I Dream of a Carpenters' Christmas

Of Karen and Richard Carpenters' odes to the season

December is here and that means, for me, Christmas music is never far from the stereo (truth be told, that’s been the case here since mid-November). As regular readers likely know, I love the sounds of the season and spend this month writing about them. The below is the first of two essays planned for this Yuletide (the second will be out on December 20). It focuses on the Christmas recordings of the Carpenters. I hope enjoy it and will let me know your thoughts.

Until next time, may good listening be with you all!

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I Dream of a Carpenters’ Christmas
By: Robert C. Gilbert

I enjoy looking at photographs of Karen and Richard Carpenter listening to music. There is one with Karen seated looking at the gatefold cover of Todd Rundgren’s second solo album, Runt. The Ballad of Todd Rundgren., with Richard standing over her. In the background is Paul and Linda McCartney’s Ram.

There’s another photograph that is even more interesting. Karen and Richard are sitting cross-legged on a carpeted floor. In front and behind them are stacks of albums. At the moment caught on camera, it’s a reel-to-reel they appear to be listening to. Of the albums on the floor, only two are visible. One is Neil Sedaka’s Emergence. The other is Steely Dan’s Katy Lied. They make for an interesting juxtaposition. Middle of the road meets disaffected hipsterism. Both dedicated to the craft of making sophisticated music. Knowing that Karen and Richard were hip to Rundgren as well as Donald Fagen and Walter Becker is perhaps surprising but probably shouldn’t be.

For what is the music of Karen and Richard Carpenter but another result of making records in the seventies that were centred on songs that were deeply acquainted with the fundamentals of pop songwriting and also sounded pristine. That also applied to Sedaka but without the street cred even if perhaps some should stick to him. After all, few have written and recorded something as gorgeous as ‘Laughter in the Rain.’

Squeaky-clean is, I suppose, a moniker that can stick easily to the Carpenters. When they covered Leon Russell and Bonnie Bramlett’s ‘Superstar,’ the lyric “…and I can hardly wait to sleep with you again” was changed to “…and I can hardly wait to see you again.” A gloss was applied to covers of urgent rockers like ‘Help!’ and ‘Ticket to Ride.’ The recordings that made them very popular very quickly: ‘(They Long To Be) Close to You’ and ‘We’ve Only Just Begun,’ had a meticulousness to them that made them seem as if they were exactly designed to hit every pleasure centre except for the one that counted most: the heart. That is, of course, not even remotely the case.

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Consider the latter, initially a jingle for Crocker-Citizens National Bank that Paul Williams and Roger Nichols quickly fleshed out once it hit the ear of the Carpenters. There’s that opening clarinet line by Doug Strawn. There are tom fills, like heartbeats, that could only be played by Hal Blaine. Layers of harmony powered by Karen and Richard and, what gelled it all together, Karen’s lead vocal. She was barely 20 when she recorded it, singing with a maturity and knowingness not dissimilar to Johnny Mathis’ early sides when he too was just barely out of his teens. Richard was 23. In addition to playing a whole host of keyboards on ‘We’ve Only Just Begun,’ he orchestrated it. The verses luxuriate in the romanticism of lines like, “and when the evening comes, we smile / so much of life ahead.” The bridge pushes ahead with the promise of the road ahead, punctuated by punchy brass. There’s depth even as the recording could plausibly be labeled soft rock. The emotion it can bring up is anything but mushy. And a descriptor like that only captures part of what the Carpenters were all about.

‘All I Can Do,’ from their debut album, initially titled Offering and then changed to Ticket to Ride, is jazz at a frenetic clip. ‘Another Song,’ which closes their second album, Close to You, verges into progressive rock by the end. It was one of many songs that Richard wrote with John Bettis, who had been part of the second band Richard and Karen formed, Spectrum, and who also, with Richard, got fired from Disneyland in 1967 when they slipped one too many Beatles songs serenading visitors on Coke Corner. They all also went to California State University, Long Beach. Frank Pooler ran the choir at the school—Karen sang in it, Richard provided the piano. It’s Pooler’s words that Richard set to music on ‘Merry Christmas Darling,’ the Carpenters’ follow-up to ‘We’ve Only Just Begun.’

It’s one of those special seasonal recordings that can be heard just about everywhere at this time of the year and, at least for me, is always good to catch even if it’s just a brief snippet in the rush of holiday preparations or when festivities are underway. The version most commonly heard has a vocal that Karen recorded in 1978 to replace what was put on tape eight years earlier. While the re-recording is just about perfect, it loses some of the vulnerability of Karen’s original vocal take—for example, the way she stretches the “too” in “Happy New Year, too”—that makes the song’s yearning more real, better in allowing the listener to layer in his or her own pining for someone special at this time of the year whomever that person or persons may be.

It would be four years before the Carpenters released another Christmas song, a transformation of ‘Santa Claus is Coming to Town’ into their musical language. The slow tempo. The brilliant brass fanfare that opens it. The exact enunciation that Karen gives the words, placing the seasonal standard at some mid-point between being a lullaby and being a love song, turning into a celebration of the wonder of Christmas through the eyes of a child. The amazement that attends going to bed on Christmas Eve with the family tree barren of presents only to wake up the next morning with it laden with gifts. Again, softness does not connote syrupiness.

