Little Girl Blue (5 page)

Driving around Downey one sunny afternoon, Harold pulled the family car into Furman Park on Rives Avenue to ask for directions. A park groundskeeper by the name of Nip noticed the Connecticut plates and asked if they were new to Downey. Agnes began to tell of her prodigy son and how his talents led them to Southern California. Karen and Richard, embarrassed by their mother's boasting, slumped deep into the backseat of the family car. Nip told the Carpenters that Furman Park's gazebo was the site of a weekly talent show held every Sunday afternoon. At first opportunity, Richard entered the talent show performing “Theme of
Exodus
,” Ernest Gold's Grammy for Song of the Year in 1961, and a 1923 Zez Confrey piece called “Dizzy Fingers.” He also accompanied Karen singing “The End of the World,” a hit for Skeeter Davis in the spring of 1963. Singing with a light, pure, head tone, Karen had an airy quality to her voice, much like other girls her age. There were no signs of the rich, smoky alto register to come.

As he left the stage that day, Richard was approached by Vance Hayes, the choir director at Downey Methodist Church. In need of an interim organist, Hayes felt the young pianist would be well qualified based on the performance he had just witnessed. Having little experience on the organ, Richard was hesitant to accept the offer, but Hayes would not take no for an answer. He began the following Saturday playing for two weddings at fifteen dollars each. Playing for the weekly
church services, Richard was responsible for preludes, offertories, and postludes. He often improvised, disguising melodies from his favorite Beatles tunes, even up-tempo numbers, like “From Me to You” or “All My Loving.” In his words, he would “church them up.” Karen was never far from her brother in those days. She would be in the back of the church or singing in the choir and notice melodies from the Beach Boys, the Beatles, and Burt Bacharach.

A reporter with the local
Downey Live Wire
newspaper heard of the new young organist at Downey Methodist and felt the story would make for a pleasant human interest feature. Along with a photographer, the reporter came to the family's apartment and took Richard's picture next to the family's black Baldwin Acrosonic, one of the few large items they had been sure to move across the country that past summer.

In the fall of 1963, thirteen-year-old Karen entered Downey's South Junior High as Richard, just shy of his seventeenth birthday, began his senior year at Downey High School and enrolled in the school band. “What can you play?” asked Bruce Gifford, the band director.

“Piano,” Richard replied.

“Baby or grand?”

The two shared a laugh as Gifford explained he had no need for a pianist in his marching band. Richard went home and unpacked a trumpet he had purchased years earlier for four dollars at an auction. He attempted to play the instrument but to no avail. Luckily, the band director did not require an audition after Richard distracted him with a few impressive piano arpeggios. Outside of his teaching career, Gifford also led a nightclub band with his brother Rex. Richard was recruited and became the group's pianist for a short time, playing at dances, clubs, and weddings. He felt the group's sound was reminiscent of Louis Prima with Sam Butera and the Witnesses.

The Carpenter family's New Haven home finally sold in November 1964. Having tolerated cramped apartment living for a little more than a year, the family packed up and moved to a storybook house located at 13024 Fidler Avenue in Downey. To help offset the purchase of the new home and the higher cost of living in Southern California, Agnes Carpenter took a job running several mimeograph machines in the
stockroom at North American Rockwell Corporation. The aircraft assembly plant, Downey's number-one employer, was responsible for manufacturing systems designed for the Apollo spacecraft program.

In the living room of their new home on Fidler, Richard finally had space for a larger piano. With money earned teaching piano lessons and playing the organ at church, in addition to the help of his parents, he traded in the spinet for a Baldwin Model L, a six-foot three-inch parlor grand. For a short period of time he studied piano at the University of Southern California.

E
NTERING
D
OWNEY
High School in the fall of 1964, Karen was just fourteen years old, an entire year younger than most of her classmates. Although Karen enjoyed playing sports, she did not like to exercise and detested the idea of running around a track every morning. So she paid a visit to band director Bruce Gifford, by then a family friend, who confirmed her participation in marching band would count toward a physical education credit. Karen also succeeded in opting out of geometry class in favor of joining the school choir.

