Let me start by saying that I have no memory of how I ended up with this record in my collection. I tossed all of my jewel cases not long ago in favor of thin plastic sleeves, so there are no price tags or other stickers to offer evidence of whether I spotted “The Best of the Carpenters” at a WFMU Record Fair $3 table and thought why not, or if I actually sought out the Carpenters section at Amoeba or some other record store because I felt my music selection wasn’t complete without “Rainy Days and Mondays.”

I do know that the Carpenters were on my musical radar early, and why. From the time I was a baby, my parents were playing me The Beatles, as many parents everywhere were doing at the time with their own children, and that would be the bulk of my musical diet for my first decade on Earth. At some point, my Saturday morning TV viewing led me to also getting some Osmonds records — I was a little too young to pick up on the Monkees or the Archies, and thankfully the Harlem Globetrotters never recorded an album — but that was about the breadth of my tastes.

Part of this was no doubt thanks to my dad, who was happy to have his musical explorations start and end with the Beatles and whatever classical music he could eke out of Columbia University’s radio station with a rabbit-ear antenna. (We lived just over a mile from Columbia, which speaks to both the weakness of the station’s signal and how hard it was to get FM reception in skyscraper-dense Manhattan in the days of only over-the-air broadcasts.) My mother, however, was a different story: She listened to popular music all the time, even playing it as musical accompaniment to the modern dance classes she taught around our neighborhood, including occasionally at the Ansonia Hotel of Babe Ruth fame. My own record player may have been permanently weighted with a stack of Beatles LPs, but her collection was far more diverse: Helen Reddy, Linda Ronstadt, Carly Simon, Mac Davis, Gladys Knight, Bread.

Okay, maybe “diverse” isn’t the best word for it: She was stuck firmly in the early-‘70s light rock canon, as conveyed by an FM station whose call letters I’ve forgotten, but whose playlist seemed to require at least three John Denver songs per hour. And first among those many equals were the Carpenters, who I can remember as my household’s 1b to the Beatles’ perpetual 1a from a very young age. It didn’t hurt that they covered the Beatles’ “Ticket to Ride,” though an equal influence on me may also have been their recording of the Sesame Street staple “Sing” — I was as devout a viewer of Sesame Street as I was of Scooby-Doo. Either way, Richard and Karen were as big a presence in my life as John, Paul, George, and Ringo, or, for that matter, Ernie and Bert.

The Carpenters, in case the two cover choices cited above weren’t a hint, were seriously weird in their choice of material. They had 12 top-ten hits, and those included: a Burt Bacharach song that Richard Carpenter rewrote from its original version performed by Richard Chamberlain; an early Motown hit that the Beatles had covered as well; a much-covered song that was once recorded by an early version of the Guess Who; a song based on an idea that Bonnie Bramlett stole from Rita Coolidge (though not as blatantly as Eric Clapton stole “Layla” from Rita Coolidge) after Richard saw Bette Midler singing it on Johnny Carson; two songs by Paul Williams, one of which Richard adapted after hearing it as the jingle for a bank commercial; a song co-written by two members of Bread that Richard lifted from the soundtrack to the movie Lovers and Other Strangers; the Sesame Street song; and four Richard originals. Once filtered through Richard’s brain and production manipulations, they all came out sounding roughly the same: tuneful, hooky, and drenched in enough plinky piano and schmaltzy strings to kill a roomful of pancreases.

The secret ingredient that saved it all, obviously, was Karen’s voice. She may have started as the band’s drummer, but that soon became secondary — Hal Blaine played drums on many of the Carpenters hits — as her singing took center stage. It takes a lot for me to prefer someone’s cover over Bob‘s original, but it’s fair to say that Karen knocked it out of the park, as she did with whatever song her brother laid in front of her to do magic with.

Which may be why the Carpenters managed to retain, dare I say, an element of cool that, say, the Captain and Tennille could never hope to approach. Sonic Youth put them back on the radar of the young and hip with their beautiful and chilling ode to Karen and her life with and death from anorexia; then there was the “If I Were a Carpenter” tribute album that featured Shonen Knife doing an even more dramatic reconfiguration of one of Richard’s songs than he’d ever done to something he’d discovered while watching TV. And, of course, there was that movie about Karen with the all-Barbie-doll cast, which I still haven’t watched all the way through even though it’s now out of litigation hell and available, like everything else, on the web. Everyone, for a while it seemed, was retelling the story of the biggest pop band of the early ’70s as a tragic tale of abusive family members and fat-shaming, which weirdly gave its sibling duo some element of depth that their wall-of-violins arrangements had denied them.

The typical “Behind the Music” arc (success, collapse, redemption) has become a cliche at this point, but it’s just one part of a broader attraction to stories that reveal what we think of as the dark underbelly of straight white conventional America. Nobody would have watched “Breaking Bad” if Walter White had just stayed a chemistry teacher, and there’s a similar arc at work for other public falls from grace — regardless of which demons people fall victim to, stories like these both confirm the corruptability of the American dream and maintain the image of the dream itself, which is kind of the point of dark underbelly narratives going back a century or more.

Anyway, there it is, the Best of the Carpenters, sitting on my CD shelf right between Care Bears on Fire and the Carter Family. Am I going to take this opportunity to give it a listen with fresh ears, now that I’ve spent more time looking into Richard and Karen’s strange backstory? Probably not. Am I going to take this opportunity to finally watch that Todd Haynes movie? Probably. Once you’ve gotten a glimpse at the dark side of mainstream success, it’s hard to look away.