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This Just In...
Kevin Fischer is an award-winning veteran broadcaster who has been seen and heard on Milwaukee TV and radio stations for nearly three decades.
Kevin, who is a legislative aide to state Sen. Mary Lazich (R-New Berlin), can be seen offering his views on the news on the public affairs program, “INTERchange,” on Milwaukee Public Television Channel 10. He lives with his wife, Jennifer, in Franklin.
Friday Night Live
By Kevin Fischer
Friday, Jun 13 2008, 11:30 PM
Tonight’s guests are:
Kiss, ABBA, and the Captain and Tennille.
In the 70’s, In Concert and The Midnight Special aired on Friday nights. On Saturday night, it was Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert.
Prior to his 70's show, Kirshner was a successful record producer in the 60’s. From Answers.com:
“Kirshner employed some of the best writers in the business including Carol King, Neil Diamond and Tommy Boyce. The latter two artists played a large part in the success of another Kirshner creation, the pop group the Monkees. Kirshner's staff of writers churned out hit song after hit song for such groups as the Drifters, the Ronettes, the Crystals and the Shangri-Las, upping the standard of songwriting significantly in the process.
In 1966, the enterprising Kirshner embarked on the second stage of his professional career when he developed America's answer to the Beatles. By creating the Monkees, a group assembled by placing advertisements in various trade papers, for the NBC network, Kirshner created a cute, loveable, slightly anti-establishment rock group that would parade around in a half-hour TV show while going on zany adventures a la the Beatles in a Hard Day's Night and Help! The kids loved it. And so did Columbia when they received the royalty checks from the Monkee's hits.
After the Monkees ran their course, Kirshner formed Don Kirshner productions in 1973 to produce his successful Don Kirshner's Rock Concert series. The ‘Rock Concert’ series ran for several years before Kirshner eventually moved away from rock n' roll and into TV production in the mid '70s.”
“ABBA, a musical entity consisting of two couples, became by far the most successful act of that decade (70's), even one of the biggest phenomenons of the whole century.”
carlmagnuspalm.com
From biography.com:
“Swedish pop singing group, formed in 1973 by Björn Ulvaeus (1945– , guitar, vocals), married to Agnetha Fältskog (1950– , vocals), and Benny Andersson (1945– , keyboards, vocals), married to Anni-Frid (known as Frida) Lyngstad (1945– , vocals). The group's name derives from their first-name initials. Their major international breakthrough came with the winning song in the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest, ‘Waterloo’, which was followed by hit singles and albums throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. During the 1970s they were the most successful international group since the Beatles. Ulvaeus and Andersson wrote their songs, and have written a successful musical, Mamma Mia! (1999), built around many of them, as well as collaborating with Tim Rice in the musical Chess (1984). Björn and Agnetha divorced in 1979, and Benny and Frida in 1981.”
We close with the Captain and Tennille. From Music.yahoo.com:
Keyboardist/arranger "Captain" Daryl Dragon and his wife, singer/pianist Toni Tennille, scored a series of pop/rock hits in a light, romantic vein in the second half of the 1970s, the most successful of which was the first, "Love Will Keep Us Together." The couple met in the summer of 1971, when Dragon was engaged as the keyboard player for a musical revue, Mother Earth, composed by Tennille. Dragon, born August 27, 1942, in Los Angeles, was the son of conductor Carmen Dragon; his mother was a singer. He studied piano while growing up and briefly attended California State University at Northridge before dropping out to form an instrumental jazz trio with his brothers called the Dragons. In 1967, Dragon became a touring backup musician for the Beach Boys. He was dubbed "Captain Keyboard" by lead singer Mike Love because he always appeared on-stage in a yachting cap.
Tennille, born Cathryn Antoinette Tennille on May 8, 1943, in Montgomery, AL, was the daughter of Frank Tennille, a big-band singer (under the name Clark Randall) who had given up music to run his family's furniture store, and Cathryn Tennille, who became a local television talk-show host. Tennille also studied piano and occasionally appeared on her mother's show as a child. She attended Auburn University, studying music.
Dragon and Tennille toured with the Beach Boys for a year, meanwhile becoming a romantic couple (they married in 1975), then left and began performing in Los Angeles clubs as a duo called Captain & Tennille. In September 1973, they financed their own debut single, Tennille's romantic ballad composition "The Way I Want to Touch You," pressing up 500 copies on their own Butterscotch Castle Records label and earning airplay in Los Angeles. "The Way I Want to Touch You" was purchased by the large independent A&M Records, which re-released it and signed Captain & Tennille to a contract, apparently viewing them correctly as a slightly harder rocking, slightly sexier version of the Carpenters, who also recorded for the label. For their next single, Captain & Tennille covered Neil Sedaka and Howard Greenfield's "Love Will Keep Us Together," a song that had appeared recently on Sedaka's American comeback album, Sedaka's Back, even singing "Sedaka is back" at the end of the track. The disc became a number one, gold-selling hit, launching Captain & Tennille's career.
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