Terminal Fandom
By Chrissie Hynde,
New Musical Express Magazine
8 June 1974
IN "FREE" ADULTS, mass frustration breeds war. In "free" teenagers, mass frustration breeds rock phenomena.
Can't stop it though. Give somebody everything he needs and it kinda knocks out his survival instinct. Ideals rush in and life gets complicated. No point in trying to figure out how adults cope – Jean Paul Sartre's got that one all sewn up anyway.
The "teen years". 'Spose to be a larf a minute, but in the final analysis, the whole process can get to be a real drag. Like, you wait ages for that First Kiss, and sure enough, the guy had onion curry for lunch. Seems like you just can't win.
And that's where the "idol" steps in. Pick a pretty face and enter the daydream. Relief.
So what if you had a lousy day at school, the guy you're trying to impress calls you "Pimples" in front of all your friends, your wardrobe's really shitty, you're flunkin' history, and your folks are in constant battle; close your eyes and watch all that harsh reality melt in "His" arms.
In this case, in David Cassidy's arms.
NOW HERE'S a guy who has more "teen appeal" than China has Wongs.
What a face!! He just can't take a bad photo, and his combination of features are unbeatable on The Teen Scale.
Try to see this through the eyes of a bored, disillusioned, frustrated 16-year-old female. You want something you can hold like a cuddly dog, but that can seduce you at the same time. Now if you're a normal (sic) kid, a dog won't fulfill both purposes, but David will – at least in theory, if not practice.
A girl could spend hours gazing into those gorgeous puppy-dog eyes, without being threatened by anything overtly sexual. That "please love me" vibe fills the bill every time.
Moving down to the nose now, and what pubescent female can relate to some guy who has a big manly bazooka for a snout? I mean, it's just out and out unappealing for a young girl to imagine looking up into the hairy cavities of the average male nose. Kinda squashes the sexual idealism one feels at those tender ages.
David scores again. A prettier, more feminine nose has never rested on a boy's face. The very type one can easily imagine planting with a petite kiss.
Down to the lips, and this is the really vital area.
Now, at least one half of average fantasy time is centered here. (Some chicks may tend to be a bit more adventurous, but I'll try to keep this on the up and up.) Once again size is the ticket. Let's face it, no chick wants to be all slopped up and brutalised by some guy's oversized maw.
Again, David gets the proverbial A-plus. Delicate, slightly parted and OH – turn me loose! Suffice it to say, that on The Teen Scale, David Cassidy's face is flawless. (I even like it myself.)
So now we got a sellable face to work with and, familiarity being the key to mass popularity, let's smear that perfect mug over every inch of London and look no further for a nationally-acclaimed partner in nocturnal fantasy.
NOW WHERE was I? Oh yeah, London Weekend Television Saturday afternoon and don't be late.
In fact, I was damned late. Just in time to see Our Hero hoofing it out of the Press conference to the roof and sneaky escape. I was deranged white with anger, but fortunately rage doesn't affect my appetite, and the buffet provided wasn't too shabby.
Still, no prawn in a pastry shell could compensate for missing you-know-who.
I mope out onto the street and here's where the fun really begins. A few hundred weepy chicks spy me exiting the hallowed edifice where He had just been, and leap on me like pigs into shit.
"Did you SEE him??"
"What was he wearing??"
"Oh God! Oh God! – you SAW him??"
I shrewdly latch onto the most fanatical of the lot, and with a sly "Let's get outta here", dash her off for a Coke and a veryrevealing chat.
Pay attention here and you might learn something, as my Dad would say.
Barbara is a typical Cassidy fan. She's a little, perhaps a lot, more determined than most, but the basic sentiments behind her trip are not uncommon.
Barbara is 17 years old. She's not a girl you'd notice in a crowd, save for the fact that she's plastered with D.C. badges, is displaying his face on her t-shirt, and for all I know has "Property of David Cassidy" tatooed on her ass.
Barbara's claim to fame is that she runs her very own disco, once a month, dedicated solely to the music of Guess Who. This organization costs Barbara much time and money, a fact of which she's immeasurably proud.
She knows as much about David as the printed word will allow. Place of birth, name of hospital, time of day, year, astrological status, a fairly conclusive run-down on the events of his childhood, his personal likes and dislikes, which books he's read, movies he's seen, hobbies, and generally the same data any astute Cassidy fan can tell you.