But, it was that lightness—a feeling that I would characterize as comfort or a genuineness free of cynicism or agenda—that made it inevitable that the Carpenters would have much more to say about the music of the season. So much so, in fact, that it resulted in two albums: 1978’s Christmas Portrait and 1984’s An Old-Fashioned Christmas which Richard built around a half-album’s worth of material recorded with Karen, but not released on the former album, as a tribute to her after her passing. She had a particular affection for Christmas music and indeed, both albums have a go-for-broke mentality, an attempt to create a compendium of the seasonal repertoire, reaching all the way back to ‘Il Ducli Jublio’ and covering just about every nook and cranny save for Handel’s Messiah.

It’s the classic approach. Reverent with largess: brass, strings, a choir. Each album opens with a brief prologue, like the Introit to begin a Christmas mass, which leads to a lavish overture constructed by Richard. They are not traditional opening suites in that, save for ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas’ on Christmas Portrait, none of the compositions, carols, hymns or songs are referred to subsequently in full. As theme after theme goes by—sometimes sprightly, other times lushly and occasionally a beloved melody just unfurls—it is like two streams converging, one made of memories, almost all good ones of Yuletides past, and the other of anticipation of all the rituals to partake of once again. If there is good to be found in Christmas, it may ultimately be that as it reminds of how one has been worn down by the year, it presents a chance to repair the frayed threads and to recommit once again to the ideals of the season.

That consolation seems very near when Karen is first heard on Christmas Portrait, telling of “frosted windowpanes” and “candles gleaming outside” on ‘The Christmas Waltz.’ The same feeling, magnified even more, comes as she begins ‘Sleigh Ride unaccompanied. Has anyone caressed the words, “just hear those sleigh bells ringing, jing-ting-tingling too…” like she did, stretching out syllables and words to express a joy beyond words? It meets Richard’s arrangement head on: clip-clopping drum brushes, bells of all kinds, a choir. The chance to hear him sing on the bridge. It’s a recording that moves not because it is easily recognized—it’s another of their Christmas recordings that is heard everywhere—but because it is all about atmosphere. It’s a milieu that is radiant, full of the glow of a living room bright and cozy with reds and greens. It’s sentimentality done right and a reminder that sentimentality does not always result in treacle.

What makes Christmas Portrait fairly remarkable is how it sustains this snow-globe aura for 50 minutes. Even in its cutesiest moments—a glockenspiel-heavy ‘Winter Wonderland’ for starters—wonder is never far away. Its height, at least to these ears, is thirty seconds from the medley pairing ‘The First Snowfall,’ just one of the many seasonal songs introduced by Bing Crosby, with ‘Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow!’

After a stately introduction, ‘The First Snowfall’ shifts into tempo. At first, it’s the choir—shades of the Ray Conniff Singers here—that sets the scene. There’s then a deepening of the harmony with Richard heard at its tip. The excitement builds as “folks puts runners on their surreys / and forget about their worries.” It’s then Karen to deliver the kicker, the harmony shifting again, as she sings, “when a man becomes a boy once again.”

That’s the whole thing right there: why the Carpenters had a natural affinity for Christmas music. Everything fits just so. The collective sound asks, of the listener, to remember, if just for a moment, what it was like to be a child in December.

It’s a bit jarring then to consider what was happening to the Carpenters while Christmas Portrait was recorded. Richard was addicted to painkillers, a habit he would kick in 1979. Karen’s struggles with anorexia would lead to her untimely passing four years later.

It’s inevitable then that her loss hangs over An Old-Fashioned Christmas. After starting off, as Christmas Portrait does, with a kind of Introit (here, it’s ‘It Came Upon a Midnight Clear’) and an overture, there is the melancholia of the title track, sung by Richard and a choir, and written by him and Bettis. The ache of the line, “it used to be that all the family would gather together for this one night,” is acutely poignant. Following it is an instrumental and ornate version of ‘O Holy Night’ leading directly into a rich interlude for strings that clear for Karen to sing, “oh, there is no place like home for the holidays”—the dream of that old-fashioned Christmas being realized. This entire opening sequence, spanning about 17 minutes, is the linchpin of the album. It’s the one segment that re-captures Christmas Portrait’s primacy of feel.

There is much good to be heard on the episodic remainder of the album, including an effecting version of the spiritual ‘Little Altar Boy,’ Richard’s creative suite of the most memorable moments of Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker and the pleasure of the Carpenters’ ‘Santa Claus is Back in Town’ from 1974.

The initial CD release of their music for Christmas strung together most of both albums while using the artwork of Christmas Portrait, creating a super-sized aural fantasia of the season while leaving off, inexplicably, ‘The First Snowfall’ medley. In 1996, both albums were issued on a two-CD collection. That’s the version to own. Karen and Richard’s Christmas music is one part of the puzzle explaining why they reached and continue to reach so many. They weren’t soft. They were real.