Crawl into my ambulance, your pulse is getting weak

In the early to mid- 70s, it was baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and The Carpenters, whether you liked it or not. The Carpenters had the purest of images and were ubiquitous on AM radio; you simply couldn't escape them. And they showed up in other places too. In high school chorus, we sang "Close to You," a song that seemingly became a standard almost instantly.

We were so hip.

Their music was in direct contrast to the chaos of the world at the time: Vietnam, Nixon, and the fallout of the 60s.

But then again, the number one song on my high school graduation day was "Billy, Don't Be a Hero."

Strange times.

Today, listening the music of the Carpenters remains somewhat strange: it all sounds foreign, like from another planet: calm melodies and saccharine instrumentation. I never actively disliked it, but I never took them seriously either. How could any self-respecting testosterone-fueled teenager do that when Black Sabbath and Alice Cooper were around?.

I bring this up, because thanks to my friend Robot Hull, I finally saw "Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story." (Farther On's suggested alternative title: "The tame, the innocent and the anorexic shuffle.") I had heard about the controversial film but never saw it as it was banned for years due to licensing issues. Now it can found on You Tube (everything finds it way to the Internet).

Karen and Richard Carpenter are portrayed as Barbie and Ken dolls (!) with dollhouse-like sets. Sounds crazy, but it is genius. Part of the brilliance is that the dolls, much in the same manner of the Carpenters themselves, can be molded in any conceivable way. The film, only 43 minutes long, is sympathetic to Karen's anorexia, but not to her family, with the underlying theme that they played a huge hand in her demise. As Karen increasingly takes laxatives and Ipecac and gets sicker and skinnier, her doll is actually whittled down. The film is interspersed with images from the era; bombs dropping, soldiers, Watergate.

It is a powerful, and at times creepy and dark, statement on the times and the pursuit of fame.

And the result is that I now I have a new appreciation of their music, which is used very well in the film. This doesn't really affect my music cred, I think. Oh, I won't be running out to buy their greatest hits, but their craftsmanship and lack of irony is most welcome and sorely lacking in pop music today. And that fuzz box guitar solo in Goodbye to Love is superb and, for better or worse, the sound of the very first power ballad.

For that alone, The Carpenters will be roundly blessed and cursed.