Paul McCartney & Wings - Venus And Mars Outtakes Are Alright Tonight, Vol. 1 & 2

Happy 75th Birthday, Sir Paul! Many, many more!

I was too young to absorb the Beatles in real time, so the first Beatles-related release I was conscious of as a kid was McCartney's "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey", a single from his first solo album Ram, released in August 1971.

I can't tell you why I enjoyed this tune so much as a child - maybe it was the sound effects (thunderclaps, ringing phones, seagulls), that made it seem more like a Yellow Submarine outtake (I'd just seen that movie for the first time that year, as part of a summer film series for kids sponsored by the local elementary schools - I saw Willy Wonka and The Phantom Tollbooth for the first time that summer as well).   After that limited exposure to McCartney's work, I wasn't really aware of anything regarding his music for another three years.

I remember when Band On The Run came out - my older cousin had a copy of the LP, and he played it for me during a visit my family paid to his in 1974. I was fascinated with the "jailbreak" cover! Outside of Paul McCartney and his wife, I didn't know or recognize any of the other people featured on the front of that album. But it didn't matter - I thought that everything about Band On The Run - artwork and music - was great. My favorite songs at the time, outside of the title track, were "Mrs. Vandebilt" and "Helen Wheels" - they remain some of my favorite Paul tracks to this day. By the time I got to experience the album, it seemed that a vast majority of Americans and the world seemed to think as positively about this disc as I did. I had no idea until much later how much work and effort went into making this album the runaway hit it became.

Due to the mixed critical and commercial reception of the group's first two albums, 1971's Wild Life and 1973's Red Rose Speedway, buyers were initially reluctant to shell out their hard-earned cash for Band On The Run, only to get burned again by yet another weak Wings release.  So, despite some positive reviews from influential music writers and publications, early sales performance of this release in December 1973 was good, but not great.  The album rose slowly on the US Billboard charts to a peak of #7 in early February 1974, before beginning to slowly slide back down the list.

To counter this perceived public lack on interest, Apple (well, specifically, Capitol Records, Apple's US distributor) embarked on a very planned and methodical marketing campaign - quite possibly the first one ever considered necessary for a Beatles-related release. Essentially the brainchild of Capitol's marketing head, Al Coury, Coury goosed LP sales by strategically releasing album singles at key points during the year, initially over McCartney's objections.  The first single Marketing released was "Jet" b/w "Let Me Roll It" in late January 1974.

The song quickly shot into the Top Ten in both Britain and America, where it remained until late spring, and rekindled public interest in the album - Band On The Run began moving up the charts again, and reached #1 US for a week in mid-April. When album sales began declining again that month, Coury arranged for the release of the next album single, the title track "Band On The Run" b/w "Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Five". This single was even huger than the previous release; "Band On The Run" topped the American charts by June, and dragged the album along with it - the LP hit #1 again for three weeks that same month. Band On The Run topped the US album charts yet again in July. All told, the release was at or near the top of the charts for almost the entirety of 1974, staying in the Billboard Top Ten from January to late November. Its reception made McCartney the most commercially successful of the solo Beatles from that point on (believe it or not, but George Harrison was eating Paul's lunch on that measure in the early '70s).

After this year of great success, both McCartney and Capitol Records were eager to keep the money train rolling. Wings' lineup was augmented with new members during mid-1974 (Geoff Britton on drums and Jimmy McCulloch on lead guitar joined Paul & Linda McCartney and guitarist Denny Laine), and after some early session work in Nashville and London in the fall of 1974, the band headed to Sea Saint Studios in New Orleans in January 1975 to complete recordings for the next album. The Louisiana sessions were progressing fairly well, except in one area - some animosity had arisen between Britton and McColloch during the Nashville stay, and by the time they reached New Orleans, they fucking HATED each other. Fed up with the tense atmosphere, Britton suddenly quit the band in the middle of their Sea Saint session - he'd been a member of Wings for less than six months. McCartney scrambled to find a replacement, quickly auditioning a suitable alternate, American drummer Joe English. Despite that brief hiccup, the main album tracks were all laid down less than a month after arrival in New Orleans. Some rerecording and overdub work was completed in California a couple of months later.

The album Venus and Mars was released in late May (two weeks after the release of the lead single, "Listen To What The Man Said") to a public still hungry for Wings product, and in the afterglow of the positive vibes for the last album. Both the single and the album topped the US charts, with the latter selling over 4 million copies worldwide. However, the overall critical reaction to Venus and Mars was much more subdued and muted than for Band On The Run; the LP was generally viewed by music writers as a step back by the band. Still, it sold - which was all Capitol cared about.

The commercial success of this album served as the impetus for McCartney and Wings to embark on a year-long worldwide concert tour, Wings Over The World, where the band played over sixty arena-rock shows in eleven countries on three continents. In all, more than a million people attended those sold-out concerts, further establishing McCartney's reputation as a commercial juggernaut.

The tour even resulted in a companion album, the triple-disc Wings Over America live release, another Number One record for the band in early 1977.

