night, Richard was a no-show. But nobody at the convention looked too disappointed.
Yesterday once more: The feel-good sadness of a Carpenters fan convention
By RJ SMITH
MAY 16, 2019
Jeffrey de Hart is standing at the edge of a driveway in Downey. Not just any driveway, but the one before the ancestral home of the Carpenters. The two-story tract house, these days with several concrete deer frolicking in front, is recognizable from the photograph on the cover of the duoâs 1973 âNow and Thenâ album, with siblings Karen and Richard sitting in his cherry-red Ferrari parked on their street.
On this sunny April afternoon, two busloads of Carpenters fans are taking pictures in front of the house. They are in the middle of a four-day Carpenters convention, centered at a midsize hotel in Thousand Oaks, and are celebrating the music of the Southern California pop duo that sold over 100 million albums. Loosely pegged to the 50th anniversary of the groupâs 1969 signing with A&M Records, the convention features tribute concerts, panel discussions with Carpenters historians and sidemen, and daylong field trips to âfamousâ locations in Carpenters lore.
De Hart, 59, is remembering a kid who stood on this same spot four decades ago.
âI was a troubled youth, I guess,â he says. Heâs got short grayish-blond hair and a gentle grin. âMy father was abusive and there were all these other issues going on.â He was 9 or 10, living in a small West Virginia town, when the Carpenters began recording. An older brother introduced him to their 1970 breakthrough hit â(They Long to Be) Close to You,â and pretty soon, it was over for him.
âI decided I had to study music and become Richard Carpenter. I wanted to play, write, produce. I was determined to do it all, just like he did.â
Inspirational stories flow freely. A mother and son from Arkansas, who sang hymns together in their church and today sing Carpenters songs outside it. A schoolteacher from Florida, hoping to spread the word about anorexia nervosa, the affliction that led to the congestive heart failure that killed Karen in 1982 at age 32. The farm girl from Saskatchewan who heard the music on her transistor radio and performs it today on stages all over the world. All told there are about 150 people present, coming from Belgium, Japan, Mexico and around the United States. Bringing them to Southern California was a need to share and, OK, overshare how and why the Carpenters matter.
Toni Lee from England holds up the "Now & Then" album art that features the Carpenters' Downey, Calif., home, as she stands in front of the house on April 25, 2019. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)
Which is funny, because not even their fans look at the group as anything like the voice of a generation. During their recording career, they became famous for making America feel good at a time when there was so much to feel bad about. The Vietnam War. The struggle for civil rights. Watergate. Wistful soft-rock â the Carpenters, Bread, James Taylor, Carole King, that guy who sang âFeelingsâ â was a balm in troubled times.
The Carpentersâ sunny affirmations (âTop of the World,â âSingâ) were sweet enough to give you an ice cream headache. Their midtempo songs and ballads, though â âWeâve Only Just Begun,â âGoodbye to Love,â âOnly Yesterday,â âRainy Days and Mondaysâ and especially their version of the Leon Russell/Bonnie Bramlett composition âSuperstarâ â were often transportive, thanks to Richardâs exquisite skill as an arranger, but most of all because of Karenâs contralto, which had an extraordinary relationship to the microphone and rarely seemed to be showing off â it just richly is, finding the right places to go.
âI donât think even she realized how great she was,â says Michelle Berting Brett, a classically trained singer who brought her show of Carpenters songs to Downey for the celebration. âShe made it sound so effortless, with these incredibly long phrases â the breath that girl had was incredible.â
The Carpenters perform on the BBC "In Concert" series in 1970. (Tony Russell / Redferns)
You could dive into their sound but never the people who made it. The image Richard and Karen projected flowed from the reassuring music, but also from the way they looked: remote, powerful, satisfied. Fairly or not, the imagery stamped them for the rest of their lives as not-rock, not-counter anything, as cultural figures in a California lineage that included Ayn Rand, Ronald Reagan and Mike Curb. âI donât even like milk,â Richard once sneered in Rolling Stone. When you have to disavow milk, the gig is up.
