Friday, January 7, 2011

Captain and Tennille Unload Desert Digs at a Loss

SELLERS: Daryl Dragon and Toni Tennille
LOCATION: La Quinta, CA
PRICE: $660,000
SIZE: 2,867 square feet, 4 bedrooms, 4 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: For quite some time now and with regular frequency Your Mama receives friendly and informative missives from the Bizzy Boys at Celebrity Address Aerial that alert us to the real estate doings of one (in)famous person or another. Though our very demanding and long-in-the-tooth house gurl Svetlana thinks of them in the most prurient of ways, over the years Your Mama has come to think of the Bizzy Boys like kinfolk. The other day the Bizzy Boys winged a message through the interweb to inform Your Mama that a man named Daryl Dragon and a wo-man named Toni Tennille had done sold their house in California's hot-as-Hades Coachella Valley near Palm Springs.

All those old folks like Your Mama born before 1970 surely remember Mister Dragon and Miz Tennille as the Grammy-winning pop music duo Captain and Tennille. The married pair are most widely renowned for their first hit single, a smarmy but catchy cover of Neil Sedaka's Love Will Keep Us Together. Although their time at the top of the charts was short-lived, Captain and Tennille had a string of hit songs in the late 1970s that included a cover version of The Miracles' Shop Around and a remake of Willis Alan Ramsey's Muskrat Love. In 1979 Captain and Tennille had their second and last number one hit with the not very subtle and naughty sounding title Do That To Me One More Time.

Captain and Tennille were so famous in their day that they were invited to perform at the White House in front of president Gerald Ford and the Queen Elizabeth II during the 1976 Bicentennial celebrations. However, after 1980 the pace of couple's career slowed dramatically; together they performed all over the world including, natch, lots of shows in Las Vegas. She released a number of solo albums of big band and pop standards and in 2006 they recorded a Christmas album, their first full length recording in more than a decade. Whoopee!

For many years Captain and Tennille lived in Carson City, NV but sometime in the fall of 2005 or early 2006 they relocated to the California desert community of La Quinta where in September of 2005 they paid $825,000 for a good-sized but fairly ordinary mock-Mediterranean in a gated community that surrounds the fairways and greens at the Palms Golf Club.

Unlike our Big Daddy, Your Mama wouldn't know what do with a golf club except maybe knock an intruder upside the head so we can't fathom why a person might want to live in a house that backs right up to an over-manicured park where paunchy middle-aged white men in brightly colored outfits chase a little ball around for hours on end. Even more puzzling to our pea brain is why a person would even want to live up on a golf course where all those paunchy middle-aged white men can stroll by at their leisure and take a good long gander right into your backyard and through your bedroom windows. All you golf course dwellers who think these golf people are not trying to catch a glimpse of you as you roll the hose up your newly shaved legs or combing out your wig are merely fooling yourself into a false sense of privacy. Okay?

But we digress. It seems that after that, after more than two long years on the market, Captain and Tennille were eager eager eager to sell the 2,867 square foot house. They were so eager, in fact, that listing information for the property plainly states that the asking price had been reduced by a staggering $525,000 and that the sellers were willing to hear all offers and/or trade the house for vacant land.

Property records reveal that in early December of 2010 Captain and Tennille finally sold their 4-bedroom and 4-pooper real estate white elephant in La Quinta for $660,000. A few quick flicks of the well-worn beads on our bejeweled abacus reveals that the couple took a $165,000 loss on the property, not including whatever real estate fees they paid.

The house is a pretty average architectural affair of the sort that over the years have sprung up willy-nilly like weeds in gated communities all up and down the Coachella Valley. To the right of the front-facing two-car garage an arched passage way tunnels into an enclosed courtyard entry. A guest casita–which, we admit, is a nice feature in an otherwise pedestrian residence–opens into the courtyard.

Open-plan interior spaces include a living room furnished with little more than a disturbingly dirty bone-colored leather sectional sofa and sliding glass doors to open into a covered terrace with golf course view. The dining area has garden views and is open to the decent-sized and well-equipped but utterly and depressingly banal kitchen with common raised panel cabinets and dull dull dull beige-and-brown flecked granite counter tops that pretty much defines a sadly perfect sort of decorative unremarkability.

The landscaped backyard does not appear to have a swimming pool but there does appear to be a party-sized spa with an all but unobstructed view of the golf course, which means of course that the golfers have an all but unobstructed view of the party-sized spa too. No daytime naughty-naughty here in this spa unless you're a robust and hopefully well-formed exhibitionist.