Generally, I tend to agree with the critics regarding Venus and Mars. Outside of "Listen To What The Man Said", I've never found the music on this disc to be as immediate or compelling as that of the previous album. It's not as though McCartney was resting on his laurels here, after the huge success of Band On The Run - there was some thought and hard work put into these selections. I don't know whether it was due to the band turmoil during the recording, or label pressure to start milking Paul and his band as a financially-viable hit machine . . . but for me, there's something missing in the overall album.

However, some folks regard Venus and Mars as equal to, if not superior, to Band On The Run. I'll let you all be the judge of that, by giving you a glimpse into the creative effort behind the making of this album. Here are an assortment of demos and rehearsal tracks from the Venus and Mars sessions in 1975. According to bootlegzone.com, The 910 (a key publication on unreleased Beatles recordings) states that the source of this music is an unnamed person (presumably in the production crew) who surreptitiously recorded and retained a low bias cassette dub of some early takes and some later, more polished remixes.

Here is an excerpt from the liner notes on the 2005 release of this bootleg, containing a bit more info:

"The music was culled from sessions that took place between January and April of 1975, first at Sea Saint Studios, New Orleans and later at Wall Heider Studios in Los Angeles. The majority of the sessions feature the fifth Wings line-up of Paul/lead vocals, guitar, bass; Linda/piano, synth, backing vocals; Denny Laine/guitar, bass, backing vocals; Jimmy McCulloch/guitar, backing vocals (lead on Medicine Jar); and Joe English/drums (it is unknown whether this music features any of Geoff Britton on drums)."

In terms of track listings, here's the lineup for both discs:

Disc 1

1. Venus And Mars (instrumental)
2. Rock Show
3. Love In Song
4. Letting Go
5. Medicine Jar
6. Venus And Mars (reprise)
7. Listen To What The Man Said, Treat Her Gently/Lonely Old People, Crossroads Theme
8. Venus And Mars
9. Rock Show

Disc 2

1. Love In Song
2. You Gave Me The Answer
3. Magneto And Titanium Man
4. Letting Go
5. Medicine Jar
6. Venus And Mars (reprise)
7. Spirits Of Ancient Egypt
8. Call Me Back Again
9. Listen To What The Man Said
10. Treat Her Gently/Lonely Old People
11. Crossroads Theme
12. Lunch Box/Odd Sox

For your consideration, here are Vols. 1 and 2 of Venus And Mars Outtakes Are Alright Tonight, a rare and hard-to-find selection of rough cuts, rehearsal tracks and unreleased material from Wings' sessions for the album of the same name, first pressed by bootleg label Starlight Records in 1990 and subsequently released on CD by equally shady German record label No Pig International in 2005. Have a listen, and as always, let me know what you think.

Please use the email link below to contact me, and I will reply with the download link(s) ASAP:

Send Email

Various Artists - If I Were A Carpenter

My son had his thirteenth birthday this past weekend, the last of my children to hit their teens. We tried to make it a memorable one; we booked a few hours at a local paintball facility, and he invited about a dozen of his friends to engage in birthday-related combat at the outdoor arena there, interspersed between intervals of pizza-eating, cake-cutting and present-opening. For almost all of the boys who attended, it was their first paintball experience, and after a little initial nervousness, everyone really got into it. All in all, it was an outstanding afternoon, one that I hope my boy and his friends will always remember.

Thirteen seems to be a big birthday milestone culturally, bar and bas mitzvahs notwithstanding. It's a transitional birthday, the day supposedly when the world starts opening up for you, and you're no longer considered a "boy" per se. and also the time (at least for me) when you begin to notice things in your life changing. What may have looked steady and seemingly eternal when you're six or eight - home, friends, family - suddenly all of that seems to be in flux with the advent of your teenage years.

With my son's big day come and gone, I can't help but reflect back on my own thirteenth, so many years ago. I remember it well - at the time, it was the best birthday I ever had, and one of the best days of my life. But in hindsight, it definitely and clearly marked a point when things shifted in my own life, and a major presumption of my boyhood fell away.

But first, let's go back a few years earlier . . .

As I've mentioned before, my dad was a career Navy officer, and as such we moved a lot when I was a kid, as his duty stations changed every couple of years. The first place we lived that I was consciously aware of was in Norfolk, Virginia, my fourth home by the time I turned three (Both of my parents were born and raised in Norfolk, and most of my immediate relatives - aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins, etc. - still lived in the city).

My family lived on Marlfield Drive in Crown Point Townhouses, a (then) brand-spanking new housing location along Virginia Beach Boulevard, midway between downtown Norfolk and Virginia Beach and close to Janaf, the most popular shopping center in the area. Every one of the hundreds of two-story semi-detached residences in this sprawling development featured heating and air conditioning, a fenced-in backyard area and storage shed, and other amenities considered "modern" and "cutting edge" for the mid/late 1960s. The front yards and sidewalks were immaculate, with young saplings in the front yards of each building at exactly the same intervals on every street. The place was definitely a cut above what was generally available in the Hampton Roads area at that time. As such, although Crown Point wasn't government or military housing per se, young military families flocked to the place, probably because the price was right and the quality was well above what could be expected for housing on one of the several Army, Navy and Air Force bases in the area. So the neighborhood was full of kids the same age as my siblings and I.

