Major Letdowns: Captain & Tennille, "Keeping Our Love Warm"

Prior to getting started on this post, I'd never spent much time thinking about the Captain and/or Tennille, and would have been perfectly happy to go right on ignoring them for the rest of my life. I mean, don't get me wrong; "Love Will Keep Us Together" is a fun single, but it isn't like the '70s were short on adult contemporary goo, and while C&T were not untalented, I'd still put them toward the bottom of a very long list of superior alternatives for scratching that kitschy itch.

I say this not to dump on Captain & Tennille — not yet, anyway — but to explain why I'd always assumed they were more popular, and for longer, than they really were. In reality, the love song-spewing duo were a relatively short-lived phenomenon, and one whose discography yielded three gold albums, one platinum LP, and nine Top 40 singles — barely enough to fill out a budget best-of compilation. Admittedly, this all went down in a five-year span, so they burned bright even if they flamed out quickly. (They also had their own short-lived variety show, but that isn't as much of a flex as it might seem; in the mid-to-late '70s, anybody with the slightest bit of name recognition got one of those.)

The fourth Captain & Tennille album, 1978's Dream, was the first to break their chart success streak, peaking at a miserable No. 131 despite spinning off a pair of Top 40 singles. The duo apparently reached the same conclusion that I did after reading that statistic, deciding that A&M was no longer a hospitable home for their ballads of domestic bliss and trundling off for greener pastures at Casablanca. Make Your Move, released the following year, suggested they were 100 percent correct; that album peaked at No. 23, went gold, and gave the world their final No. 1 single, "Do It to Me One More Time."

And then the wheels — and everything else — fell all the way off.

Keeping Our Love Warm, released in October 1980, found Captain & Tennille at a bit of an odd juncture. For starters, Toni Tennille had just embarked on a new (and extremely short-lived) career as a talk show host, starring in the sensibly titled Toni Tennille Show in syndicated markets; beyond that, the two of them decided it was time to shake up their image. As Tennille put it in an interview with the Toronto Star, "Daryl and I want people to see us as mature, sexual human beings."

Reading that sentence — and gazing upon the rather ill-advised Keeping Our Love Warm cover art — reminded me of interviewing Debbie Gibson in 1993, right around the time she released Body Mind Soul, the album that was supposed to help her grow from a cute-as-a-button pop star into an adult singer-songwriter. To that end, the BMS record included vaguely sexual songs like "Losin' Myself" and "Shock Your Mama," while the cover art went out of its way to depict Gibson as far more grown up than the performer who'd delivered "Electric Youth" a few years earlier. It sank like a stone, partly because of changing trends, but also because the whole thing felt awkward, and I have to think the same holds true for Keeping Our Love Warm.

This is not to say that Keeping Our Love Warm includes any material that might be considered the slightest bit sexual by any stretch of the imagination. The closest it gets is the penultimate track, the Tennille-penned "This Is Not the First Time," which includes the line "You are not the first man to love me." By and large, this record is really just more of everything people had come to expect from Captain & Tennille, which is to say: A few covers and some halfway decent originals, performed with a fair bit of unnecessary synth fiddling that would make Steve Porcaro wince and topped off with vocals that seem to want to be soulful, but not if it means experiencing hardship.

About those covers. As I said, Captain & Tennille were never really as popular as hindsight might make you think, but they approached Keeping Our Love Warm with balls as big as the most persistently multi-platinum artist. The record's second song — which arrives limp on the heels of its feeble, insipid title track — is a jaw-droppingly ill-conceived cover of "Until You Come Back to Me (That's What I'm Gonna Do)." Further on down the track listing, they cover "Since I Fell for You," which is so square it makes Kenny Loggins' version of "You Don't Know Me" sound like "What'd I Say."

The one interesting thing about that cover of "Since I Fell for You" is that it highlights the guitar work of Ira Newborn, who served a tour of duty as Tennille's talk show musical director — a gig that included having his toenails painted on television — before going on to become one of Hollywood's most prolific composers. But the covers aren't all bad. The Captain takes center stage for a six-minute version of Horace Silver's "Song for My Father," which includes a whole bunch of unnecessary dicking around on various synths but is still far more ambitious than much of the rest of the album, and then the whole thing closes out with a surprisingly entertaining version of "Your Good Thing (Is About to End)," which manages to suggest the framework for a much more entertaining LP while also not ever being a patch on the Mable John or Lou Rawls recordings.

In the end, Keeping Our Love Warm did about what you'd expect it to do, which is to say that it did not chart anywhere in the world. Part of this has to be blamed on the numerous reversals of fortune suffered by Casablanca Records, which went from chart king to industry pariah in a matter of months; the same year Warm was released, label boss Neil Bogart was pushed out of his office by his new corporate bosses at PolyGram, and shortly thereafter, the roster was stripped for parts before eventually being absorbed into Mercury.

Still, even with all the muscle of the most enthusiastic major label behind it, it's hard to imagine Keeping Our Love Warm finding a great deal of commercial success. You can chalk it up to changing trends, but as it so often is, that excuse is mostly a canard; with the benefit of 45 years of hindsight, I think we can all agree that this is a shrug of an album, a deeply uninspired set of songs that's delivered with little heat and less commitment. I'm sure it came as no surprise when, after Warm sank like a stone, Captain & Tennille fucked right off for the better part of 30 years. Their next album, 1982's More Than Dancing, was only released in Australia and therefore doesn't count; the one after that, The Secret of Christmas, arrived in 2007.

This is not to say that Captain & Tennille sat at home licking their wounds. Far from it. Toni Tennille released a trio of big band records in the '80s, and although none of them sold more than a fraction of the ones Linda Ronstadt was releasing at the same time, they were generally well-received. They also continued performing regularly, and beyond that, they owned Rumbo Recorders, the Los Angeles studio that produced everything from Eye of the Tiger to Appetite for Destruction before the couple finally sold it in 2003.

Here at Jefitoblog, we begrudge the Captain and/or Tennille none of that success, and we also resolve not to weigh in on the embarrassing relationship revelations arriving courtesy of the Tennille memoir that showed up on shelves after their divorce, which must have shocked at least a few AARP-eligible diehard fans in and of itself. That being said, we also do not forgive them for taking Casablanca's money and using it to produce this half-hearted tease of a record, which promised a steamy good time but couldn't even be bothered to rise to Debbie Gibson levels of sexitude. This series isn't really about digging up an act's shittiest record; it's just about pinpointing the spot where major labels gave up on them. But in this case, the Venn overlap is at 100 percent — Captain & Tennille were audibly out of gas, and it was only just and proper that this is the album that sent them slinking out of American record stores for decades to come.