Little Girl Blue by Randy L. Schmidt Read Free Book Online Page A

I never thought about. When I sing, I don’t think about putting a pitch in a certain place, I just sing it.”
    Becoming more confident in Karen’s vocals, Richard began to feature her with their act and called less upon Margaret Shanor. Thegroup’s set strayed from jazz to Richard’s pop-influenced originals and tried-and-true standards like “Ebb Tide,” “The Sweetheart Tree,” “The Twelfth of Never,” and “Yesterday.” No matter how much singing she was asked to do, Karen also seemed to consider herself first and foremost a drummer who just happened to sing.
    Around this time Agnes Carpenter met Evelyn Wallace, a fellow employee at North American Aviation. The women became close friends when Agnes came to Evelyn in tears following a heated disagreement with another coworker. After Wallace was promoted to the division of laboratory and tests for the Apollo program, Agnes took over her old job. “Why don’t you stop in and hear the kids?” Agnes would often ask Evelyn. “They practice after school every day.”
    But Evelyn always seemed to find some excuse. “I thought she was talking about
little
kids,” she recalls. “Then I thought it might be that acid rock, and I couldn’t stand to listen to that. Finally I couldn’t keep saying no. I had to say yes.” Reluctantly Evelyn agreed to join the Carpenters in their home for dinner one evening and to hear Karen and Richard rehearse. Proud to finally find a captive audience, Agnes called out to her daughter seated behind the drums. “Sing it, Karen,” she said. “
Sing out!
”
    Wallace sat spellbound. “I had never heard a voice like that in all my life,” she says. “What a beautiful, beautiful voice she had, and I told her when she finished, ‘That was beautiful, Karen.’ She thought I was just being nice.”

    L IKE MANY college music majors, trumpeter Dan Friberg directed a church choir on the weekends for extra income. At a church in Hawthorne he met Don Zacklin, a member of the congregation. “I was doing lead sheets for him,” Friberg recalls. “He would bring me tapes of different artists that he had recorded on Sunday, and I’d write out lead sheets. He would send them in for copyright purposes.” Zacklin encouraged Friberg to share some of his original compositions and recordings with his friend Joe Osborn, a business partner in a small record label called Magic Lamp Records.
    Joe Osborn was one of the most prominent and sought-after studio bassists on the West Coast pop music scene in the 1960s. He frequently played in tandem with drummer Hal Blaine and keyboardist Larry Knechtel, an association known as the Wrecking Crew. The three were featured on numerous hits by the Beach Boys, the Mamas and the Papas, and many other popular artists of the late 1960s. “We were a bunch of guys in Levis and T-shirts,” says Blaine, who first worked with Joe Osborn on the live
Johnny Rivers at the Whiskey a Go Go
album. “The older, established musicians in three-piece suits and blue blazers who had been in Hollywood all their life started saying, ‘These kids are going to
wreck
the business,’ so I just started calling us the Wrecking Crew.”
    As the spring semester of 1966 drew to a close, Friberg saw Richard on campus and told him of his upcoming audition with Osborn. “I’ve got a guy that wants to hear some songs that I wrote, but I need somebody to play piano for me,” he said.
    Richard agreed to accompany Friberg on the informal try-out. “It all goes back to that fateful night at Joe Osborn’s in his garage with egg cartons on the wall,” he says. It was April 1966. Both Karen and Richard traveled with Friberg and his young wife to Osborn’s house, located at 7935 Ethel Avenue in the San Fernando Valley. The audition and recording session were slated for 1:00 A.M .