It must have been the summer of 1969 when Ricky, a new boy exactly my age, and his family moved in a couple of doors down from me. Ricky's dad was in the Navy as well, and had just been transferred to the Norfolk area from Minnesota. In addition to his mother and father, Ricky also had a older sister, Diane. As little kids do, we had no hesitation or trepidation regarding meeting and getting acquainted, and by the end of that summer we were inseparable friends.

Crown Point was bounded by Broad Creek to the west, wide open play fields to the south, and woods to the east. As such, there were multitudes of places there for children to play and explore, and Ricky and I were familiar with all of them. We would splash ourselves in the stinking mud on the shores of the creek, or go running pell-mell through the woods, swinging sticks at each other and playing "swords". At five and six years old, we thought nothing of walking several streets over to visit our other friends, or spending the entire afternoon far from our homes and our parents' sight, doing activities like climbing trees and balancing along high walls, locales and actions that would give today's parents (myself included) no end of anxiety. Looking back on it now, it seems amazing to me now how much freedom we had as little kids, and how much mischief and trouble we were able to get into.

Once Ricky somehow came upon a pocketknife, and he and I decided that it would be a good idea to "prune" the young sapling in front of his house with it. Well, "pruning" quickly turned into carving our names into the trunk, then stripping the bark off the tree, then eventually gouging at it. We had just about finished our "work", and were headed over to do the same job on the tree in front of my house, when Ricky's mother happened to glance out the front window to see what we were up to. Two six-year-old boys had managed to chop down all but about a two-foot stump of the tree! Both Ricky and I were sent to our respective rooms for the afternoon, and when his dad came home, he uprooted the pitiful remainder of the tree, never to be replaced. So if you ever find yourself on the middle block of Marlfield Drive, and wonder why one of the townhouses on the north side of the street doesn't have a tree in front of it, now you know!

Diane was already a teenager, several years older than Ricky, and her room was strictly off limits to her little brother and his pesky little friends - which of course made the lure of it irresistible to us. We sneaked into her bedroom several times when she wasn't around - not really looking for anything, but moreso just reveling in the "forbidden" nature and adventure of it all (if sneaking into a teen girl's room could be called that . . .). In only one instance did our surreptitious excursions into Diane-land bear fruit; Ricky and I discovered - and were genuinely shocked to find - MENTHOL CIGARETTES (horrors!) hidden away in the back of one of her bureau drawers! The main thing I recall about her room what her music collection, generally late-'60s/early-'70s AM radio fare, stacked in vinyl on the top of her bureau - Simon & Garfunkel, Bobby Sherman, Three Dog Night, The Hollies . . . and especially The Carpenters. Diane owned every Carpenters album then released, and had a big poster of the duo up on her wall.

Originally from Connecticut, Richard Carpenter and his younger sister Karen spent their teenage years growing up in Downey, California, a suburb of Los Angeles. Richard showed interest and promise at the piano at an early age, and in the mid-60s enrolled at Cal State - Long Beach to study music. Karen was more of a tomboy in her youth, but while in high school got into drumming, and by her early teens was considered good enough on the kit to play professionally. Richard formed his first band (without his sister), a jazz combo called the Richard Carpenter Trio, and had some local success, winning a "Battle of the Bands" competition at the Hollywood Bowl in 1966 that led to the group being signed by RCA. But the demos the trio recorded that year were deemed unsatisfactory and the label quickly dropped the group without producing them.

Later in 1966, Karen tagged along with Richard to a demo session he was participating in at a ramshackle L.A. studio. On a whim, the session producer asked the sixteen-year old to sing a few bars - to everyone's shock and surprise, Karen was fantastic; "This girl can sing!" The producer, Joe Osborn (a bass-playing member of the legendary and prolific group of top Los Angeles session musicians famously known as The Wrecking Crew) immediately signed Karen as a solo act onto his personal label, and in 1967 produced her first release, a single featuring two of Richard's compositions. Sadly, the record flopped, and the label went bust soon afterward.

With their recording life seemingly stalled, the siblings hooked up with four of Richard's old college buddies to form Spectrum, a sort of 'meh', generic jazz-pop combo with mild psychedelic trappings, that played in and around the Los Angeles area wherever they could find - everywhere from supper clubs to the Whisky a Go Go; just another one of hundreds of area bands trying to 'make it' in showbiz. Here's a sample of what Spectrum had to offer the world in 1968:

In the meantime, Joe Osborn was cool enough to let the Carpenters continue to use his garage studio to record demos to submit to record companies. In early 1969, they had the good fortune to have one of their demos heard by the founder of A&M Records, the legendary Herb Alpert, who liked Karen's voice enough to sign the duo in April 1969 (as "Carpenters", as opposed to "The Carpenters" - at the time they thought the former sounded 'cooler'). They immediately entered the studio to begin work on their debut album.

A&M gave the group near-total independence in the crafting of their first long-player, hoping to recapture some of the magic that Alpert heard on their demo. The disc, to be titled Offering, contained ten Richard Carpenter originals and three cover tunes - by the Youngbloods, Neil Young and The Beatles ("Ticket To Ride"). Richard's songs, written mostly during their Spectrum period, for the most part consisted of E-Z listening jazz-pop and Flowery-Powery fluff. In addition, Richard sings lead vocals on almost half of the record, with Karen singing lead on the other half - an arrangement they planned on continuing.

