One person’s view: “This song is such a failure that it makes ‘Afternoon Delight’ sound like ‘Let’s Get It On.’” – dagwood525 @ Rate Your Music
The public’s view: 2.30 / 5.00, the worst #1 hit of 1978 to 1980
It’s little wonder that I latched on to the Billboard charts when I did, because 1978 and 1979 were a pretty good time for hit music. Unfortunately, that means I’m hard pressed to find any stinkers from those two years to highlight on this blog. There were a few slow-moving ballads that get mediocre retrospective reviews, but there’s no consensus that any of them is a genuine outrage against humankind. And Rupert Holmes nearly achieved “bad #1” status with “Escape (The Piña Colada Song)”, but that song still has something of a fan base. This is disappointing, because it would have been more fun to pick apart Holmes’s bizarre infidelity tale than to analyze the record I’m covering today.
“Do That to Me One More Time” took a long while to climb the charts to #1, probably because radio programmers and the public needed time to warm up to its overtly sexual theme. No one should have been surprised by the lyrics, however, because the Captain & Tennille had been hinting at this for years. They’d already reached the top 10 with “The Way I Want to Touch You” and “You Never Done It Like That”. If the husband and wife team had continued their recording career, Toni Tennille might have next written a song called “I’m Gonna Jump Over That Piano and Straddle You”. Good thing that they decided to go in a different direction in the 1980s, with Tennille hosting a talk show and singing big band music while the Captain apparently did a whole lot of nothing. Perhaps he finally worked on getting that boating license.
There are a lot of bad reviews of this song, and some of them stress just how repulsive it is to contemplate the Captain & Tennille being intimate with each other. Yet this was an actual married couple – not an artificially assembled couple like Peaches & Herb or Daryl Hall & John Oates – so there was really nothing disgusting about it. In fact, many of the people of their time seemed to think that Toni Tennille and Daryl Dragon looked really cute together. The comments sections of their YouTube videos are populated by middle-aged fans who say they had a crush on one or the other when they were kids in the 1970s. This trend must have missed my city. My peers admired the beauty of Linda Ronstadt and Donna Summer, but no one ever put up posters of Toni Tennille except maybe at dental offices that were advertising teeth whitening procedures.
Some of the criticism is probably ageist. The Captain & Tennille were already in their mid 30s by the time they became famous, and nobody wants to hear about people over 30 having sex. We all know it happens occasionally, but it doesn’t need to be scrutinized. I can think of only one other singer from that era who recorded a lot of sexual songs despite starting her career late: Roberta Flack. She was often singing about making love or celebrating her love, and then at age 54 she had a hit duet about setting the night to music. I never thought that Flack was too old for this material, but as a kid I was always grossed out when Casey Kasem reminded me that she had once been a schoolteacher. I really didn’t want to know what went on in teachers’ bedrooms, especially because I attended Catholic schools and many of my teachers were 80-year-old nuns. Why couldn’t Roberta Flack record a less libidinous song like “The Safety Dance” or “Rock Me Amadeus” so that I could enjoy her music for a change?
The production and arrangement of “Do That to Me One More Time” are legitimate targets for critique. The duo enlisted the respected saxophonist Tom Scott for the track, and a sultry saxophone would have been perfect for a record like this. Instead, Scott played an electronic horn known as a Lyricon. From what I can gather, he owned the first Lyricon ever sold and it was a very expensive instrument. I can understand why he would want to get his money’s worth out of it, but this wasn’t the best venue. The Lyricon comes into the song like a toddler wandering into the bedroom at exactly the wrong moment. It reminds me of how the kazoo noises help defuse any sexuality on Ringo Starr’s “You’re Sixteen”. That was a positive for Ringo’s record, but on “Do That to Me One More Time” the Lyricon kills whatever mood might have been there.
Most people were happy that “Do That to Me One More Time” did not have a long shelf life on top 40 radio in the 1980s. It did, however, shape the Captain & Tennille’s legacy. When the notorious Parents Music Resource Center formed in 1985, it named the duo as one of the industry’s bad influences on children – even though no child had voluntarily listened to their music in years. Sadly, the Captain & Tennille didn’t use this opportunity to line up an opening slot for W.A.S.P. They could have called it the “Do That to Me Like a Beast One More Time” tour.
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