I'm not a fan of soft rock or yacht rock or whatever people want to call it, but I ran across this documentary series in a newsletter, and if you thought the Max doc was fantastic, the guy who puts out the newsletter thinks this is much better:
https://www.allyourscreens.com/reviews/2940-review-sometimes-when-we-touch-the-reign-ruin-resurrection-of-soft-rock
Mainly because there apparently are some huge revelations, including this one about Toni Tennille:
But the most jarring stories come from Toni Tennille, who fronted the massively successful duo The Captain and Tennille with husband Daryl Dragon. While they looked like the perfect couple from the outside, it was far from an idyllic marriage.
In her segment, Tennille admits that he never told her that he loved her. "It was hard," she says. "The first few years I kept hoping. Hoping that there would be a breakthrough or something. I always thought Daryl was a genius. He was an odd duck, boy. But he was a genius. Maybe it was some form of autism. I don't know. I never understood it."
"I couldn't make him fall in love with me," she continued. "I hoped he would. But as the years went by, I realized that he was not capable of that. And then I was kind of stuck. I just went along with it. I know he admired me tremendously. He admired my talent, my voice, my gift for writing. He was just closed up and he couldn't open up to any kind of emotion."
"I was kind of a hot dish in those days," she explained. "But throughout that entire relationship with Daryl, I never, ever cheated on him. I never had an affair. He was the only man that interested me. And even though I couldn't have him the way I wanted him, when I would have dreams, erotic dreams, he was the guy in the dreams.
That loveless marriage inspired one of the duo's biggest hits and it's impossible to hear "The Way I Want To Touch You" the same way after knowing the backstory of the tune.
"I never wanted to love a man/the way that I want to love you."
"It was our second hit and I wanted to express how I felt about Daryl. He was everything to me," she explains. "This was early on, when I still thought I could get through to him. But I was never able to. And I kept thinking. 'Why are you doing this? Why are you still with him?' I kept worrying about all of our fans. So that's why I stuck with him."