By 1972, they were visiting Nixon in the White House, where the president gave them White House golf balls and had them sing for German Chancellor Willy Brandt. They were, the president said, symbols of âyoung America at its best.â
For years after their last official album (1981âs âMade in Americaâ), their music hung in the air like an omnipresent mist: gently wafting from Lite FM stations and doctorsâ waiting rooms, from karaoke bars and piano lounges, and from wherever weddings receptions were held. It took Generation X to cast the Carpenters in a new light, to manipulate and critique the groupâs bruised banality in ways old fans might not have appreciated.
Director Todd Haynesâ short 1987 film, âSuperstar: The Karen Carpenter Story,â told a version of Karenâs life using Barbie dolls in place of actors. Haynes hadnât licensed the music he used, and nobody would show it commercially for fear of being sued, yet in its time âSuperstarâ achieved considerable underground status. It became a harbinger of themes Haynes has developed subsequently: Americaâs obsession with hygienic purity; the toll of gender roles and of fame.
Indie bands, as well, were rediscovering the Carpenters. âIf I Were a Carpenter,â a 1994 tribute compilation, featured covers by alt-rock acts like the Cranberries, Redd Kross and Sonic Youth, whose deadpan, dissolute version of âSuperstarâ took center stage. Karen performed it from the point of view of a fan who fell in love with a star one night at a show and now yearns for contact that comes only from the radio. The way Sonic Youthâs Thurston Moore frames it, the superstar was Karen, and the distance between the image and the tragic life echoes in waves of sadness.
Today, the Carpentersâ legacy is open for a new round of rediscovery and deconstruction. USC professor Karen Tongson, in her new book, âWhy Karen Carpenter Matters,â argues that she âmatters to people of color, immigrants, queer people, gender outlaws.â Last year, singer-songwriter Natalie Prass (who played Karen Carpenter on HBOâs âVinylâ) released âFar From You,â a reverse image of the Carpentersâ âClose to Youâ that restores distance and pain to the picture. On psych-soft rock band Weyes Bloodâs acclaimed new album âTitanic Rising,â singer Natalie Mering all but channels Carpenter, giving her an emotional autonomy she never had in her life. And in last yearâs deranged horror film âMandy,â a cult leader kidnaps a woman and forces her to submit to a Satanic inauguration. But first, he has a question for her: âDo you like the Carpenters?â Even today, Karen and Richard force us to choose.
âCloseâ call
Downey, about 13 miles south of Los Angeles, officially became a city in 1956. By then a growing aerospace industry had established it as a free-standing suburban enclave. Downey scored big in the pop-culture sweepstakes: It has the oldest surviving McDonalds and is the birthplace of Taco Bell. It was a hot-rod hotbed and home to musicians Dave and Phil Alvin, Metallicaâs James Hetfield and Weird Al Yankovic.
But it wasnât any music from Downey that affected the Carpenters sound; it was the orderliness and control of the place itself. After restrictive covenants were ruled unenforceable, real estate agents found ways to keep homeowners from selling to nonwhites. Then, in the aftermath of the Watts riots of 1965, whites fled many communities bordering Downey, but the city itself remained unchanged and unruffled, in large part because it had its own police and fire departments and school district, and was thus able to fend off integration for some years to come.
Agnes and Harold Carpenter, Karen and Richardâs parents, moved the family from New Haven, Conn. to Downey in 1963, in large part to continue Richardâs musical education. Once there, their kids created a sound out of various playfully high-toned California musics, including Burt Bacharachâs commuter romanticism, the go-kart go of the Beach Boys and the whiz-bang vocalizing of the Hi-Los and the Anita Kerr Singers. The sound and lyrics carried a nostalgic longing for the way things used to be almost from the moment the Carpenters started. Karen and Richard were in their 20s and wishing for it to be yesterday once more.
Fifty years ago, Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss, founders of A&M Records, were thinking of their future. âRichard knew how to get the most out of Karenâs unusual talent,â says Alpert. âHe knew how to ... not necessarily manipulate her, but how to work with her.â
Alpert remembers the moment when he put on the Infinity Gauntlet and snapped his fingers. It was 1970, and he had just brought Karen and Richard a Burt Bacharach/Hal David tune he thought would be good for them: âClose to You.â Alpert had already recorded the song. âI asked my engineer, Larry Levine, what he thought of my version. He said, âYou sound terrible.â So I put it away and gave it to Karen and Richard. And that was the turning point.â
Alpert also talked Karen, who viewed herself as a drummer more than a singer, into coming forward to become the face of the group. He brought in session musicians from the Wrecking Crew, including drummer Hal Blaine and bassist Joe Osborn, to fill out the sound that would define them.
