SONGS OF OUR LIVES: THE CAPTAIN AND TENNILLE’S “LOVE WILL KEEP US TOGETHER”

Why are the songs that I listened to only circumstantially—or, rather, heard only circumstantially, mostly because they happened to be on the radio—also the songs that are bound up most intimately with my vague-but-compelling, inarticulable and semi-formed memories of childhood? Dispossessed of all agency and stuck in the backseat of my parents’ old Jeep—or allowed to lie on a musty blanket in the way-back—while we drove from our house to someplace I had no say in whether I did or did not want to go. The AM-only radio turned on, fenceposts and trees and telephone wires, overpasses and streetlights and signs, houses and hillsides flicking past the rear window at however-many miles per hour: in this way I unwittingly consumed the pop music of the early and mid-1970s. These songs became the soundtrack to my primordial memories not because I liked them, not because my parents necessarily liked them, but simply because one of my parents had turned on the radio while we drove. I became a self-aware person to the sounds of Orleans’ “Dance with Me,” Elton John’s “Bennie and the Jets,” 10cc’s “I’m Not in Love,” Neil Sedaka’s “Laughter in the Rain,” Roberta Flack’s “Feel Like Makin’ Love,” Wings’ “Band on the Run,” Jim Croce’s “Time in a Bottle,” Joni Mitchell’s “Help Me,” Stevie Wonder’s “Sir Duke,” Seals and Croft’s “Summer Breeze,” Carole King, Anne Murray, Barry Manilow… and the Captain and Tennille.

Pop songs are, and always have been, constructed to restate clichés in an immediately familiar way; to be so catchy and compelling that we can’t ignore them, that we find ourselves humming or singing along, even in the music’s absence; and to withstand constant broadcast on the radio, at least for a brief time, until we tire of them. These songs are also meant as throwaways, to be replaceable by other, often similar songs on next week’s Top 40. Endless replay and of-the-moment sonic particulars instantly fossilized 1970s pop songs in their moments, as those moments came and went. Still, these songs never left me. Neurologist Oliver Sacks has proposed that “[t]here are attributes of musical imagery and musical memory that have no equivalents in the visual sphere, [perhaps]…because we have to construct a visual world for ourselves, and a selective and personal character therefore infuses our visual memories from the start—whereas we are given pieces of music already constructed[,]…[and] the recall of a musical piece has to be close to the original.” Sacks’s hypothesis offers a testament to the violence done by radio. For the past thirty-some years, I have, whenever I’ve re-encountered some 1970s pop hit, recognized—anticipated—its every lyric, its every melody and harmony, its every drumbeat and synthesizer squiggle. Love kept us together far less than the brutality of broadcast did.

“You, you belong to me now / ain’t gonna set you free now,” sings Toni Tennille, all huge, predatory eyes and toothy smile. And it’s true: I do belong to her, to this song, the #1 song of 1975 on the Billboard Top 100, and Grammy Award winner for Record of the Year. But until I finally submitted and salvaged the LP from a dollar bin a few years back, I had never heard this song except by chance, despite the fact it simultaneously signifies for me childhood and the 1970s more than any other three-and-a-half minutes I know.

And, disregarding the song’s dowdy opening bars and its cheerful pop insistence, the odd textures and flourishes of Daryl Dragon’s Mini-Moog synthesizer and his bizarre synth solo, when I listen to “Love Will Keep Us Together” now, I notice its peculiarities and darker corners. What I at first hear as a celebration of marriage or at least commitment—a seemingly conservative gesture in the post-free love years of no-fault divorce laws and singles bars, though perhaps not to Toni Tennille and Daryl Dragon, who were married in 1975 and who remain married—is instead, the entreaty of a woman begging her husband not to stray. There’s a sad desperation in how she keeps imagining “some sweet-talkin’ girl” he will encounter, or “those girls…hangin’ around,” and in how she obliviously fulfills the nagging wife stereotype in the line “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again”: and an equal desperation in the background harmonies that, during the chorus, increase in pitch to a near-screech as they plead “stop! st-op! really love you! / stop! st-op! thinking of you!” and chant “love, love, love, love, love!” like some deranged mantra. Unlike the other songs on the record that feature Toni Tennille’s sisters as backup singers, “Love Will Keep Us Together” includes harmonies overdubbed by Toni herself—making the singer appear intent on preserving control over a position she feels is threatened. The song promotes not sexual liberty (as does Donna Summer’s 1975 hit “Love to Love You Baby”) but old-fashioned love, not independence (as does Helen Reddy’s 1972 hit “I Am Woman”) but mutual dependence, and, in the social and political context of its time—the Equal Rights Amendment, the Billie Jean King vs. Bobby Riggs “Battle of the Sexes” tennis match, Phyllis Schlafly, Ms. magazine, All in the Family, the Laurel’s Kitchen cookbook—it seems a tame throwback. It doesn’t advance or elaborate the basic forms of the chart hit, which is probably why I remember it in terms of its historical moment as well as in terms of its music.

The world I passed through as my parents drove seemed complicated and huge—not because I was smaller then but because I could not discern its workings, and because I felt and was so powerless to effect any outcome in my own life. To be a child often means one is unable to effect outcomes. We can say the same about being a radio listener, despite the call-in vote for the top five at five, or the request line, or the long-distance dedication: none of these participatory gestures will be acknowledged unless they concede to both current demand and a station’s specific format (and, except for the fact they they help popularize radio stations, and thus increase advertising revenue, they would not exist). The commercial radio of the 1970s, like that of today, was as predictable in its structures as the songs it broadcast—a short set of music, a commercial bumper or station ID, a long set of advertisements, maybe a brief traffic or weather update, another commercial bumper, some allegedly personal blather from the DJ, another short set of music—and offered us only the narrowest slices of all possible experiences, repeated hourly, even as we hoped to hear some minor variations in that routine. Radio is a form of manufactured and unreciprocated desire that convinces us the one song we really want to hear is “coming up,” and then deliberately delays that moment. And radio infantilizes us with its devotion to popularity and hits and countdowns, its admonitions—don’t touch that dial!—and its sound effects, its drive-time gags and its shock jocks. For decades it has been an increasingly dehumanized medium, its playlists determined by industry or algorithm. It gives us nothing except on its own terms, which are the terms of the market. Jacques Attali noted in 1977: “it appears increasingly to be the case that a radio station has an audience only if it broadcasts records that sell…. Radio has become the showcase, the publicity flier of the record industry.”

In an era in which the illusion of consumer choice is sacred—even if such choices generally involve the products of one corporation pitted against those of another—it’s unsurprising that many people now listen to the radio a lot less than they once did. Most of us prefer to shut out that huge and complicated world in favor of creating our own soundscapes to usher us through it, and rely on radio only when we’re offered no better options. The radio we do listen to is often, as with Last.fm and Pandora (“it’s a new kind of radio—stations that play only music you like”), personally tailored to the point of absurdity. I typed the name of the band Josef K into Pandora’s search function and was told that the songs played by the resulting “station” would feature “electric rock instrumentation, punk influences, a subtle use of vocal harmony, repetitive melodic phrasing, and major key tonality.” When I gave one of those resulting songs a thumbs-down, the software apologized so profusely—“Sorry about that—we’ll try something else, and we’ll never play that song again on this station”—I felt guilty.