Captain & Tennille are
U.S.
pop music recording artists who achieved chart
success from 1975–80 with a repertoire of hit pop songs. The
duo consists of "Captain"
Daryl Dragon
(born
August 27,
1942), and
Toni Tennille
(born
May 8,
1940). They
are probably best known for their singles, "
Love Will Keep Us Together" and
"
Do That to Me One More
Time," as well as their television variety series which
appeared on the
ABC
network in the 1976–77 season.
Early history and collaboration
In 1971
Tennille was performing in an ecology-themed musical called
Mother Earth when the show changed venues from San Francisco
to Los
Angeles
. Dragon had been playing in a backing band
for
The Beach Boys, but was between
tours when Tennille called him in to audition as a replacement
keyboardist for
Mother Earth. Tennille later joined Dragon
in the next tour with the Beach Boys' backing band.
When the tour was
over, they began performing as a duo at the Smoke House Restaurant
in Burbank,
California
, where an early version of their single "The Way I
Want To Touch You" led to a contract with A&M Records.
Their first hit single was a
cover of
Neil Sedaka and
Howard Greenfield's "
Love Will Keep Us Together". A
textbook example of how top 40 heavy rotation can launch a career,
the song went to number-one on the pop charts nine weeks after its
debut in 1975, and it went on to win the
Grammy Award for
Record of the Year. A
Spanish recording of the single ("Por Amor Viviremos") also charted
that same year. This was the first time two versions of the same
single charted at the same time.
Toni and Daryl married on 11 November 1975, - on Veterans' Day, not
Valentine's Day as is sometimes reported.
Popular success
Over the next few years Captain & Tennille released a string of
hit singles including "The Way I Want To Touch You" (U.S. #4),
"
Lonely Night " (U.S. #3),
"
Shop Around" (U.S. #4), "
Muskrat Love" (U.S. #4), and "You Never Done It
Like That" (U.S. #10). Such was their level of success that they
were given their own television variety show,
The Captain &
Tennille, but they were not only unhappy with its
network-imposed heavy reliance on comedy, but also its physical
demands and its resulting overexposure of their image, and they
asked to be released from their contract. They also left A&M
when it began to turn its attentions to the newly signed
punk rock act
Sex
Pistols at the expense of acts such as
the Carpenters and themselves.
In July
1976, Captain & Tennille were invited by First Lady Betty Ford to perform in the East Room of the
White
House
in the presence of Queen Elizabeth II and President Gerald Ford during the Bicentennial
celebration.
In 1979,
Neil Bogart signed them to a
contract with
Casablanca Records,
and they reached number-one with their first single "
Do That to Me One More Time" in
January 1980. Subsequent singles achieved only moderate success,
and when Bogart died in 1982, the Casablanca company went bankrupt,
and the duo was left without a record company. They signed with
CBS Records but, not being able to find a
niche there, they were released from their contract.
Captain & Tennille appeared on many television
talk shows of the era; one memorable appearance as
guest hosts of "
The Mike Douglas
Show" in July 1981 had them hear "
Do That to Me One More Time"
being "sung" by a
TI 99/4A home computer.
[60732]
During the duo's period of highest popularity, Tennille also worked
as a session singer (most frequently partnered with The Beach Boys'
Bruce Johnston), performing backup on no fewer than three
Elton John albums including "
Caribou", "Blue Moves", and "21 at 33" (some
vocally arranged by Dragon) and most notably (and prominently) on
the hit track "
Don't Let
the Sun Go Down on Me". She also appeared as a backup vocalist
on tracks by
Art Garfunkel and
The Beach Boys, as well as
Pink Floyd for whom she performed backing tracks
on "
The Wall" album.
In the liner notes of the Captain & Tennille anthology
Ultimate Collection: The Complete Greatest Hits, Tennille
explains how her work on Pink Floyd's album gained her at least one
new fan:
I went to see the [Pink Floyd] concert at the
Sports Arena in Los Angeles. There was a 15-year-old boy
sitting in front of me who recognized me. He turned around
and snottily said, "What are YOU doing here?" So I told
him I sang on the album. He ran off to find a friend who
had brought the LP to the show, and looked at the back to see if my
name was really on there. A few minutes later, he came
back and apologetically said, "Can I have your
autograph?"
