Little Girl Blue (39 page)

For Karen's album, the band was tracked at A&R's studio A1, located at 799 Seventh Avenue. “It was kind of a family situation,” Javors says, “but this was a whole different kind of family than she was used to. We were kind of ‘New York' and Karen was nothing like that. We were a rowdy bunch of bar band guys. Karen became part of the fold, and we didn't hold anything back. She certainly got into it, and it felt like she was one of the guys. I think she had fun.”

Bob James, renowned smooth-jazz artist, keyboardist, and former musical director for Sarah Vaughn, was enlisted by Ramone to arrange, orchestrate, and play keyboards for the project. “Karen was an arranger's dream,” says James, who admits he found himself a bit starstruck at times in the studio. “It was a flattering but also very intimidating assignment. That sound coming through my headphones in the studio
was very inspiring and exciting. I remember thinking, ‘Wow, I'm actually in the studio playing the piano for Karen Carpenter!'”

Javors was surprised by the tiny sound he heard coming from Karen in the booth. “When you hear her voice on a record it's so big and so full. In the studio it was kind of like a whisper. She didn't really belt it out. She was up close to the mic, and it wasn't this tremendous voice that you'd hear. It was just a very intimate, focused voice. I was amazed at the ease and how softly she really sang.” DeVitto concurs “She almost whispered into the mic, but Phil was able to capture that and have it sit on top of the music. He never lost sight of Karen.”

In one of their daily phone calls, Karen told Frenda Franklin that she was in awe of this diverse assembly of musicians. “They treated her like an equal in the studio, and she loved the process,” Franklin says. “She had the best time!”

At times the band members saw evidence of Karen's sheltered Downey life and would even poke fun at her, which she seemed to enjoy, given her own knack for humor. “She'd never been on an airplane by herself before,” Javors recalls. “Then she had these road cases with different sweat suits and Nike sneakers, and they were all the same color and all lined up in a row. She came from a different world.” Even Phil would join in and tease Karen, especially when she would show up to a session wearing pressed and starched blue jeans. “This girl loved to be fussy and get it done right,” he laughs. “Karen was fastidious, and I would tease her ruthlessly. She had every satin jacket given out by the record company—and a matching pair of sneakers for each one!”

A
FTER NEARLY
a decade of having tried unsuccessfully to shed the Carpenters' image, Karen realized this break from the confines of the duo might be the perfect opportunity to explore and push the envelope with her music—not in the same manner that
Passage
pushed the envelope with “Calling Occupants,” but perhaps by establishing herself as an independent twenty-nine-year-old woman. “She didn't want to do anything totally left field from the Carpenters,” Itchie says, “but she wanted to say that she was an independent artist. The Carpenters had
their image, and she didn't want to present an image that clashed with that, but she did want an image that set her apart. I saw what Phil was doing. Basically he was trying to help her grow up a bit, gain the confidence to be a woman, and state what she felt and what she thought.”

Olivia Newton-John sensed that Karen was torn between following this desire and staying loyal to her family. “She was incredibly ensconced by or tied into her family and Richard and the whole situation,” she says. “She wanted to break out as a human being and as a woman and live an independent life. She also wanted to feel her way musically into other areas. . . . I think it was really important for her to feel that it wasn't just Richard or just the production that had made the Carpenters a success. She was just as important and needed to find her own feet and find her own style.”

According to Ramone, “Karen was twenty-nine, but she couldn't be a woman who could think like a woman and express herself. . . . Some people still thought that I was taking her down a street she didn't want to travel. We weren't out to shock people. I was not interested in putting out a shock record on her behalf. That would be so wrong for me. But some people were shocked. You can't make a record in fear of what everyone's going to say. You can't make a record that doesn't speak from your heart.”

The environment was one of “admiration and appreciation for Karen and her talents,” says Russell Javors. “People had such strong feelings about their legacy and what they'd done and the way they did it, but this was
Karen
, and it should complement anything that she'd already done. Nobody was doing it in the spirit of ‘we'll show you, Richard,' or anything. Phil was trying to push the envelope a little bit but let her do it naturally.”

Song titles like “Remember When Lovin' Took All Night,” “Make Believe It's Your First Time,” and “Making Love in the Afternoon” led to accusations that Ramone was force-feeding Karen sexual lyrics and themes to create a new persona, but according to those closely involved, he gave Karen complete choice and control. “Phil was trying to pick material that would allow her to push the envelope, but it was never forced on her,” says Javors. “He's a nurturer. He kind of
opens the road up to you, and you either take it or you don't; but he's not somebody who says, ‘You go down this road.' . . . She was very intimately involved in everything that was going on, and this was 100 percent her project.”

A number of Karen's song choices contained lyrics with overtones of sexuality, some less subtle than others. “I Love Makin' Love to You” was written by Evie Sands, formerly with A&M Records, and recorded for her
Estate of Mind
album on the Capital/Haven label in 1975. “When I heard Karen was going to cover it,” Sands recalls, “I imagined her take on it would be similar to mine or closer to the mellow Barbra Streisand version. It turned out to be a perfect blend of both.” Although Karen and Phil finished the ambitious arrangement of Sands's tune, complete with lush background vocals and an outstanding brass section, it was ultimately set aside. The risqué lyric is likely to blame.

There's no lightnin' or thunder, any seventh wonder

Mightier than what you've got

Keep it up forever, no one does it better

Baby, get it while it's hot

For the infectious “Making Love in the Afternoon,” Chicago front man Peter Cetera joined Karen in the studio on the song he had written. “Peter was a fan of Karen's voice,” recalls Ramone, who produced the
Chicago 13
album around that time. “Cetera wrote the song for her.” Billed as a duet, Cetera's role was more of a backup singer to Karen's lead. According to Itchie, “A true duet would have stepped over the line by stepping on Richard. Harmonizing is one thing, but a duet? No. That would have been trespassing.”

