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sparkle with double floor toms. She also asked for the all-chrome, top-of-the-line Super Sensitive Snare. At first her parents opted for the more economical Supra-phonic 400 but later gave in and purchased the Super Sensitive Snare, too. Bragging to friends about her son’s piano talents, Agnes secured him the job of pianist for a local production of the Frank Loesser musical
Guys and Dolls
. Karen packed up her new set of drums and joined Richard for their first instrumental performance together, an unlikely piano-drum duo accompanying the production.
    Karen soon became the drummer for Two Plus Two, an all-girl band comprising Downey High School students including Linda Stewart and Eileen Matthews. “We wanted only girls because an all-girl band in those days was very rare,” Stewart explains. She and Matthews carried their guitars and amps to school, where they would catch the bus to the Carpenter home for rehearsal each week. Karen recommended friendNancy Roubal join to play bass. “Nancy came on board but did not have a bass guitar,” Stewart says. “She did what she could on the bass strings of a six-string guitar. It didn’t sound as good as we wanted, but we worked through that. The other problem we had was our amps were so small that Karen had to play softly. We were kind of a surf band, but one of Karen’s favorite songs to play was ‘Ticket to Ride’ by the Beatles. None of us sang at that time, so I never heard Karen sing, but I never heard such a good drummer in my young life at that time.” After only a few rehearsals Karen approached Linda and the other girls suggesting that Richard join the group. “I said no,” Stewart recalls, “because I wanted an all-girl band. Boys were out.” The girls were finally booked to play for a local pool party, but when Eileen’s mother refused to let her attend, Linda became discouraged. “I was so upset I just broke up the band.”

    H AVING GRADUATED from high school in the spring of 1964, Richard enrolled at nearby California State University at Long Beach. In June of the following year he met Wes Jacobs, a tuba major from Palmdale, California, who was also a skillful upright bassist. “ We met in theory class ,” Jacobs recalled in a 2009 interview. “It was obvious to me that he was a genius. Right from day one he could take all the dictation that the teacher could dish out; he would just write it out. . . . He wanted to do something jazzy. . . . We played, and it just clicked right away. Since I had considerable keyboard experience, I could look at his hands and read what he was doing. I could almost play along with him as if I were reading music. We really locked in stylistically. Within a short time, it was apparent that we had to do something musically, but we didn’t know what. At one point he said, ‘I’ll tell my sister to learn how to play drums, and we’ll have a trio.’ Within three weeks she could play drums better than anybody that I heard at the college.”
    In actuality Karen had been playing a number of months by the time she teamed with Richard and Wes to form what became the Richard Carpenter Trio, an instrumental jazz group with the classic combo of piano, bass, and drums. Richard did all the arrangements, and by the end of the summer they were rehearsing on a daily basis, sometimes playing well into the night.
    Financing a piano and drum kit, in addition to paying for music lessons, Agnes and Harold were barely making ends meet. Now the newly formed trio wanted amplifiers and microphones. Plus Richard felt a new electric piano would make their act more portable. Even so, a tape recorder took precedence, as this would allow the group to make demos. For several months Richard saved to make a down payment on a Sony TC-200 Stereo Tapecorder. The first recordings of the trio were made during the summer of 1965 in the Carpenters’ living room at the