More recent activities
Throughout
the '90s, they continued to perform various concert dates at venues
around the world, frequently at Harrah's Lake Tahoe which was close to
their home near Carson City, Nevada
. One of the most lauded of their appearances
in this decade occurred when they played a one-time-only date at
the
House of Blues on
the
Sunset Strip in Los Angeles in 1995
as part of their twentieth anniversary as an act.
At the same time throughout the 1980s and '90s, Tennille enjoyed a
second career as a
big band and
pop standards singer, not unlike pop colleague
Linda Ronstadt. She released several
albums and performs with orchestras throughout the country.
Both the Captain and Tennille had a guest appearance as themselves
in the TV show 'Vega$' (Year 2, Ep 18)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0739238/
Tennille
also enjoyed a year as the star of the Broadway
tour of
Victor/Victoria. At
the end of that project, she and Dragon were to have embarked on a
twenty-fifth anniversary tour; however, the stresses of the road
proved too demanding and Captain & Tennille instead put an
indefinite hold on their career as a performing duo. During their
run through the mid 70s into the early 80s Captain And Tennille
have been said to have sold close to 25 million records, enough to
lock them in as one of pop music's most successful acts.
Nevertheless, Captain & Tennille's popularity remained evident
in the release of their
Ultimate Collection: The Complete
Hits on
Hip-O Records (a
subsidiary of
Universal Records)
in 2001 and
More Than Dancing...Much More, a 2002 compact
disc. The latter contains what was originally their final album in
1982,
More Than Dancing, which at that time was released
only in
Australia, and is combined with
selected tracks from their 1995
20 Years of Romance,
originally on K-Tel (re-recordings of their songs, and cover
versions of others), as well as five tracks never-before-released
on vinyl or CD.
In
November 2003, Tennille performed a benefit concert for the Reno, Nevada
Chamber Orchestra,
where her surprise guest was none other than Daryl Dragon.
This was the first time they had publicly performed as Captain
& Tennille in many years. As a result, their first live
recording,
An Intimate Evening with Toni Tennille, was
released to commemorate the event.
2005
marked a resurgence for Captain & Tennille when Brant Berry,
the vice president of a small Portland, Oregon
-based entertainment company, Respond 2
Entertainment (R2), an avowed fan, signed an agreement with Dragon
& Tennille to release three separate projects featuring the
duo.
The first — and most anticipated — was the home video release of
Captain & Tennille's 1976 variety series, on a three-disc DVD
set containing eleven complete episodes with lots of bonus musical
tracks.
Second, R2 re-released all six of their albums — both from the
original A&M and Casablanca labels — on newly-remastered CDs.
Several of the CDs were previously only available in Japan. The new
CDs, packaged both as individual CDs and in a boxed set, contain
new liner notes written by Toni Tennille.
Third, a new recording by Captain & Tennille was released — a
three-song Christmas CD entitled
Saving Up Christmas. This
effort was in anticipation of a full-length Christmas CD originally
to be released in the fall of 2006 by R2 Entertainment, but which
was released instead on Dragon & Tennille's own label, Purebred
Records. The brand-new Christmas CD entitled
The Secret of
Christmas was officially released on
November 1,
2006. This is
Captain & Tennille's first complete original album produced in
more than a decade, and their first-ever Christmas album.
Toni Tennille returned to British airwaves and to club play when
the mischievous electro-kitsch duo
Bent
sampled a small portion of her vocals from Captain & Tennille's
1979 track, "Love on a Shoestring" (from the album
Make Your Move), into their "Magic Love"
single in 2003. An
Ashley Beedle
remix of the single considerably heightened
the danceability of the originally
ambient track. Many in Great Britain knew the
voice was vaguely familiar but couldn't place it (most having been
born a generation too late to catch Captain & Tennille on top
40 radio).
A new direction for Captain & Tennille began in October 2006
with the release of
Cartoon
Network's animated special
Casper's Scare School. Not only
did the duo record two songs for the movie, they voiced the
dialogue for the characters who sang the songs. Tennille portrayed
Aunt Belle and Dragon was Uncle Murray, who together formed a
two-head-on-one-body being known as the Ankle. The two songs they
performed, "Why Does Love Make Me Feel So Good" and "World Without
Fear", were written by
Magnus
Fiennes, younger brother of popular motion-picture stars
Ralph and
Joseph Fiennes. Captain & Tennille's
co-stars on the show included
Phyllis
Diller,
Jim Belushi,
Dan Castellaneta, and
Bob Saget.
