Early History and Collaboration
In 1972 Toni Tennille was the co-writer of an ecology-themed musical called Mother Earth. At that time, Daryl Dragon (son of composer Carmen Dragon) was the keyboardist for The Beach Boys. When Tennille's show was getting ready to move from San Francisco's Marines Memorial Theatre to Southern California's South Coast Repertory, a call was put out for a replacement keyboardist for Tennille. Dragon was in between tours when he heard about the opening, went to audition and landed the gig.
Reciprocating in kind, Dragon later suggested Tennille to The Beach Boys when the band needed an additional keyboardist, and they hired her. She toured with them for a year, and Toni Tennille has since been forever known as The Beach Boys' one and only "Beach Girl".
When the tour was over, and realizing their collaborative potential, they began performing as a duo at the legendary Smokehouse Restaurant across from Warner Brothers Studio in Burbank, California and started to make a name for themselves in the Los Angeles area. During this time, an early version of a Tennille-penned tune they had recorded, "The Way I Want to Touch You", became a hit on a local radio station and led to a recording contract with A&M Records.
Their first hit single was a cover of Neil Sedaka's and Howard Greenfield's "Love Will Keep Us Together". The song went to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart nine weeks after its debut in 1975, and it went on to win the Grammy Award for Record of the Year. Tennille paid tribute to Sedaka in the recording when she overdubbed her own voice during the outro of the single, singing "Sedaka is back." The reference is to Sedaka's aptly-titled album Sedaka's Back, which also included his own original version of the duo's single, recorded several years earlier during his difficult years attempting a comeback while in the UK. While Sedaka hit No. 1 twice in 1975 with both "Laughter in the Rain" and "Bad Blood" (the latter of which stayed at No. 1 for three weeks, was certified gold, and became Sedaka's most commercially successful individual single of his career), Dragon and Tennille bested even Sedaka's incredible success in 1975 with his own song, "Love Will Keep Us Together," which went on to be the biggest single for all of the year 1975. The duo successfully mined the Sedaka songbook a number of times over their chartmaking career, including "Lonely Night (Angel Face)" and "You Never Done It Like That." It sold over one million copies, and was certified Gold by the R.I.A.A. in July 1975. 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.
Tennille and Dragon married on November 11, 1975.
Read more about this topic: Captain & Tennille
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or history:
“Make-believe is the avenue to much of the young child’s early understanding. He sorts out impressions and tries out ideas that are foundational to his later realistic comprehension. This private world sometimes is a quiet, solitary
world. More often it is a noisy, busy, crowded place where language grows, and social skills develop, and where perseverance and attention-span expand.”
—James L. Hymes, Jr. (20th century)
“The history of medicine is the history of the unusual.”
—Robert M. Fresco, and Jack Arnold. Prof. Gerald Deemer (Leo G. Carroll)