David Cassidy in the News
Free Bird
David Cassidy Looks Ahead, But Embraces His `Partridge` Past
September 20, 1991
By Patrick Kampert.
Chicago Tribune
There was a time in the early 1970s when David Cassidy fled from his fame as a Partridge Family heartthrob like a sparrow trying to elude a hawk.
But the smaller bird usually can`t escape. Neither could this particular Partridge. And as nearly two decades have flown by, the passage of time and a few years of therapy have given Cassidy a new outlook on his role as Keith Partridge in the ABC-TV series about a family musical group.
I never hated it, said Cassidy in a phone interview from his New York hotel room. It was just kind of a misconception of my own musical taste. Those songs were great pop songs, but they were created for a character I was playing, not me.
The image that Cassidy created on the TV show is indelible. Not to mention that the series is still in syndication 17 years after it went off the air. Yet it is not merely nostalgia that is fueling Cassidy`s current musical tour, which brings him to the Park West for a concert Friday night.
In 1990, Cassidy broke a 15-year recording silence in the U.S. by releasing the eponymous David Cassidy album on the trendy Enigma label, which launched the careers of bands like the Smithereens and Stryper.
The pop-rock album, truer to the personal tastes of the now-41-year-old Cassidy than the Partridge warblings, even boasted a Top 20 single, Lyin` to Myself. But then Enigma went belly-up and Cassidy`s comeback album disappeared from the stores.
It was all the things I hoped it would be, said Cassidy of the album. It was very well-received. The first video was in rotation on MTV and VH-1, and suddenly there was no follow-up. It`s like a baseball hitter who gets up to the plate and goes 1-for-1 and then the season`s over.
With no record company to back him, plans for a tour last year fell by the wayside. This time around, Cassidy is funding the tour himself, which is concentrating on large rock clubs and small halls.
It looks like the whole tour is going to be sold out, Cassidy said.
I should break even and might make a small profit. Cassidy, whose last tour at the height of his `70s fame found him playing stadiums and large arenas, says promoters initially talked to him about playing the Rosemont Horizon, but I thought that was a little too ambitious at this point.
Cassidy is coy about what songs he and his five-piece band will be playing, but says it will be a combination of new and old numbers, not all of which were hits. And for the first time, he`s definitely looking forward to playing both. This is a great opportunity, he says, to embrace the past and yet still be in the present, having success today.
Cassidy is taking it slowly in his return to the spotlight, and with good reason: It was the pressures of the poster-boy existence of his early 20s that caused him to retreat from high-profile entertainment ventures. In the intervening years, he returned to the stage, doing regional theater as well as plays in New York and London. He raised racehorses. He did a couple of movies and made a stab at a TV series. He even recorded an album that was released only in Europe.
On the personal side, he married twice and divorced twice. Last year, he tied the knot a third time with his songwriting partner, Sue Shifrin. They have a 7-month-old son, Beau Devin.
But the proof that he has reconciled his reservations about his Partridge past is evident when you look at who`ll open the Park West and other shows for him: Danny Bonaduce.
Bonaduce, a recent example of the child-star-turned-troubled-adult syndrome, played Cassidy`s brother on The Partridge Family. His problems with drugs, with police, and with his radio-station employers are well documented. But Cassidy persuaded Bonaduce to take a stab at standup comedy, and coaxed him onto his current tour. Cassidy admits that the choice, at least to outsiders, seemed foolish at best and damaging to Cassidy`s career at worst. But he believes it was a good move.
Danny opened for the first time last night and he was incredible. It defied all the flak I`d been getting for having him on the tour, Cassidy said. He`s the perfect guy to open for me. After he was out there for a minute, the audience wanted to like him. He`s hysterically funny, and I`m really happy for him.
