In 1968, Spectrum broke up, and the Carpenter siblings soldiered on as a duo. For a while, they were too new for old sounds, and too old for new ones. Meanwhile, Spectrum, the first band that Richard and Karen formed, had a hard time getting signed or even getting shows because their music was too soft and ponderous. Richard got a job playing old-timey music at Disneyland, but he got fired when he and his bandmates tried incorporating newer music into their act. Karen, meanwhile, started out playing drums before everyone around her realized that she had a rich and communicative singing voice. Richard liked classical music, and he was into rich and complex orchestrations, which made him an odd man out in the psychedelic era. But for a while, their musical ambitions weren’t in line with what was happening at the time. Richard and Karen Carpenter had been born in Connecticut, and they’d moved to the LA area when their parents realized that they had musical ambitions. It’s not hard to figure out why a lot of people might resent them, why they might become a punchline in a gory and experimental B-movie 48 years after their breakthrough. In doing so, they became a commercial juggernaut and helped to invent the somnambulant sound of ’70s studio-pop. But the Carpenters took that music, with all its lush and syrupy orchestration, and fused it with the starry-eyed sensibilities of late-’60s rock. Easy listening had done huge business all through the ’60s, and people like Herb Alpert, the man who signed the Carpenters to his A&M label, had made fortunes off of it. The Carpenters didn’t invent easy listening music. But we don’t truly realize how evil he is until he forces her to listen to him prattling on about the Carpenters.
He has dosed her with weapons-grade acid. He has sacrificed one of the members of his cult to a demonic cannibal biker gang. When that scene kicks in, we already know Jeremiah Sand is a bad guy. So that Carpenters line is a nice little moment of comedy before things get massively fucked up. Mandy, a hallucinatory and horrific revenge thriller, is one of my favorite movies of last year - I wrote about it here - but it’s also a dark, difficult watch, and that scene is one of the darkest and most difficult.
#THE CLOSER SONG MOVIE#
“Do you like the Carpenters? I think they’re sensational.” That’s something Jeremiah Sand, the monstrous cult-leader villain of the 2018 movie Mandy, says at the beginning of a particularly intense scene. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.
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