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I know we have debated this a zillion times, but I happened to come across a couple of things today at wikpedia.com about record contracts. And what I read made me immediately think of Karen. First up, was this section:

QUOTE

In many contracts there is no commitment of the label to actually release the finished product. Whether it's released or not depends on "acceptance" by the company. The label can reject delivery of an album by relying on quite precise conditions contained in the contract.

So it really is the case that if A&M didn't like this, they were within their rights to reject it. I knew that was of course probable, but hadn't seen it explained like this before. What I would like to know, if the above is true, is what role Werner Wolfen played in all of this. He was her lawyer, and the only involvement we know of in this whole saga, is when Karen harried him to go back in and get her money back that she had lost (see below ).

QUOTE

The company will want the contract to say that each album must be "commercially acceptable"and a good lawyer acting on behalf of the artist should tone this down to "technically acceptable".

I would LOVE to ask Richard and Herb Alpert why they thought Karen's album wasn't 'technically acceptable' for release. Because Richard has said in interview 'it was all very well done. Very well done'. So although they didn't like the material, they thought technically it was very well done. So why was it not 'technically acceptable?'



Bearing this in mind, where do you think the album would have been released? They had their favoured territories like USA, Japan, South America and England. Do you think they would have ventured outside of their safe zone if it had been something with smash potential?



This is something I cannot to this day get my head around. Karen was roped into a 'non-recoupable' arrangement where she had to put up $100,000 of her own cash, along with the $500,000 that A&M did. Why? What difference did the extra hundred grand mean, for a company that was raking in millions of dollars a year through the Carpenters record sales alone? I just don't get this. So this 'non-recoupable' payment meant Karen got none of it back, irrespective of whether the record was released and was a success or not. Where the hell was her lawyer while all of this was agreed? It seems very unfair to ask her to put up this much of her own money (remember, this was 1979!) when it was the record company who partly encouraged her to go solo and found Phil Ramone for her.

I know that's a few questions, but still interesting to me. What do you think?
Edited by newvillefan, 30 December 2006 - 02:21 PM.

Good points, Was $100,000 really alot of money to Karen though? Remember on the show when Richard said yes we are millionares, separtely and that was many many years before this, so with proper investing Karen would still be a millionare right?

Remember too that by 79, Karen was not dumb she knew alot more about how the business is run, maybe she never thought a project of her's would ever get rejected. I mean up to this point she had to have known in the back of her mind that her voice sold records and her music affected fans, she knew how large her fan base was. Maybe she always thought she would recoup this money from the project.

True Chris. Not a lot to her, but from that Coleman book I still sense she was a frugal person. But that opens up another can of worms. How come the money that she left after her death was such a paltry amount? It only came to a few million dollars

I so do not understand this either. Especially since, if they did release it and it flopped, they could so easily just explain to critics that this was an individual experiment for Karen to explore other ideas, and then they'd just get back to being the Carpenters again. Honestly, A&M had nothing to lose by releasing the album. I think they should have had more respect for Karen after all those years and treated her as a competent artist with a mind of her own. I can't imagine they would, not with so much uncertainty around the success of the album. Even if they thought it was going to be a smash, just based on technical merit, they still had the uncertainty about knowing how the public would react to the fact that the duo was temporarily splitsville. (Of course, they never were, but I'm talking about public perception)


I am so with you on this.

So basically, part of me thinks this comes down to the level of respect they had for Karen as an artist in her own right. It's almost like saying 'without your brother, you're not marketable'. Who knows what untold damage that did to her persona, and whether it had anything to do with the fact that, although they made their 1981 comeback, she kinda hit the self destruct button as far as her anorexia was concerned. I dunno. But this makes more sense to me now.

Stephen
Edited by newvillefan, 30 December 2006 - 03:22 PM.

I know I've mentioned this a few times, but it breaks my heart that Karen, even on the very night before she died, was still not over the 'loss' of her album and the way everything turned out... so much so that she actually was on the phone with Phil Ramone on Feb 3rd.

I don't think the ones around her had any idea how important this was to her, NOT as a career move, but as an opportunity for personal growth. I tend to think that Karen probably didn't express this well enough, so A&M, Richard and the others just treated it was just another day at the office. Maybe if she had, they'd have factored it in to their decision?



Edited by Lindakron, 30 December 2006 - 03:26 PM.

I think that's a great summation (is that a word? ) of the way things were. As far as A&M were concerned, Richard was back, he was well, so can we please get back to what makes the money around here. Kinda thing. The insinuation here though is that, if this is all true Linda, Richard didn't know his sister nearly as well as he thought. Or she chose to keep her private feelings very, very well hidden.

Stephen

I pick B.

Well, I bet daily therapy with the original Kron, and a snazzy hotel suite over the course of 1982 would have sucked up a large amount. And, did her sort-of-ex-husband have his hand in the pot too?

This has always been the view I have maintained about what she left in financial terms. Her later years (1979-1983) must have been a drain on her resources. Especially since the one album they released was a. a flop, and b. not co-produced by her anyway, so she had no return on it in that sense.

FANTASTIC POST, Stephen, Chris and Linda.


Commercially, I don't see how the album could have failed. The album still has a fresh sound in 2006 (10 years after the CD was released!).

I think it would have been a big success. And you know that all Carpenters fans all over the world would eat it up.

Look at Gwen Stefani and how big of a success she is away from No Doubt as a mondern-day glance of this.

It's a shame it wasn't released. It could have been much bigger than it was/is.

The songs are good, the voice is still one of the very best voices there ever was. That equals a masterpiece.

