“Passage,” by Carpenters

Richard and Karen Carpenter were, arguably, the most popular and influential North American pop music act of the early part of the 1970’s, placing a remarkable 15 top 40 singles in the first half of the decade and holding a ubiquitous presence in popular culture during that timeframe, with constant touring, television specials, guest appearances, and even shout-outs on The Brady Bunch! Seriously. The one-and-only Marsha Brady name-checked the Carpenters in the Davy Jones episode. Rock critics, on the other hand, while conceding raw talent and admitting fondness for Karen’s unmistakable vocals and Richard’s composing and arranging, universally hounded the duo throughout their meteoric success. And the reason? Carpenters were, simply put, not cool. After all, they were a nerdy brother-sister act from suburban Downey, California, and in the early-1970’s, Rolling Stone magazine cast them out of the “cool kids club.”

Rock-and-Roll Hall of Fame-er, Linda Rondstadt, recently noted with dismay how Rolling Stone magazine widely determined “rock cred” and peddled a “cooler-than-thou” posture in the industry:

That was sort of the attitude of wanting to get with the hipper side. But I never bought into that. It was so competitive and all about looking down at other people and trying to trip them up and make them look bad…Rolling Stone magazine really encouraged that attitude. It was kind of Puritanism, and I never liked it.

Carpenters’ 1975 album, Horizon, a departure from their early 1970’s, trend-setting style, was thought to be the album that would finally bring credibility to the duo, the anticipation of which ironically placed them on the coveted cover of Rolling Stone in the summer of 1974. In the winter of 1974, the duo released the first single from that album, the bubbly, and, in hindsight, throwaway remake of the Marvelette’s 1961 #1 hit, “Please Mr. Postman,” which itself hit the #1 spot in January of 1975, setting the stage for the coming-of-age for the pop duo. The follow-up single, “Only Yesterday,” was released in March of that year, reaching an anticipated #4 in late May (and serving as the duo’s last top 10 single in the U.S.). And while the Horizon album was released the next month, due to label delays and possible over-confidence, the next single, “Solitaire,” wasn’t released until July and only reached #17. The Horizon album only reached #13 on the album charts, signaling the beginning of the long-term downward spiral of the duo that plagued the siblings for the remainder of Karen’s short life.

Richard and Karen rebounded by dutifully (if not mechanically), returning to the studio that winter to record their follow-up, the paint-by-numbers approach of an album, A Kind Of Hush. The title tune was a cover of Herman’s Hermits 1967 top five hit, and Carpenters’ version eked to #12 on the pop charts, further indicating a drop in the duo’s popularity, being the first lead single from a Carpenters album to fall short of the Top 5 since the group's debut, while the #33 chart peak of the A Kind of Hush album was their first Top 20 album shortfall also since their debut. The subsequent singles from that album, “I Need ToBe In Love,” and “Goofus,” both fell short of expectations in the summer of 1976, peaking at #25 and #56, respectively.

All of this set the stage for their next album, Passage, of which Richard recalls,

I was hardly surprised then, when I heard from (A&M label boss) Jerry Moss, relating his concern about relatively lackluster sales by A&M’s biggest worldwide record sellers…us.  As an owner’s eyes fall on the manager when a fine baseball team doesn’t perform as expected, so the eyes of the record company fall on the producer when a successful artist’s record sales falter. This, by the by, is the way it should be, so I was perfectly willing to let someone else take over my role; it would be a lot less work for me and, as previously mentioned (Carpenter was battling addiction to Quaaludes at the time), I was not 100% myself. The problem was, not one major producer would sign on; radio was not quite as friendly at that time to our type of sound and to be honest, my track record on the whole was a tough act to follow. Accordingly, I remained producer, but I did try to approach this new project from a different angle, hence my selection of songs for this album made Passage a bit of a departure from our previous recordings.

“A bit of a departure” is putting it mildly. This album, to my ear, is a pull-out-all-the-stops, shotgun approach to record making and smacked of desperation and audience pandering. The duo, per Richard’s above recollection, was desperate for a MEGA hit record and made an album designed to appeal to everyone, and in doing so, made an album that appealed to relatively few at the time (but was not altogether unsuccessful, as singles “All You Get From Love Is A Love Song” and “Calling Occupants Of Interplanetary Craft” both scraped the surface of the Top 40 in 1977 as well as the surprise Country Top 10 hit, “Sweet, Sweet Smile," the following Spring). 

I’ll discuss the Passage album, here, song by song:

B’Wana She No Home: This jazz-fusion opener, while featuring a fun, funky, stylistic vocal departure for Karen, was a cringe-worthy, privileged slice of oblivious racism, where the narrator barks at her paid, brown-skinned help, “Got to learn these words, and I know you will, or I'll send you right back to Guayaquil,” and “I want you to speak the English right; I want you to smile and be polite…” Ugh. Gawdawful. Of the hundreds of funky songs out there at that time, why’d they have to pick that one?

