SELLERS: Daryl Dragon and Toni TennilleLOCATION: 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
