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.”
HAVING GRADUATED from high school in the spring of 1964, Richard enrolled at nearby California State University at Long Beach. In June of the following year he met Wes Jacobs, a tuba major from Palmdale, California, who was also a skillful upright bassist. “We met in theory class,” Jacobs recalled in a 2009 interview. “It was obvious to me that he was a genius. Right from day one he could take all the dictation that the teacher could dish out; he would just write it out. . . . He wanted to do something jazzy. . . . We played, and it just clicked right away. Since I had considerable keyboard experience, I could look at his hands and read what he was doing. I could almost play along with him as if I were reading music. We really locked in stylistically. Within a short time, it was apparent that we had to do something musically, but we didn’t know what. At one point he said, ‘I’ll tell my sister to learn how to play drums, and we’ll have a trio.’ Within three weeks she could play drums better than anybody that I heard at the college.”
In actuality Karen had been playing a number of months by the time she teamed with Richard and Wes to form what became the Richard Carpenter Trio, an instrumental jazz group with the classic combo of piano, bass, and drums. Richard did all the arrangements, and by the end of the summer they were rehearsing on a daily basis, sometimes playing well into the night.
Financing a piano and drum kit, in addition to paying for music lessons, Agnes and Harold were barely making ends meet. Now the newly formed trio wanted amplifiers and microphones. Plus Richard felt a new electric piano would make their act more portable. Even so, a tape recorder took precedence, as this would allow the group to make demos. For several months Richard saved to make a down payment on a Sony TC-200 Stereo Tapecorder. The first recordings of the trio were made during the summer of 1965 in the Carpenters’ living room at the house on Fidler.
Richard met trumpet major Dan Friberg, a junior college transfer, in choir during the fall of 1965. The two had several other classes together including music history and counterpoint, and Richard began to call upon Friberg when he needed a trumpet player for the trio’s weekend gigs. “Karen was the drummer and didn’t sing at all yet,” Friberg recalls. “She was listening to Louie Bellson and Buddy Rich. Those were some of her idols. I remember going into her room at their house, and she had pictures on the wall of all these great drummers. Her goal was to be as good as they were. She was great then, by all I could tell, but not good enough for her.” Friberg became a recurring soloist with the Richard Carpenter Trio. “We had a girl vocalist named Margaret Shanor,” he recalls. “With Karen strictly drumming at this point, Margaret fronted the group.”
IT WAS not until 1966 that Karen came into her full voice. Although she had always sung in tune, her voice had lacked vibrato and any real depth or presence. It was mostly a light falsetto with a noticeable break between her lower and higher registers. “I can’t really reme
mber why I started to sing,” Karen said in 1975. “It just kind of happened. But I never really discovered the voice that you know now—the low one—until later, when I was sixteen. I used to sing in this upper voice, and I didn’t like it. I was uncomfortable, so I think I would tend to shy away from it because I didn’t think I was that good. And I wasn’t.”
Karen deplored the sound of her tape-recorded voice at first but continued to experiment with her abilities as a singer. “It’s kind of corny to listen back,” she recalled. “We had an original recording of one of Richard’s songs that I’d sung, and the range was too big. I’d be going from the low voice to the high voice, and even though it was all in tune, the top part was feeble and it was different. You wouldn’t know it was me. Then suddenly one day out popped this voice, and it was natural.”
Richard soon introduced Karen to his college choir director, Frank Pooler, with whom she began taking voice lessons every Saturday morning. This would be the only formal vocal training she would ever receive. “We’d have a half-hour or forty-five-minute voice lesson,” Pooler says. “She always had her drums with her in the car. From there Richard would take her over to study with Bill Douglass in Hollywood.” The lessons with Pooler focused on both classical voice study and pop music. The first half was devoted to art songs by Beethoven, Schumann, and other composers. During the last half Karen would sing the new songs Richard had written. “Karen was a born pop singer,” Pooler says. “She wasn’t particularly interested in that other stuff, but she had to do it to get into school.”
