The Carpenters - Promotion and Touring

Promotion and Touring

Although the Carpenters had a rough start in 1969 with the lukewarm reviews of their first album, Offering, they tried to promote themselves by being Burt Bacharach's opening performance. In a live concert in 1974 at The Riviera Hotel, Las Vegas, Karen Carpenter explained:

One night, we were doing a benefit dinner after the premiere of "Hello, Dolly!", and Burt Bacharach walked up to us, and he asked us if we would like to open the show for him at another dinner that he was going to be doing later on in the year. And he asked us to do something that turned out to be very, very special for us.

Then, Richard took over, and said:

He wanted us to put together a medley of his songs; any tunes of his that we wanted to do, and it took a couple of months. We arrived at 8 tunes.

The medley eventually was abridged and released on their eponymous album Carpenters in 1971. The song was shortened from almost 13 minutes to only 5 minutes.

The band maintained a demanding schedule of concert tours and television appearances. Among their numerous television credits were appearances on such popular series as The Ed Sullivan Show, The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, The Carol Burnett Show in 1971 and 1972, The Mike Douglas Show in 1971, and The Johnny Cash Show, also in 1971, where they played their hits "For All We Know" and "Rainy Days and Mondays". The duo appeared in a television special on the BBC in 1971 where they performed songs "live". They were also the featured performers in a summer replacement series, Make Your Own Kind of Music, which aired on NBC every Tuesday at 8:00 p.m. in the United States. Both Karen and Richard would later state in a 1980 radio interview that they were often taken advantage of in their dealings with television during the early seventies and wanted more control in the production of future projects.

In May 1973, the Carpenters accepted an invitation to perform at the White House for President Richard Nixon and visiting West German chancellor Willy Brandt.

The Carpenters played numerous concerts from 1971 to 1975:.

By the mid-1970s, extensive touring and lengthy recording sessions had begun to take their toll on the duo and contributed to their professional and personal difficulties during the latter half of the decade. Karen dieted obsessively and developed the disorder anorexia nervosa, which first manifested itself in 1975 when she collapsed during a show in Las Vegas. Exhausted, Karen was forced to cancel concert tours in the Philippines, UK and Japan. Richard has said that he regrets the six- and seven-day work schedules of that period, adding that had he known then what he knows now, he wouldn't have agreed to it. Karen looked noticeably thin—although not sickly—in the music video produced for the "Only Yesterday" single. Richard developed an addiction to quaaludes, which began to affect his performance in the late 1970s and led to the end of the duo's live concert appearances in 1978.