David Cassidy on the News
Ex-Partridges: A Family Affair
September 27, 1991
By Joe Brown
www.washingtonpost.com
Before I go insane I hold my pillow to my head
And spring up in my bed, screaming out the words I dread . . .
"Hey man, please don't call me a former teen idol," pleads David Cassidy. "If you'd do me a favor, the one thing you can do for me -- don't hang me with the albatross of saying 'former teen idol.' The hardest thing for me to overcome is that."
Cassidy's sudden reappearance in clubs and concert halls -- he performs Thursday at the Bayou -- is perhaps the strongest and strangest evidence of a resurgence of '70s pop.
"Although I'm freely talking about the past, I live in the present, and my future is what I'm concerned about. And what I want to do is not have to constantly be referred to as a former teen idol, but as a present musical force. OK?"
OK, OK, David!
But Cassidy's impassioned outburst is understandable, as he has spent much of the last two decades living down the words he dreads: "teen idol."
At the height of his fame as lovably vain, velvet-suited, center-part, shag-haircutted Keith Partridge, lead singer for television's family rock 'n' roll band, the Partridge Family, Cassidy was receiving 3,000 fan letters a day, and his fan club membership surpassed those of Elvis and the Beatles.
But "The Partridge Family" went off the air in 1974, and Cassidy's solo music career petered out in '76 (although he remained a god in Japan and Europe). Several TV roles later, he popped up this year in the overlooked, cheeky, low-budget spoof "The Spirit of '76" (out on RCA/Columbia home video in December). Now the 40-year-old Cassidy is on his first tour in 15 years -- with opening act Danny Bonaduce, Cassidy's red-haired, bass-playing, tabloid-famous TV kid brother. It's selling out everywhere it goes.
"There were over 200 people at the door after the show in New Jersey the other night!" Cassidy says. "There were thousands of people at Hershey Park. It's so vast, the crowd goes from late teens to mid-late 30s. I come out of that whole ilk of being the guy who's associated with screaming girls, but it's not just that. It's encouraging that a lot of males like me now, and did in fact love the music, but didn't want to be associated with that teen thing, you know. They come looking like complete freaks, decked out in all their Partridge Family stuff."
Cassidy says on one hand it was difficult to walk away from his "Partridge Family" teen idol legacy, but on the other it was something he had to do. "It kind of saved my emotional life and in a way my professional career," he says. "In that genre, I played it and did it as long as anybody's ever done it."
Calling from Chicago, Cassidy is surprisingly good-natured when talking about his bubblegum tunes, now rearranged with more guitar.
"I always said we made some really good records," he says, "although they weren't records I personally would have made -- I was playing a character on television. When you hear me play some of them now, you really get it, 'cause they're a lot more powerful."
But he won't tell which Partridge classics he's playing on his 20-date tour.
"No. Uh-uh. I can't. If I tell you what I'm doing, your readers are gonna go, 'Oh -- he's not doing this and he's not doing that?' I can promise you that I'll do 'Lying to Myself,' which was my Top 20 record last year, and I'll certainly do 'I Think I Love You.' Those two things are guaranteed."
Cassidy insists this is not a nostalgia tour. "I'm in the '90s now, I have hits in the '90s. If you have a musical present you can go out and do the past and it's great, it's fun, it's not an oldies act. Acknowledge it, embrace it, enjoy it, that's how I'm approaching it."
People are reexamining the '70s now, Cassidy theorizes, because "it was fun: the color, the style, the sort of carefree attitude we all had. We live in a very serious world now, man. It's very serious. There's not a lot of looseness or fun. It's all image. Everything's dark and black and serious. You gotta power-dress. You know? And the '70s were the antithesis of that. And I think people are like, 'Let's loosen up and lighten up and have a good old time.' "