By the second half of the 1970s, with the hits trailing off, attention turned more sharply to their wholesome image, how it might be gently recalibrated, how Karen might redefine herself. She would hit reset on a solo album, which Richard criticized and the label kept under wraps until 1983, after her death.
Listeners increasingly noted the sadness in her voice, maybe most of all when she sang happy songs.
âI compare her to Ella Fitzgerald,â says USCâs Tongson. âElla can be singing a sad song, but you always heard the smile in her voice. Well, Karen, she can be singing a happy song, but you hear the sadness in her voice. I think it mimics a kind of heaviness in ourselves.â
Karen and Richard Carpenter, right, in the studio in 1971. (Chris Walter / WireImage)
The happiest place
Singer-songwriter Jenny Lewis remembers where she was when she heard Karen Carpenter had died. She was 7 and living with her mother in the San Fernando Valley. Linda Lewis was a sometime lounge singer who emulated Karen: Today, if listeners hear Karenâs phrasing and diction in Lewisâ singing, itâs because she listened to her motherâs voice growing up.
âMy mother was very upset when she died,â says Lewis. âAnd she was about 100 pounds herself. She looked exactly like Karen Carpenter.
âI feel Karen through her â a skeletal figure standing on a stage in front of people, petrified, self-conscious and afraid,â says Lewis. âI have immense empathy and love for Karen. An amazing drummer, a beautiful voice, a beautiful woman. How could you want more from her than what she gave?â
Fans of the Carpenters visited the Downey, Calif., high school the musical siblings attended. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)
By the middle of the decade, photographs showed a singer who looked starved. Her marriage was falling apart. She was down to 77 pounds and moved to New York to receive treatment. She told interviewers she loved hamburgers and began taking massive amounts of laxatives, a thyroid medication and a drug that induces vomiting, all to get rid of what she ate.
In moments of stress, her mind would take her to Disneyland. âShe was a big admirer of Walt Disney and Mickey Mouse,â says Greg Kuritz, one of the organizers of the Carpenters convention. The Carpenters loved Disneyland. Before they signed to A&M, Richard sang on the Magic Kingdomâs Main Street, U.S.A. in a vest and straw hat; their âPlease Mr. Postmanâ video was filmed at Disneyland. In her home, Karen had shelves of Mickey Mouse memorabilia.
During the fan convention, a day tour of Carpenters landmarks includes the old A&M studio, the Walk of Fame and Hollywood Bowl. The bus then drives to a Woodland Hills Costco parking lot. From there, the assembled fans take a long walk to Pierce Brothers Valley Oaks Memorial Park, Karenâs final resting place.
âWe had some flowers made to put at her crypt,â says Kuritz. âThe florist shaped the vines like Mickey Mouse ears.â
Finding home
A Carpenters fan from Maine, Jimmy Iovine (not the record executive) remembers the ways young fans might hide their ardor in the interest of seeming cool. As a teen in the 1970s, he had a friend with a big album collection. One day Iovine pulled out his friendâs copy of Rick Derringerâs hard-rock classic âAll-American Boy,â and out slid the Carpenterâs greatest hits, tucked inside the sleeve. It was like reading Mad magazine behind your math textbook, only in reverse.
Later, when he became a career Navy man, Iovine would guardedly drop a few references to his favorite group with the guys, seeing if anybody responded favorably before tipping his hand.
Slowly things changed. âAfter Karenâs death, people revisited the music,â he says at the convention hotel in the Valley. Many rounds of âCarpenters Bingoâ have just been played.