All You Get From Love Is A Love Song: More along the lines of what one might expect from a Carpenters track at that time and featuring Tom Scott on saxophone, this song was understandably pulled as the album’s first single, reaching the top 40 (#35) in the summer of 1977. This jazzy pop tune, while not one of their best-known singles, features a playful, pre-MTV music video and remains a fan favorite.

I Just Fall In Love Again: If released in May, 1978, this old-fashioned love song would have pre-dated Anne Murray’s #12 hit by one year and would have easily gone as high on the Billboard chart, if not higher. A&M Records decided not to release it as a single, because it was considered too long for Top 40 radio stations to play at the time (it was just over 4 minutes). Instead, it remained a forgotten album track. Fun fact: Carpenters also recorded another would-be hit, “Trying To Get The Feeling Again,” in 1975, during their Horizon recording sessions, but they shelved the track, not seeing its hit potential, only to have Barry Manilow’s version peak at #10 the following year.

On The Balcony Of The Casa Rosada / Don’t Cry For Me Argentina: It takes over three minutes to get to Karen’s remarkable, higher-register vocal on this orchestral tune from Evita, but Carpenter’s performance on this track is, by my ear, the definitive version of this well-known song, which has been covered by, officially, and as of 2015, everybody. I’m glad they recorded it.

Sweet, Sweet Smile: The third and final single release from Passage, this Juice Newton tune (“Queen Of Hearts,” “Break It To Me Gently,” “Love’s Been A Little Bit Hard On Me”) was intended for Newton, herself, to record, but first went to Carpenters when Newton's manager played the demo for Karen, who brought it to Richard, who noted, "I liked it immediately...now there's one that, to me, should have done better than it did…I think if someone else had done it at that time, it would have been a bigger hit." Not that the song was a complete flop, falling just short of the American Top 40 at #44 and giving the duo their sole Country hit, rising as high as #8 on the Country chart and as high as #7 on the Billboard Easy Listening chart.

Two Sides: Another country-flavored tune, this particular track was a bit of a departure for the duo, as the background vocals on the verses feature a Karen duet (as opposed to their stacked vocals), something the duo initially tried on their previous album, A Kind Of Hush, with album tracks and fan favorites, “You” and “I Have You.” I suspect this song might have been a hit on the Country charts in the winter of 1977 or the spring of 1978 had it been released as a single.

Man Smart, Woman Smarter: Originally a calypso tune harkening back to the 1930’s, the duo’s funky little head-scratcher of a recording whistles, wheezes, jerks, pops, and burps (Literally. There’s an audible burp in there; I’m not kidding.). And after many years of wondering, “why this song?” I think I’ve recently landed on what might have been going on: the duo, always weary of their saccharine image (which, in hindsight, turned-out to be fairly spot-on), started pushing back (hard) against the “goody four shoes,” “Pepsodent Twins” image on which the rock press overly focused on, especially as more and more Top 40 stations ignored their “unhip” love songs. It was the mid-Seventies, after all, and the specter of Disco was rising with New Wave close behind. The Clash and The Sex Pistols released their debut albums that year, Elvis died in August, and fly-by-night acts like The Captain & Tennille had stolen the Carpenters’ pop crown two years previous by performing similarly silly (“Muscrat Love”) and/or irreverent songs (“Love Will Keep Us Together”).

I suspect songs like “Man Smart, Woman Smarter” (and “Goofus,” and “B’Wana She No Home,” and “Calling Occupants Of Interplanetary Craft”) were a strategic career move to show a less stodgy, more playful image. Bad call. And when it didn’t work (and after a stint in rehab for Richard and a shelved solo album from Karen), the siblings reverted back to formula on their follow-up album, 1981’s Made In America, and while it boasted their final top 20 hit, “Touch Me When We’re Dancing (#16), the album failed to find an audience, and subsequent singles only scraped the bottom of the Hot 100. Maybe the duo had run their hit-making cycle and (had Karen lived) were destined to spend the remainder of the 1980’s in no-hit, adult contemporary hell, only to reemerge in the 1990’s as an oldies act with a flukey hit single or two from a movie or an unexpected duet with Bryan Adams or Gloria Estafan. Who knows? Maybe they were onto something and could have had an unexpected and extended hit-making shelf life had they stuck with recording goofy songs like this one:

Calling Occupants Of Interplanetary Craft (The Recognized Anthem Of World Contact Day): Released as the second single to Passage, Carpenters’ version of “Occupants” climbed to #32 and was first released by Canadian rock group, Klaatu. John Woloschuk, one of the song's writers, noted the idea for this track came from an actual event: in the early 1950’s, the "International Flying Saucer Bureau" sent a bulletin to all its members asking them to participate in "World Contact Day," where, at a certain date and time, members would collectively send out, telepathically, a message to nearby visitors in space. The message began with, "Calling occupants of interplanetary craft…"

