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Those "Can con" rules pretty much killed CKLW (The Big in Windsor. They were a major hitmaker back in the day, and having the programming pulled out from under them definitely let the US stations across the river in Detroit take back the airwaves. The program director even tried a few tricks, like playing only a minute or so of a Canadian single, but they got called out on that. Still, there were a lot of good artists from Canada that I knew of back then, or have gotten familiar with in later years. It's all good! Then again, I've always been fond of our southern neighbor (Canada), since we vacationed there many times.In the early '70s, the Canadian government imposed regulations on radio stations, mandating that 1 out of every 3 songs they played had to be Canadian. The problem was, at the time there just weren't that many Canadian recording artists. The ones we did have, like Gordon Lightfoot, Anne Murray, Joni Mitchell, and The Guess Who, got an awful lot of airplay. At any time of the day, chances were that you could find a Gordon Lightfoot song playing on at least one local station.
My point is, compared to Mr. Lightfoot and their contemporaries at the time, Carpenters were held to an unusual and impossible standard. Perhaps it is okay that Passage or MIA didn't sell a million copies and still be considered a success; or that a few songs only reached the top 40 or 30 on Billboard rather than having to crack the top 5.
In Canada, perhaps. Here in the U.S., it peaked at #58, which is pretty grim and was just barely a turntable hit at mostly MOR and Adult Contemporary stations, with only a few weeks of play. The exception that I can think of was KFMB-AM in San Diego, which kept it in its gold category through the 1970s.
Being focused on Top 40 at the time, it blew past me on release in 1972 (none of the California Top 40 stations I listened to played it), but I heard it as a golden on KFMB in 1975 and put it in the library of the stations I programmed after that.
I think R & K set the expectations for them when they hit it big with "Close to You" and "We've Only Just Begun." Had they had a long mid-level career before those hits, like Lightfoot did, they'd have been in that mold.
A similar situation happened with Fleetwood Mac. They had a nice career going, but they were not superstars by any means. A typical album would sell 200k units and chart in the mid-50s or lower. Then along came the Buckingham/Nicks era and everything exploded. Suddenly they were expected to "turn out" three or four hit singles with every album. and anything that didn't hit the top 10 was a "disappointment." And they experienced burnout -- which also happened to Karen and Richard. The big difference with them was their "pre-superstar" stretch didn't go on for as many albums.
In short, I don't blame the label for these things -- it's just the nature of the business. If you look at the biography of almost any big artist, a remarkable number of them follow a similar career trajectory. Some come through relatively unscathed, others don't fare as well.
Back to Gordon Lightfoot - surprisingly, despite liking quite a few of his songs, I've never owned any CDs by him. I did have the Gord's Gold LP though, but it's been decades since I've played it. I guess I get my fill of his music on the '70s channel on the Sirius radio.
Since this thread really has very little to do with Carpenters, I'm going to move it to the general music forum.