Offering was released on October 9th, 1969, and met with near-total critical and commercial failure. Their heavily-Spectrum influenced sound just didn't resonate with the general public. The album scraped along the bottom to the Billboard 200 for a few brief weeks, and only one song, the "Ticket To Ride" cover, charted, peaking at #54 on the Hot 100. By any measure, the group's first LP was a flop.

The Carpenters fully expected A&M to drop them, as RCA had done three years earlier, and by all rights in the cutthroat commercial landscape of the time, the label would have been justified in doing so. But Alpert, the label head, was fully invested emotionally and financially with the group, and as such he was determined to help them succeed.

To that end, he took a more active role in the crafting of their second album - recommending (more like "insisting") on the inclusion of cover songs by more successful, established composers. During the recording sessions (which began in late 1969 and ran off and on through May 1970), Alpert pointed Richard towards several songs written by '60s pop giant Bert Bacharach . . . including an old Bacharach/Davis chestnut called "(They Long To Be) Close To You", a song that had been kicking around for most of the decade and recorded several times by various artists without appreciable success.

While the recording sessions were progressing that winter, Richard happened to be at home one evening, watching the tube, and came across a TV commercial for Crocker National Bank featuring footage of a young couple getting married and just starting out (of course, with the unstated implication being that Crocker Bank would be financing their progress):

The ad included an appealing theme song, sung by an unidentified vocalist, who Richard quickly guessed was a friend and fellow musician at A&M, Paul Williams. A couple of days later, Richard ran into Williams in the company parking lot, where he confirmed his guess as to the authorship and vocals, and also learned from his friend that he had written a full song, not just a commercial-sized snippet. Permission was granted to include the full-length version of the tune, called "We've Only Just Begun", on the upcoming Carpenters album.

Richard reworked all of the tunes by these outside composers. A&M released "Close To You" in June 1970, as a teaser single and table-setter for the upcoming album release . . . and it exceeded the label's and band's highest hopes. In a month, "Close To You" had vaulted to #1 in the nation, and it stayed there for the next four weeks, the Carpenters' first bonafide hit single and gold record.

While the single was riding high on the charts, the Carpenters' sophomore album release, also titled Close To You, came out on August 19th, 1970 to great acclaim, selling over two million copies in the U.S. alone. A month later, "We've Only Just Begun" was also released as a single, and like "Close To You" also shot to the top of the charts. On both hit songs, Karen served as lead vocalist, and also did so for nearly all of the album's song - an arrangement that would remain in place for the remainder of the band's career.

By the time Ricky and I entered elementary school together that year, the Carpenters were big time. At the 1971 Grammy Awards, the band was nominated in eight different categories, with "Close To You" winning for Best Contemporary Vocal Performance and the group itself being named Best New Artist. They released their third album, the eponymously titled Carpenters, in the spring of 1971. It was to be their most successful album ever (and their first to feature the celebrated band logo), making it to #2 on the U.S. album charts, selling over four million copies, and producing the #1 Easy Listening/Adult Contemporary hit singles (and soon-to-be pop standards) "Rainy Days and Mondays"(also #2 on the Hot 100), "Superstar" (#2), and "For All We Know" (#3). The Carpenters even had a short-lived replacement show on NBC during the summer of 1971, Make Your Own Kind Of Music, which I only watched a couple of times, as it came on opposite reruns of ABC's The Mod Squad (yes, as a little kid, my parents let me watch The Mod Squad . . . I used to watch all sorts of non-kiddie fare back then!).

Suffice to say, the Carpenters were all over the airwaves in 1971-72, in heavy rotation of all of the AM stations. In hindsight, it's sort of weird that in an era of turmoil - Vietnam, domestic terror groups, political assassinations and the like (with the Watergate scandal waiting just offstage) - this soft-rock duo and their music could be so universally successful and accepted . . . Actually, maybe it's not so weird; for some, in many ways. the Carpenters' poppy, soothing sound was a comforting throwback to music and vocals of a bygone, less frenetic age. So they drew in both old and young fans - including my friend's sister Diane. Although the poster was in her room, somehow I began associating The Carpenters and their music with Ricky.

In the summer of 1972, when I was eight, we moved away from Norfolk, ending up in Wisconsin for two years while my dad attended graduate school in Madison. I was thrilled with discovering all there was to know about a new place and meeting new kids, but still, I missed my best friend back in Norfolk. Ricky and I wrote one another constantly during my first year in the Upper Midwest; I told him about my new school and the new friends I had made; he told me about what was happening back at our old elementary school and about the old neighborhood kids we used to play with.

As big as The Carpenters were before I left Virginia, it was during my time in Wisconsin when the group became really huge. The band released two albums during that period, A Song For You in June 1972 and Now And Then in May 1973. Both albums went multi-platinum in the States, reached the Billboard Top Five, and between them spawned

seven songs that reached either #1 or #2 on the Adult Contemporary charts, five of which ("Hurting Each Other", "Goodbye To Love", "Sing", "Yesterday Once More" and "Top Of The World") also making the national Top 10. I remember for the Spring Pageant at my school in 1973, the third graders sang The Carpenters' "Sing", which had topped the charts just that March. By the middle of 1973, the Carpenters were the best-selling, most popular music group in the United States, and their songs were AM radio staples.

