British guitarist analyses Karen Carpenter - the drummer who sang!!!

hello Phil here from wings of pegasus and welcome to another analysis video if you enjoy this video please give it a thumbs up and subscribe on the agenda tonight we're going back to 1976 we're going to be taking a look at Karen Carpenter and she's gonna be playing a drum solo so a little bit different for tonight I will be doing a video in the future on her vocals and probably mentioning them in this video anyway because they were so distinctive but this is from their first television special where Karen just going to be playing through a drum solo so let's get Karen up on screen and see how she gets on [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] I'm just going to jump in here it's difficult to interrupt this because it is just one planned piece and the link to this is going to be in the description below so you can watch the video the whole way through but just getting into this because I mentioned about other performers other artists and singers who play an instrument as well as singing and let's get this straight Caryn was a drummer who then sang it wasn't her initial aim to be a singer it just so happened that she started to sing at an audition with Joe Osborne from the wrecking crew she was there to play drums and when they heard her voice that Joe actually signed her up to his record they were straight away but they were taken aback by how good her voice was in terms of the quality of the tone and it wasn't her intention to sing and you can tell in this performance that the amount of time Karen has spent on the drums this isn't just somebody who's playing and has just picked up a little bit here and there this is dedicated practiced for years four hours a day also being able to sing and play at the same time there are other videos on YouTube go and search them out of Karen playing drums and singing her songs at the same time and that is a totally different level of ability to be able to play the drums authentically for a track that you're singing over the top of and never miss a beat you have some people who focus on their vocals their whole life in order to get as good as they can vocally and you have other people that are drummers who spend the whole life trying to get the best that they can at playing the drums and you've got Karen here who is such an accomplished drummer and singer really top level in both of those regards I think maybe the vocals just was something that came a little bit more naturally and her vocal tone which is something that I probably expect she didn't have to work out too much it was just her natural singing voice that sat in quite a low range in terms of that female voice but it has such a great quality to and unique quality to it that as soon as she started singing people started to listen because it sounded different and it was such a great tone that she could produce vocally she started playing in the school band initially she joined up just to get out of gym class and when she joined up with the band she was given the glockenspiel to play and she wasn't overly thrilled at the prospect of playing the glockenspiel so she asked if she could change the drums because her friend called Frankie Chavez played the drums and he was an accomplished player even though he was still the same age as Karen because he'd been playing from a very early age so she asked if she could change to playing drums and then her parents bought her a drum kit and this was quite an investment because it would have been just under two and a half thousand dollars at the time but Frankie then started to help teach her how to play the drums and she was also into drummer's at the time because that was the instrument she wanted to learn that's what she was passionate about so she was really into Joe Morello and Ringo Starr as well so she had that initial fire inside her to start playing the drums she had that drive to practice hours and hours every day because that's what she saw herself doing being a drummer and Karen's brother Richard was a few years older than she was so when he was at college he set up the Richard Carpenter trio with one of his friends called West Jacobs and Karen played drums in that band and she was only 15 at this point to put it in perspective she hadn't started doing any singing yet in fact they occasionally had a guest vocalist that would sing with them and that trio actually did sign a deal with RCA Records and I think they recorded a couple of tracks but none of those got released and she graduated from high school in 1967 and at this point she joined up with her brother Richard at the same College and she decided to sing in the choir with him and it was Frank Poehler who was the director of the choir at that time and he noticed that Karen had a great voice so he started working with her in order to achieve a three octave range sporting a couple of years to 1969 this is when they signed with A&M Records and this would have made Karen at 19 at the time and she was still playing the drums for the band but had started singing now as well and Richard was singing their first album that they released called offering it was later changed to Ticket to Ride the title for that album but Richard wrote 10 out of the 13 tracks and he sang on five of them and Karen sang on the rest of those tracks so she was starting to get a lot more involved with the vocals and just to mention as well as playing drums Karen laid down some bass on a couple of those tracks too and the change in name from offering to Ticket to Ride happened because they had a cover of ticket to ride on the album and it turned out to be their first single release and that got to number 54 in the charts and it's the next album in 1970 called close to you that had a couple of monster hits on it the first was they long to be close to you that got to number one in the US charts and that is written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David and the other track was we've only just begun and that got to number two in the charts and that was Roger Nichols and Paul Williams they wrote that track and now being a very well-known act having that mainstream success international success they had a problem because Karen was playing from behind the drums and she was only five foot four in height so amend the shoots quite small and people couldn't really see her in live performances so they convinced her Richard and the management at the time to get out to the front of the stage so that they now had that focal point and I think initially Karen struggled with that because she had always had that natural barrier between her and the audience whereas now she felt a bit of vulnerable just getting out to the front of the stage and only having a mic and it was just her but fortunately she did warm to her and started to now spend more time singing and less time drumming and I quickly want to mention as well just before we dive into the video again looking at the shot that we've got on screen because this was 1976 and what they're doing here is something called chromakeying and if you don't know what that is it's when you have a green screen behind you or you have a blue screen it's just a uniform color but then it gets edited out and you can put an image where that is I'll do it for some of my videos on this channel but this is a great example of it done really well because in the foreground we've got Karen playing a drum kit and behind her it would have been filmed as either a green or a blue screen and then the other footage that they're filmed would then be placed behind her it just stands out to me because this is the mid 70s and it's a great example of it done really well it's one of those things that because I edit videos myself I look at this and think it's really cool for the time but let's get back