Keeping Our Love Warm
Keyboardist / arranger / producer Daryl "The Captain" Dragon and singer / pianist Toni Tennille became one of the most successful pop music duos of all-time as Captain & Tennille. The husband and wife team kicked off their recording career in style when their debut single Love Will Keep Us Together went straight to # 1 and won the 1975 Grammy Award for Record of the Year. The hits kept flowing with more top 40 singles, including The Way I Want to Touch You, Shop Around, Lonely Night (Angel Face,) Muskrat Love, Can’t Stop Dancin’, You Never Done It Like That and another chart-topper in 1980 with Toni Tennille’s Do That To Me One More Time.The couple met in 1971, when Dragon was the keyboard player for a musical revue composed by Tennille. Daryl is the son of conductor Carmen Dragon and his mother was a singer. In 1967, he was playing and touring with the Beach Boys - where he was dubbed "Captain Keyboard" by lead singer Mike Love for always wearing a captain’s hat on-stage. Additionally, he appeared on a few Beach Boys albums of the period.Toni Tennille, born Cathryn Antoinette Tennille – is the daughter of Frank Tennille, a big-band singer and Cathryn Tennille, who became a local television talk-show host. In 1965 Toni moved to California and became involved in theater, which led to her toward writing music for the ecologically minded revue, Mother Earth. The show was performed in San Francisco and Los Angeles, where Dragon joined the band. After it closed, Dragon returned to the Beach Boys and arranged to have Tennille hired as a pianist and backup singer. "Captain Keyboard" and the "Beach Girl" toured with the Beach Boys for a year, while becoming romantically involved. The couple was married shortly thereafter and began performing in Los Angeles clubs as a duo called Captain & Tennille.In September 1973, they financed their own recording, Tennille’s composition of The Way I Want to Touch You and released it on their own Butterscotch Castle label. The song earned significant airplay in Los Angeles and the duo was signed by A&M; Records. For their major-label debut they covered the Neil Sedaka/Howard Greenfield tune Love Will Keep Us Together. The song quickly went to number 1 on the Billboard charts, and the rest is pretty much pop-music history.Amidst a continual flurry of hit songs, 1976 also brought the Captain & Tennille’s weekly television show, which only lasted one season. In 1979, Captain & Tennille left A&M; for Casablanca records, a move that placed them atop the Billboard Hot 100 once again, this time with Toni’s song Do That To Me One More Time.Toni Tennille continues on with a solo career as a singer of traditional pop, performing with big bands and symphonies and has released numerous solo recordings to the praise of critics. She’s also become involved in stage musicals, having starred in the touring company of Victor/Victoria. Daryl Dragon continues to produce Toni’s and Captain & Tennille records and he also ran Rumbo Recorders, the recording studio they built in Los Angeles in 1979 – and sold in 2003.   These days there’s no place like home for the couple, as they much prefer their own surroundings to life on the road. Now, 30 years after their chart debut they’ve recorded two new holiday songs, Saving Up Christmas and Tahoe Snow.