Sonic Youth Superstar carpenders album9/28/2023 ![]() During their recording career, they became famous for making America feel good at a time when there was so much to feel bad about. Which is funny, because not even their fans look at them as anything like the voice of a generation. ![]() Bringing them to Southern California was a need to share and, OK, oversharehow and why the Carpenters matter. All told there are about 150 people present, coming from Belgium, Japan, Mexico and around the United States. The farm girl from Saskatchewan who heard the music on her transistor radio and performs it today on stages all over the world. A schoolteacher from Florida, hoping to spread the word about anorexia nervosa, the affliction that led to the congestive heart failure that killed Karen in 1982 at age 32. A mother and son from Arkansas, who sang hymns together in their church and today sing Carpenters songs outside it. I wanted to play, write, produce, just like he did.” “I decided I had to study music and become Richard Carpenter. An older brother introduced him to their 1970 breakthrough hit “(They Long to Be) Close to You,” and pretty soon it was over for him. “My father was abusive and there were all these other issues going on.” He was 9 or 10, living in a small West Virginia town, when the Carpenters began recording. He’s got short grayish-blond hair and a gentle grin. ¶ “I was a troubled youth, I guess,” he says. ¶ De Hart, 59, is remembering a kid who stood on this same spot four decades ago. Loosely pegged to the 50th anniversary of the group’s 1969 signing with A&M Records, the convention features tribute concerts, panel discussions with Carpenters historians and sidemen, and daylong field trips to “famous” locations in Carpenters lore. They are in the middle of a four-day Carpenters convention, centered at a midsize hotel in Thousand Oaks, and are celebrating the music of the Southern California pop duo that sold more than 100 million albums. ¶ On this sunny April afternoon, two busloads of Carpenters fans are taking pictures in front of the house. The two-story tract house, these days with several concrete deer frolicking in front, is recognizable from the photograph on the cover of the duo’s 1973 “Now and Then” album, with siblings Karen and Richard sitting in his cherry-red Ferrari parked on their street. Not just any driveway, but the one before the ancestral home of the Carpenters. Jeffrey de Hart is standing at the edge of a driveway in Downey.
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