And a groovy, silly, space-age song was born. The duo have often noted that their song was well underway well before the “space craze” of the later part of the 1970’s, recalling taking a break from recording the song to watch Star Wars the week it was released. I was 6 years old hearing this song when my sister played it for my siblings and me on her wood-grained stereo. Tony Peluso’s reprised, “All Hit Radi-ooooo!” DJ bit from the Now & Then album was hilarious to us at the time, especially the “aliens” monotone, robotic voices and the mimicked, “ba-by” that bled into the first few seconds of the song. It was a laugh riot. Who could ever think these two wacky kids from Downey were nerdy?

The framed artwork for this album hangs in my office today; it’s probably their best album cover (in a career of poorly-conceived album artwork). But beyond being the least-known Carpenters album of the 1970’s and their first album since their 1969 debut not to make the Top 40, what most intrigues me about Passage is not the calculated approach to getting a hit record, nor the daring-to-questionable song choices, but it’s brevity, at only eight songs. Were they so burned out and second-guessing by then that they couldn’t add two more songs to make ten? Probably. 

To wit, a tender, unreleased track from the Passage sessions, “You’re TheOne,” an exquisitely performed ballad (and a potential 1977 top 40 hit) that finally surfaced on the 1988 CBS made-for-TV Carpenters movie, reiterated the questionable artistic choices the duo was making at that time, further exposing the fact that, in 1977, all was not well in Carpentersville. With “You’re The One” being brushed aside, one has to wonder what other lost gems might remain in the vaults? The relative failure of this album led the duo limping through the sessions for their unexpectedly triumphant (and essential) Christmas album the following year, and after that, a career free-fall from which they never recovered. Nevertheless, the album holds some of the duo’s most imaginative performances, Karen was still in terrific voice, and Passage is, unquestionably, the most adventurous album the group ever recorded.

The Last Of The Monkees

You’ve heard the story: The Monkees were a made-for-TV rock band that’s first two albums were engineered in a hit-making studio-lab featuring the talent of pop music’s most reliable songwriting and studio pros of the moment. The rock press maligned the foursome for not playing their own instruments on the recordings and for not writing their own songs (which, today, is normative). But the lads, to their great credit, ultimately became a real band, writing, playing, and producing the entirety of their third album, Headquarters. As noted by All Music Guide, the albums the band made after wrestling artistic control from Don Kirchner proved “…they were legitimate musicians with enough brains, heart, and soul as anyone else claiming to be a real band...” And Micky Dolenz famously likens The Monkees becoming a legitimate band to Leonard Nimoy becoming a real Vulcan. And yet it happened.

The television program ended after two short, successful seasons, after which the radio hits quickly dried up (no longer having a weekly vehicle to promote the songs), which is unfortunate for Top 40 radio in the late 1960’s, as their subsequent, self-directed albums proved no less engaging. I’ll be addressing them here, taken together – the final four original albums by The Monkees. I encountered Monkee-mania in its second (or maybe third?) iteration, through the MTV-fueled, twentieth Anniversary resurgence, and as a result, a new generation of fans and I were exposed, ad nauseam, to the band’s 12 top-40 hits, mostly coming from their first five million-selling albums, which mainly demonstrated the vision of the producers, music directors, and the television program, but gave little insight into the four individual members of the band. I’d argue that the final four original albums, while not only revealing so much more about Nesmith, Jones, Thorkelson, and Dolenz, also contain some of group’s best musical moments.

The downward sales spiral and the band’s ultimate demise started with their ill-fated film, Head. The idea behind the movie was to explode the whole mythology behind The Monkees: “a manufactured image with no philosophies.” It was a declaration of independence, of sorts, for the four actors/musicians, who were eager to shed the baggage of the kid-friendly television program. The film touched upon every movie genre imaginable as well as a few made-up ones as well, and it ended where it began, with the band running away from what it had become and featuring some of the best pop songs of the moment, from the psychedelic warmth of the movie’s theme song, the Goffin/King gem, “The Porpoise Song,” to Nesmith’s rocking barn-burner, “Circle Sky,” to the mellow gold, Carole King-penned, “As We Go Along.” Interspersed with snippets of dialogue from the film, the soundtrack is eclectic, eccentric, fun, and well-worth seeking out. Rhino recently released a 60-track collector’s edition of the soundtrack, featuring live versions and alternate vocal tracks as well as a few interviews from the era. 