According to Itchie, “Everybody had input as far as the album was concerned. . . . I remember Billy Joel coming in the studio and saying, ‘Uh, excuse me, but why am I not doing keyboards?'” Paul Simon stopped in as well. “They treated her like a major mega artist,” Itchie says. “I think she really needed that in becoming her own self. It really got her started building a backbone. It was her environment, and everybody was there to support her, and she absolutely loved it.”

Paul Simon recommended to Karen his own “Still Crazy After All These Years,” a song originally produced by Phil Ramone on the Grammy Album of the Year for 1976. “It expressed a lot of what she wanted to say,” Ramone recalls. “But she had Paul rewrite a line. It used to be ‘crapped out, yawning' and she did ‘crashed out, yawning.' We talked about how that song wouldn't be a Carpenters song!” Karen's vocal on the mellow, jazz-inflected “Still Crazy” was self-assured, relaxed, and alluring. She also recorded Simon's “I Do It for Your Love” and, in true Carpenters fashion, the oldie “Jimmy Mack,” a Motown hit for Martha and the Vandellas in 1967. The initial rhythm tracks and work leads for these two showed little promise, and both went unfinished. Another outtake, a real diamond in the rough, was “Something's Missing in My Life,” a stunning ballad by Jay Asher and Paul Jabara and recorded by Jabara as a duet with Donna Summer on his 1978 album
Keeping Time
.

Karen felt challenged by the intricate background vocal arrangements, many of which took on a brass-influenced instrumental feel. Bob James was responsible for several arrangements, including “If I Had You,” the most funky, demanding, and ambitious of all. Like Ramone, he felt obligated to move Karen out of the Carpenters mold. “I wanted to give her something different and challenging,” James explains. “I was very intrigued to find out how she would react to an arrangement that was deliberately moving away from the Carpenters sound.” Karen's inimitable style on the sophisticated “If I Had You” resulted in an original and captivating piece of ear candy with a complex, multilayered call-and-response ending, the brainchild of Rod Temperton.

Although Karen had conveyed to her brother the vocal challenges she faced when singing Bob James's arrangements, she spoke very little about Richard to the guys in the studio. “I don't recall Karen
ever
mentioning him,” Russell Javors says. According to Frenda, despite having given Karen the go-ahead, Richard was “not supportive” of the project after it got underway. “I don't want to pick on him,” she says. “He wasn't exactly in good shape. His and Karen's timing was always off, but I know during that whole time when Karen did the album and stayed with Phil and Itchie, he was never supportive. . . . We were all hoping
that because she finally was able to do this that it could be the catalyst to really turn everything around. Nothing else was doing it.”

Sitting down at the drums next to Lib (as she and others referred to Liberty DeVitto), Karen joked, “Let me show you what I got,” before tearing into the kit. A second-generation Italian-American, DeVitto taught himself to play drums after having seen the Beatles on
The Ed Sullivan Show
. He claims to have been a closet Carpenters fan even prior to meeting Karen. “I never bought a record but knew all their songs,” he says. DeVitto was attracted to Karen from the start, and his feelings grew the more time the two were together. “To be honest with you, I fell in love with Karen,” he says. “I was married at the time, but I felt like I wanted to be with her. Silly, I know. I had no idea how she would have felt about that so I just kept it to myself.” When asked his views on Karen as a drummer, the comic emerged: “Is this the part where I am supposed to get in trouble by saying, ‘She was all right for a girl'?”

Karen was drawn to the drums as if by some gravitational pull. Occasionally she would go to the studio before the others arrived and sit down behind the battery of drums. “Those days are over,” she told Ramone. “I'm not sitting behind the drums and singing anymore.”

Sensitive to this downhearted moment he replied, “Well, you never know.”

“It doesn't help my rear end,” she told him.

Ramone thought Karen looked good during the first recording sessions and did not sense any unusual eating habits. Even so, her comment at the drums that day stuck out in his mind. He had been cautioned about her eating disorder by others. “But there were no clues at all at first,” he says. “If there were dead giveaways they came later. Everything seemed logical and fine. Sitting down at a meal was to sit down to have a meal. I know a lot of nitpickers. She wasn't a fusspot.”

In her free time, Karen enjoyed going with Itchie to Serendipity, a favorite Manhattan restaurant, and out to the Bottom Line, a popular Greenwich Village music club. She also liked eating seafood but only with an abundance of lemons. “She had a little bit of fish with her lemons!” Itchie laughs. “Then we would eat stone crab claws
at Joe's Pier Fifty-Two across from A&R Studios every night until the stone crab season was over.” The trio of Karen, Phil, and Itchie also attended a baseball game at Shea Stadium in Queens where Karen immediately noticed the initials “K.C.” on the scoreboard. “Look, it's for me—K.C.!”

“Come on, Karen,” Ramone chuckled. “That's Kansas City, the
team
!” A few minutes later Karen was thrilled to hear the announcer say, “Please welcome Karen Carpenter from the Carpenters,” as strains of “We've Only Just Begun” echoed across the park.

“Oh, here comes Lucy and Ethel,” the guys in the band would tease when Karen and Itchie would arrive at the studio together. According to Itchie, she was the Ethel to Karen's Lucy in almost every scenario. Karen's collection of
I Love Lucy
videotapes often traveled with her. A favorite episode was “The Ballet,” in which Lucy trained with Madame LeMond, an authoritarian ballet teacher. “I think we should go to the barre,” LeMond said.