Tell me Barbara, are you a virgin?
"Me? No. Well, you know, you find out David's not a virgin – cos he's not – and you make sure that you're not. You do a lot of things he does. He took drugs. If somebody offers you a drug, you don't think 'no, I shouldn't take it' – the first thing you think is 'David took it – I'll take it'."
What kind of drugs?
"Well, the most I've been offered is pot, hash and acid."
Have you done acid?
"No."
Has David?
"Not as far as I know. He's done pot and hash, so I thought I'd try it"
But if he tried acid, you'd try it?
"Yeah, I'd try it."
Anything he'd do you'd do?
"Yeah."
Do you have a lot of pictures of him?
"Yeah – thousands! T-Shirts, rings, necklaces, scarfs, books, magazines – I spend about £3.50 a week on magazines. Everything going – train tickets when I go to see him – I keep ALL those. I found a rose he threw down – I kept that. He touched some bit of paper and I picked it up and kept that – I've got all his competitions, I read everything there is about him – watch every programme he's on. I 'spose I know him better than he knows himself, really."
How do you feel about him going off the road? Does that bother you?
"I'm going over to America. He's leaving, he's not doing another tour in England, so the best thing I can do is go over to America."
Ever been there?
"No."
Your life is pretty much ruled by what David does, right?
"It's ALL ruled by David. If he says he likes a certain amount of hours sleep – I get a certain amount of hours sleep – you know, there's thousands of fans like me. I've been chucked out because of him – out of home."
You were thrown out of home??
"Yeah, I got such on me mum's nerves, she just threw me out in the end."
Is that common?
"Not really. I haven't found a person that's driven their mums so much that they've been thrown out – except me."
Do you resent that?
"No not really. To me I've been thrown out because of David Cassidy, and I've done something for David, which nobody else has done so far."
You're proud?
"Yeah, I'm proud, in a big way."
THERE'S A HELL of a lot of energy in a large crowd. Usually this energy is dissipated by the fact that no two people therein are channeling their feelings in the same way. That's the kind of energy you feel walking down The Kings Road on a Saturday afternoon.
Sometimes, however, when people congregate in the same place for the same reason, the collective energy emitted creates its own force-field. Like at political rallies and rock concerts.
The closest thing I've ever felt to the feeling at White City Stadium on Sunday, was the feeling I got at a student demonstration back at school in Ohio where four students were shot dead. Even then the energy was confused with sorrow, loathing, anger and fear. There was nothing confusing about White City.
I don't know what need it was that each of the 35,000 girls tried to fulfill that day, but they all went about doing it the same way. The feeling of hysteria was so heavy that entering that stadium was like being gripped in a vice.
The support band alone saw at least 50 carried out on stretchers. Wasn't because the band was anything special, wasn't because there wasn't enough room for everyone to move about comfortably, wasn't because security was inadequate (400 trained security guards can normally handle a much larger audience than this).
The reason is quite simple.
This evening, people want to get as close to realizing their fantasies as possible. The appearance of David Cassidy will serve as a catalyst, and maybe, just maybe, if they can touch him, hundreds of dream-hours might climax in real life.
It's physically impossible for that many people to stand on the same stage at the same time, but by God they're gonna try.
To stimulate the predominant sensation felt in the stadium that day, try this simple experiment. Stand against a railing, on a bridge, a gate or a flight of stairs. Now ask no less than two thousand people to push you into the railing, exerting as much force as possible. Kinda scary, huh?
David Cassidy is a real good performer. His show is a whole lot of fun to watch, entertaining, professional, injected with much humour – a quality event. Shame I couldn't stay for the whole thing, but after 30 minutes of being terrorised and clawed by females making their mass crawl to the stage, I just wanted to get the hell out of there.
I escaped unscathed, but close to a thousand young women were treated for either hysteria or injuries. One girl, Bernadette Whelan, was hospitalised with a heart attack.
It wasn't known until Thursday that Sunday's entertainment would cost Bernadette her life.
I MET DAVID CASSIDY on Wednesday.
David is soft-spoken, sincere, straight-forward and intelligent. In fact, he's everything his fans hope he is. (Yeah, he's a hot number, girls.)
You know, David, a lot of chicks really emulate you. Like, if a particularly devoted fan reads that you sometimes get up at 4 a.m. and eat a steak, then she'll get up at 4 a.m. and do the same.
"I don't eat steak, but I understand what you're saying."
