Karen Carpenter tragedy THE SONGS THAT BROKE HER HEART
New Zealand Woman’s Weekly Her death at 32 is made all the more tragic by the revelation the singer had only just begun to live
With her soft, caramellaced vocal tones, Karen Carpenter had a whole generation of music lovers falling at her feet in the 1970s.
As one half of the wildly successful brother-and-sister pop duo the Carpenters, she made hearts swoon with her mellow, honey-dipped songs.
Then, 13 years after becoming famous, the star broke those same hearts when she died suddenly of a heart attack after many years of suffering from anorexia nervosa.
Books, newspaper articles and movies have all been written about the life and death of the adored and critically acclaimed singer.
But what few fans knew was that at the time of her demise, aged 32, Karen was struggling to free herself of her girl-next-door image and had even cut a sexy solo album that would have changed the way the world saw her forever.
In an authorised new biography entitled Carpenters: The Musical Legacy, Karen’s budding solo career is brushed over in just a few paragraphs. But many in the music industry – including the late Grammy award-winning producer Phil Ramone – maintained for years after her untimely death that if she’d lived, Karen’s musical legacy would have been markedly different from the all-American sweetheart that has been written into the history books.
“The new Karen Carpenter who was emerging in the
’80s was liberated and far less demure,” tells an industry insider. “Now, we will never know…”
The Carpenters – Richard, born in 1946 and Karen in 1950 – were just teenagers when they began working together as a musical duo. Richard was the arranger and creative force, while Karen played the drums and sang.
In 1970, they became an overnight sensation with their single Close to You. Hit after hit followed, but by the end of the decade they were both succumbing to the strains of stardom.
Richard was heavily addicted to Quaaludes, a prescription sleeping tablet that was cheekily called a “disco biscuit” in the 1970s for its ability to calm someone down after a night of hard partying.
In 1979, stoned on the tablets, he fell down a flight of stairs before a gig and ended up in rehab.
“It was six weeks in the facility, which for the first several weeks seemed like hell on earth,” Richard – now 75 and married for 38 years, with five adult children – shares in the new book. “Little by little, I found out I could sleep without any aid. Eventually, I was happy and healthy, and I gained my weight back while I took the rest of the year off.”
While
Richard was recovering,
Karen was struggling with her own demons. By then she was in the grip of anorexia.
Despite her brother’s absence, she wanted to continue working and she pleaded with him for months to give his blessing for a solo album. Richard finally relented on one condition – “Don’t do disco.”
But at the time, the world was at the height of disco fever and Karen ended up recording an album that was indeed disco influenced, with a touch of New Wave
‘The new Karen who was emerging in the ’80s was liberated and far less demure’
thrown in for good measure. It was far edgier than anything she had recorded with her brother, with song titles like Making Love in the Afternoon and Love Makin’ Love to You.
She adored the album, but her record label didn’t share her enthusiasm. And when she turned to Richard for support, he refused to give it.
“Nobody is saying Richard had to like the record,” Karen’s friend Frenda Franklin said after Karen’s death. “But he could have supported her. When he didn’t, I think it forever put a division in her mind about him.”
The album, simply called Karen Carpenter wasn’t released when it was finished and Karen, falling deeper and deeper into her anorexic abyss, continued to record songs with her sibling until she died in 1983.
It was finally released in 1996, so long after the zeitgeist in which it was made that it understandably had little impact on the world.
Almost four decades after her heartbreaking death, both fans and music critics continue to wonder what might have been if Karen had been able to break free of her strait-laced image.
“I’m not saying Karen was Ella Fitzgerald or Sarah Vaughan,” her producer
Phil Ramone, who died in 2013, once mused. “But a voice like that could have done anything…”