In the summer of 1973, during my dad's school break, we went back to Norfolk for a week to visit relatives, driving across Indiana and Ohio, stopping occasionally at Stuckey's along the way for drinks and their famous peanut brittle (remember those places?), and listening to Carpenters songs on the radio practically the entire way there. During that summer vacation back in Virginia, I got to spend a glorious day with Ricky back at Crown Point. Just like old times, he and I played in the woods and in his front yard with some of my other old friends from the year before, like Craig & Paul and Marlena and her little sister Gee. It was loads of fun, and it felt like I'd never left. It was one of the more magical days I'd had in my life up to then - to paraphrase a Carpenters song that was a big hit during that summer, it really was 'yesterday once more' . . . and despite the time and the distance, I knew that Ricky remained my best friend, and always would be . . . at least that's what I thought.

Shortly after my family returned to Wisconsin from our Virginia vacation, Ricky's dad received transfer orders to a new duty station, and later that summer they moved to Massachusetts. Ricky wrote me to tell me of the news, and during the latter part of 1973 we exchanged several letters, telling one another of our new lives, friends and adventures in our current towns.

Then, late in the winter of 1974, I sent off a letter to Ricky . . . and a week or so later, it was returned, marked "Addressee Unknown" - which, needless to say, was weird. I quickly sent off another letter to my friend, apologizing for taking so long between replies and explaining the curious case of the previously returned letter. But that one too came back a few days later, also marked as undeliverable. Worried now, I got permission from my parents to call Information, to see if his father had a phone number registered with them. But no luck - there was no such listing under his name in that area. Ricky and his family had seemingly disappeared, and without a forwarding address or any contact info. I was heartbroken, but also determined to find him - after all, we were best friends.

Thus began my multi-year quest to discover the whereabouts of my buddy. For the next three-plus years, the mission of my young life was to discover where Ricky was - no mean feat in a time without search engines or social media or online people finders, like we have nowadays. I had to make do with the tools and methods of the time, as primitive as they were. Public libraries used to have rooms full of local phone books from across the nation - mainly for the large urban centers, but some smaller communities as well. At every library I visited in my travels, I scoured those White Pages, searching in vain for Ricky's dad's name. I mailed letters to addresses that I thought were close to his old "addressee unknown" one, a couple of numbers above or below his street address, hoping for a response containing any news regarding their erstwhile neighbor - I never received any replies. I also tried contacting every military base I could find in Massachusetts, then New England as a whole, trying to find out if Ricky's dad might have worked there - again, no responses. I even found an advertisement in the back of Boy's Life magazine, claiming to be a "People Finder" service that could find the location of anyone - I quickly sent the address some of the money I had saved from my paper route, hoping for good news. After three months, I received a letter from the company with several random addresses across the nation for people whose name were similar - but not identical - to my friend's father. In other words, it was a complete waste of money.

But still I persevered, continuing my search, past our move from Wisconsin to Maryland in 1974, through 1975 and 1976, and into 1977 - hoping against hope that I might find Ricky again someday. Now, this might not seem like much time now, at our current respective ages (I'm assuming that most of you reading this are well along in years . . . ) - but when you're eight/nine years old, three years is an eternity. Yet I stuck with it, and never lost faith in my quest.

. . . I would sometimes imagine what the day would be like when I finally found him, what our reconciliation would look like. We would meet up somewhere, either his house or mine, or maybe at a restaurant, and at first sight on one another we would shout, laugh and approach each other to shake hands, while someone like my dad or brother would say something like "The best friends are reunited once again!" Then we would run off to play somewhere, and everything would be just like it was years before - of that I was certain.

While I was doing all of this during the middle of the decade, the Carpenters' hit machine was began to wobble a bit. Changing music styles may have had something to do with it. However, a more likely cause were the constant demands on the duo and their relentless touring schedule; it began to take an obvious toll on the siblings. Karen began to obsess about her appearance; her weight fluctuated wildly, and eventually she developed anorexia nervosa. Richard was under constant stress to come up with that next chart-topping hit; he started taking Quaaludes to calm himself, but quickly became heavily addicted, frequently dosing himself into a semiconscious state.

The Carpenters did not put out an album in 1974, the first time since their 1969 debut that they didn't have an annual LP release, and the first clear indication to the public as to where their heads were at. Their next record, Horizon, was released in the spring of 1975. The album cover is particularly telling; you can literally see the exhaustion in Richard and Karen's faces. It was the group's first album in five years not to make the Top Ten. There were two big hits off of Horizon; the first was the Richard Carpenter-penned "Only Yesterday" - the final Carpenters song, and final original tune, to reach the Billboard Top Ten. The second hit was a cover of The Marvelettes' "Please Mr. Postman". From that point onward, the group's increasing reliance on cover songs would be a sign of things to come.

