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Congratulations, You Made It, Welcome To The Seventies: “We’ve Only Just Begun” by The Carpenters

By Marcello Carlin



As one door (Creedence) closes, so does another one open, and at last I think we can say that here is a record which tells us definitively that we are now in the seventies. Certainly I cannot think of “We’ve Only Just Begun” being conceived, let alone recorded, in the sixties; no, this is something new and very different. Alternatively, it is something very old and very reassuring, a ballad, performance and production which appear to bypass this thing called rock and roll. One might imagine Peggy Lee recording it for Capitol in the fifties – but then think of Brian Wilson and these two most unlikely Pet Sounds disciples, and once again this is something which really could only have come from California.

The song, or two verses of it, was commissioned for a series of Crocker Bank commercials. The music was written by the perpetually undersung Roger Nichols, whose Roger Nichols And The Small Circle Of Friends album of 1968 stands beside Song Cycle and 12 Songs in terms of ambition and invention – both Parks and Newman contributed to it – and impressed Herb Alpert enough to sign Nichols to A&M as a staff songwriter and introduce him to Paul Williams.

The original intention of “We’ve Only Just Begun” was to have Tony Asher (a direct Pet Sounds injection) write the lyric, but Asher fell ill and recommended that Williams do the job. Thus it was that, while watching television one evening in early 1970, Richard Carpenter happened to see this:


Impressed by the song, he correctly assumed that Williams was singing it. Shortly afterwards he came across Williams in the A&M office parking lot and asked him if there were more to the song than those two verses. Williams assured him that there was, hastily went away to write a chorus, bridge and third verse with Nichols and came back to Richard with the finished result. Richard was knocked out by the song and reckoned that he and Karen could turn it into a hit.

Both Lena and I have written about The Carpenters and this song before, so all I can say here in summary is that Karen’s lead vocal is painfully exquisite, as though already knowing that this new dawn isn’t going to last, that the future isn’t going to be as good as she deserved, and that the final Picardy third is heartbreaking. The water of trouble has been bridged – for now.
 
Date Record Made Number Two: 31 October 1970
Number Of Weeks At Number Two: 4
Records At Number One: “I’ll Be There” by The Jackson 5 and “I Think I Love You” by The Partridge Family
UK Chart Position: 28

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