Captain & Tennille Biography
Female vocalist Toni Tennille (8 May 1940, Montgomery, Alabama, USA) co-wrote the 1972 rock musical Mother Earth. When it was staged in Los Angeles, the house band included keyboards player Daryl Dragon (b. 27 August 1942, Los Angeles, California, USA), the son of conductor Carmen Dragon. The duo teamed up romantically and professionally, and toured as part of the Beach Boys' backing group before writing and producing "The Way I Want To Touch You", their first recording as Captain And Tennille. The first hit was the jaunty "Love Will Keep Us Together" (1975), a Neil Sedaka composition that established the duo as a close harmony favourite of Top 40 radio programmers. That song sold a million copies, as did "Lonely Night (Angel Face)" and "Muskrat Love". "You Never Done It Like That" (1978) was their last Top 10 single before they moved from A&M Records to the Casablanca label. The sensual slow ballad "Do That To Me One More Time" reached number 1 in the USA in 1979 (number 7 in the UK, where they were not as successful with any of their singles), but afterwards the hits tailed off. By now, however, Captain And Tennille were established in television with their own primetime series, which was followed in the 80s by a daytime show hosted by Tennille with Dragon as musical director. Toni Tennille later made solo albums of standard ballads, before reuniting with Dragon in 1995 to record Twenty Years Of Romance.
Source: The Encyclopedia of Popular Music by Colin Larkin. Licensed from Muze.
|