All signs indicate that Captain and Tennille have relocated to a newly-built house in a planned development of custom homes just north of Prescott, AZ. Records show they bought the bare 2.06 acre parcel in April of 2006 for $350,000. It would seem that Captain and Tennille's real estate luck has yet to change. At least one lot the same size as theirs in the same development is currently listed for just $115,000, which means due to the economic downturn they've already lost almost two-thirds of the value of the land. Life can be bitch.

listing photos: Zillow

10 comments:

Aunt Gina said...

may the real estate curse on them continue unabated...it's the least they deserve having subjected us to Muskrat Love.

Anonymous said...

Amen Auntie!

Muskrat Love may not be the most hated song of all time (I think 'She's having my baby' gets that distinction), but it's in the top ten.

Part of the punishment was surely cleaning those awful glass jalousie windows.

Anonymous said...

I can't get past the filthy footprints all over the bottom of the white leather sectional sofa.

John McKee said...

Re: Golf Course Lots

It's an open view, some find lots on hill, mountain, lake, river or ocean side. I personally choose to make my home high in the sky in a tall building with big windows.

I grew up in a golf course home on a hole, it's not my personal cup of tea but we dealt with far fewer potential lookie loos than I do in the sky of a major city, however I doubt many people have much interest in peering into either my present or former domicile.

It's the price the not fabulously wealthy have to pay to have an open view in an urban area, although my Forbes ranked billionaire upstairs neighbor might disagree with me on that from his duplex apartment that dwarfs most mansions that people can glimpse in the big windows of just as they can of my home which undoubtedly occupies less square footage than his master suite.

organbrett said...

I have to disagree with the comments thus far. In the '70's my FAVORITE t.v. show was "The Captain & Tennille Show". Yes, they had their own TV show. This is how popular they were. I have all the early albums to this day. I admit I'm a bad fan because I didn't know about the Christmas album! In those days, I loved the sound of the synthesizer. I was dilligently practicing on my little spinet organ. Today & 10 organs later, I'm glad to read about them in Mama's column. I say glad because I had heard they broke up their marriage long ago. This part made my day. I wish them all the best!!!

lil' gay boy said...

"Today & 10 organs later, I'm glad to read about them in Mama's column."

Oh honey, that sounds like a busy weekend, not a lifetime!

;-)

I can see the appeal of a golf course home (especially if one indulges in the "sport") ––– well manicured & maintained vistas that one needn't foot the bill for, and after dusk there's no one there to avoid.

As for the Captain & Tenille, well... the less said the better (note to Aunt Gina: come sit by me at the next party). There are sartorial choices I made along the way that I'm not proud of either, yet at the time seemed like a good idea.

Anonymous said...

I'm guffawing so hard halfway through Mama's spiel about golf courses (I live about 8 units from one in Scottsdale/Phoenix that I can't even finish the damn thing. I love me some Mama! *MUAH* PS we don't have snoops, just little high school bastards setting off firecrackers as het white males are eternally wont to do.

Anonymous said...

If you live on a golf course it isn't the people looking in your windows that are the problem, it's the golf balls left littering your yard, or the ones that smash into your windows when some doddering oldster (see Caddyshack) decides he wants to play a round for old time's sake.

Pudenda Shenanigans said...

Anon 7:58, that's what I was gonna ask. Don't your windows get broken?

I feel bad for the Cap'n and his Missus. Then again they're buying and trading half-a-million-dollar homes, so I suppose there are differing definitions of "unlucky."

I actually really like Prescott. It's nice and gets weather, unlike most of the southwest. Carson City is the real head-scratcher for me. And lawd, Palm Springs. I don't care how much money is poured into it, it's a trashy hole of a place.

Anonymous said...

I like Captain and Tennille, I still listen to their music and I have their show on DVD. I will never change and I also still live in a "time warp".

I don't approve of how this shows their home is. That is a shame. Shame on the person who took pictures of their homes and invaded their privacy. I don't care how much they spent on a home but to tell the price and location is a shame! There are poor and starving people on this planet and many don't have a job or a home and you have the nerve to describe these singers homes and cost and everything.

What if Captain and Tennille were struggling in their lives to get by? Is that everyone else s business?

It irritates me knowing there are so much poverty in the quote "most wealthiest" nation and you have to show celebrities homes and cost.

Find a blog about people who are homeless and do interviews with them about their lives. Why not talk to Native American Indians that are suffering in their lives and ask people to help them? That would do you some justice? Stop paying attention to the wealthy or celebrities and deal with reality!