All of you have valid points here. It does seem like it was more of a business decision. I guess Karen is more personable than I ever thought, I could see how Richard would have thought hey if this is released it could be the end of the Carpenters and this is not what we want to do right now, how is this going to coincide with our comeback album? Of course he didn't like how the album sounded and then A&M took the same business view. All the while Karen looking at it maybe not so much as a business venue but more of a personal growth, learning new things, being on her own in NY and just sampling life out there. I'm reminded in the interviews of Phil when he said that this is Karen grown up singing more adult oriented lyrics and growing within herself as an artist. I can only imagine all the fond memories she had of making this album, it was indeed a new launch for her, as Phil said he did not go into this to make another Carpenters album. Indeed he didn't and I love this album.

I also bring up again the fact that on the Good Morning America interview (by this time Karen had already experienced what it was like to make a solo album, yet the public was not to know much) Here Karen says I think..there is still a way for us to be together but still work separtely. Oh my did she really say that? Too bad Joan didn't catch what Karen was really trying to say. Those here know what I mean.

I think with MIA, yes Karen was into it and giving it a total thumbs up but inside possibly she was still thinking of all the personal things that transpired with her solo album. I just can't imagine Olivia recording a whole album and then her management telling her no it's not good enough to release, technically it just won't work. Olivia actually did just the opposite, She had always wanted to record an album of lullabys for her daughter when she was born, knowing that a major record company would not want to release it she went to Geffen Records and they welcomed the project and Warm and Tender was made. Of course it was not top 10 material but still Olivia wanted to do this and she got it done. Karen wanted to do the same thing, she really wanted this solo album and worked ever soooo hard at it, even phoning Richard about how difficult some of the songs were to record, wasn't it "If I Had You"??? Still Karen's reception was not ultimately what she wanted. Didn't Phil even say the reception was...cold?
Edited by Chris-An Ordinary Fool, 30 December 2006 - 11:10 PM.

I know it's ground we have covered before, but I agree that maybe if Joan Lundin had been a fan as well as the interviewer, she might have picked up on that and made reference to the solo album. I mean, it wasn't a secret that Karen was recording this: hell, it's even in the fanclub newsletters! Imagine if she had asked the question 'So why didn't your solo album get released then?' In that atmosphere? Yeah right.

My point being, it wasn't something that was really put out to the media like 'newsflash! Karen Carpenter leaves for New York to record her first album alone!'. There wasn't much fanfare about her doing it, and ultimately there wasn't much fanfare at the playback for A&M either.

This is a largely cynical opinion, and one which I'm sure isn't true, but part of me thinks this was A&M's way of keeping her busy for a while until Richard was better. It's almost like they didn't want her around, moaning and groaning that she had nothing to do, so they came up with something that would get her out from under their feet and keep her doing something useful. If it's a hit, then so much the better. I know from what Phil Ramone has said in interviews that he feels like that too.

I know they rang around and helped find a producer for her, but at no point do I sense that anyone from LA took the slightest interest in anything that she was up to during the making of this. At no point does there seem to have been any input or enquiry from the label as to how it was going, nor from Richard or her parents. She brought some selections home at one point and played 'Still In Love With You' for Agnes. Even at that point, all she could bring herself to say to her daughter was 'I don't like the fact you're singing the line 'I remember the first time I laid more than eyes on you'. Come on for God's sake, the girl was 29! She should have been able to record whatever she liked!

As I see it, the only people who rallied around her when she played them what she had done so far, were the friends from her childhood who were outside of her working life and environment anyway. Interesting that one of her friends thought it was the best work she had ever done.

So the warning signs were always there that this wasn't gonna be too good when it came to playing the final results. I would love to have been a fly on that particular wall! What annoys me slightly is the fact that when they played it for people in New York, they were bouncing off the walls, and yet those same people stayed quiet during the playback in LA. Why would you do that? It's like 'oh well big daddy Herb and the boys don't like it, so I had better not say anything here'. Grr

And yes, then there is the Good Morning America clip, filmed in the aftermath of all this, where there clearly seems to be something just below the surface between them. Call it what you like, bitterness, resentment, whatever. And I mean on both their parts: Karen, because she never got the chance to release something which she really believed in and Richard, because she broke ranks in the first place and went and did something he told her not to (i.e. disco and dance music).

Stephen

I know Agnes "meant well" in her parenting of Karen, but, looking back, it's not hard to see how Karen developed her horrible disease. Talk about control issues -- poor Karen couldn't even choose the material for her solo LP without receiving negative feedback from her mother.



Of all the things that bothered me in the Coleman book, this is in the top three. If I remember correctly, wasn't Quincy Jones in the room that night in N.Y. for the playback? He has a pretty good ear for a hit record I would think. But, no, if Herb and RC don't approve ...

I would like to hear the Good Morning America interview if anyone has it.

Sorry if I jumped off topic and turned this into an anorexia thread, but I think the disease and her career are inextricably linked. Thanks for another thought-provoking thread, Stephen!

I was under the same impression, Stephen, that Karen was 'shipped out East' and that nobody back in LA really wanted her to do this. So it must have been really difficult for Karen to be in foreign territory, with a different producer, in a different studio, trying to do something that was not greatly supported back home. In fact, she *possibly* may have had a nagging feeling of guilt for being so 'selfish' as to want to do a solo project. There's no evidence of that, of course, but if I put myself in her shoes, and my brother/career partner's response to the idea was 'fine... pffft, if you must... but no disco... ', I mean, she probably felt guilty for pursuing her own interests.

So much speculation, no evidence.