If you care deeply about the fate of houses that skinny dead women used to live in, then this is the story for you.
The family home of The Carpenters is going to be demolished because the current owner is sick of weird Carpenters fans hanging around all the time, and the fight is on to save the important memorial that one quite dull band used to live in for a while until one of them died.
Will the campaign to save The Carpenters house from demolition be successful? More importantly, can you really bring yourself to be even slightly bothered about whether a sodding house gets knocked down or not?
Some terrible things happen to the houses of dead celebrities. Take Graceland, for example – Elvis fans have literally started to go there to die now, while Johnny Cash's house suffered the biggest indignity of all in 2006 when a Bee Gee bought it. Perhaps it'd be better if all these houses were just demolished.
That seems to be the case at the moment with the old Carpenters house in Downey, south of Los Angeles. Although the house holds special significance for fans of The Carpenters because if featured on the cover of one of their albums and the band recorded there and it's where Karen Carpenter collapsed before she died, the current owner wants to knock it down anyway.
The reason? She's fed up with creepy Carpenters fans coming along and staring through the windows like a bunch of easy listening sods and leaving flowers everywhere. BBC News reports:
Fans of The Carpenters are objecting to plans to have pop duo's former family home knocked down… Jon Konjoyan, fan of the act who had huge success in the 1970s, said: "This house is our version of Graceland." The five-bedroom house was immortalised when it featured on the cover of The Carpenters' 1973 hit album Now & Then. Jessica Parra, whose parents own the house, said at first they allowed fans into their home and gave away items left behind by Richard Carpenter. "But honestly, it became horrible, not only for us but for the neighbourhood," she said, adding that fans "peek in windows and take pictures".
Sort of makes you wonder what they thought they'd be getting into buying a house where a woman who sold 100 million albums died. If they didn't want all this intrusion, perhaps it'd have been wiser to a house belonging to someone who fewer people cared about, like Dane Bowers or Shane Richie or something.
But regardless of that, it'll be interesting to see whether the Carpenters fans will be able to halt the demolishment of their heroes' home. Perhaps if enough of them gang together they'll be able to buy the house and turn it into a theme park-style shine to The Carpenters, that lets fans pay to lie down in the exact spot where Karen Carpenter collapsed, or ride a nauseatingly psychedelic ghost train that helps visitors understand what it was like to be Richard Carpenter when he was off his face of Qualuudes. And, of course, the Karen Carpenter Experience, which mainly involves not eating very much for a while.
Chances are that none of this will happen though because, as Carpenters fans, the protesters are among the puniest and most ineffectual saps ever to walk the earth.
Read more:
mst3kster says
What’s the big deal? All houses are built by Carpenters.
Ryan says
fuck you… that is all. You sound like a total bastard who has nothing better to do but bitch about things that dont concern you. Once again. Fuck you you lonely, sad excuse for a even a disease ridden twat.