Captain & Tennille -- Love Will Keep Us Together

A special article to finish the day here on "Kayo Kyoku Plus" since I did want to mention that Daryl Dragon, aka The Captain from the 70s duo Captain & Tennille passed away yesterday at the age of 76. All throughout the history of this blog, I have been mentioning that my interest in music really came around in the middle of high school at the turn of the decade into the 1980s, but that didn't mean that I had failed to remember some of the big pop hits in the 1970s.

One of those songs was "Love Will Keep Us Together" by Captain & Tennille, released in April 1975. Written and composed by Neil Sedaka and Howard Greenfield, the song was a long-time resident on AM radio here in Toronto and hit No. 1 on both the year-end charts for American Billboard Top 100 and Canada RPM Top Singles in that year. Plus, I think that thanks to that hit and a few other songs, the duo even got their own short-lived music-variety hour on ABC. It was such a poppy bit of fun for me that when I heard the news yesterday of Dragon's passing, I immediately searched for their biggest hit on YouTube.

As you can see at the top, "Love Will Keep Us Together" was also released in Japan under the title "Ai Aru Kagiri"（愛ある限り）, and on the J-Wiki article for the song, it did get covered by singers such as Hatsumi Shibata（しばたはつみ）and Junko Sakurada（桜田淳子）in 1976 though I haven't been able to find their versions on YouTube thus far.

What I hadn't known much to my surprise is that Captain & Tennille's big hit was actually a cover of the original by Sedaka via his 1973 album "The Tra-La Days Are Over" that apparently never got a US release.

Of course, this is a very personal article for me, but being as this is a Japanese music blog, I will retain the content mandate here by supplying a few of the singers that actually debuted in April 1975 when "Love Will Keep Us Together" was released. All three singers and songs have already gotten their own articles so I will just provide the label and video with the link.

Hiromi Iwasaki -- Duet

Sugar Babe -- Downtown

Takashi Hosokawa -- Kokoro no Nokori