Let\u2019s just get the best thing about this review out of the way right off\u00a0— I got to tease the rest of the Vault\u2019s writing staff for months, asserting repeatedly that they\u2019d never guess what my first purchased album was.\u00a0 Many names were bandied about, including Michael Bolton, Barry Manilow, the Bay City Rollers, Tiny Tim and the Bee Gees.<\/p>\n
Worthy guesses all, but back in 1976 the honors went to none other than Captain and Tennille.<\/p>\n
Yes, at age 13, right about the time my mom drove me down to Pacific Stereo in San Rafael so that I could lay down something like 59 big ones for a turntable, I bought my very first LP record, whose cover features a dork in a yachting hat, the perkiest woman ever to wear a blonde pageboy, and two astonishingly ugly dogs.\u00a0 What was<\/i> I thinking\u2026?<\/p>\n
The truth is, I was a closet romantic.\u00a0 Yeah, in my never-been-kissed stage I pretty much bought the whole nine sugar-coated, rosy-colored yards of a lyric like \u201cLove Will Keep Us Together,\u201d with those almost-but-not-quite cool keyboard tones bouncing along underneath.\u00a0 As a pop act, C&T were a slightly hipper husband-and-wife doppelganger of label-mates the Carpenters.\u00a0 Sure, they worshipped Neil Sedaka — he wrote \u201cTogether\u201d along with a couple of their other chart hits — but they actually had stronger ties to those original sunny pop masters the Beach Boys.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
Captain (a.k.a. Dayrl Dragon) had in fact earned his nickname as part of the Beach Boys\u2019s live act (they nicknamed him \u201cCaptain Keyboards\u201d because of the hat) and on this debut disc, C&T covered two songs written by former Beach Boy Bruce Johnston (\u201cDisney Girls\u201d and \u201cI Write The Songs\u201d) as well as a track co-composed by Dragon and Dennis Wilson (\u201cCuddle Up\u201d).\u00a0 Finally, they also cover the Brian Wilson classic \u201cGod Only Knows,\u201d which shows guts if not wisdom.<\/p>\n
To be fair, Dragon is a talented arranger and Tennille has a nice voice.\u00a0 That said, this album has all the substance of cotton candy.\u00a0 It\u2019s been suggested by other reviewers that albums like Love Will Keep Us Together<\/i> provided a counterpoint to and\/or escape from the pervasive cynicism of the post-Watergate mid-70s.\u00a0 Which is accurate enough, but it doesn\u2019t change what comes out of your speakers when you put this disc on\u00a0— feather-light, 100-proof saccharine.<\/p>\n
In the end, other than to acknowledge the fact that there is a place in this world for shallow, sickly-sweet romanticism — there must be, or there wouldn\u2019t be so damn much of it around — the most positive thing I can say about this album today is that it doesn\u2019t have \u201cMuskrat Love\u201d on it. \u00a0\u00a0For that, we can all be grateful. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":29116,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[8107],"rating":[11205],"class_list":["post-40636","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-captain-tennille","rating-rating-d-plus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/40636","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40636"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/40636\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29116"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40636"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=40636"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=40636"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}