âThere was a re-evaluation, and critics softened their edge. It kind of became OK to be a fan. I donât think people hide their affections for them anymore.â
One of the Carpentersâ greatest songs was an outlier, âCalling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft,â a seven-minute sci-fi opus that sent a playful message to aliens everywhere to come home to Earth. The whole convention, in a sense, had been making a call of its own, to fellow fans around the world and to Richard Carpenter himself, who, as Carpenters50th.comâs homepage took pains to point out, is not affiliated with the gathering. (He also declined an interview for this story.) It was no accident the celebration is minutes away from Richardâs home. Word goes out: If Richard were to drop by, it would be on Saturday night, during a panel discussion featuring session musicians, producers and historians.
Jeffrey de Hart wanders the banquet room all evening, keeping spirits up, moving from table to table. After first hearing the Carpenters in his small West Virginia town, De Hart had gotten a paper route to pay for his own piano lessons when his father refused to. He longed to be where they were: musically, geographically. A year later, he discovered he was a prodigy and began teaching students of his own. By the time the Carpentersâ album âHorizonâ came out in the summer of 1975, he discovered something else. âI realized I was coming of age in a conservative family and I did not fit in, so I ran away from home.â
He hitchhiked all the way to Downey. âI didnât know what else to do,â he says in a quiet voice. âIt was a mission, really a pilgrimage, I guess, though I didnât think of it that way then. Then it was just an escape to find my identity.â
He rang the doorbell. The president of the Carpenters Fan Club answered the door and kindly explained that Karen and Richard were on tour in Japan.
Carpenters fans pose for a group photo in front of the band's original home, in Downey, part of a tour offered by the Carpenters convention. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)
âWhat did I just do?â he asked himself. But he was in Southern California, and the experience of being there, in communion with the Carpenters, was the start of a new existence. A few years later he came out to friends and some family; eventually, he came out to his parents.
Today, De Hart is a paralegal based in Washington, D.C. On one level, he believes it was âHorizonâ that set him on his path: âTheir most sonically correct and advanced production techniques, perhaps even Richardâs peak at his songwriting prowess, was what inspired the journey,â he says.
But in a larger sense, it was the wholeness of the band, the sadness, the promise of Downey, that pulled him out of West Virginia and into a community of Carpenters fans and beyond. âIt just turned my life around. It allowed me to discover my own true self.â
By the end of the night, Richard was a no-show. But nobody at the convention looked too disappointed.
David A
Well-Known Member
Overall I think the article is pretty good, and it's nice to think that the celebration - and the Carpenters music and legacy - was a significant enough event that it was deserving of an article. I could do without the social commentary (how is it at all related to the Carpenters? ), but then, that seems to be mandatory these days.
Geographer
Well-Known Member
I completely agree (social commentary). It's made what would have been a great article just a good one. In fact, I got the feeling that the reporter didn't really "get it;" not that he necessarily had too, but I don't think he "saw" and "felt" what we did. Just my opinion. At least he wasn't taking swipes and was respectful of the attendees he interviewed. Sometimes, the LA Times can be condescending to some.
GDBY2LV
Well-Known Member
Wow, that was very kind of you to put the whole article here for all of us to read. Thank you so much Mike for being so considerate and such a great fan. Especially for those of us that were not able to attend the convention, or read the Times. They were never really supportive of Carpenters, but this was a positive article for them and their dedicated followers.
newvillefan
I Know My First Name Is Stephen
Portlander
Well-Known Member
Happy for Richard, looks like the photos were taken outside of his "Yesterday Once More" warehouse.
I don't see anything wrong with the social commentary -- in fact it wasn't really "commentary," it was just relating the mood of the country at the time. The Carpenters music (like several other A&M acts, especially Herb Alpert) was a bit of an escape from all the negativity. There were plenty of "protest songs" coming out, but he's just pointing out that K&R stayed away from that territory for the most part. That's why the writer says they weren't considered "the voice of a generation." It's not a comment on their talents; it's just saying they were entertainers, not commentators.
newvillefan
I Know My First Name Is Stephen
I chose both when we were asked to vote as we could vote for up to two, but in retrospect Iâd agree. All of the attractions and sights, save Karenâs resting place (and the warehouse which we didnât get to see anyway) were in Downey and central LA. The trips back and forth from Thousand Oaks added up to hours on those coaches as the traffic was often a nightmare, time that could have been better spent with hindsight. That said, it was immaculately planned and an adventure I wouldnât have swapped for the world.
