Don't worry that it's not good enough for anyone else to hear

Continuing my trip back in time through the album charts

14/10/73 : Now And Then - The Carpenters

The Carpenters are an odd one - in theory, it's all a bit twee and/or cheesy and I should find it super annoying.  Yet somehow, they seem to carry it off and I find myself enjoying it and my mood lightened (even when she's singing about feeling sad).  However, I've only experienced their best-of album so I may find there are some horrors lurking on their "normal" albums - let's find out...

But, before we do that, we have a compilation album to firmly reject - Sing It Again Rod at #6.  No, please don't.  Actually, it does have "Handbags And Gladrags" on it, so it's not irredeemable but I have no intention of ever hearing his version of "Twistin' The Night Away".   So back to Karen and Richard...

Hmmm - I'm not sure it's quite a horror, but the second side is most definitely odd.  Starting with the much more normal first side, it contains "Sing" (written for Sesame Street) and "Jambalaya (On The Bayou)" (written by Hank Williams) and no-one can fault these for their Carpenteresque vibe - the rest of that side is fine, if somewhat forgettable.  The second side is much more peculiar though - it's a medley styled as a radio station complete with annoying DJ, competitions and phone-ins.  It starts with "Yesterday Once More" (actually written by Richard) with the rest being 60s tunes to which I showed varying levels of recognition - none of them are horrendous, but they all feel a little unnecessary.  All in all, it's very much a game of two halves but Karen obviously has a lovely voice throughout.  It does have a surprisingly cool album cover though (and check out those collars!).

We're all the way down at #10 this week on their 16th week of a 61 week run, having peaked at #2 in its tenth week.  And this is only their fourth most successful album in terms of chart weeks - the country was indeed Carpenter crazy back then.  The top five were Slade, Gilbert, Genesis (a new entry), Status Quo and The Rolling Stones (with an album I bizarrely met in 2020) and there were no other new entries in the top ten, with the next one being Lou Reed at #21.  You probably don't need me to tell you who the highest woman in the charts was and this week's Bowie count is five, including two in the top ten.

Wikipedia tells us that the medley is a result of an oldies revival that occurred in 1973 "as an outgrowth of the Rick Nelson Garden Party incident" - admit it, you're intrigued by that sentence, aren't you?  Well I was, so followed the link and it describes Rick Nelson (the original teen idol, apparently) being booed at a concert and then proceeds to give ABSOLUTELY NO CLUE why that would have resulted in an oldies revival.  

Back to The Carpenters, Wikipedia tells me that Karen did all the drumming on the album (there are some fine YouTube videos out there if you haven't seen them).  It also tells me that the house on the cover is their parents house, which the owners planned to demolish in 2008 because they were annoyed about all the fans visiting - so the fans mounted a campaign to get it saved (I'm sure the owners must have LOVED that).  And the car is a Ferrari Daytona - which doesn't feel very Carpenteresque at all!  There isn't a section on the critical reception (I suspect they were pretty critic-proof) but it did well commercially - #2 here and in the US (selling 2 million copies over there) and #1 in Japan.

"Customers also listened to" Janis Ian, Mary Hopkin and Helen Reddy - if you like a female voice, you like a female voice (and I do!).  But this fell into the musical curiosity section for me though with that second half being just too peculiar and dated to ever warrant revisiting - so I'll be sticking with their best-of.   It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if we were to meet them again earlier this year though...

07/10/73 - Cool album, cool cover
21/10/73 - An interesting, if not entirely enjoyable, listen