CAPTAIN & TENNILLE: Millennium Collection Liner Notes: - Melodies, arrangements and lush, exacting vocals are the cornerstone elements of Captain & Tennille’s catalogue and this Millennium collection. Not to mention the heartfelt lyrics, many of which were penned by Toni Tennille as a testament of love for her arranger, her partner and husband, the Captain ­ Daryl Dragon. The couple’s initial connection was musical. They first met in the lobby of the Marine’s Memorial Theater in San Francisco where Dragon, on break from a Beach Boys’ tour, applied for a keyboard position for Tennille’s musical Mother Earth. "I couldn’t believe she had written all the music for the show, something like 30 songs. I wanted to work with someone I thought was a true musician and talent," says Dragon, dubbed the Captain by the Beach Boys as he often wore a skipper’s hat, says. By the time the Beach Boys went back on the road, Dragon had hooked Tennille up with the tour as keyboardist. When they returned to Los Angeles, they moved in together and began performing locally in the San Fernando Valley, including a long standing gig at Encino’s Smoke House, where two disc jockeys discovered the duo. With a promise of radio airplay, the twosome recorded a song Tennille had written for Dragon called "The Way I Want to Touch You." "When I first heard that on the radio, I was blown away," says Dragon. "It was like being in a different dimension. You think, ‘Oh, there is a Mars!’ You don’t ever think that your song could possibly get on the radio and I thought, ‘Boy, that sounds pretty good.’" When the song became a local hit, five labels began to vie for the duo. They signed with A&M and proceeded to make their first album with family members in tow ­ Tennille’s sisters Melissa, Jane and Louisa on backgrounds, along with Dragon’s brother engineering and playing drums on some cuts. "Love Will Keep Us Together," which they found late in the project, became their first No.1 million seller in the summer of ‘75, and that following winter ­ November 11 ­ Tennille and Dragon married at the Silver Queen Saloon Wedding Chapel in Virginia City, Nevada. Seeing the duo’s potential success, the record company decided to re-release "The Way I Want To Touch You," which rose to No. 4, nationally, this time. While living in their first house in Chatsworth (about which they wrote the song "Butterscotch Castle"), Dragon played a unique, haunting arrangement of Smokey Robinson’s "Shop Around" for his wife. "At first, I couldn’t quite place the song," Tennille remembers of their first hit off of Song Of Joy, "but then he sped it up and boogied it and I realized what it was. Then we started thinking that, even though the song had not been sung from a woman’s point of view, it worked for the girl, too. After we recorded it, we actually got a call from Smokey saying how much he liked it." Dragon recalls that his wife locked him in a room to work on the arrangement of Sedaka and Greenfield’s "Lonely Night/Angel Face" after they had moved to Pacific Palisades. "He came up with this jungle thing that went totally insane," Tennille says with a laugh. "I don’t know where it came from, but it was a hoot and it ended up being one of our million sellers." "You Never Done It Like That" was also done that way, recalls Tennille. "Neil Sedaka’s version was a very happy, peppy version and I said, ‘That’s not sexy. Go in that room and come up with a sexy beat.’ So I locked him in the pink room," she laughed. "And he came up with a sexy beat and that turned out to be, still, another million seller for us." Perhaps their oddest hit of all was a song they heard on the radio one night on the way to their Smoke House gig. It was America’s version of "Muskrat Love," which would turn out to be a huge success (and their third best-selling single), despite Dragon’s initial resistence to it. "When I heard the song, I said to Daryl, ‘I think this is a song about muskrats in love. It’s pretty cute. Let’s go find the lyrics,’" Tennille says. "So the next day, we went to the music store and they actually had the sheet music. I started to read the lyrics in the store and I laughed out loud." "Normally Toni and I agreed about what tunes we were going to perform, but I said, ‘Absolutely not. This is the stupidest song I’ve ever heard,’" Dragon recalls. "I finally said, ‘Okay, I’ll give it a week. If we don’t get any reaction, it’s out.’ She agreed." "We did it at the Smoke House and we ended up having to put a cap on it of twice a night ­ once early in the night and once late in the night. It became this huge thing," says Tennille. Melissa Manchester and Carole Bayer Sager’s "Come in From The Rain" has always been the duo’s encore song, due to its positive message. "It really touches people in some way," Tennille says. "It talks about unconditional friendship, and Daryl did such a beautiful arrangement of it, which suits my voice particularly." Tennille’s own "Do That To Me One More Time" she recalls, with a laugh, was often misconstrued. "If it was what people think, I would have said do it to me one more time. It’s about the first time Daryl kissed me." Both "Circles" and "We Never Really Say Goodbye" were also written by Tennille about their relationship, which both agree has lasted all these years because of their compatible value system. And, adds, Tennille ­ one other thing: "When we traveled, we always got two rooms connecting so we had two bathrooms, two TV’s and we could get away from one another. You’ve got to have some space once in a while." Mostly their personal and musical unions have lasted because they respect each other. Dragon respects Tennille as the proficient songwriter and vocalist and she respects Dragon for his creative and commercial arrangements, which together made them the success this Millennium collection celebrates.