Unlike Richard, who practiced endlessly, Karen rarely, if ever, rehearsed between her lessons with Pooler. Concerned that their money might be better spent somewhere else, the Carpenter parents met with her teacher to inquire about Karen’s progress. “The folks were very supportive of both of them, but they weren’t rich. I was getting paid five bucks an hour for those lessons, and they finally came up to see if Karen was getting her money’s worth!”
Pooler told Karen her voice was “arty” and “natural” and discouraged the idea of subjecting it to any sort of intense vocal training. “He heard this voice and he wouldn’t touch it,” Karen said in 1975. “He said I should not train it . . . and the only thing I did work with him on was developing my upper register so I would have a full three-octave range. . . . Something else you don’t think about is being able to sing in tune. Thank God I was born with it! It’s something I never thought about. When I sing, I don’t think about putting a pitch in a certain place, I just sing it.”
Becoming more confident in Karen’s vocals, Richard began to feature her with their act and called less upon Margaret Shanor. The group’s set strayed from jazz to Richard’s pop-influenced originals and tried-and-true standards like “Ebb Tide,” “The Sweetheart Tree,” “The Twelfth of Never,” and “Yesterday.” No matter how much singing she was asked to do, Karen also seemed to consider herself first and foremost a drummer who just happened to sing.
Around this time Agnes Carpenter met Evelyn Wallace, a fellow employee at North American Aviation. The women became close friends when Agnes came to Evelyn in tears following a heated disagreement with another coworker. After Wallace was promoted to the division of laboratory and tests for the Apollo program, Agnes took over her old job. “Why don’t you stop in and hear the kids?” Agnes would often ask Evelyn. “They practice after school every day.”
But Evelyn always seemed to find some excuse. “I thought she was talking about little kids,” she recalls. “Then I thought it might be that acid rock, and I couldn’t stand to listen to that. Finally I couldn’t keep saying no. I had to say yes.” Reluctantly Evelyn agreed to join the Carpenters in their home for dinner one evening and to hear Karen and Richard rehearse. Proud to finally find a captive audience, Agnes called out to her daughter seated behind the drums. “Sing it, Karen,” she said. “Sing out!”
Wallace sat spellbound. “I had never heard a voice like that in all my life,” she says. “What a beautiful, beautiful voice she had, and I told her when she finished, ‘That was beautiful, Karen.’ She thought I was just being nice.”
LIKE MANY college music majors, trumpeter Dan Friberg directed a church choir on the weekends for extra income. At a church in Hawthorne he met Don Zacklin, a member of the congregation. “I was doing lead sheets for him,” Friberg recalls. “He would bring me tapes of different artists that he had recorded on Sunday, and I’d write out lead sheets. He would send them in for copyright purposes.” Zacklin encouraged Friberg to share some of his original compositions and recordings with his friend Joe Osborn, a business partner in a small record label called Magic Lamp Records.
Joe Osborn was one of the most prominent and sought-after studio bassists on the West Coast pop music scene in the 1960s. He frequently played in tandem with drummer Hal Blaine and keyboardist Larry Knechtel, an association known as the Wrecking Crew. The three were featured on numerous hits by the Beach Boys, the Mamas and the Papas, and many other popular artists of the late 1960s. “We were a bunch of guys in Levis and T-shirts,” says Blaine, who first worked with Joe Osborn on the live Johnny Rivers at the Whiskey a Go Go album. “The older, established musicians in three-piece suits and blue blazers who had been in Hollywood all their life started saying, ‘These kids are going to wreck the business,’ so I just started calling us the Wrecking Crew.”
As the spring semester of 1966 drew to a close, Friberg saw Richard on campus and told him of his upcoming audition with Osborn. “I’ve got a guy that wants to hear some songs that I wrote, but I need somebody to play piano for me,” he said.