Their next album, A Kind Of Hush, came out in June 1976. Of the ten songs on this disc, only three were Richard Carpenter originals; the rest were covers of songs by Herman's Hermits, Neil Sedaka and Barry Manilow. By the time of this recording, Richard was a full-blown addict to downers, and that undoubtedly affected his output and production duties, which led to the album's underwhelming performance. Despite having two singles (the title track and "I Need To Be In Love") reach #1 on the Adult Contemporary charts, A Kind Of Hush was the first Carpenters album since their debut not to achieve platinum status, and it charted well below its predecessors. The album was released on the cusp of a full-blown disco craze in the U.S., and entering 1977 the Carpenters signature sound was becoming increasingly dated and not to the general record-buying public's taste. The group entered the studio again that year determined to reverse this trend by including more modern, experimental sounds in their music. Their efforts were hampered somewhat by their long-term reliance on their signature formula, and by Richard's continuing drug dependency. But as the year progressed they soldiered on, trying to make it - something - work.

By mid-1977, my family was making a change as well - we were moving again. My dad's tour at the Naval Academy was winding up, and a new position awaited him at a Naval Air Station on Massachusetts' South Shore. My folks went up to the new location a couple of weeks before we were scheduled to leave Annapolis to do some house-hunting, while my grandmother came up from Virginia to watch over us kids while they were gone. Of course, I asked my dad to keep his eyes open, to see if he ran across any signs of Ricky's family, as that area was their last known location. I wasn't really expecting anything - it was more or less just a hope.

So I was jolted when I received a phone call from my dad a few days later - he'd found them!

On his preliminary check-in at his new duty station, my dad discovered that Ricky's father was still deployed at the base, so he looked him up and spoke with him one evening. They were still living in the same house they moved into three years earlier; it seemed that the post office had misdirected my letters to them in 1974 due to some faulty/erroneous information they had on file. I had assumed that he had changed addresses, and therefore never tried to write to his old one again after those two letters came back to me. And by the time this postal faux pas was discovered and Ricky tried to respond to me with this news, we'd moved away from Wisconsin, so his letters to me were also returned as undeliverable. Government bureaucracy was therefore the cause of all those years of childhood angst! In any case, plans were made for Ricky and I to meet up in a couple of weeks, when we moved to the state - my birthday was shortly after our scheduled arrival time there, so it seemed like the perfect time to reunite.

We motored up from Maryland to Massachusetts in mid-July 1977, in the midst of a blistering heat wave, finally making it up to temporary family quarters at the air station that evening, as my parents weren't scheduled to close on the house they had chosen for a few more days (just as we settled into our rooms that night, we learned that New York City, the place we'd spent a miserable, sweaty afternoon crawling through on our way up north, had just been hit by a citywide power outage - we just missed being plunged into the middle of the Great New York Blackout of 1977 by mere hours). A day or two later was my birthday party; my parents had made reservations at the Ponderosa Steak House in nearby Hanover. On the way there, we picked Ricky up from his home nearby, the first time I'd laid eyes on him in nearly four years.

The guy who climbed into the Dodge van that day looked a lot different than the kid I'd known back in Norfolk - like me, he was no longer a little boy, but just a gawky tween, on the cusp of being a teenager. But to me, at that moment, he was still good ol' Ricky, and he grinned broadly as he settled into the middle seat of the van, next to me. I stuck out my hand, and he shook it warmly as my family looked on, and over the driver's seat my dad said, "The best friends are finally reunited - at last!", just as I'd always dreamed someone would say at that moment. Three years of diligent, focused effort had paid off, and that instant, that handshake, was by far the best moment in my life up to then.

We all got steaks and burgers at the Ponderosa, everyone gave me presents (Ricky brought one along too), and the wait staff brought out a little birthday dessert with candle on it for me at the end of the meal. Ricky and I sat next to each other at the restaurant and told the stories of our lives over the past four years - new schools, new friends, new activities and adventures. We talked about the old times back at Crown Point and our old friends there, many of which had long since fallen by the wayside. Despite the passing of time, it still felt as though the old connection was still there, and I was glad for it. After the dinner party was over, we drove Ricky back home, and we made promises to see each other again soon, and keep in touch once the school year started.

We called one another a couple of times during the summer break, and made plans to meet up again. But those plans always seemed to fall through for one reason or another. I wasn't too worried about it, though - we made promises to hang out at some point in the coming months. But those promises quickly fell by the wayside as the summer ended and classes began. I guess we both got busy, with me settling in to my new surroundings and all, and Ricky doing his thing. My family ended up living only a couple of towns over from Ricky's, but far enough away to make it inconvenient to visit. As the weeks and months progressed, we contacted each other less and less. As Halloween approached, Ricky faded more and more into the background of my life.

During that fall, the Carpenters finally finished their "modern, more mature" album, titled Passage. The group made their last major run at the '70s charts later that year, with their cover of Klaatu's "Calling Occupants Of Interplanetary Craft" (Klaatu was a Canadian prog-rock group of middling success, nowadays remembered mostly due to the rumor at the time that they were actually The Beatles secretly recording under a pseudonym).

Although the song was a major hit in the UK, it stalled at #32 here in America, and the album was the first by the band that failed to reach Gold status (500,000 copies sold). The group's glory years were pretty much at an end.