into the video [Music] and there we have it what a great performance and I know Karen referred to herself as a drummer who sang and this really shows her ability on the drum kit and a lot of people might not even know that Karen played the drums to this level because just hearing her on the radio you would just assume that she was a singer because she was so great vocally and how many vocalists have we seen in bands that have started singing through necessity not through choice and another one this just popped into my mind phil collins another drummer drumming was his passion but then he started singing through necessity and i'd say that he's got a great voice as well so often the times of having a passion for an instrument but then also not being able to find a singer sometimes the easiest option is just to learn to sing yourself I think Karen was one of those people who just had a naturally great tone to her voice she of course worked to her singing like I said at college she had a few years of singing lessons and developing her range but just that vocal quality she has and this is something that karen said herself that the money's in the basement and what she meant by that was that her singing range was quite low she wasn't having to really scream for notes up high she just sang where she had that rich vocal tone that connected with so many people she could tell a great story in that low register and why change it when it's that good and it certainly was in the basement that lower vocal tone was something that couldn't be matched with other vocalists at the time another thing that they did in the studio to make use of all of Karen's quality vocally and the tone that she had was to use really close miking positions so it means that the microphones right by the mouth in order to pick up as much detail in the vocal as possible so now that Karen was moving towards being the sing out of the front of the stage she is moving away from playing the drums in the studio as well but let's bear in mind that's on the first album ticket too right she played all of the drums on that album and then also on now and then she played all of the drums apart from one track so they then got how Blaine involved and Hal started to take over some of the playing in the studio and he'll still stated that Karen played on many of the studio cuts but in the studio sessions that he was involved with it helped to have another drummer because of the bleeding that you'll get on the microphone especially in recording of demos and ideas for songs you can imagine that if Karen is singing or trying to get down a demo you'd get bleeding both ways in terms of recording the drums you'd hear her vocal while she was playing and vice versa when she's recording her vocal you'll get the drums bleeding onto that microphone bleeding means that you can hear the drums going at the same time and will mask over the vocal that she's trying to record so it works both ways but to have somebody else potentially in a different room playing the drums and then you can get down the vocal it means that you don't get any of that bleeding so they had a lot of success throughout the 70s and unfortunately Richard became addicted to sedative drugs and in 1979 is when he decided to try and tackle his addiction and get treatment for it so that's when Karen did her solo album and it was a bit of a departure from their original sound maybe a little bit more up-tempo and using Karen's higher register vocally and when it was played to Richard and record label executives they weren't mad about the result but Quincy Jones heard it and said that all it needs is a remix and you can release it but the record label anm records shelved that album and the other thing is that they charged Karen four hundred thousand dollars for the recording of that album because that's what they spent on it and then they didn't release it and this is something that I mentioned all the time in my videos if you sign a record deal with a record label it's alone a four hundred thousand dollar record deal is alone so because they didn't even try and sell it they charged in that amount of money for the recording and this is the other thing that $400,000 is a lot of money it's not something that Karen could just go to the bank and take out and say there you go and I've still got plenty left so it was decided that will be taken out of their future royalties obviously the record label receive all of those oil teas and rather than pay them they are now holding that money until they've earned $400,000 so it means even going into the future and recording whenever you play or whenever you sell a record you know you're not getting paid for that you could have paid like half a million dollars almost before you can actually start to make money yourself a portion of that solo album was released in 1989 with love lines and then the album was released fully in 1996 and that was just called Karen Carpenter and unfortunately we all know the story about Karen who passed away at age 32 and it put a spotlight on anorexia because nobody had been in the spotlight and struggled with that condition the way that Karen did and I think it all started when she saw a picture of herself wearing some clothing that was baggy and it made her look bigger than she was and it was just a downhill spiral from then on really and I think she used diuretics to help speed up that metabolism to get the food just through the body even faster so that she didn't put on a lot of weight well she didn't put on anyway in fact she lost a lot of weight over a very short space of time in the mid-70s I think it was noticeable and the other thing was that she went through a divorce in the early 80s as well and it was actually when she was due to sign the divorce papers is when she collapsed and they found that her heart was pumping at one beat every 10 seconds and just a few days earlier she had been discussing with Richard about the new tour so it wasn't as if she was feeling that bad she felt like she would go and tour so I think it was just the fact that she'd lost so much weight and her body was still struggling with that and also maybe the use of things to help her vomit in order to not store the food that she'd eaten and this is all anorexia it's not being addicted to a drug per se is being addicted to looking thin and being a lightweight and is a mental condition and takes a hell of a lot to be treated and Karen really brought that into the spotlight and has subsequently made such a difference to so many people's lives who have struggled with this illness so unfortunately a really sad ending to the story having that marriage breakdown which must have caused so much stress and anorexia I think it was just a vicious spiral that unfortunately couldn't be controlled but thankfully we have these videos and her recordings that we can listen to because they are in constant airplay because of the quality of Karen's voice but this video really puts a spotlight on her ability and her talent as a drummer as a musician as an instrumentalist but thank you so much for suggesting this video for me to take a look at and keep their suggestions coming in the comments below let me know what you guys think and if you like this video please give it a thumbs up and subscribe and I'll see you guys at the next one rock

Channel: Wings of Pegasus

Views: 211,453

Keywords: richard, karen, carpenter, carpenters, the, john, denver, drum, drums, drumming, girl, female, drummer, 1976, music, retro, marching, band, karen carpenter drumming, karen carpenter story, karen carpenter, wings of pegasus, wingsofpegasus, british guitarist analyses karen carpenter - the drummer who sang!!!, british guitarist analysis, british guitarist reacts

Id: BCMyQD1-LYc

Length: 19min 50sec (1190 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 24 2019