The news broke today that the Captain & Tennille are getting a divorce after nearly 40 years of marriage. This has inspired my Differently for today which is this: I am coming out of the closet.
No, not that… I did that years ago. I’m coming out of the closet as a Captain & Tennille fan.
I had all of their albums when I was kid – every single one of them. I even had a poster of them that I put up on my bedroom wall. It looked like this:
(you really can find anything on the Internet)
Mind you it was hung near the poster of Jimmy & Kristy McNichol that came with the album they did together. Oh yes… I’m letting it all hang out there, folks!
I loved the Captain & Tennille and not just their hits. “Love Will Keep Us Together” and “Shop Around” are obvious but I would sit and listen to their records from start to finish over and over and over. When the records got scratched, I replaced them with 8-tracks, my friends. Don’t judge me! I also watched every single episode of their variety show and was sure that they were going to be my best friends someday.
After hearing the news of their impending divorce, I went on to Spotify and listened to a bunch of their songs and had such intense late 1970s fat kid alone in my bedroom pretending to be a (soft) rock star memories that it nearly killed me. I have not listened to “Song of Joy” – the 1976 album with “Shop Around” and “Muskrat Love” – in probably 35 years but I remembered every single track, in painfully vivid detail. Yes, I was able to sing along to Captain & Tennille deep album cuts.
As with all great love affairs, my passion for Captain & Tennille was brief. By 1979 I was mainlining disco, in 1981 I was in love with Olivia Newton John, and in 1984 my mind was blown open when I heard “When Doves Cry” for the first time and understood what music could really be.
These days I’m more into EDM (Calvin Harris, Tiesto, Avicii, etc.), old school soul and funk (James Brown, Aretha, Bill Withers,etc.), and current pop/rock (Pink, Kelly, Katy) but after listening to the Captain & Tennille today I am not ashamed to admit that I still found some of it charming in an era-specific kind of way.
So don’t be ashamed, Muskrat Heads! Join me in professing your love for C&T! Even if their love can’t keep them together anymore, our love for them will never truly die!
BTW, just in case you don’t believe that it ever happened, I give you…
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