Fact #116973
When:
Short story:
Superstar by The Carpenters, written by Leon Russell and Bonnie Bramlett, enters Billboard Top 40 singles chart in the USA where it will peak at No2.
Full article:
The Story of The Carpenters' Superstar by Johnny Black
Richard Carpenter has a very clear memory of the first time he heard Superstar. "I'd come home from recording one night and turned on 'The Tonight Show.' Johnny Carson had Bette Midler as a guest, before she was a household name, and she sang Superstar. She sang it more as a modern-day torch song, but the song really caught my ear."
That he immediately considered it as potential material for The Carpenters is just one of several mysteries surrounding Superstar, given that its central theme – a groupie yearning for another sexual encounter with a rock star who has since left town – would have been considered exceedingly risqué in those days, especially when sung by an artist as apple pie wholesome as Karen Carpenter.
However, with the passage of time and the tragic circumstances of Karen’s death from anorexia , it has become apparent that The Carpenters’ appeal was no simple thing, and certainly not limited to mainstream American music consumers. Acoustic slowcore guru Mark Eitzel, one of many alternative rockers who contributed a track to the tribute album If I Were A Carpenter, observes that The Carpenters’ “pastel, chicks-and-puppies aspect is undercut with a traumatic kind of thing.”
Although the song is credited as a collaboration between southern rockers Leon Russell and Bonnie Bramlett, Superstar actually began with country vocalist Rita Coolidge. Russell has acknowledged that Coolidge gave him the title and the basic idea for a groupie-rock star lyric. Which rock star? "Eric Clapton!" Rita Coolidge has said. "He was the only guitar player we knew at the time."
Coolidge knew Clapton from having sung backup vocals on his 1970 solo debut album, and shortly afterwards, she toured with Bramlett and Russell during Joe Cocker's Mad Dogs And Englishmen Tour, a legendarily debauched U.S. jaunt whose backstage amusements have been recalled by drummer Jim Keltner as, "Sharing girls. Screwing every chick in sight. Most were there for that purpose. The drugs were just as easy to get."
“If anything bothered me at the time,” Coolidge has since said, “it was the fact that I was one of the writers on the song and when the song was published, my name was not on it. Since then, the other writers have given me credit. I haven't gotten my check in the mail. But at least I know that they know that the song was my idea and I began the song. They took it and ran with it.”
“I took the idea to Leon,” explains Bonnie Bramlett. “He said he liked it and that he'd work on it and I guess he did. Then he gave it to Delaney and Delaney gave it back to me and encouraged me to finish it, and that I did with the help of my dear friend Rita. Although Rita did not write on the song, I believe that without her help it would not have gotten done. She sat there and sang harmony so I could build parts. She was encouraging and helped me to finish by keeping me focussed. When that was done she stayed and taught the parts to Delaney. We sang the most beautiful three parts on that original tape.”
“I can't tell you about what the other writers on the song were thinking of,” adds Bramlett, “but as far as I was concerned, it was the lament of a Groupie. Hence it's co-title, Groupie Song. Now, it's about whomever the listener wants it to be about. The point of the song is he's not there and he probably will never come back for her. But because she is still singing it, she still has hope.”
It was during the Mad Dogs mayhem that Coolidge first performed the song, and her soulful version appears on Mad Dogs And Englishmen, the live album of the tour.
Richard Carpenter didn't see the tour, but when he heard Superstar on Johnny Carson's late-night talk show, he loved it: "I thought it was a hit, no two ways about it." He immediately presented the song to Karen, and was surprised to encounter her resistance.
"It was one of the very few tunes that Karen ever questioned me on. Usually our tastes were exactly the same and I thought she'd just go crazy over this, but she didn't. So I asked her just to indulge me and sing it and listen to the record as it was being put together."
It would have been hard for Karen to find much fault with the track, given that it used the talents of veteran players from the Wrecking Crew, the West Coast's top session pool, whose credits ran from Elvis Presley through The Beach Boys, and virtually every hit ever produced by Phil Spector. As Karen listened, Richard has said, "She changed her mind. It became one of her favorites." Well, maybe, but legend holds that the vocal take on the finished record was Karen's first run-through, and that she was reading the words off a napkin where Richard had hastily scrawled them.
Given the prevailing attitudes of the day, Richard had felt it necessary to make a slight alteration to Bramlett and Russell's lyrics. "We only had to change one word in the whole song," he says. "At that time, Top 40 radio in America would not have played something that said, 'can hardly wait to sleep with you again.' So I changed it to 'be with you again.'"
A minor change, perhaps, but one of which Bramlett says, “I hated it.”
By the time Superstar was released as a single, the album it came from had sold a million copies in the U.S., but within eight weeks it became the Carpenters' fifth gold single, and Richard's backing-vocal arrangement scored a Grammy-nomination.
Superstar was neither their biggest hit nor their best-loved song but, although it has been covered many times, by artists as diverse as Luther Vandross and Cher, it has become indelibly associated with The Carpenters, turning up as the title of their 1987 biopic Superstar – The Karen Carpenter Story, and gracing the soundtrack of the 1995 movie Tommy Boy.
In the words of Red Kross’s Steve McDonald – another contributor to If I Were a Carpenter - “Songs like Superstar have a very melancholy way of hanging this message on you. She had a really warm voice with an androgynous quality.”
Rita Coolidge, who has every reason to feel aggrieved by the song’s success, now seems resigned to the unjust workings of fate which deprived her of royalty payments that could have run into millions of dollars. "I don't blame anybody,” she says. “At this point in my life, I'm just glad that I've gotten credit for the idea of the song and for being one of the writers. It's not about the money. I don't need it. And it's not about my ego, I just want for myself and for my children that I didn't make up that story about the night we wrote that song."
