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You Can’t Go Home Again. You Just Can’t: “Yesterday Once More” by The Carpenters

By Marcello Carlin


Richard Carpenter says that the impetus behind the song was the oldies medley which he and Karen had been performing on stage for about a year and which had become a hugely popular element of their live act. When it came to recording the Now & Then album, they elected to compose and use “Yesterday Once More” as a framing device to bookend that medley, and although they confined their selection of oldies to the sixties, the enterprise occupied the album’s entire second side.

That is the song as I know it, and hence the full-length version with oldies is what I’m going to consider here. Of course, on the seven-inch single which ended up becoming the duo’s best-selling record globally, we only hear the first four or so minutes of the actual song, which in isolation sounds oddly incomplete; Karen is pining for older, less complicated days, when crying along to records meant something different and presumably one could recognise the tune, hear what the singer was singing, etc. But here the resurgence of the old, encapsulated in the sarcophagus echo of “all those oldies but goodies,” makes us wonder about the presence of a Ouija board. As the Carpenters entry in The Story Of Pop makes clear, in the context of Watergate, Vietnam and so forth, “Yesterday Once More” is actually quite a loaded political song.

But on the album, after about four minutes the motorcycle revs up and we go into an octet of oldies from the sixties, all of which predate the Beatles. These interpretations sound distant, etiolated. Brian Wilson gets two songs – “Fun, Fun, Fun,” which title Karen chants in the unnervingly jolly manner of Julie Andrews, and the confounding inclusion of “Dead Man’s Curve” which accentuates the overall aura of visiting a morgue. Karen intones “The End Of The World” – a song I visited barely a decade before – with a dread-filled finality and her “Johnny Angel” is hardly more reassuring.

Yet we are encouraged to think of this exercise as a nostalgic Disneyland whirl, guided by Tony Peluso’s slightly over-jovial DJ links. As with the B.E.F.’s Music Of Quality And Distinction, Volume 1 just under a decade later, however, it is difficult to imagine how any of these covers might have become hits in their own right. Although the B.E.F. pulled off the artful trick of converting popular songs into experimental art-electro canvases, there is no such subtext in the Carpenters medley – these songs are just blanded out into white bread oblivion. On “Da Doo Ron Ron,” which almost works when considered as an electronic refraction of Spector’s original maximalism, Karen’s titular syllables are so clipped and drained that they sound computer-generated – in 1973, bots did not yet exist, but this is like a Martian reconnaissance trip to Earth trying to reproduce what they hear. Fittingly, Peluso’s lead guitar nearly obliterates this politesse.

“The Night Has A Thousand Eyes” is as square as Bobby Vee originally rendered it – one is amazed that stuff like this was still loved. One thinks of prototype Muzak piped through the speakers of the average early seventies Co-op supermarket. By the time we reach “One Day Will Come,” we are in David Jacobs land (what a contrast to the Willem Breuker Kollektief’s lusty and forthright 1976 reading of the same song on their marathon Live In Berlin album) and the entire thing culminates in “One Fine Day” – one notices that on none of these songs does the singer find true love.

Emerging out of this very WASP-centred, Cuban Missile Crisis-orbiting assemblage of songs – as though the world had actually ended in October 1962 – is a shadowed Xerox of the original song which simply repeats the line “When I was young, I listened to the radio” (with an echoed “So fine” in the background) over and over. It eventually dispels in eddies of echo and phasing, as a ghost might depart. The sequence is disturbing, as though this “memory” had been implanted in a replicant. No one can hear anyone screaming in the space of silence which ensues.

Date Record Made Number Two: 28 July 1973
Number Of Weeks At Number Two: 1
Record At Number One: “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” by Jim Croce
UK Chart Position: 2

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