Comeback singles are supposed to announce a new chapter. Touch Me When We’re Dancing did something sadder and more dignified: it proved, one final time, that the Carpenters’ old magic still worked — and then became the last hit of their career. Released in the summer of 1981 after three years of silence, illness and upheaval, the record carried Karen and Richard Carpenter back into the Top 20 and gave them their fifteenth number one on the adult contemporary chart. Nobody knew, as it climbed, that it was a farewell. Karen Carpenter had less than two years to live.
A Muscle Shoals Song Looking for a Voice
The song began far from the Carpenters’ polished Los Angeles world. It was written by Terry Skinner, J. L. Wallace and Ken Bell, three musicians embedded in the Muscle Shoals, Alabama, scene — the small southern town whose studios, including the little building at 3614 Jackson Highway in neighboring Sheffield, had powered hits by Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett and the Rolling Stones. Skinner and Wallace led a studio group called Bama, and it was Bama who first recorded Touch Me When We’re Dancing, releasing it on the Free Flight label in 1979.
Bama‘s version was warmly reviewed — Billboard praised its smooth production — but it stalled at number 86 on the Hot 100, a good song in search of the right singer. The melody was built for a voice that could sound tender and commanding at once, over an arrangement that swayed rather than pushed. It waited two years for Karen Carpenter. The writers, meanwhile, were no one-hit accident: Skinner, Wallace and Bell went on to write Even the Nights Are Better, which Air Supply took to number 5 on the Hot 100 and number one on the adult contemporary chart in 1982. The trio had a specialty — unhurried, harmonically plush ballads about the moment loneliness ends — and Touch Me When We’re Dancing is its purest specimen.
Three Quiet Years
The Carpenters who returned to A&M Studios in 1980 were not the duo that had dominated the early seventies. Their late-decade albums had sold respectably but the hit singles had dried up; their last single, I Believe You, dated from 1978, and their last album had been the seasonal Christmas Portrait that same year. Behind the scenes, the machinery had broken down. Richard, exhausted and dependent on Quaaludes, the prescription sedative he had begun taking to sleep through the touring years, fell down a flight of stairs backstage in January 1979 and finally confronted the addiction, checking into the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas, for a six-week treatment program, then taking the rest of 1979 off to recover. Karen’s health, strained by an eating disorder that few around her yet understood, was quietly deteriorating even as she pursued a solo album with producer Phil Ramone — a record that Richard and A&M executives voted to reject in 1980, devastating her; it was finally released in 1996, thirteen years after her death.
Made in America, the comeback album Richard produced himself, was conceived as a restoration: the close harmonies, the orchestral sweep, Karen’s voice front and center, as if the interregnum could simply be sung away. The sessions began in 1980. Touch Me When We’re Dancing was recorded on June 15, 1980, with the duo’s veteran bassist Joe Osborn joined by guitarists Tony Peluso and Tim May, drummer Larrie Londin, percussionist Paulinho da Costa, Tom Scott’s tenor saxophone and Earl Dumler’s oboe, all wrapped in Richard’s orchestration. The album held one more homecoming: on its tracks, Karen played drums in the studio for the first time since Horizon in 1975, the singer reclaiming, briefly, the chair she had started from. Richard would later say of Made in America that it “was Karen’s favorite album and is mine, out of all our projects” — a judgment delivered in 1985, when both of them knew things about it that the public was only beginning to guess.
The single’s B-side carried a private significance its A-side could not match. Because We Are in Love (The Wedding Song) was played at Karen’s wedding to real-estate developer Thomas Burris on August 31, 1980 — a marriage that would collapse within little more than a year, adding one more sorrow to the comeback’s undertow; Karen filed for divorce in 1982, though it was never finalized before her death.
Back on the Charts
A&M released Touch Me When We’re Dancing as a single on June 19, 1981, days after Made in America itself. The response was immediate and, by the standards of 1981, remarkable. The record climbed to number 16 on the Billboard Hot 100 — number 17 on Cash Box — the Carpenters’ first Top 40 single in over three years and their first Top 20 showing since 1976, and reached number one on the adult contemporary chart, the fifteenth and, as it turned out, final number one of their career on that format. It reached number 4 on Canada’s adult contemporary chart and number 22 in New Zealand. The duo worked the comeback properly, too, appearing on Good Morning America in August 1981 and The Merv Griffin Show that October — Karen, gamely promoting an album her health would not let her tour behind. Its music video, a gentle period piece by later standards, shows Karen singing and slowly dancing beside Richard’s piano while images of a dancing couple are superimposed on the piano’s black gloss — the duo’s chemistry, intact to the end.
As a piece of record-making, the single is a bridge between two eras of the Carpenters’ sound. The bones are classic Richard: Earl Dumler’s oboe drifting through the arrangement, strings arranged with a couturier’s precision, Karen’s lead doubled by her own harmonies until the voice seems to glow. But the surface is 1981 — Richard’s Fender Rhodes electric piano supplying the record’s warm pulse, Paulinho da Costa’s percussion dusting the edges, and Tom Scott’s tenor saxophone stepping forward for the kind of sleek solo that defined soft rock’s new decade. It is the seventies Carpenters, tailored for the eighties — and the tailoring fit well enough that even listeners too young to remember Close to You bought the record.
The numbers came with an asterisk no one could yet read. The album itself peaked at a modest number 52 in America, though it reached number 12 in Britain, and its follow-up singles — Those Good Old Dreams, (Want You) Back in My Life Again and Beechwood 4-5789 — stalled in the lower reaches of the Hot 100. Only the lead single had truly landed. Made in America would be the last Carpenters album released in Karen’s lifetime. She died on February 4, 1983, at thirty-two, of heart failure brought on by complications of anorexia. Later that year Richard assembled Voice of the Heart from unreleased recordings, several of them Made in America outtakes — the comeback’s echoes, issued as an epitaph; the album reached number 46 and was certified gold. Touch Me When We’re Dancing, the comeback’s spearhead, had become the coda: the last time the machinery of a Carpenters hit — her voice, his arrangement, the charts bending toward them — operated at full power.
The Song’s Second Life in Country Music
Hit songs, unlike careers, can have more than one life. In 1984, Mickey Gilley and Charly McClain recorded Touch Me When We’re Dancing as a duet for their album It Takes Believers, nudging it toward the country audience its Muscle Shoals writers had always been close to. Two years later the super-group Alabama — by then the biggest act in country music — made the song the first single from their album The Touch, released in September 1986. Alabama’s version went to number one on Billboard‘s Hot Country Songs chart, the group’s twentieth consecutive chart-topper in a streak stretching back to 1980, and repeated the feat in Canada.
The Alabama hit completed the song’s strange journey: written by Muscle Shoals session men, first cut by their own band, made famous by a California brother-and-sister act at the end of their story, and finally crowned by country music’s reigning hit machine. Few songs have been sung by so many different kinds of Americans.
A Farewell Hidden in a Comeback
Later in 1983, months after Karen’s death, the Carpenters were awarded their star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame — Richard accepting for a duo that had become, in the cruelest way, a solo act of remembrance. Touch Me When We’re Dancing occupies a particular place in what they left behind. It is not their biggest hit or their most famous recording. It is the sound of the Carpenters insisting, one last time, on being themselves: a sad-eyed love song, immaculately arranged, sung as if nothing were wrong.
That insistence is exactly what makes it hard to hear casually now. The record promises dancing. History answered with silence. But for one summer in 1981, the promise held — and the Carpenters stood, briefly, back where they had always belonged.