The Greatest Songs Ever! Superstar

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.”

Why he immediately decided it was perfect for the Carpenters is just one mystery surrounding “Superstar,” given that its central theme – a groupie yearning for one more tryst with a rock star who’s 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 1983 death from anorexia, it’s become apparent that the Carpenters’ appeal was no simple thing, and certainly not limited to mainstream America. Acoustic slowcore guru Mark Eitzel, one of many alternative rockers who contributed a track to the 1994 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 Leon Russell and Bonnie Bramlett, “Superstar” actually began with 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, 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, and shortly after, she played with Bramlett and Russell on Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs and Englishmen tour, a legendarily debauched U.S. jaunt whose backstage amusements have been described by the drummer Jim Keltner: “Sharing girls. Screwing every chick in sight. Most were there for that purpose. The drugs were just as easy to get.”

It was in this period that Coolidge’s idea found its way to Russell and Bramlett, who turned the initial concept into a finished song. “Although Rita did not write on the song,” Bramlett says, “without her help, it would not have gotten done. She sat and sang harmony so I could build parts. I can’t tell you what the other writers were thinking of, but as far as I was concerned, it was the lament of a groupie. Hence its co-title, ’Groupie Song.’ Now, it’s about whomever the listener wants it to be about. The point is, he’s not there and he probably will never come back for her. But because she’s still singing it, she still has hope.”

It was during the Mad Dogs mayhem that Coolidge first performed the song before an audience, and her soulful version appears on Mad Dogs and Englishmen, the tour’s live album.

Richard Carpenter didn’t see the Joe Cocker tour, but when he heard “Superstar” on The Tonight Show, he loved it: “I thought it was a hit, no two ways about it.” He immediately presented the song to Karen, whose initial resistance to recording it surprised him. “It was one of the very few tunes that Karen ever questioned me on,” Richard has said. “Usually our tastes were the same, and I thought she’d just go crazy over this, but she didn’t. So I asked her to indulge me and sing it and listen to it as it was being put together.”

It would have been hard for Karen to find much fault with the track, given that it employed 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.” Still, its origins with the Carpenters were inauspicious. 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 on which Richard had hastily scrawled them.

Given the prevailing societal attitudes of the day, Richard had felt it was necessary to make a slight alteration to the lyrics Bramlett and Russell had written. “We had to change only one word in the whole song,” he said. “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.’ ”

By the time “Superstar” was released as a single, the album it appears on, Carpenters, had sold a million copies in the U.S. The song became the Carpenters’ fifth gold single, and Richard’s backing-vocal arrangement soon scored him a Grammy nomination.

“Superstar” was neither the Carpenters’ biggest hit nor their best-loved song. But although it’s been covered many times – by artists as diverse as Luther Vandross, Cher and Sonic Youth – it has become indelibly associated with the Carpenters’ myth, turning up on the soundtrack of the 1995 Chris Farley movie Tommy Boy, and in the title of Superstar – The Karen Carpenter Story, a 1987 biopic filmed by Todd Haynes with Barbie dolls instead of live actors. (Karen’s estate successfully sued to prevent the film’s release and distribution; it is almost never seen.)

“Songs like ’Superstar’ have a very melancholy way of hanging this message on you,” says Redd Kross’s Steve McDonald, another contributor to If I Were a Carpenter. “[Karen] had a warm voice with an androgynous quality.”