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.
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 theGrammy 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.
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 (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 rockact Sex Pistols at the expense of acts such as the Carpenters and themselves. In July 1976, Captain & Tennille was 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 Fordduring 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. [wikipedia]
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