![]() ![]() “Then, of course, rock surfaced in 1955-56, and they co-mingled,” he says. “Listening to the Top 40 stations back then, even before rock hit, you’d get a variety - you’d have pop acts, and then if the DJ liked it, he’d play Homer and Jethro. “As a student back then, for a quarter or 50 cents, you could watch Van Cliburn or Arthur Rubenstein rehearsing with the New Haven Symphony,” he says.īut his music education was equally shaped by local radio. He took some classical classes at Yale and played fill-in organ at the local Methodist Church. ![]() “I played piano for a dance school in West Haven,” he recalled. There were also legitimate jobs back then. “Between the slicked-back hair, the glasses and a suit, I could play all these dives and was never carded.”Īt clubs like The Coast Inn, if they suspected Carpenter was underaged, “They never asked me,” he says. “Back then I had my hair slicked back and had these black horn-rimmed glasses,” Carpenter says. His own influences as a young man came in New Haven, where he performed in dark nightclubs before he was old enough to drive. And anything that strong is going to be heard and passed to another generation.” “But obviously we were selling tens of millions of records, too. That made them the ultimate squares –“to some people,” Carpenter says. The Carpenters’ image in the hard-rock ’70s made them seem like Nixon Youth - a notion furthered by a White House command performance around the time of Watergate. The hipness factor comes about 20 years later. New interpretations of Carpenters material has been a growth industry in the 1990s, especially after hip young underground bands like Sonic Youth and Redd Cross contributed to “If I Were a Carpenter,” an acclaimed tribute album. “The thing was trying to come up with something new, using certain chord changes I became aware of back even when Karen and I were performing them that I hadn’t had a chance to use,” he says. Some of the group’s biggest hits, including “Sing,” “Goodbye to Love,” “Rainy Days and Mondays” and “Superstar” also are on the album. He mixes in some of the more obscure Carpenters material with some new songs, including “Karen’s Theme,” which grew out of music he wrote for the made-for-TV “Karen Carpenter Story” in 1989. ![]()
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