The Carpenters had a pretty big hit in 1970 with a song officially called, I believe, "[They Long To Be] Close To You." You need to include the part in brackets. It came from the same album as another huge it of theirs, "We've Only Just Begun," which made it to the top of the charts but not — and I'm sure they were crushed about this — to my mixtape.
I liked The Carpenters a lot. It was pretty sad in 1983 when Karen Carpenter died from heart failure brought on by complications of anorexia. Two years earlier or so, a producer I was later glad I never worked for took me to lunch and said he was closing a deal with ABC for a weekly Carpenters TV series and he wanted to lock me in as head writer. I was not sure that either ABC or The Carpenters knew about this and many years later when I met Richard Carpenter, I found out they didn't.
I decided at the time that even if the series was a real offer, I was going to pass on it. Before I did — or maybe after I did but before this producer gave up on the project and/or involving me — he sent me over a package of all the Carpenters records to date. I played them. I enjoyed them. Gee, that lady had a pretty voice.
The records were messengered to me in a package that contained the receipt from Tower Records, which was where the producer had purchased them. That heightened my suspicions that he wasn't in tight with the Carpenters. If he couldn't get a few free records out of them, he probably couldn't get a contract out of them. But I was grateful for the records.