Captain & Tennille: Difference between revisions
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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''. Reciprocating in kind, Dragon later got the Beach Boys to take Tennille on the next tour as part of the backing band.<ref>Fuqua 131</ref> 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]].<ref name=Fuqua132>Fuqua 132</ref> |
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''. Reciprocating in kind, Dragon later got the Beach Boys to take Tennille on the next tour as part of the backing band.<ref>Fuqua 131</ref> 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]].<ref name=Fuqua132>Fuqua 132</ref> |
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Their first hit single was a [[cover version|cover]] of [[Neil Sedaka]] and [[Howard Greenfield]]'s "[[Love Will Keep Us Together]]". The track went to number-one on the [[Billboard Hot 100]] |
Their first hit single was a [[cover version|cover]] of [[Neil Sedaka]] and [[Howard Greenfield]]'s "[[Love Will Keep Us Together]]". The track went to number-one on the [[Billboard Hot 100]] only nine weeks after its debut in 1975, and it went on to win the [[Grammy Award]] for ''Record of the Year''.<ref name=Bronson408>Bronson 408</ref> It sold over one and a half million copies, and was awarded a [[music recording sales certification|gold disc]] by the [[R.I.A.A.]] in July 1975.<ref name="The Book of Golden Discs">{{cite book |
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Revision as of 08:12, 7 September 2010
Captain & Tennille |
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Captain & Tennille are American pop music recording artists who achieved chart success from 1975 to 1980 with a repertoire of hit songs. The duo consists of "Captain" Daryl Dragon (born August 27, 1942), and Cathryn Antoinette "Toni" Tennille (born May 8, 1940), who are also married. 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. Reciprocating in kind, Dragon later got the Beach Boys to take Tennille on the next tour as part of the backing band.[1] 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.[2]
Their first hit single was a cover of Neil Sedaka and Howard Greenfield's "Love Will Keep Us Together". The track went to number-one on the Billboard Hot 100 only nine weeks after its debut in 1975, and it went on to win the Grammy Award for Record of the Year.[3] It sold over one and a half million copies, and was awarded a gold disc by the R.I.A.A. in July 1975.[4] 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.[2][3]
Toni and Daryl married on 11 Nov 1975[5] – on Valentine's Day as stated by Toni on their 1975 show.[2]
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) and another million seller;[4] "Lonely Night (Angel Face)" (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 were released from their contract.
Captain & Tennille appeared on many television talk shows of the era. In an appearance on The Mike Douglas Show in July 1981, Tennille sang "Love Will Keep Us Together" accompanied by music played by a TI 99/4A home computer.[6]
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 as a backing vocalist on three Elton John albums including Caribou, Blue Moves, and 21 at 33 (some vocally arranged by Dragon) and most notably on the hit track "Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me". She also appeared as a backing 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 1990s, 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 their appearances in that decade occurred when they played 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 1990s, Tennille enjoyed a second career as a big band and pop standards singer, not unlike pop colleague Linda Ronstadt. She released several albums and performed 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).[7]
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 1970s into the early 1980s Captain & Tennille sold close to 25 million records.[citation needed]
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.
In November 2003, Tennille performed a benefit concert for the Reno, Nevada Chamber Orchestra, where her surprise guest was 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), signed an agreement with Captain & Tennille to release three separate projects featuring the duo. The first was the home video release of Captain & Tennille's 1976 variety series, on a three-disc DVD set containing eleven complete episodes with 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 box 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 followed by The Secret of Christmas released on Captain & Tennille's own label, Purebred Records 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.
Tennille returned to the UK airwaves and to club play when 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 heightened the danceability of the original ambient track.
In October 2006 Cartoon Network's animated special Casper's Scare School was aired. The duo recorded two songs for the movie, and 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. 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.
Dragon & Tennille spent most of the 1990s and 2000s in the Lake Tahoe area in Nevada, where they had lived for more than a dozen years, and where, during that time, Tennille served as Ambassador for the Arts for the state. In the mid-2000s, 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.