Gifford presented Karen with a glockenspiel and a set of mallets and put her right to work in his marching band, where she marched in the percussion section alongside the drums. Karen quickly found the glockenspiel cumbersome. Additionally, the tone of the instrument began to bother her. She detected that it played a quarter-step sharp in relation to the rest of the band.

Rehearsing with the percussion section, Karen became increasingly intrigued by what classmate Frankie Chavez and the other drummers were doing. As in the Carpenter home, in the Chavez residence music was part of daily life. “
He'd been playing the drums
since he was three,” Karen said, calling him “a Buddy Rich freak. He even ate the same food as Buddy Rich!” But Chavez denies this allegation. “No,” he says, “I didn't eat the same foods as Buddy,” but he admits that Buddy Rich certainly influenced his playing.

Karen marched with the glockenspiel for about two months, by which time it became evident to her that Chavez was the only drummer in the band who had a real passion for his music. “
I used to march
down
the street playing these stupid bells, watching Frankie play his tail off on the drums,” she later said. “It hit me that I could play drums as good as nine-tenths of those boys in the drum line, outside of Frankie.”

Meeting with band director Gifford, Karen informed him of her desire to switch instruments. She wanted to join the drum line. “
I finally had to
talk him into it,” she recalled. “At that time, no girl anywhere was in the drum line of a marching band in any school.” This was met with a tepid response from Gifford, to say the least. “Girls don't play drums,” he told her. “That's not really normal.”

“
All I ever heard
was ‘girls don't play drums,'” Karen later recalled. “That is such an overused line, but I started anyway. I picked up a pair of sticks, and it was the most natural-feeling thing I've ever done.”

Karen saw Gifford's cynicism as a challenge. “Well, let me try,” she told Gifford.

Although the director was doubtful, he agreed to let Karen transition to the drums. First he assigned her to play a pair of cymbals, which was not her goal but did bring her closer to Frankie and the other drummers. Chavez was in charge of writing and developing drum cadences for the group, and his goal was to have fun and encourage listeners to move or dance. “They were funky and syncopated and kind of infectious,” he says. “We were having such a great time that Karen wanted to play the cadences with the drum line, so she left the cymbals and started playing tenor drum.” Never one to settle short of her goal, Karen aspired to play the snare drum during parades and the halftime shows at football games. According to Chavez, “the most interesting parts were assigned to the snare drums, so that's where she ultimately ended up. That was the conduit to playing drums.”

Immediately at ease with the snare drum, Karen spent countless hours rehearsing before and after school. At home she assembled the kitchen barstools and even a few pots and pans to simulate a drum kit. Her father's chopsticks served as drumsticks. Karen began playing along to LPs like the Dave Brubeck Quartet's
Time Out
and
Time Further Out
, which were filled with difficult time signatures like 9/8 and 5/4. “They liked to play jazz,” Chavez recalls. “Richard was a huge Dave Brubeck fan, and Karen and I both loved Joe Morello. They liked everything from Brubeck to Beatles. I remember being at their house
and the Beatles'
Rubber Soul
had just come out. I remember sitting around listening to ‘Norwegian Wood,' and we were all saying what a great production the album was and how great the songs were. Karen and Richard were good students of the art form.”

Karen also sought the guidance of Frankie, with whom she may have been smitten. “There wasn't a romantic interest on my part,” Chavez says, “but I always felt there may have been on hers. I had a girlfriend at the time, so Karen and I just became very good friends.” Karen's only steady boyfriend during her high school years was a clarinet player by the name of Jerry Vance. Although the two dated for several years, most recall the relationship to have been nothing serious and more of a “buddy” situation than a romance.