After Head, Tork left, and then there were three. Instant Replay was the first album from the group that wasn’t connected to either a television program or to a film. Released just two months after the film soundtrack, the powers-that-be at Colgems apparently presumed the band still had sales potential. And while not boasting any true hit singles, the album did manage to eke its way up #32 on the album charts in the spring of 1969. The first single, the Boyce and Hart-penned, “Tear Drop City,” was an outtake from some of their earliest 1966 recording sessions and sounds suspiciously similar to their #1 debut single, “Last Train To Clarksville.” Truth was, it was reportedly an attempt by the band to reclaim territory on the pop charts by reaching into the hit-filled Kirchner vaults. Either way, it was a likable, sunny pop song that just missed the top 40 that summer, peaking at #56. Other gems on this forgotten album include the Goffin/King songs, “I Won’t Be The Same Without Her” and “A Man Without A Dream,” Jones’ acidic vocal on “You and I,” which boasted equally acidic guitar work by Neil Young, and the Neil Sadaka/Carole Bayer-Sager coulda-been-a-hit-in-1966, “The Girl I Left Behind Me.” The album’s closer, the McCartney-esque, bombastically schizophrenic cat biography, “Shorty Blackwell,” featured three separate, yet intertwining sonic movements and was written by Dolenz, foreshadowing the quirky art pop to come from the actor turned drummer turned songwriter (and my favorite Monkee: I love you, Micky Dolenz!).

The Monkees Present: Micky, David, Michael was originally conceived back when Peter Tork was still with the group and had been planned as a double album, devoting one side to each Monkee. With Tork absent and sales dwindling, the main concept was retained, but the project abbreviated to two sides, with songs contributed separately by the remaining three. Standout tracks include Nesmith’s country-rock, “Good Clean Fun,” (#82) one of the albums failed singles, and the Nesmith’s fan-favorite and leadoff single, “Listen To The Band” (#63). Davy submitted some of his best recorded efforts ever in tried-and-true starry-eyed mode for which he had become most known, the self-penned, “If I Knew” and the eerie, lounge-act number, “French Song,” as well as a surprising rocker written by the reliable tunesmiths, Boyce and Hart, “Looking For The Good Times.” As with the last LP, Micky Dolenz turned-in the most experimental tracks, with the terse album opener, “Little Girl,” and the similarly claustrophobic and excellent, “Bye-Bye, Baby, Bye-Bye.” Dolenz also contributed the album’s third failed single, the overtly political and tightly coiled, “Mommy and Daddy,” (#109). More musically gifted than many might have presumed, I’ve often wondered what might have happened had Dolenz chosen to devote himself to a musical, post-Monkees career (sigh...).

After Present, Nesmith left, and then there were two. Changes was the final “original” Monkees album, which featured the two actors in the band, Dolenz and Jones, with industry insiders joking that the final remaining band member would eventually release an album as “The Monkee.” **Good one, industry insiders** This contractual obligation of an album was produced and largely written by Jeff Barry and Andy Kim (“Rock Me Gently,” #1, 1974) and is surprisingly strong. By my ear, Changes is a perfect representation of the type of preteen-oriented bubblegum music being released around that time (e.g., “A-B-C,” The Jackson 5, “Sugar, Sugar,” The Archies – which was another Andy Kim song, by the way, “Dizzy,” Tommy Roe, “Simon Says,” 1910 Fruitgum, “I Think I Love You,” Partridge Family…). Standouts include the album opener and sole single, “Oh, My My” (#98), the mournful, meandering melody of “Ticket On A Ferry Ride,” and “You’re So Good To Me,” which rounds out the album’s first three tunes. “Acapulco Sun” and the Dolenz-penned, playful, country-R&B tune, “Midnight Train,” which was recorded during the sessions for the previous album, also hold their own on this universally ignored, final Monkees release. While neither Jones nor Dolenz reported having fond memories of the recording sessions or of the album, it’s a surprisingly enjoyable and playful Polaroid of that era in pop music.

After The Monkees, Tork wandered aimlessly through the next two decades doing a stint in prison for marijuana possession and meandering in and out of various rock bands. Nesmith enjoyed modest success as a country-rock pioneer and early adopter of music videos, and the final two Monkees quietly made their ways into the tumultuous new decade, with Jones releasing a failed solo album in 1971 and making ends meet with guest appearances on The Brady Bunch, etc., and Dolenz, financially solvent from the success of The Monkees, eventually carving out a career for himself as a television director in the UK. Twenty years later came the MTV-fueled reunion extravaganza, which gave the group an unexpected (and unnecessary?) half-life, providing opportunity for the group to release new recordings in the late 1980’s and into the 1990’s in various incarnations. None of the new material comes close to the quality of their 1960’s recordings, and The Monkees story came to a sad end with Jones’ untimely death in 2012. “Goodnight, goodnight everybody; everybody everywhere, goodnight.”