Discography
Albums
| Year | Album | RIAA Certification | US 200 | Label |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1975 | Love Will Keep Us Together | Gold | 2 | A&M |
| 1976 | Por Amor Viviremos | A&M | ||
| 1976 | Song of Joy | Platinum | 9 | A&M |
| 1977 | Come in From the Rain | Gold | 18 | A&M |
| 1977 | Greatest Hits | Gold | 55 | A&M |
| 1978 | Dream | 131 | A&M | |
| 1979 | Make Your Move A | Gold | 23 | Casablanca |
| 1980 | Keeping Our Love Warm | — | Casablanca | |
| 1980 | 20 Greatest Hits | — | Music for Pleasure | |
| 1981 | Scrapbook | — | Spectrum | |
| 1982 | More Than Dancing B | — | Wizard | |
| 1993 | A&M Gold Series: Captain & Tennille | — | A&M | |
| 1995 | Twenty Years of Romance | — | Nouveau | |
| 1997 | Captain & Tennille | — | Arcade | |
| 1998 | A&M Digitally Remastered Best | — | A&M | |
| 2001 | Ultimate Collection | — | Hip-O | |
| 2002 | More Than Dancing … Much More C | — | Raven | |
| 2005 | 20th Century Masters: The Millennium Collection | — | Universal | |
| 2005 | Saving Up Christmas | — | R2 Entertainment | |
| 2005 | Songs of Joy: The Complete Captain & Tennille Collection | — | R2 Entertainment | |
| 2007 | The Secret of Christmas | — | RetroActive |
(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 (Angel Face)" | 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" | — | — | — | — | — | |
| 1981 | "Keepin' Our Love Warm" | — | — | — | — | — | |
| 2007 | "I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas" | — | — | — | — | — | |
| 2007 | "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year" | — | — | — | — | — |
DVDs
The Ultimate Collection
2005 Moonlight & Magnolias, Inc - The complete first and only season of the Captain & Tennille Show on 3 DVDs including such guests as Ron Howard, John Travolta, Gabe Kaplan, Penny Marshall, Redd Foxx, Bob Hope, George Burns, Farrah Fawcett, Kate Jackson, Jaclyn Smith, and many More! Plenty of DVD extras as well: The rare music video of "Do That To Me One More Time", Footage of their TV Debut on the Tonight Show, The Captain & Tennille Jukebox and much more!
The Christmas Show
2007 Moonlight & Magnolias, Inc - The one and only Christmas Episode from the Captain & Tennille show from 1976 with guests Don Knotts, Tom Bosley, The Pointer Sisters and the Tennille Sisters singing songs Little Saint Nick, Jingle Bells, Wedding Song, I'm Saved/Amen, O Holy Night, and more.
Captain & Tennille in New Orleans
2007 Moonlight & Magnolias, Inc - Welcome to N'awlins! Join Toni and Daryl for some funky Dixieland in this 1978 TV special from the heart of the French Quarter in New Orleans. The was Captain & Tennille's first of three TV specials following their weekly variety show with guest stars John Byner, Hal Linden, the legendary Fats Domino and the Tennille Sisters.
Captain & Tennille in Hawaii
2007 Moonlight & Magnolias, Inc - Aloha from 1978! Hit the beach with Captain & Tennille as they spread love over the world from the scenic island of Hawaii with special guests Kenny Rogers, David Soul and Don Knotts. Toni performs "Love is Spreading Over the World, Gentle Stranger, I'm On My Way, Back to the Island and join Daryl at the Kona Coast as he experiences a Close Encounter of the Third Kind
Songbook
2007 Moonlight & Magnolias, Inc - It's hats off to 1979! Unlike the previous specials there were no comedy sketches, this one was all about the music. Not seen since it originally aired and now in 5.1 surround sound with brand new audio commentary from Toni and Daryl - this show will be a real treat for Captain & Tennille fans. Special guests include Ella Fitzgerald, B.B. King and Glen Campbell. Songs include Love Me Like a Baby, Good Enough, Dream, and more!
References
- Fuqua, Christopher S. (2004). Music Fell on Alabama: The Muscle Shoals Sound That Shook the World. Montgomery, AL: NewSouth Books. p. 159. ISBN 1-58838-157-9.
- Bronson, Fred (2003). The Billboard book of number 1 hits. New York, N.Y: Billboard Books. p. 980. ISBN 0-8230-7677-6.
Notes
- ^ Fuqua 131
- ^ a b c Fuqua 132
- ^ a b Bronson 408
- ^ a b Murrells, Joseph (1978). The Book of Golden Discs (2nd ed.). London: Barrie and Jenkins Ltd. p. 355. ISBN 0-214-20512-6.
- ^ Futch, Michael (1996-10-18). "The captain and tennile: one more time". Fayetteville Observer.
{{cite news}}:|access-date=requires|url=(help) - ^ "Tunnels of Doom: An Interview with Hank Mishkoff". Ridingthecrest.com. Retrieved 2010-08-05.
- ^ IMDb.com