Karen Carpeneter died 42 years ago.

WOW! I miss what could have been at what was. Karen had such a gorgeous voice and was my first female singer that really captivated me in my youth. I have to admit the arrangements by her brother played a part, but her voice, lush, clear, entrancing. I think tonight I'll be listening to them again. I too also enjoyed the fact that she could drum with the best of drummers too. Back then you didn't find many women playing any instrument maybe outside of guitars back then.

Legend has it that Frank Sinatra said Karen Carpenter "was the only singer that he would pay to see.".

One of the stupidest things I have ever done was to trade the only Carpenters album I owned in at the local Peaches store in Atlanta. They were giving a 50 cent credit for used records toward new albums, so I picked out a few from my collection that I had listened to a couple of times, but felt like I wouldn't be listening to them much in the future. The clerk who helped me tried to talk me out of trading it in (I think he knew it was a decision I would would later regret, which I did). There is no other female artist that would be mistaken for Karen Carpenter - her voice was that unique.

@discnik

Fifty cents???

You must have more albums than cents!!! 

Or should I say, you have more albums than sense...

...Either way seems right. 😜

Anyway, I've done much worse. Twenty-five years ago I put together a $20,000 high end audio system and sold it for a great loss just one year later!

You might ask why I would do that.... Well the answer is even more preposterous.  I quit a great job, sold most everything, and moved to a deserted island called Dry Tortugas. So I definitely have regrets too!!

In the late 70s, fifty cents was probably equal to $2.00 today. Albums typically were around $6.98 each at that time, so I got a credit of $3.00 by trading in the six albums out of my collection. The others were probably real dogs because I don't recall any of their titles. As some have expressed in this thread, at the time I was not a huge fan of the Carpenters. Some of their songs sounded contrived, to put it charitably. If you do the math above, Peaches was actually given just a 25% discount on the dollar.