(This feature first appeared in Blender magazine)
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Richard Carpenter has a very clear memory of the first time he heard Superstar. "I'd come home from recording one night and turned on 'The Tonight Show.' Johnny Carson had Bette Midler as a guest, before she was a household name, and she sang Superstar. She sang it more as a modern-day torch song, but the song really caught my ear."
That he immediately considered it as potential material for The Carpenters is just one of several mysteries surrounding Superstar, given that its central theme – a groupie yearning for another sexual encounter with a rock star who has since left town – would have been considered exceedingly risqué in those days, especially when sung by an artist as apple pie wholesome as Karen Carpenter.
However, with the passage of time and the tragic circumstances of Karen’s death from anorexia , it has become apparent that The Carpenters’ appeal was no simple thing, and certainly not limited to mainstream American music consumers. Acoustic slowcore guru Mark Eitzel, one of many alternative rockers who contributed a track to the tribute album If I Were A Carpenter, observes that The Carpenters’ “pastel, chicks-and-puppies aspect is undercut with a traumatic kind of thing.”
Although the song is credited as a collaboration between southern rockers Leon Russell and Bonnie Bramlett, Superstar actually began with country vocalist Rita Coolidge. Russell has acknowledged that Coolidge gave him the title and the basic idea for a groupie-rock star lyric. Which rock star? "Eric Clapton!" Rita Coolidge has said. "He was the only guitar player we knew at the time."
Coolidge knew Clapton from having sung backup vocals on his 1970 solo debut album, and shortly afterwards, she toured with Bramlett and Russell during Joe Cocker's Mad Dogs And Englishmen Tour, a legendarily debauched U.S. jaunt whose backstage amusements have been recalled by drummer Jim Keltner as, "Sharing girls. Screwing every chick in sight. Most were there for that purpose. The drugs were just as easy to get."
“If anything bothered me at the time,” Coolidge has since said, “it was the fact that I was one of the writers on the song and when the song was published, my name was not on it. Since then, the other writers have given me credit. I haven't gotten my check in the mail. But at least I know that they know that the song was my idea and I began the song. They took it and ran with it.”
“I took the idea to Leon,” explains Bonnie Bramlett. “He said he liked it and that he'd work on it and I guess he did. Then he gave it to Delaney and Delaney gave it back to me and encouraged me to finish it, and that I did with the help of my dear friend Rita. Although Rita did not write on the song, I believe that without her help it would not have gotten done. She sat there and sang harmony so I could build parts. She was encouraging and helped me to finish by keeping me focussed. When that was done she stayed and taught the parts to Delaney. We sang the most beautiful three parts on that original tape.”
“I can't tell you about what the other writers on the song were thinking of,” adds Bramlett, “but as far as I was concerned, it was the lament of a Groupie. Hence it's co-title, Groupie Song. Now, it's about whomever the listener wants it to be about. The point of the song is he's not there and he probably will never come back for her. But because she is still singing it, she still has hope.”
It was during the Mad Dogs mayhem that Coolidge first performed the song, and her soulful version appears on Mad Dogs And Englishmen, the live album of the tour.
Richard Carpenter didn't see the tour, but when he heard Superstar on Johnny Carson's late-night talk show, he loved it: "I thought it was a hit, no two ways about it." He immediately presented the song to Karen, and was surprised to encounter her resistance.
"It was one of the very few tunes that Karen ever questioned me on. Usually our tastes were exactly the same and I thought she'd just go crazy over this, but she didn't. So I asked her just to indulge me and sing it and listen to the record as it was being put together."
It would have been hard for Karen to find much fault with the track, given that it used the talents of veteran players from the Wrecking Crew, the West Coast's top session pool, whose credits ran from Elvis Presley through The Beach Boys, and virtually every hit ever produced by Phil Spector. As Karen listened, Richard has said, "She changed her mind. It became one of her favorites." Well, maybe, but legend holds that the vocal take on the finished record was Karen's first run-through, and that she was reading the words off a napkin where Richard had hastily scrawled them.
Given the prevailing attitudes of the day, Richard had felt it necessary to make a slight alteration to Bramlett and Russell's lyrics. "We only had to change one word in the whole song," he says. "At that time, Top 40 radio in America would not have played something that said, 'can hardly wait to sleep with you again.' So I changed it to 'be with you again.'"
A minor change, perhaps, but one of which Bramlett says, “I hated it.”
By the time Superstar was released as a single, the album it came from had sold a million copies in the U.S., but within eight weeks it became the Carpenters' fifth gold single, and Richard's backing-vocal arrangement scored a Grammy-nomination.
Superstar was neither their biggest hit nor their best-loved song but, although it has been covered many times, by artists as diverse as Luther Vandross and Cher, it has become indelibly associated with The Carpenters, turning up as the title of their 1987 biopic Superstar – The Karen Carpenter Story, and gracing the soundtrack of the 1995 movie Tommy Boy.
In the words of Red Kross’s Steve McDonald – another contributor to If I Were a Carpenter - “Songs like Superstar have a very melancholy way of hanging this message on you. She had a really warm voice with an androgynous quality.”
Rita Coolidge, who has every reason to feel aggrieved by the song’s success, now seems resigned to the unjust workings of fate which deprived her of royalty payments that could have run into millions of dollars. "I don't blame anybody,” she says. “At this point in my life, I'm just glad that I've gotten credit for the idea of the song and for being one of the writers. It's not about the money. I don't need it. And it's not about my ego, I just want for myself and for my children that I didn't make up that story about the night we wrote that song."
(This feature first appeared in Blender magazine)