Oh, are you a "veg'y"?
"Yeah. I don't eat anything I can't justify going out and killing myself. I'd eat steak if I could go out and kill a cow, but I can't do that. I eat shell-fish sometimes, cause I've actually taken a clam outta the sand, 'n' cut it open 'n' eaten it..."
I brief David on my conversation with Barbara. Is he fully aware of the extent to which these chicks idolize him?
"I don't know them, but it disturbs me a little bit to find out that they're that INTO me. I'm just an ordinary cat – I'm just doin' what I'm doin' – singin' songs, playin' music 'n' all that, you know?
"That's what I do for a living. I'm not on a power trip. I don't want them to do what I do. I'm not the Messiah – heh, heh, CERTAINLY not. It disturbs me that they're not living their own lives."
Well, look where they're coming from. To some of them, the 'let's go surfin' thing is really exotic.
"That's cos they live here, and that's cos they don't know what the Hollywood 'Let's go surfin' thing is all about. If they saw it and had done that trip, they'd understand that ain't really where it's at either."
Speaking of where it's at, I eventually get around to asking the Big D about drugs and sex. Because, after all, I realise that you out there are interested in all that (and, if you aren't, I sure as hell am!).
"It's not like even 17 any more – they're 11 and 12, smokin' dope, jammin' needles in their arms and everything – it's unreal, man! I remember when I was 15 – nobody in my school in 1965 had gotten high, expect for maybe a couple of the Mexicans. Someone turned me on. 'Hey man, I got some pot.' I said, 'HUH? What does it look like?' I mean, now they're so much more sophisticated and hip than they were. It's scary."
How old were you when you first got laid? – or is that getting too personal?
"Well, it might be – ha ha ha ha ha – I can't even REMEMBER! I was pretty young."
Well, I think he can remember, but he ain't telling. I'm reduced to grovelling for an answer, as David throws his legs over the side of his chair and giggles at my apparent interest.
"Ha ha – Oh, I don't know, I don't even know how old I was. I can remember always thinking about it when I was a little kid. It always intrigued me."
At this point, Mr. Clean starts getting a particularly "pervy" gleam in his eye. His voice gets very soft, he leans towards me and...
"I've always been very much a voyeur. A woman used to undress by our window all the time. Used to excite me. Still does."
I can't tell any more whether or not he's putting me on, and I'm starting to get the same feeling I used to get when I was four, behind the garage with the neighbour boy.
"Dave" continues...
"You know why? Because where I grew up, in my situation, it was such a no-no. People never walked around without any clothes on. You know, we didn't walk around naked, we didn't show each other our bodies – I was so intrigued with it cos I could never see it.
"It was never so much a sexual thing, like having sex – it was like I wanted desperately to see a woman's naked body! I'd sit there and my heart would be beating like this, you know? Hee hee hee he ha ha ha ha.
"Well, there I go, revealing some of my intimate secrets and we've only known each other for 15 minutes."
Wow! Things are looking good, girls! David sitting there wearing cut-off levis – the sight of those legs making me bite down hard on my filter-tips...
SO TO WHAT does he attribute this mass hysteria? I mean, he's sexy on stage, but he's not bumping and grinding and threatening to expose himself. All he had to do was walk out, lift his arms and say "I feel so good", and five hundred chicks fainted right on their noses!
"Ha ha ha ha hee hee hee..."
(He thinks I'm kidding?)
"My band and I were talking about, 'Why don't you do something overtly sexual?' – since this was the last show, we were all gonna streak – or we were all gonna come out and 'hang a moon' ha ha ha ha – "
(For those of you who aren't hip to American slang, "Hang a moon", is an expression which implies the act of turning one's back to a person and flashing one's bare ass at him.)
Meanwhile this interview is degenerating fast. We're both laughing like morons, completely blowing our cool – until suddenly David pulls himself together and begins to regain some semblance of his former composure.
"That's really tacky, isn't it? But it's all right, we never really seriously considered doing that. I'm not into that, that isn't my trip on stage – I'm in there to play, I'm in there to sing – like performing, but I'm glad it's over, I'm glad I finished doing that."
And the reason he's quitting the stage?
"The only way that I can really grow – and devote enough time to making a good album – is not to be touring six months out of the year, being blown-out, tired and wasted."
Hmmmmmmm. So now what can I ask you?
"Ask me anything you want."
What are you doin' tonight?