I think Thousand Oaks was chosen partly because of its proximity to Richardâs home in the event he might show up, but as even that LA Times article concluded, he didnât in the end. That did disappoint me and I left shortly after the panel discussion concluded (as did quite a few other people), only to miss the group photo - which I had no clue was planned.
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David A
Well-Known Member
Yes to everything you say here, and yes, that's why I voted for T.O. as well. As you say, the trip was amazingly well done and hats off to the organizers. I also missed the group photo.
Carpe diem
Well-Known Member
If this has already been mentioned, my apologies. Received this email this morning from the 50th anniversary coordinator Greg:
Carpenters 50th Anniversary Celebration <[email protected]>
To:Greg Kuritz
Oct 3 at 6:58 AM
Hi!
We are happy to let you know that we were finally able to wrap the event up with a shiny bow and send a donation to the Carpenter Performing Arts Center in the name of the 50th Anniversary Celebration attendees!
Here is the response we received yesterday:
We received the incredibly generous donation from the Carpenters 50th Anniversary Celebration Attendees â wow! Thank you all so very much for this gift, which will go to support our educational arts programming. Please know that we loved having you here when you visited last April â it was truly our pleasure to give you the tour of our theatre and the Carpenter family display. We hope you come back to visit us soon!
With deepest gratitude and kindest regards,
Megan
Megan Kline Crockett
Executive Director
Carpenter Performing Arts Center
California State University, Long Beach
562.985.7098
Thank you again to everyone who attended the event!
Greg, Robert & Peter
Carpenters 50th Anniversary Celebration Planning Committee
Carpenters 50th Anniversary Celebration <[email protected]>
To:Greg Kuritz
Oct 3 at 6:58 AM
Hi!
We are happy to let you know that we were finally able to wrap the event up with a shiny bow and send a donation to the Carpenter Performing Arts Center in the name of the 50th Anniversary Celebration attendees!
Here is the response we received yesterday:
We received the incredibly generous donation from the Carpenters 50th Anniversary Celebration Attendees â wow! Thank you all so very much for this gift, which will go to support our educational arts programming. Please know that we loved having you here when you visited last April â it was truly our pleasure to give you the tour of our theatre and the Carpenter family display. We hope you come back to visit us soon!
With deepest gratitude and kindest regards,
Megan
Megan Kline Crockett
Executive Director
Carpenter Performing Arts Center
California State University, Long Beach
562.985.7098
Thank you again to everyone who attended the event!
Greg, Robert & Peter
Carpenters 50th Anniversary Celebration Planning Committee
Geographer
Well-Known Member
Got it too. I wonder how much the donation ended up being. Also, I go THIS e-mail, too:
David A
Well-Known Member
Got it too. I wonder how much the donation ended up being. Also, I go THIS e-mail, too:
Busy morning regarding Carpenters in my in-box!
Ditto, waiting for more details on the agenda that consumes 4 days.
Carpe diem
Well-Known Member
This is a surprise!Got it too. I wonder how much the donation ended up being. Also, I go THIS e-mail, too:
Busy morning regarding Carpenters in my in-box!
Jarred
Well-Known Member
I got thinking recently of the âSimple Melodyâ recording and it is still on Facebook. If youâre part of the âClose to the Carpentersâ group, in your general title bar search type in âplay a simple melody, carpentersâ and youâll find the post from last April.
Itâs chilling in more than one way.
Itâs chilling in more than one way.
Martin Medrano
Well-Known Member
So i tried to look for it what is the post exactly?
Jarred
Well-Known Member
Itâs a video that contains the audio of the recording being played at the gathering.
Martin Medrano
Well-Known Member
What date is that post from?
Jarred
Well-Known Member
That could definitely be a facet of their complex relationship. If so, Streisandâs motherâs stilted relationship with her daughter was in part due to this. Different dynamics but a similar core.
Jarred
Well-Known Member
April 2019
Jarred
Well-Known Member
Oh of course. A complicated, artistic yin-yang.
newvillefan
I Know My First Name Is Stephen
Hereâs something that shocked me only because the place looks even worse than it did when we visited in April 2019. Much of the front section of trees, shrubs and foliage has either died or is in the process of collapsing, almost into the street.
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