Are you claiming that Paul Simon is on record saying that he hates the sound of his own voice?
I’m 40, and readily admit that most of the soft rock of my youth was cack. I thought I hated The Carpenters. Richard was way too plastic looking, and the sister-brother act screamed cheesy. But I heard “Top of the World” on a commercial about 10 years ago, and thought, “Hey, that’s kind of a good song…” About two weeks later I had bought their greatest hits album.
My tastes tend towards indie/alternative and funk/soul/hip-hop… but I love me some Karen Carpenter!
Paul Simon was a terrific singer, and was the primary singer on the majority of S&G songs. Gazrfunkel only got one or two solo’s per album, Simon got 5 or 6, and the rest were duets. Art Garfunkel sang a few of them too.
I just watched Paul host a first-season episode of SNL and he had Art on as a guest artist. As he introduced Art for a solo number (they also did several duets), he said that Art was always a better singer than he was. But it was pretty amusing (to me at least) that when he first introduced Art and they sat on a couple of stools on stage, he said, “So, Art, you’ve come crawling back at last…”
Yes. Yes I am.
His voice is high & reedy and he often didn’t reach the notes he was aiming for. More often than not, he yo-yos between singing and speaking the lines.
That’s not to say I don’t like his singing. I like most of Bob Dylan’s and Neil Young’s songs as well, and many find them irritating. I draw the line at Geddy Lee.
My point was that his imperfect singing made him more palatable to a wider audience. It humanized him and folks didn’t have to strain to sing along with him in the car. Garfunkel on the other hand…another outstanding voice like Carpenter’s. There are many good songwriters out there, and Art had a great voice. Why wasn’t he more successful as a solo artists. I say it’s because he had a high pure tone that people found hard to sing along with.
I saw them in concert twice when I lived in Austin. They were just freakin’ wonderful.
Karen would talk to the audience and get them laughing, then fire off a heart-wrenching love song that would have us sitting there with tears running down our faces. IMNSHO, she was head and shoulders the best female vocalist of the 20th century and her death was a tragic, tragic loss.
Better heard than watched. Zero sex appeal (which many say is the best thing about her.) Remember her crappy music video about meeting a guy aboard a plane and when they landed, the guy was mobbed by his family?
Thelink in Moog’s post in that thread almost brought tears to my eyes, she looked so happy behind the drums.
A voice like her’s doesn’t come along very often.
I watched that video recently a few times. Here it is. The Karen part is from 1:40 min. to 2:40. As a music video it’s not much.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1tjFIuyCAU
But what about her flirting with the gentleman across the aisle? The segment 2:10 min. to 2:40 is a half-minute window on what ‘might have been,’ acting-wise for Karen and for us. The performance looks effortless. She’s at ease and in control. She’s not radiating sexuality but vulnerability and warmth, I would say. She hits just the right note over and over in that half minute without overacting or falsely understating anything. Just like in her singing she takes you through a range of emotions every few seconds. As far as I know she never had acting lessons or acting experience. This video is a mixture of documentary footage in the arrival-at-the-airport scenes and real actors in the in-flight sequences. Karen is one of the real actors.
Notice in the 1:40 min. to 2:40 min. section the two lines, “So here I am with pockets-full of good intentions” … and … “I’m hangin’ on a hope but I’m all right.” The words “so” and “hope” are examples of her unique diction. The long o’s are exquisitely rounded. This can be heard in any Carpenters song from 1970’s “Close to You” all the way through – “through” is another word that is always a pleasure to hear her sing, not only for the long u but her always softly-trilled r’s – to the early 80’s.
There are as many distinctives in her pronunciation as any other great singer, Barbra Sreisand or Bing Crosby for instance, but as far as I know her voice and mannerisms were never comically (or seriously) imitated by anyone - as again Sreisand’s would have been - even though Karen was often the butt of unkind comments and mockery from the (rock) press and others in the business. Why not? I think because it was not possible. Her pronunciations are not idiosyncratic but are simply pure, not just a personally unique way of saying words but a better, a purer version of the words. She’s a pure singer in other ways. She always hit her notes exactly ‘on,’ never landing a little below and gliding up into them, for instance, unless she wanted to.