As for Karen and Frankie, they too remained “just good buddies,” he says. “She had that little tomboy streak to her and used to talk like a beatnik. I loved that she would talk like a jazz player. What developed was a very good friendship and a mutual interest in drums and music. She'd come over after school and we'd talk drums. She always had a ton of questions about playing so we used to talk about the most effective ways to hold the stick, traditional grip versus matched grip, stick control, playing technique, drum styles. We'd talk about different drummers and listen to jazz records and big bands. Karen took to drumming quickly, and it was very natural to her. She showed great ability, had good timing, and kept getting better and better. She ended up being one of the better snare drum players in the drum line in no time.”

Given Karen's track record with musical instruments, her parents were skeptical. They were quite sure it was just another passing fancy. Additionally, Agnes and Harold were already struggling to pay for Richard's new Baldwin. But thanks to his urging, their parents agreed to invest in a basic drum kit for Karen. Karen loved the sound of Ludwigs and wanted them because two of her favorite drummers, Joe Morello and Ringo Starr, played Ludwigs exclusively. Agnes wanted Richard's input, and he felt Ludwig drums would be a good investment since they were known to have a higher resale value than most other lines.

On a Sunday afternoon the family drove to the San Fernando Valley with Frankie Chavez in tow to the home of a music teacher who dealt instruments on the side. They settled on an entry-level set that was
dark green with a yellow stripe around the center of each piece. Karen contributed some of her own savings to assist with the three-hundred-dollar purchase. “Ludwig makes a great product,” Chavez says. “It was a good move.” And with that purchase Frankie became Karen's first drum teacher. Although the rudiments of drumming, time signatures, cadences, and fills came naturally to her, she wanted to know more. “A lot of what she picked up early on was influenced by what she heard on recordings,” Chavez explains. “As her interest in certain portions of the art of playing came up, I would try to teach her the concepts and answer her questions.”

Karen soon began studying drum technique under the tutelage of Bill Douglass at Drum City on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood. Douglass was a well-known jazzer who played with the likes of Benny Goodman and Art Tatum. “Bill was well respected and a great teacher,” says Chavez, who also studied with Douglass for eight years. “We used to play on practice pads reading concert music. Bill had Karen reading very complex material and thought she had become quite a reader.” The lessons continued for the next year and a half.

After only two months of playing, Karen was convinced she had outgrown her first drum kit and by Christmas persuaded her parents to trade in the entry-level set toward the purchase of a show set identical to one belonging to Joe Morello—a 1965 Ludwig Super Classic in silver sparkle with double floor toms. She also asked for the all-chrome, top-of-the-line Super Sensitive Snare. At first her parents opted for the more economical Supra-phonic 400 but later gave in and purchased the Super Sensitive Snare, too. Bragging to friends about her son's piano talents, Agnes secured him the job of pianist for a local production of the Frank Loesser musical
Guys and Dolls
. Karen packed up her new set of drums and joined Richard for their first instrumental performance together, an unlikely piano-drum duo accompanying the production.

Karen soon became the drummer for Two Plus Two, an all-girl band comprising Downey High School students including Linda Stewart and Eileen Matthews. “We wanted only girls because an all-girl band in those days was very rare,” Stewart explains. She and Matthews carried their guitars and amps to school, where they would catch the bus to the Carpenter home for rehearsal each week. Karen recommended friend
Nancy Roubal join to play bass. “Nancy came on board but did not have a bass guitar,” Stewart says. “She did what she could on the bass strings of a six-string guitar. It didn't sound as good as we wanted, but we worked through that. The other problem we had was our amps were so small that Karen had to play softly. We were kind of a surf band, but one of Karen's favorite songs to play was ‘Ticket to Ride' by the Beatles. None of us sang at that time, so I never heard Karen sing, but I never heard such a good drummer in my young life at that time.” After only a few rehearsals Karen approached Linda and the other girls suggesting that Richard join the group. “I said no,” Stewart recalls, “because I wanted an all-girl band. Boys were out.” The girls were finally booked to play for a local pool party, but when Eileen's mother refused to let her attend, Linda became discouraged. “I was so upset I just broke up the band.”