Since establishing their rockabilly act with the 45 Diamond Girl in 1972, Seals & Crofts have coined five gold LPs, including their current Greatest Hits collection. But for the Texas-raised, California duo—Dash, 36, the drummer-mandolinist, and Jimmy, 34, the ex-state fiddling champ on guitar—it is God, not gold, that glitters brightest in their life. Seals and Crofts are now nearly as renowned for their "firesides" (Bahá'í raps) as for their gliding harmonies, rich melodies and slick arrangements. These beliefs emerge clearly in their writing. Their smash hit, We May Never Pass This Way Again, says Jimmy, "is about the opportunity on this plane of existence to evolve towards perfection in the next world." But, he adds, "We don't intentionally write Bahá'í songs all the time. A constant barrage of unity and love would be the quickest way to turn people off. But being a Bahá'í is like being in love with a girl. You think about it all the time, and the message, sometimes inadvertently, comes out in our music."
"We're not a Billy Graham revival," insists Dash. "We are not looking to save souls." For example, one of their most popular songs, Unborn Child, is a right-to-life anthem, but they have resisted performing it at any concert where pro-abortion pickets are present. With such restraint, S&C have, in the past two years, sung for $7 million—much of which they turned over to Bahá'í and other causes. No pop performers have fused artistic, commercial, spiritual and love lives as tightly—or as convincingly—before.
Along the way, Seals and Crofts have emerged as a family-style religious community and business conglomerate of Osmond proportions in the L.A. suburb of San Fernando. The stars themselves aren't in charge. Rather, it is a matriarchy managed by Crofts' mother-in-law, an aggressive 45-year-old former actors' agent named Marcia Day. All five of her daughters (equality of the sexes is a key Bahá'í tenet) are active in the operation, as are Marcia's four other sons-in-law who play backup or production roles with the duo. Not surprisingly, S&C have their own soft-ball team and 17 Day grandchildren around the offices.
Seals married out of the clan, but his wife and two kids live on the same street with Crofts and most of the Day in-laws. For all their teetotaling, Boy Scout abstemiousness, Jimmy and Dash wear diamond-and-ruby-studded jewelry and have the two spiffiest homes and speediest sports cars in their mostly Mexican-American town. They also fly their 23-member entourage in their own Convair jet fitted with piano and $100,000 of sound gear.
But Seals and Crofts have paid their way. Dash's father was a cattle rancher near Johnson City, Jimmy's a roustabout 200 miles across state. As carefree success-driven teens, the boys taught themselves music and joined a group called the Champs, which was almost instantly if anonymously immortalized with the six-million seller Tequila. Money poured in, and soon there were flashy mohair suits, fleets of two-and four-wheel vehicles, reckless races and motel-room brawls. When shirts got dirty, they were simply replaced, not washed. But, just as suddenly, in the mid '60s the Champs (except for lead-singer-guitarist Glen Campbell) went under in the wake of the Beatles, Stones, et al. Sustained by amphetamines and out of bread, Dash and Jimmy were nosediving fast when they fell in with the Day women.
At the time, one of the daughters and her husband were starting a group named the Mushrooms. Word went out around L.A. for a sax player and in walked the versatile Seals, who later brought in Crofts. But within two years, both that outfit and the successor group, the Dawnbreakers, failed. The Day daughters became manicurists and moviehouse popcorn vendors. Seals & Crofts holed up in the basement of the Day HQ, then a decrepit five-bedroom house in Hollywood, and began writing the material that launched them as a duo. It was also a period of spiritual awakening for the two lapsed Texas Protestants under the guidance of the Day family. Dash recalls: "The girls loved to sit around with us and talk about the Faith and life. We used to sing about silly things like puppy love."
With success came a pressure to tour that the boys and their families regard ambivalently. "It's cheating both couples," says Marcia the manager-grandmother, "and it keeps them from enjoying parenthood to its fullest." On the other hand, Dash, more the loner of the two, may semiconsciously be starting to find all the togetherness a little oppressive. Remarking that his daughter is just six weeks older than Seals' son, Crofts gibes: "Can't we even have a baby alone?"
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