Karen said numerous times I Need To Be In Love was her favorite song that she sang. It is autobiographical and I think that is probably the reason in addition to its worth as a song.
I have often heard that story, that Buddy rich complimented her drumming, but always wondered whether true. Here’s a citation from a Modern Drummer Magazine article, “Karen Carpenter: A Drummer Who Sang,” by Ron Fogarty, posted here. Fogarty says:
As a child actor Cubby O’Brien was one of the Mouseketeers on The Mickey Mouse Club TV show and became the Carpenters’ road drummer from 1973 on.
Hal Blaine drummed on many Carpenters hits, and Ron Fogarty quotes him in the same article:
It’s hard for me to gauge her performing skills because the style of the day – the long, shapeless dress, the heavy hair, the blue eyeshadow… overwhelms her. It’s kind of metaphor for her life, no?
I still have trouble believing Karen Carpenter was only in her early 30s when she died. She looked and acted so much older. She was an old soul, I guess. I only saw, and still see, melancholy in her eyes when she sang, rarely a sparkle. I can see how men might respond to the vulnerability, but I just feel sad when I hear her voice.
For me the vulnerability is not sexual but rather elicits a feeling of wanting to protect her, like when seeing a newborn. It’s a good point about the lack of sparkle in her eyes. I think Karen extinguished the sparkle at will. You certainly feel its absence in her performance of Superstar (link at Icerigger’s Post 17). There’s infinite yearning but no hope whatsoever. No spring in the step either but a whole lot of facial expression and subtle upper body movement. Watch the arc she draws with the microphone at the end of the first verse. And where exactly are those eyes gazing, when they’re open?
In the melancholy Rainy Days and Mondays Karen does a considerable amount of half-smiling in lines like “Funny but is seems I always wind up here with you – nice to know somebody loves me.” As time went on she came more and more to smile warmly and extend her hands to the audience when she sang the line, expressing openly in the lyric what was a fact of her life. This particular performance also shows the counterpoint she often employed of keeping feet planted in one spot while moving every other part of her body. This performance is November 1971. She was 21 and remarkably poised.
The Rolling Stone Album Guide second edition of 1983 rated the first ten Carpenters albums all one star out of five, meaning: “Poor: a record where even technical competence is at question or it was remarkably ill-conceived.” (Except 1973’s The Singles which got 3 stars). Two stars would have been: “Mediocre: a record that is artistically insubstantial, though not truly wretched.” No Carpenters album attained two stars.
The review itself was one long trashing except in mentioning Karen’s voice stylings on Superstar and Rainy Days and Mondays it said, “… the former evoking a creeping panic and the latter deeply subsumed desire. These disarming singles can still catch a listener totally unawares.”
I actually think the reviewer had it backwards because for my two cents worth Superstar is subsumed desire and Rainy Days and Mondays creeping panic.
Recently I glanced at the latest 2004 (fourth) edition. Those ten albums are now:
Offering/Ticket To Ride 1969 ++
Close To You 1970 ++1/2
Carpenters 1971 ++++
A Song For You 1972 ++++
Now and Then 1973 ++
The Singles 1973 +++
Horizon 1975 ++1/2
A King of Hush 1976 ++1/2
Passage 1977 ++
Christmas Portrait 1978 ++
So in those twenty years “Christmas Portrait” went from “Poor: a record where even technical competence is at question or it was remarkably ill-conceived” to “Mediocre: a record that is artistically insubstantial, though not truly wretched.”
Indeed.
The Fourth Edition has this blurb:
Richard didn’t even arrange anything on “Christmas Portrait” except his own Merry Christmas Darling – he was strung out on sleeping pills at the time. Billy May and Peter Knight were brought in for the arranging, so the technical competence is certainly there even for those who simply won’t say a nice thing about Richard. We’ll just have to see what they say in another twenty years.