Posted on 05/25/2018 9:42:50 AM PDT by Morgana
The Carpenters were one of the biggest-selling American musical acts of all time. Between 1970 and 1984 brother and sister Richard and Karen Carpenter had 17 top 20 hits, including "Goodbye to Love", "Yesterday Once More", "Close to You" and "Rainy Days and Mondays". They notched up 10 gold singles, nine gold albums, one multi-platinum album and three Grammy awards. Karen's velvety voice and Richard's airy melodies and meticulously crafted arrangements stood in direct contrast to the louder, wilder rock dominating the rest of the charts at the time, yet they became immensely popular, selling more than 100m records.
Richard was the musical driving force but it was Karen's effortless voice that lay behind the Carpenters' hits. Promoted from behind the drums to star vocalist, she became one of the decade's most instantly recognisable female singers.
But there was a tragic discrepancy between her public and private selves. Offstage, away from the spotlight, she felt desperately unloved by her mother, Agnes, who favoured Richard, and struggled with low self-esteem, eventually developing anorexia nervosa from which she never recovered. She died at the age of 32.
In 1996 journalist Rob Hoerburger powerfully summed up Karen Carpenter's tribulations in a New York Times Magazine feature: "If anorexia has classically been defined as a young woman's struggle for control, then Karen was a prime candidate, for the two things she valued most in the world – her voice and her mother's love – were exclusively the property of her brother Richard. At least she would control the size of her own body." And control it she did. By September 1975 her weight fell to 6st 7lb (41kg).
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
Why not?
The metric system is a quaint relic of nineteenth century thought which made sense economically before calculators, but which now is only useful to committed globalists in furthering their incessant desire to completely erase cultures other than the one they propogate.
Hey, what about Chrissie Hynde (the Pretenders) ultra-sexy voice?
There is a funny story told. I don’t know if it’s true. According to the story, Karen and a friend of hers were driving somewhere with the radio on and she was singing along with all the songs on the radio. Her friend said, “You have a great soprano. Why don’t you ever use it?”
To which Karen replied, “The money’s in the basement.”
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I wonder if Barry Gibb knows that.
Karen Carpenter’s voice was liquid gold; one of the greatest voices of all time.
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I agree. But she may have been a better drummer, and I believe she preferred drumming to singing.
They didn’t write many of their hits. Paul Williams and Burt something or other were the main writers. And the Gershwins.
Why do we still use inches and feet ?
Probably they just do it to annoy the French.
Now that’s sick. Ugh!
“I still think her and her brother were lovers and thats why she was so messed up”
I knew her well enough to know that not to be true.
The remarkable thing to me was how she made it seem effortless, like she was just casually speaking. Karen didn't pack as much emotion into her vocals as, say, Linda Ronstadt (another amazing natural talent), but wow, what pipes.
How I wish that she'd had a chance to evolve more as a singer and shake herself loose from Richard's arrangements. BTW, I saw Richard on one of last year's episodes of "Jay Leno's Garage", where he was showing off some old car that he's owned for ages. I'm pretty sure that I saw what appeared to be a Parkinson's-like tremor problem.
I remember a local car dealership made a hilarious ad using the opening strains of one of the Carpenters’ hits:
“We’ve Only Just Begunnnn....”
“Yes we’ve only just begun to clear out our inventory of ‘78 Plymouths and Dodges !!”
Karen was worth was about 6 Million at the time of her death.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
I don’t know if that is true, or not. But I think the 14 million number you mention is way low. Probably more like $35 million in today’s money.
A mile is from the Latin for "one thousand"--one thousand paces. Probably for most people a pace (considered as from when one foot leaves the ground to when it is on the ground again, while walking) is more like a bit over 5 feet rather than 6 feet.
The other practical advantage of the English system is that the number of inches in a mile is almost the same as the number of astronomical units in a light year. So if you make a model of space where the earth is one inch from the sun, Proxima Centauri is about four and a quarter miles away, and the other stars are as many miles distant from your starting point as they are light years away from the sun.
At any rate you're in bad shape when your found eating out of a dog dish!
Then you would also know she denied her condition for a very long time.
>>One of the most beautiful voices of all time<<
I don’t know about the rest of you but when she sang she was singing right to ME!
no need to apologize, that’s been a standing joke in our family whenever Mama Cass or Karen Carpeter.
But in our story it’s a ham sandwich :)
A beautiful voice gone far too early.
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>> “ The only advantage that metric brings to the table is easier conversion—all by 10s” <<
Until you bring Gravity into the picture! Then the metric system completely falls apart with crazy numbers that are hard to remember, while our system soars with powers of two that are easy to remember.
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