Captain & Tennille - More Recent Activities

More Recent Activities

Throughout the 1990s, they continued to perform various concert dates at venues around the world, frequently at Harrah's Lake Tahoe which was close to their home near Carson City, Nevada. One of their appearances in that decade occurred when they played at the House of Blues on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles in 1995, as part of their twentieth anniversary as an act.

At the same time throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Tennille enjoyed a second career as a big band and pop standards singer, not unlike pop colleague Linda Ronstadt. She released several albums and performed with orchestras throughout the country.

Both the Captain and Tennille had a guest appearance as themselves in the television series Vega$ (Season 2, Episode 18).

Toni Tennille also enjoyed a year as the star of the Broadway tour of Victor/Victoria. At the end of that project, she and Dragon were to have embarked on a twenty-fifth anniversary tour; however, the stresses of the road proved too demanding and Captain & Tennille instead put an indefinite hold on their career as a performing duo. Nevertheless, Captain & Tennille's popularity remained evident in the release of their Ultimate Collection: The Complete Hits on Hip-O Records (a subsidiary of Universal Records) in 2001, and More Than Dancing... Much More, a 2002 compact disc. The latter contains what was originally their final album in 1982, More Than Dancing, which at that time was released only in Australia, and is combined with selected tracks from their 1995 20 Years of Romance, originally on K-Tel (re-recordings of their songs, and cover versions of others), as well as five tracks never-before-released.

In November 2003, Tennille performed a benefit concert for the Reno, Nevada Chamber Orchestra, where her surprise guest was Dragon. This was the first time they had publicly performed as Captain & Tennille in many years. As a result, their first live recording, An Intimate Evening with Toni Tennille, was released to commemorate the event.

In 2005, Brant Berry, the vice president of a small Portland, Oregon–based entertainment company, Respond 2 Entertainment (R2), signed an agreement with Captain & Tennille to release three separate projects. The first was the home video release of Captain & Tennille's 1976 variety series, on a three-disc DVD set containing eleven complete episodes with bonus musical tracks. Second, R2 re-released all six of their albums, both from the original A&M and Casablanca labels, on newly-remastered CDs. Several of the CDs were previously only available in Japan. The new CDs, packaged both as individual CDs and in a box set, contain new liner notes written by Toni Tennille.

Third, a new recording by Captain & Tennille was released—a three-song Christmas CD entitled Saving Up Christmas. This effort was followed by The Secret of Christmas released on Captain & Tennille's own label, Purebred Records, on November 1, 2006. This is Captain & Tennille's first complete original album produced in more than a decade, and their first-ever Christmas album.

Tennille returned to the UK airwaves and to club play when the band Bent sampled a small portion of her vocals from Captain & Tennille's 1979 track, "Love on a Shoestring" (from the album Make Your Move), into their "Magic Love" single in 2003. An Ashley Beedle remix of the single heightened the danceability of the original ambient track.

In October 2006, Cartoon Network's animated special Casper's Scare School was aired. The duo recorded two songs for the film, and voiced the dialog for the characters who sang the songs. Tennille portrayed Aunt Belle and the Captain was Uncle Murray, who together formed a two-head-on-one-body being known as the Ankle. The two songs they performed, "Why Does Love Make Me Feel So Good" and "World Without Fear", were written by Magnus Fiennes. Captain & Tennille's co-stars on the show included Phyllis Diller, James Belushi, Dan Castellaneta, and Bob Saget.

In 2007, three new DVDs were released of Captain & Tennille's ABC TV specials: Captain & Tennille in Hawaii, Captain & Tennille in New Orleans, and Captain & Tennille Songbook.

Dragon & Tennille spent most of the 1990s and 2000s in the Lake Tahoe area in Nevada, where they had lived for more than a dozen years, and where, during that time, Tennille served as Ambassador for the Arts for the state. In the mid-2000s, they temporarily took year-round residence at their second home, located in the Palm Springs area of Southern California, until 2008, when they built a house and settled down in Prescott, Arizona, where Tennille participates in the annual Prescott Jazz Summit.