Richard agreed to accompany Friberg on the informal try-out. “It all goes back to that fateful night at Joe Osborn’s in his garage with egg cartons on the wall,” he says. It was April 1966. Both Karen and Richard traveled with Friberg and his young wife to Osborn’s house, located at 7935 Ethel Avenue in the San Fernando Valley. The audition and recording session were slated for 1:00 A.M. since Osborn was usually in sessions each night until midnight.
Unbeknownst to Karen and Richard, Don Zacklin had asked Friberg to recommend other talented kids from the college to audition for Magic Lamp. So when Karen and Richard showed up, Zacklin and Osborn assumed they’d come along to audition, too. The brother and sister were befuddled but cooperative. “Karen ended up singing that night,” Friberg says. “She sang and that was the end of me! To me, her voice was just like nothing else I’d ever heard before or since. It was just so distinctive. To think of all the times I saw her sitting behind the drums, never knowing that she could even sing. It’s really weird the way things worked out because that night was what started the whole thing for them. If Richard had said, ‘I’m busy,’ I probably would have gotten somebody else, and they never would have met Joe.”
Captivated by Karen’s raw, husky voice, Osborn asked musician friend and drummer Mickey Jones to travel with him to Downey to see this “chubby little girl” perform. “We went to a small dinner house where we heard Karen sing,” Jones recalls. “I was shocked. I had never heard a more pure voice in my life.” Hearing Karen again, Osborn was won over. He told Mickey Jones he planned to contact the girl’s parents. He wanted to record her. This was surely good news, but it did not sit well with Agnes Carpenter. She was set on the idea of her son becoming the family’s famous musician. After all, they’d moved across the country in hopes of Richard getting into the music business, and now he was being disregarded in favor of his kid sister, a musical novice. “I know that Agnes was really, really mad about that,” recalls Evelyn Wallace. “There are many piano players that are very, very good. But let’s face it, all pianos more or less sound alike. All voices do not.”
On May 9, 1966, Osborn signed sixteen-year-old Karen Carpenter to Magic Lamp Records’ small roster of artists, which included Johnny Burnette, James Burton, Mickey Jones, Dean Torrence (of Jan and Dean), and Vince Edwards, best known as television’s Dr. Ben Casey. Since Karen was not of legal age, Agnes and Harold signed on her beha
lf. Two days later, Magic Lamp’s publishing division, Lightup Music, signed Richard as a songwriter in an effort to help reconcile Agnes’s displeasure with Osborn having initially overlooked her son’s talents. “Joe thought that Richard was a pain in the ass,” Mickey Jones recalls. “Richard not only wanted to play the piano but to run everything. Joe did not want him around when he was working with Karen, so he made Richard wait outside the studio.”
Any resentment between the two soon gave way to new friendships as Karen, Richard, and Wes Jacobs began spending hours on end at Osborn’s studio. That summer Karen recorded several of Richard’s original compositions including “The Parting of Our Ways,” “Don’t Tell Me,” “Looking for Love,” and “I’ll Be Yours.” She also played drums on the recordings, which featured Osborn on electric bass and sometimes Wes Jacobs on upright bass. Richard was on piano and the Chamberlin Music Master, a version of the Mellotron, both of which were popular analog synthesizers that provided taped string and woodwind sounds. Osborn used a Scully 4-track recorder and Neumann U87 condenser microphones to tape the sessions. Playback was done through Altec 604 studio monitors. When four tracks were complete, they were bounced or “ping-ponged” to his Scully 2-track machine, which condensed multiple tracks to two or sometimes even one. This process freed additional tracks for overdubbing and layering voices or instruments.
“Looking for Love / I’ll Be Yours” (ML 704) was the first and only single by Karen Carpenter for Magic Lamp Records. Five hundred copies were pressed, and most extras were given to family and friends. “There was no distribution that I am aware of,” Mickey Jones says. “It was mainly a tax shelter.” Like most small labels, Magic Lamp did not have the means to promote their singles, and by late 1967 the company folded.
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