In 2007, three new DVDs were released of Captain & Tennille's
ABC TV specials: "Captain & Tennille In Hawaii", "Captain &
Tennille in New Orleans", and "Captain & Tennille Songbook".
They also released their first Christmas album, which was also
their first newly recorded studio album in more than a
decade.
Dragon & Tennille spent most of the '90s and '00s in the Lake
Tahoe area in northwestern Nevada, where they had lived for more
than a dozen years, and where, during that time, Toni had the honor
of serving as Ambassador for the Arts for the state.
In the mid-'00s,
having tired of the often harsh winters in that area, they
temporarily took year-round residence at their second home, located
in the Palm Springs area of Southern California, until 2008, when
they built a house and settled down in Prescott, Arizona
, where Tennille participates in the annual Prescott Jazz Summit.
Tennille writes a blog, located on their website
[60733].
Discography
Albums
| Year |
Album |
RIAA Certification |
US 200 |
| 1975 |
Love Will Keep Us Together |
Gold |
2 |
| 1976 |
Song of
Joy |
Platinum |
9 |
| 1977 |
Come in From the Rain |
Gold |
18 |
| 1977 |
Greatest Hits |
Gold |
55 |
| 1978 |
Dream |
|
131 |
| 1979 |
Make Your Move A |
Gold |
23 |
| 1980 |
Keeping Our Love Warm |
|
— |
| 1982 |
More Than Dancing B |
|
— |
| 1995 |
Twenty Years of Romance |
|
— |
| 2001 |
Ultimate Collection |
|
— |
| 2002 |
More Than Dancing … Much More
C |
|
— |
| 2005 |
20th Century Masters: The Millennium
Collection |
|
— |
| 2007 |
The Secret of Christmas |
|
— |
(A) Also charted at No. 33 UK
(B) Australian release only
(C) Worldwide re-release of 1982 Australian album with bonus
tracks
Singles
see Captain &
Tennille Singles Discography
| Year |
Single |
RIAA Certification |
Hot 100 |
AC |
Country |
R&B |
UK Pop |
| 1975 |
"Love Will
Keep Us Together" |
Gold |
1 |
1 |
— |
— |
32 |
| 1975 |
"Por Amor Viviremos" |
|
49 |
— |
— |
— |
— |
| 1975 |
"The Way I Want to Touch You" |
Gold |
4 |
1 |
— |
— |
28 |
| 1976 |
"Lonely
Night " |
Gold |
3 |
1 |
— |
— |
— |
| 1976 |
"Shop Around" |
Gold |
4 |
1 |
— |
— |
— |
| 1976 |
"Muskrat Love" |
Gold |
4 |
1 |
— |
— |
— |
| 1977 |
"Can't Stop Dancin' " |
|
13 |
12 |
— |
— |
— |
| 1977 |
"Come in From the Rain" |
|
61 |
8 |
— |
— |
— |
| 1977 |
"Circles" |
|
— |
9 |
— |
— |
— |
| 1978 |
"I'm on My Way" |
|
74 |
6 |
97 |
— |
— |
| 1978 |
"You Never Done It Like That" |
|
10 |
14 |
— |
— |
63 |
| 1978 |
"You Need a Woman Tonight" |
|
40 |
17 |
— |
— |
— |
| 1979 |
"Do That to
Me One More Time" |
Gold |
1 |
4 |
— |
58 |
7 |
| 1980 |
"Love on a Shoestring" |
|
55 |
— |
— |
— |
— |
| 1980 |
"Happy Together (A Fantasy)" |
|
53 |
27 |
— |
— |
— |
| 1980 |
"This Is Not the First Time" |
|
106 |
— |
— |
— |
— |
| 1981 |
"Keepin' Our Love Warm" |
|
— |
— |
— |
— |
— |
| 2007 |
"I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas" |
|
— |
— |
— |
— |
— |
| 2007 |
"It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year" |
|
— |
— |
— |
— |
— |
References
Notes
- Fuqua 131
- Fuqua 132
- Bronson 408
External links
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