The classic Carpenters song that began life as a jingle: “For a wedding ceremony”
The Carpenters were way ahead of their time in a lot of respects, but they also caught the capitalism bug a lot earlier than most.
That might seem a blunt way of putting it, but it was admittedly pretty savvy of the duo to take one of their biggest hits from a place where millions of people would already recognise it: the advertising industry, and yes, that is correct – an enduring Carpenters classic actually started out in life as a jingle, but it only continued to grow from there.
The year was 1970, and a man named Hal Riney was hired as an advertising executive for Crocker Bank in the US to develop a new campaign to promote the brand. And it was clear that he was the right man for the job, because his bright idea was to attract young customers by writing an all-new chart hit to go along with the advert.
That slightly intimidating task fell to songwriting duo Paul Williams and Roger Nichols, with the latter later recalling: “Paul and I got this request from, well, from Crocker Bank in California to write a song for a wedding ceremony. So we wrote, ‘We’ve Only Just Begun’, just the first two verses.”
As it famously goes, nothing screams romance and youthful allure quite like the prospect of mortgages and bank loans, but somehow or other, when the advert went to air on both the radio and TV, it did just the trick. It even caught the attention of one Richard Carpenter.
When he contacted Williams and Nichols to say that he liked the song, it just so happened that the pair had just been approached by the bank to expand the campaign, based on its roaring success, and create a full song out of ‘We’ve Only Just Begun’. As such, they knew just the right man to call in order to cement this as a hit for the ages.
Subsequently, when The Carpenters took on the song for their own purposes, Crocker Bank was not only rolling in the money, but the pair became cemented as the latest pop duo to watch on the scene, going on to take home ‘Best New Artist’ at the Grammy Awards the following year, where they also performed the tune.
It has to be said that an inordinate number of iconic pop culture moments from the 1970s and ‘80s revolved around fictional weddings, but they clearly stood for something in terms of the currency they held for young audiences and the money potential that could be made out of them. It’s a cynic’s view of a blueprint, but then again, it was one that worked.
As such, it was a lesson from The Carpenters that, just sometimes, following a tried and tested formula really was the key to success. Was it arguably slightly scrounging to have other people do all the hard work and then insert yourself where you needed to be? Possibly. But without that vision, a first dance song for the ages would have never come to be. They just had a bank to thank.
