Throughout the mid and late 1970s, the pop music duo The
Captain & Tennille had several chart topping hits with such upbeat songs
and love ballads like “Do That To Me One More Time”, “Muskrat Love” and their
Grammy Award winning “Love Will Keep Us Together”.
However, as Toni Tennille has written in her
recently-released memoir, the story of her life behind the music, especially
with her husband and musical partner Daryl “The Captain” Dragon, certainly
belied those romantic lyrics that she sang which brought her so much success
and fame.
Tennille had a southern belle-type upbringing in Montgomery,
Alabama during the pre-Civil Rights 1950s, in a family where music played quite
a major role; her father was a popular bandleader during the 1930s (but gave it
up to run the family’s furniture store business) and her mother hosted a
popular TV talk show in Montgomery during the 50s. Although her father
struggled through a bout of alcoholism, he always encouraged Toni and her
sisters Jane, Melissa and Louisa to experience the joys of music (even when
Toni struggled with a serious injury to her finger at the age of six). With a
developed talent for the piano and as a singer, Tennille started singing
professionally during the late 50s, when she was a student at Auburn
University, with the Auburn Knights Orchestra.
A decade later, when she settled in California and created a
musical production called “Mother Earth” that was a major success (but made
very little money thanks to a bad deal with its producer), she made a
connection with a keyboardist she was about to hire for the show who was to
change her life (personally and professionally), for better and for
worse.
Enter Daryl Dragon, the son of Carmen Dragon, who was an
Oscar-winning Hollywood composer and arranger. They started working together on
the “Mother Earth” production, and then joined the Beach Boys’ tour (where
Dragon was known as “the Captain of the Keyboards” for his vast musical
knowledge and mastery of the keyboards); from there, the duo started doing club
gigs across the U.S., and gained a cult following at a club called The
Smokehouse. When they privately recorded one of their songs that was popular in
their club gigs – “The Way I Want To Touch You” – became a hit on California
radio stations, it brought them to the attention of A&M Records, where they
signed a recording contract and put together their first album “Love Will Keep
Us Together”, where the title track hit the #1 spot on the Billboard charts in
the summer of 1975.
This success led to a hit variety TV series on ABC during
the 1976-77 season and more hit singles throughout the balance of the decade.
However, as Tennille effectively states throughout most of the book, her real
life did not mirror the image the public had of her and Dragon as a happily
married couple who found happiness through their music and their pet dogs.
Tennille writes quite thoroughly that her life and career
with Dragon was one long – yet fruitless – quest to reach out to him and find
that emotional core that could have made him a loving husband, yet he never
outwardly exhibited (which she also expressed through many of their songs). She
attributed Dragon’s distant, yet sometimes bizarre, behaviour to the cavalier
way his father treated him, and was highly critical of everything that he ever
did, which was never good enough for Carmen Dragon.
“There was no denying that together we had great chemistry;
it ignited our musical collaboration into hits and our television show into
primetime gold,” she writes. “But, despite all that we had accomplished
together, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was somehow still ‘auditioning’ for
Daryl’s love.”
As well, she chronicles how living with Dragon’s
eccentricities for such a long time – whether it was enduring his bizarre
dietary habits that included cooking organic brown rice and steamed vegetables
on a hot plate in their hotel room during touring and forsaking eating out at
restaurants, or spending countless hours surfacing the internet in his bedroom,
searching for the latest conspiracy theories – had quite an almost tragic
emotional effect on her. This was climaxed with the emotional meltdown she
experienced while performing with the national touring company of
“Victor/Victoria”, thanks to the pressures of the constant travelling and
performing that went with being part of a touring theatrical company, along
with Dragon’s monthly visits, which was more like an exercise in codependency
on his part.
Toni Tennille has managed to write a fascinating, brutally
honest show business memoir that takes the sheen off one of the most successful
recording acts of the late 1970s, and serves as a breath-of-fresh-air in book
form, as she comes to terms with the ups and downs of a career as a
professional singer/songwriter/musician, and the partner who was supposed to
provide that ideal professional and emotional balance, but just came up empty,
no matter how much she valiantly tried to bring that out from him.
Love may have kept the Captain & Tennille together
musically, but after reading Toni Tennille’s memoir, you painfully discover
that love did not keep them together in reality.
* * *
Stuart Nulman’s “Book
Banter” segment is a twice-a-month feature on “The Stuph File Program” with
Peter Anthony Holder, which now has almost 150,000 listeners per week. You can either listen or download it at
www.peteranthonyholder.com, Stitcher.com or subscribe to it on iTunes. Plus you can find it
at www.CyberStationUSA.com, www.KDXradio.com, True Talk Radio, streaming on www.PCJMedia.com, and over the air at World
FM 88.2fm in New Zealand, Media Corp in Singapore and WSTJ,
St. Johnsbury, Vermont. Stuart can be reached at bookbanter@hotmail.com.
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