David Cassidy on the Web
David (aging female boomers, start screaming now) Cassidy comes to Paramount
September 26, 2002
By Benjie Hughes
The Beacon News - Aurora (IL)
You were probably in his fan club. Everyone else seems to have been. It was the largest official fan club ever — bigger, even, than the clubs of Elvis or the Beatles. David Cassidy was huge.
And he's not slacking now. You might not have seen him in record stores lately — after his success with TV's The Partridge Family and the sell-out stadium tours that followed, Cassidy found himself writing, producing, directing and acting on TV and in theaters all over. But now he's back in front of a band, pushing a new album with a new tour — his first in a decade.
"In many respects," he says, "it's like a whole new career again."
The first one took a lot out of him.
As the son of two busy Broadway actors, it didn't take Cassidy long to figure out how he would make his mark. He appeared in his first professional show at age 18, and left for Los Angeles not long after for a screen test. That job fell through — but word got around. By the time ABC was ready to premiere The Partridge Family in 1970, the network knew it had found its young star.
Just like that, David Cassidy exploded.
"When you see your picture on a Rice Krispies box, and you're suddenly seeing comic books and pillow cases with your name and likeness on them, it throws it all out of perspective," Cassidy says. "In the end, it kind of robbed me of my own identity because people assumed I was the character I played on TV."
While his friends were going to college, Cassidy went from one show to the next. He went from TV appearances to tours and back again. It never seemed to stop.
"It was phenomenal," he says. "I had the largest fan club in history and all the rest of it — it doesn't make you happy. It doesn't make you emotionally satisfied and well-balanced. You want to be doing what your friends are doing."
By 1975, he was burned out. Cassidy called it quits.
But in a sense, it was too late.
"I think my own loss of those years created a gap for me," he says. "I was going, 'OK, I'm 19' — and I was 25. My friends were like, 'we did college already — where were you?' So I started drinking a lot of beer."
There's no making up for lost time. For the next few years, Cassidy says, he lived in a sort of "retirement." A growing friendship with John Lennon helped, he said, to understand his own experience. Both men were very famous very young — and learning how to live the aftermath.
"He was a great role model in that respect," Cassidy says. "He wanted to be a normal guy, a househusband ... There were very few people that could understand everything about the experience that he had had and that I had had."
A mutual friend introduced Cassidy to Lennon; the former Beatles star showed up at Cassidy's house at 1 a.m. New Year's Day, 1974. They spent the evening drinking, Cassidy says, and playing old Beatles songs together. He had to re-teach Lennon a lot of the older ones.
The friendship helped. David Cassidy rested.
And then he worked again. By the '90s, his focus had shifted to acting — he starred in the original Broadway production of Joseph & the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, broke records in London with Blood Brothers, then moved to Las Vegas to star in EFX. Within four months of opening, the show was voted "Best Production Show in Las Vegas."
Still, it's good to be doing concerts again. The new tour, Cassidy says, has been like no other. There have been surprises — one of his first-grade classmates showed up backstage on one stop with an old picture of him at a birthday party. At another show, he ran into an actress that had starred with him in his first Broadway show.
The schedule's easier — eight shows per month, says Cassidy, instead of eight per week. That means the 52-year-old has time to see his wife and 10-year-old son. For the first time in a long time, he'll be at home on Christmas.
Pop-star culture is a little different now, too.
"Now they throw lingerie," Cassidy says. "Before, they used to throw love beads and Puka Shell necklaces. So it's gotten a lot cooler."
And — yes — the fan club is still alive and well.
"This past year has been probably the best of my career," Cassidy says. "I'm having the best time I've ever had."