About a year or so later, I went with my parents to Hanover Mall, to check out the wares in Musicsmith and Booksmith while they visited some of the other stores there. While browsing through the racks, I was surprised to hear someone call my name; I looked up, and there was Ricky. If he hadn't have said anything, I probably wouldn't have recognized him - it had been that long. Anyway, I said "hi" back, and we chatted briefly, but to this day I can't recall anything specific that we talked about; it was all pretty inconsequential. We were both polite to one another, if a bit reserved. We didn't make any plans to hang out or meet up again later; in the end, we shook hands and sort of said "see ya", and both wandered off in our separate directions. Before I walked away, I recall turning and watching him leave, and feeling like, "Well, that's that . . ." - the old, intense friendship and devotion of our youth was fully gone, leaving just two geeky teenagers, now strangers to one another, trying to make it through the rest of their lives.

That was the last time I saw Ricky as a youth, and the last I knew of him for many, many years.

After the release of a compilation album and a disc of Christmas standards in 1978, the Carpenters went on a two-year hiatus while Richard and Karen left the music scene to battle their respective illnesses/addictions. Seemed sort of fitting that a strong link to my childhood would begin to fade away at that particular time . . .

The duo regrouped in 1981 for another album, Made In America, which was tepidly received; the album sold less than 200,000 units, and the three singles released from the album made little headway on the charts. After a short tour to less-than-capacity houses in support of the disc, Karen returned home to seek further treatment for her anorexia, which in the end was unsuccessful. During a visit with her parents, on February 4th, 1983, she was found unresponsive in her bedroom; her anorexia had led to extremely low weight and associated complicating health factors that led to heart failure. She was a month shy of 33 years old when she died.

Even during their early Seventies heyday, The Carpenters were scorned and widely dismissed as inconsequential by a vast majority of the record-buying public, and generally, their music was critically derided as formulaic AM-radio pap. This critical dismissal of their being too syrupy, bland and "white bread" continued even after Karen's death, and that assessment was assumed by the industry to be the final word on the duo until the late '80s.

On January 1st, 1989, CBS aired The Karen Carpenter Story, a biopic of her life and untimely death. To the network's surprise, not only was the program the top-rated program of the week (41% of U.S. households tuned in), it also became the highest-rated two-hour TV movie of that year, and was the third highest rated such program on any network during the ENTIRE 1980s. The show sparked a resurgent interest in the group's music, with sales of Carpenters albums skyrocketing by over 400 percent in the two weeks following the broadcast. And it marked the advent of a serious critical reassessment of their art and the Carpenters' place in music history. From The Life of Karen Carpenter: Little Girl Blue, the author Randy L. Schmidt wrote:

"There had been more than twenty years of jibes and sneers - two decades of dismissing even Karen's best recordings as bland, homogenized, and saccharine sweet - but with the airing of this low-budget dramatization, prejudice against the Carpenters' recordings began to fade, revealing an extraordinary change in perception... At times, it seemed almost cool to like The Carpenters. "Maybe it's just an overdue appreciation of a singer who, despite some terrible material, always had a pure pop voice," wrote Stephen Whitty in an article for the San Jose Mercury News. "Or maybe it's simply a twinge of '70s nostalgia. For baby boomers in their twenties, 'Close To You' was part of their AM radio childhoods..."

Schmidt nailed it with that last line. What the critics never seemed to take the time to understand was that the Carpenters were ingrained in the early years of many baby boomers, and their music was part of the soundtrack of our youth. Even now, a Carpenters tune is a reminder for many of us of a more almost-carefree time for kids, when playing with your friends outside all day was standard and being allowed to ride your bike on the neighborhood streets was a big deal . . . when Halloween and Christmas were HALLOWEEN!!! and CHRISTMAS!!! . . . when you could walk to school through the woods and wander far from home without being afraid or causing your parents undue anxiety . . . when families, friends and people actually interacted and engaged with one another face-to-face, rather than through a smartphone screen or not acknowledging anyone at all while constantly searching the web. Even in that age of political scandal, gas shortages, economic worries and war - both hot (Vietnam) and Cold - most of those issues didn't really affect the lives of children all that much. Our memories from that time (at least mine) tend to focus on the fun times and good stuff, which the Carpenters were part of.

It seems that more than a few folks in my generation, now involved in the music business, felt the same way. If I Were A Carpenter came out in the mid-90s, part of a spate of tribute

albums to artists from the '60s and '70s (Where The Pyramid Meets The Eye: A Tribute To Roky Erickson; Encomium: A Tribute To Led Zeppelin; Hard To Believe: A Kiss Covers Compilation, etc.) released during that period. At first glance, you'd be forgiven if you looked upon this release as an alt-rock piss-take on the Carpenters; a bunch of hipsters doing ironic, tongue-in-cheek versions of these songs in a insincere, "This band is so uncool, they're cool now - and therefore WE'RE cool for doing this!" vein . . . until you actually listened to the music on this disc. Almost every band on this compilation approaches their reimagining of these classics seriously, respectfully and with heartfelt conviction. If there is any sense of eye-winking condescension present here, it's extremely well hidden.

