It is arguably the most famous wedding song of the twentieth century, and it was written to sell bank accounts. We’ve Only Just Begun began life in 1970 as a television commercial for a California bank — sixty seconds of a young couple marrying and driving into their future, with no sales pitch at all. Richard Carpenter happened to see the ad at home, recognised the voice singing it, and made a phone call. Within months, the jingle was a full-length Carpenters record: No. 1 on the easy listening chart for seven weeks, a Grammy nominee for Song of the Year, and the opening line of a million wedding receptions. This is the story of how an afternoon’s advertising work became a standard.
A Wedding Song for a Bank
Crocker-Citizens National Bank had a problem: nobody young knew its name. The advertising man Hal Riney and his agency proposed something radical for 1970 — a commercial that told a story through music instead of selling a product, following a couple through their wedding day under the slogan “You’ve got a long way to go. We’d like to help you get there.” The bank’s name would appear only at the end, as text. What Riney wanted, in effect, was a music video before the term existed.
The commission very nearly went to someone else. The job had first been offered to Tony Asher — the lyricist who had written God Only Knows with Brian Wilson — but Asher had a skiing accident and, laid up on painkillers, passed it on, suggesting the agency call two young A&M staff writers he knew: composer Roger Nichols and lyricist Paul Williams. They wrote the song in a single afternoon, against a deadline, and Williams sang it on the finished commercial. His account of the brief still sounds startled: a young couple getting married, driving off into the sunset after the ceremony — “and it was going to be something new; instead of having a sales pitch over it, it was just going to show what we now call a music video.”
The advertisement worked beyond anyone’s expectations — and then backfired in the most flattering way. Young viewers loved it, asked for the song, and turned up at the bank in droves; but they were newlyweds without collateral, exactly the customers a bank cannot lend to. Crocker eventually discontinued the commercial despite its popularity. Its song, however, was about to be rescued by a television viewer with perfect pitch for other people’s material.
“We Would Have Lied Through Our Teeth”
Richard Carpenter saw the commercial at home and recognised the voice instantly: Paul Williams, a fellow A&M artist. Eighteen months earlier the Carpenters had been unknowns themselves, signed to A&M by Herb Alpert; their first album had gone nowhere, and only that summer had Close to You made them stars. Richard’s gift — the one his whole career was built on — was hearing hit potential where others heard background music, and he was certain this fragment was a hit. He called Williams and asked the obvious question: is there a full-length version?
There wasn’t — not exactly. The commercial had used two verses and no bridge. Williams, who with Nichols had enjoyed album cuts and B-sides but never a single, understood immediately what was at stake. As he confessed in the documentary Close to You: Remembering The Carpenters: “We’d had some success with songs before, a few album cuts and some B-sides — but no singles. This was a major break, a chance to get an A-side and maybe even a hit, so we would have absolutely lied through our teeth if there wasn’t a full song.” The full song was promptly completed — a bridge and an additional verse materialised — and delivered to the Carpenters. (History had already given the song one rehearsal: Nichols’ friend Smokey Roberds had recorded it in March 1970 under the name Freddie Allen, to no airplay at all.)
Karen Sings the Commercial
The Carpenters recorded the song for their second album, Close to You, produced by Jack Daugherty, with Richard’s arrangement turning a gentle jingle into a widescreen record — he placed it first on the album, a statement of intent. Karen Carpenter’s lead vocal does the heaviest lifting: the melody is simple, almost hymn-like, and she sings it with the unhurried certainty that made her the most recognisable voice of her era. She was twenty years old; on the duo’s early stage shows she still sang from behind her own drum kit, the band’s drummer as well as its voice, a double shift she had been working since their club days. Richard plays piano and Wurlitzer and provides the orchestration; the rhythm section is pure Los Angeles A-list — Joe Osborn on bass, Hal Blaine on drums — with Doug Strawn’s clarinet adding the record’s sighing colour. In barely three minutes, an advertisement had become a vow.
A&M released it on 21 August 1970, as the follow-up single to (They Long to Be) Close to You — one of the great one-two punches in pop history. Where Close to You had spent four weeks at No. 1, We’ve Only Just Begun peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100, reached No. 1 on the Cash Box chart, topped the Canadian chart, and spent seven weeks at No. 1 on Billboard’s Adult Contemporary chart. It sold a million copies, earned Grammy nominations for Song of the Year and Best Contemporary Song, and helped carry the Close to You album — itself a No. 2 hit in America — to Grammy wins, including Best New Artist. It was not even the only version in the shops: Mark Lindsay, the voice of Paul Revere & the Raiders, had a recording of the song in the marketplace that same season, and Cash Box greeted the Carpenters’ disc as having “delicious lyrics and a sparkling production.” Britain, characteristically, took longer to be persuaded — the single stalled at No. 28 there — though British listeners eventually voted it the second-most loved Carpenters song of all in an ITV poll. The performance attached to this article — Karen and Richard on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1970 — shows the song in its first flush of success, sung by two people who look barely older than the newlyweds in the commercial.
The Song That Never Went Back to the Bank
The song’s afterlife outran the single. It became the default first dance for a generation of American weddings, a distinction no chart position can measure; the sheet music alone sold a million copies, the song joined BMI’s list of million-performance works, and its airplay eventually passed four million broadcasts. In 1998 it was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, and Rolling Stone placed it on its list of the 500 greatest songs of all time. Williams recorded his own full-length version in 1971, on his album Just an Old Fashioned Love Song — the songwriter finally singing his own song as a song, a year after singing it as an advertisement. For Williams and Nichols it was the breakthrough that made their careers — the first of a run of Carpenters hits they would write together, including Rainy Days and Mondays.
There is a pleasing symmetry to the whole affair. A bank paid for a song about beginning a life, then withdrew it for attracting too many beginners. A songwriter bluffed that the song was finished, then finished it. And a brother and sister from Downey, California, took sixty seconds of someone else’s advertising and sang it so plainly and so truly that half a century later, couples still walk down the aisle to it, all over the world. They had, as the lyric insists, only just begun.
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