Wow, some unbelievable polls today. Why not cut right to the chase - go straight to the source of the sugar?
Vote for ONLY one!
While you are thinking, some info on Richard and Karen!
"After listening to thirty seconds of the Carpenters' demo tape in 1969, I knew I was experiencing two extraordinarily talented people. Karen's intimate voice sounded like it was singing just for me, and Richard's original flair for vocal arranging and keyboard work made a very special sound." ~ Herb Alpert
Take two California siblings, cleaner than clean, smoother than smooth, toothpaste admen with strings and pianos...looking back over the years of chocolate box marketing, even Richard Carpenter cannot suppress a shudder. "We were getting skewered by the critics, and if you look at (our) LP covers, you can't blame them. Cheek to cheek, it's just too sweet..." and then you cut to the action, another prime time special, an early 70's video clip, and you wonder what would he have preferred? Leather, raunch and Spinal Tap? The Carpenters were sweet, and if there was something decaying beneath the surface, then it only proves how sweet they were, that they continued smiling while they rotted away.
Documenting the Carpenters rise from garageland prodigies in the early 1960's, to mega-platinum superstars just a decade later, and onto a finale so chilling it's hard to comprehend, is a sobering pastime. Songwriter Richard may look like a grinning game show host, or a put upon 60's sitcom husband, but recent years and TV documentaries alike have seen him delve into what are clearly some difficult memories and somehow come up smiling every time.
Sister Karen's death, from the then barely understood anorexia, did more than derail a monstrously successful career; after all. It also shattered his own life, and he would be the first to admit that since then, he's done little more than live in the shadow of all that the duo created through the first half of the 70's. And if he sometimes seems a little cynical, about the wealth of retro adoration which the Carpenters have accumulated in the last five or six years, and the woodwork straining emergence of countless closet admirers, that, too, is only to be expected. Like he says, at the time, the critics skewered them. Cheek to cheek...
http://maski.org/manon/carpenters/books_007.htm