Here's the song lineup:

1. Goodbye To Love - American Music Club
2. Top Of The World - Shonen Knife
3. Superstar - Sonic Youth
4. (They Long To Be) Close To You - The Cranberries
5. For All We Know - Bettie Serveert
6. It's Going To Take Some Time - Dishwalla
7. Solitaire - Sheryl Crow
8. Hurting Each Other - Johnette Napolitano with Marc Moreland
9. Yesterday Once More - Redd Kross
10. Calling Occupants Of Interplanetary Craft - Babes In Toyland
11. Rainy Days And Mondays - Cracker
12. Let Me Be The One - Matthew Sweet
13. Bless The Beasts And Children - 4 Non Blondes
14. We've Only Just Begun - Grant Lee Buffalo

Richard Carpenter himself approved of this tribute and the artists involved in its making, even making a guest appearance on Matthew Sweet's cover of "Let Me Be The One". And he was sure that his sister would have been pleased and thrilled with it as well. "She'd like it for the same reasons I like it," he told HITS magazine. "The people involved thought enough of our music or her talent to take time out of their schedules to contribute, and that there continues to be, after all these years, so much interest in our music."

I picked my copy up at the old CD and Tape Exchange in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of Washington, DC sometime between 2006 and 2008.  I used to visit that store a lot, looking for bargain gems, and came across this during one of my visits - couldn't purchase it fast enough.

* * * * * * *

In early 2009, I received a Facebook message from out of the blue, from some guy stating that he lived near a kid with my name in Norfolk, VA in the early 70s, and who was wondering if that person and I were one and the same. It was Ricky - now known as Ric; the first I'd heard of him since that day in Hanover in the late '70s. I was glad to hear from him after so long, and in the following weeks we exchanged a series of messages telling one another about how our lives had progressed since our high school days.

Shortly after we reconnected, he invited me to a party he was throwing at his home near Boston. I drove up I-95 on a warm summer night, searching for a decent radio station and feeling more than a little anxiety and trepidation over my first meeting in over three decades with a guy who was now a veritable stranger, but who once was the best friend I had on this planet. Would it be weird? Would it turn out to be cool? What in the world would we talk about? I finally settled on the local oldies station, and listened distractedly to 'classic' rock and pop tunes from the '60s, '70s and '80s while I concentrated on the road and tried not to think about the destination and evening to come.

It turned out to be a wonderful evening, full of laughs and memories. Ric treated me like the guest of honor, introducing me to all of his friends and regaling them with our story. His dad also attended, the first time I'd seen him since I was nine, and he was still as nice and gregarious as I remembered. Everyone was cool there, and I ended up having a great time. I took my leave just after midnight; Ric walked me out to my car, which was parked around the corner. We chatted about nothing of note for a couple of minutes, then we shook hands warmly. As we shook, I couldn't help but recall another handshake between us, many years before, which ended up symbolizing something a lot different from what I thought it would - an ending, rather than a new beginning. Then I got into my car, put it in gear, and quietly headed for home.

I drove away from Ric's house pleased with the events of the evening, but also more than a little sad and regretful. I thought about what might have been if we had kept in touch throughout our youth, if there had been no break in communication. In an ideal world, Ricky and I would have, should have, been close friends throughout our lifetimes. I like to think that we would have gone on being long-distance buddies, sharing stories, thoughts and adventures into our teens, and as we got older meeting up for drinks or having occasional visits together with our respective families every once in a while - stuff like that. It's funny how seemingly the smallest quirks and vagaries - a missed appointment, a word said or not said at the right time, a misdirected letter - can have such huge consequences in our lives. The guy was once my very best friend, and if not for a random error, a slip in the vast machine that is our postal system, he might have very well remained so. But who can really say? All I know is that it would have been nice to have had that opportunity.

About halfway home, I flipped on the radio, which was still set on the oldies station. Now, what I'm going to say next sounds like bullshit, the contrived ending to a Hallmark Hall of Fame made-for-TV movie, and you all have every reason to doubt this . . . but I swear to you all this is 100% true:

The song that was playing on the station at that exact moment was the Carpenters' "Close To You".

Kismet . . . the world is a very weird, odd and funny place sometimes.

In honor of Ricky/Ric (who, I might add, I remain friends with to this day) and our many years of acquaintance, I'm pleased to present to you all the If I Was A Carpenter compilation, featuring interpretations of the duo's classic songs by several alternative bands of the era, released by A&M Records on September 13th, 1994. Enjoy, and as always, let me know what you think.

Please use the email link below to contact me, and I will reply with the download link(s) ASAP:

Send Email

The Beatles - Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Purple Chick) (6-disc set) (RS500 - #1)

Fifty years . . . wow.

What is widely considered to be the greatest rock album of all time was released half a century ago today.  That length of time is truly hard to fathom.  This album is still as fresh and vital as the day it came out.

What else can I say about this album that hasn't already been said, or will be said on its golden anniversary today? Nothing . . . so why continue to elaborate, and/or belabor the point?

Thus, here you are - the six-disc version of The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, collected, compiled and remastered by the good people at Purple Chick back in 2007. Here's the complete track lineup, in case you're interested:

Don't squander your hard-earned coin on the latest loudly-trumpeted "50th Anniversary Deluxe Rerelease - in glorious 5.1 sound!" - who gives a crap? The good stuff is all right here, and at no charge!

Enjoy, and as always, let me know what you think.

Please use the email link below to contact me, and I will reply with the download link(s) ASAP:

Send Email

(and yep - I'm back (kinda . . .) - frankly, I've always been here, and never left.)