Vol. 2 Dick Carpenter and the Velvet Tunic

This next entry appears to be the second correspondence that Dolf and Holiday had concerning the Soft Rock question.  I believe it is the copy-and-pasted transcript of an exchange shared via electronic mail.  There are for the first time here hints that Adolf and Holiday are themselves aspiring musicians. –ed.

Adolf writes:

Richard Carpenter [The Carpenters]...so much said of Karen [Carpenter], one forgets the lush arrangements and fine writing of Dick.   Not to mention the toothy, white smile and occasional vinyl belt and matching boot combination, neatly matched with a sporty crocheted turtleneck and double knit trouser.   Pure class.




Call me Dick

  Kevin Holiday:

Dig, Dolf, dig.  He fits the Van Dyke Parks mold of pop fashion.  Let's face it, intelligence has little place in so-called rock, which poses as the art form of the proletariat.  We have punk to blame for this in many respects.    However, Dick Carpenter, Parks, even Curt Boettcher [The Millennium] to some extent, embraced their bourgeoisie background, ascots, dinner jackets, as if to say, "This music is pop, yes, but it is also intelligent, classy.   I did not waste Daddy's money at Julliard.  No, aspiring to a life in the orchestra as second tuba, that would be wasting Daddy's money." 

Now, producers are the intellectuals who get praised if a record is a success, cast as scapegoats, especially by the artists themselves, when an album's high-minded production robs the recording of its “rawness.”   I find our positions as working class intellectuals, transitional figures, bookish men who drink Pabst's Blue Ribbon, rich with productive irony, a Petri dish of creative possibilities in all likelihood.  I may have cut lawns with greeseballs, eaten crabs and gravy in the Pine Barrens, even used my somewhat unique position as blue collar scholar to get me into graduate school, but please, sir, don't make me ride into history with the punk rockers and those other so-called raw musicians.

Adolf replies:

Not that we don't embrace the rawness of a "Louie, Louie" or "We Gotta Get Out of This Place"; in fact we do.  Pop has many faces.  Nevertheless, it's a higher plane to which we aspire.  A place full of string arrangements, baroque anthems, falsetto vocals, and words like "Sugar", "Honey", and "Cherish" (usually phrased within the same sentence).  Delight in pop's diversity ,yet never fear the sensitive side.  Pop is our abstraction, our breakthrough.  Why is it that the “dark” side always plays the object of man’s desire.  Why can’t we be satisfied with the simple smell of a lady's freshly brushed hair?  The touch of a green velvet tunic?  The sight of young lovers wrestling in lush fields of soft grass?  Isn't it ironic?  So many simple pleasures before us to be celebrated in both action and word, and yet…. 

This is where we fit in.  Our places are among the chosen few. Not to be understood by the masses and their commercial culture.  We obey the commands of a higher ethos, understood by those who have evolved though experience and learning.  I laugh to think of Dick Carpenter as a simple man, that others consider him so, for beneath that bubblegum facade lay a genius misunderstood by the very crowds that exalted him.  For shame, for shame...