Carpenters: Karen and Richard's Untold Story by Ray Coleman

From the Publisher

We've Only Just Begun, Close To You, Top Of The World: these are just a few of the bestselling hits that rocketed the Carpenters to the top of the charts. Karen and Richard typified the best of America's golden youth, selling nearly a hundred million recordings and leaving an indelible mark on the landscape of popular music. Written with the cooperation of Richard Carpenter and with a foreword by Herb Alpert, this definitive biography traces the story of the Carpenters from their white-picket-fence upbringing in Connecticut through their move to California and struggle for recognition. It portrays Richard as the brain and architect behind a winning musical collaboration with Karen its heart and voice; and it explores the pressures of their meteoric rise. Here, also, for the first time, in detail, is the graphic, heartrending story of a brother and sister's personal battles: while Karen dieted incessantly, Richard fought an addiction to pills. Bestselling author Ray Coleman, who has known the Carpenters since their earliest successes, investigates every aspect of how Richard and Karen arrived at their unique sound. He focuses on their exceptional interaction and examines the difficulties that came with fame, contributing in part to Karen's shocking death from anorexia nervosa in 1983 at the age of thirty-two. Drawing on conversations over the years with Richard and Karen, their mother, the family, close friends, Karen's therapist, fellow musicians, and including family photographs and memorabilia, Ray Coleman has written not only the first biography of an extraordinary partnership but a tribute to Karen's yearning yet crystalline voice that was - and still is - cherished by millions.

BookList

The Carpenters' music was assailed in its time as "treacle, drippy easy listening, or even schlock music." Its critics proceeded, however, from a false premise--that it was rock music. In the 1970s--the Carpenters' career zenith--rock was "Rock", self-important and serious. But the Carpenters were creating pop, light and melodic. As the 1970s recede into history, the Carpenters' gentle music has begun to be appreciated on its own merits. It belongs to a lineage that includes Georgia Gibbs and, at its most powerful, Judy Garland, rather than that of the Carpenters' contemporaries Led Zeppelin and David Bowie. Coleman's authorized biography treats Karen and Richard Carpenter sympathetically, recounting her struggles with anorexia nervosa and evaluating her vocal abilities and his arranging talents as elements of a pop rather than a rock style. Their music may not have taken any risks, Coleman concludes, but it was well crafted and well executed. (The selected discography that follows the main text reminds us how extensive it was, too.) Regardless of how one feels about the Carpenters' music, Coleman's account of the brother-sister act is compelling, especially in its portrait of Karen as a talented, famous young woman in the grips of an overpowering disease then little known or understood.

Product Details