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Captain & Tennille

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The Captain & Tennille are a husband and wife US pop music duo who achieved super stardom success during the 1970s and early 1980s. The duo consists of The Captain, Daryl Frank Dragon (born August 27, 1942), and Tennille, Toni Tennille, (born Cathryn Antoinette Tennille on May 8, 1940).

For years Toni Tennille's birth year was erroneously publicized as being 1943, as was their marriage date which is November 11, 1975 at The Silver Queen Saloon Wedding Chapel in Virginia City, Nevada. The wrong date was erroneously publicized as February 14, 1975. They renewed their wedding vows on November 11, 1995; their 20th wedding anniversary was covered in People magazine in 1995. Despite tabloid rumors that they had divorced, C & T have always let their audiences know that they continue to be happily married. "Love [has kept] them together" for 30 years; they will celebrate their 31st wedding anniversary on November 11, 2006. Toni explains about the issue with the dates on her new blog on the official Captain and Tennille website (see link below), where she will write her thoughts and share memories with the many loyal fans and friends of C & T.

Contents

Early history and collaboration

When they met in 1971 in San Francisco, Daryl Dragon had been performing for about six years as a keyboardist for The Beach Boys and Tennille was staging a musical she had written called Mother Earth, a rock ecology, at the [Marines Memorial Theatre]. Tennille hired Dragon as a musician for the production; after which, in turn, Dragon recommended Tennille to the Beach Boys as a piano player, and she landed the gig as a touring keyboardist with them. Toni remembered that Carl Wilson had coolly leaned over toward the piano to make sure she was playing with perfection (and she was), so he slid on back to where he was strumming his guitar. She is recognized in music history books as the first and only "Beach Girl". In other memories, Toni explained that she would get stopped by security as she tried to go onto the stage and she had to be escorted by the Beach Boys' manager on stage, letting security know she was with the band. The first time Toni heard the applause and screams from fans in the audience while she was a Beach Girl, she could physically feel the "good vibrations" of the cheers, it was incredible. During touring with the band, traditionally, the Beach Boys would put bandmates in hotel rooms together to remain fiscally conscious. When it came to Toni having a roommate, it was Daryl, but by then, Toni knew that there was something very special about Daryl and being a proper Southern lady, the justification for being roommates was clear and love was in bloom (in a hotel room in New Jersey). It was around that time that Toni penned the first love song of many that she would write for Daryl, "The Way I Want To Touch You".

They soon discovered they made a great team on their own and began performing on a regular basis at The Smokehouse club in Encino, California (Los Angeles), initially billed as The Dragons. Their popularity as a musical duo reached unprecedented heights for The Smokehouse which, after Dragon and Tennille released a single on their own label (Butterscotch Castle Records) as Captain & Tennille, eventually led to a recording contract with A&M Records.

Their first single was a cover version of Neil Sedaka's "Love Will Keep Us Together". The song contained a verbal acknowledgment to its composer, as The Captain & Tennille worked the line "Sedaka is back" into the fadeout. The song spent four weeks at #1 in the US in the summer of 1975 and became the top selling single of the year. They also received a Grammy Award for Record of the Year for this recording, which also gave Sedaka his first Grammy.

Popular success

Over the next few years, the duo released a string of hit singles including "The Way I Want To Touch You", "Lonely Night (Angel Face)", "Shop Around", a cover version of America's "Muskrat Love", and "You Never Done It Like That". Such was their level of success that they were given their own television show, but they were not happy with its format and 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.

Neil Bogart signed them to a contract with Casablanca Records, and they reached #1 with their first single "Do That To Me One More Time". Subsequent singles achieved only moderate success, and when Bogart died in 1982, the company went bankrupt, and the duo were left without a record company. They signed with CBS Records but, not being able to find a niche there, were released from their contract.

Current success

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 in Northern 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 20th 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, mimicking the success of pop colleague Linda Ronstadt. She released several albums and performed with orchestras throughout the country, which she still does to this day.

She 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 25th 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.

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 CD. 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 Chamber Orchestra where her surprise guest was none other than Dragon. This was the first time they had publicly performed as Captain & Tennille in many years, and, as a result, a live recording (their first) was released to commemorate the event. Not available on commercial websites, the double-CD, An Intimate Evening with Toni Tennille, can be acquired solely through the [Reno Chamber Orchestra website].

2005 marked a resurgence for Captain & Tennille when Brant Berry, the vice president of a small Portland, Oregon-based entertainment company, R2 Entertainment (short for Respond 2 Entertainment), an avowed fan, signed an agreement with Captain & Tennille to release three separate projects featuring the duo. The first—and most anticipated—was the first-time-ever pressing of Captain & Tennille's 1976 variety series onto a 3-disc DVD set containing 11 complete episodes and lots of bonus musical tracks. Secondly, 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 box set, contain brand-new liner notes written by Toni Tennille. Thirdly, a brand-new recording by Captain & Tennille was released: a 3-song Christmas CD, whose main title is "Saving Up Christmas." This release is in anticipation of a full-length Christmas CD, to be released in the fall of 2006, Captain & Tennille's first complete original album to be produced in more than a decade.

The couple maintain homes in both Northern Nevada (where Tennille was appointed "Ambassador For The Arts" by the governor of the state) and in Southern California.

Trivia

In popular culture

External links

 

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