David Cassidy on the Web
Kiss, David Cassidy and the road to ruin
April 4, 2010
By Michele Catalano
http://trueslant.com
Everybody remembers their first concert. Most people can tell you the exact date of their first show,what they were wearing, who they went with. When people ask about my first show I always say "Do you mean my first concert? Or my first rock concert?" Because they are two entirely different things. Or, are they?
My first concert: David Cassidy - Nassau Coliseum, Long Island (circa 197something)
Not the Partridge Family. No, this was solo Dave. No Shirley Jones or Ruben Kinkaid watching from the sidelines. No Lori banging away on the tambourine. No magic bus. Just David and his flowing hair and penetrating eyes and sultry voice and...oh yea, I was smitten. Big time.
He was hot, in that 70's kind of way. So when my aunt said she was taking a bunch of us to see him at Nassau Coliseum, I got pretty excited. A concert? How cool! I may have only been about ten at this point, but I was already supplementing my Teen Beat reading with heavy doses of Creem magazine, so going to a concert was high on my list of things I needed to do. At ten, that list is pretty short. Eat ice cream for dinner, burn down the school, go to a concert, marry Lief Garret. The simple things.
On the other hand, we're talking David Cassidy here. Not exactly someone you read about in Creem Magazine. Sure he was gorgeous and beautiful and dreamy, but I didn't really care for the music. I had already moved on to The Who. Looking at the guy was ok, but listening to his love ballads for two hours? Was it worth it? Well, I was going whether I wanted to or not. My aunt bought the tickets. We were David Cassidy bound.
Nassau Coliseum is a hockey arena. A concert venue, it is not. Even though the place still brings in the big shows, it was not built with music in mind. The acoustics are terrible. If you aren't sitting in the first ten rows on the floor, everything sounds like shit. But I guess when you are going to see an act like David Cassidy, it doesn't matter. And really, I was kind of excited to be there. A concert. A live show. This was pretty cool, even if it wasn't The Who. We got to our seats and you could feel the excitement in the place. Every local girl between the ages of seven and say, 20 was there, all holding signs and banners and carrying flowers that they would throw on the stage for David. I remained stoic and quiet. I wasn't going to swoon or scream or rip my panties off and throw them in the air because I didn't do stuff like that. Ok, maybe once I wrote to Lief Garret asking him to marry me, but no one knew that. I sat back in my chair and waited for the show to start. I'd spend the time focusing on David. Quietly. Looking at his hair, his gleaming smile, his swaying hips. Just being my cool self. Staring, but not swooning. No swooning. None at all. Nope.
The house lights went down. The stage lights went on. A small ripple of noise started moving throughout the crowd, getting louder and more vibrant by the second, culminating in an ear-piercing, blood curdling, unison scream of 12,000 horny, love struck girls as David Cassidy took the stage. Girls fainting. Crying. Screaming. He broke out into song but you couldn't hear it over the screaming. The sounds of joy and love reverberated throughout the arena, and completely drowned out the music. No one seemed to care. David swayed and danced and moved and pointed at the crowd and smiled and swayed some more and the screams got louder and the girls got wilder and...oh my god. What? Was that me? Was that me that just made that sound? Did I scream? I think I did. And then..I swooned. Good lord, I was swooning. I was screaming. I was ready to run down to the stage and throw myself on the altar of David Cassidy. I was one of them. One of the crazy girls. I was half mortified, half caught up in the frenzy. Ashamed but excited. When a young girl threw her bra on the stage I got a hold of myself. Ok, I would never do that. I am not going to grow up to be a girl who whips out her tits at a concert. But when David broke out into "I Think I Love You" I knew that if I didn't control myself I could be screaming my way down a slippery slope to dancing naked on the speakers at a Who concert.
I was part of the crowd for the whole show. I sang, I yelled, I swayed. The whole time I felt vaguely guilty about it, as if I was doing something wrong. I could imagine my older cousins, who had lent me their records and showed me path to rock and roll righteousness, sneering at me for what I was doing. But it was a moment. I was caught up in it and I blamed mob mentality for the complete collapse of sanity I had when I decided I would join the older girls by tearing off my bra and throwing it on the stage. Except I was ten and not quite at the bra stage of my development; I was wearing an undershirt and the thought of David Cassidy sitting quietly in his hotel room holding my little flowered undershirt in his hands creeped me out. I spent the rest of the concert in an uncomfortable state of denial and self doubt. What was I doing here? Why was I screaming? What would Roger Daltrey think? Why did the thought of this pop icon rolling naked in a pile of bras and undershirts make me want to go to confession?
When I got home I redeemed myself by listening to "Tommy" five or six times while reading a Creem Magazine article on Blue Oyster Cult.
My real redemption would come two years later when I attended my first real rock concert. Back to Nassau Coliseum, this time with a neighbor and her kid. KISS. That's right. KISS. From the first time I saw this band on some late night tv show - possibly Don Kirschner's Rock Concert - I was hooked. Make up. Theatrics. Rock and roll all night and party every day. This is what all my time spent honing my rock fan skills had led up to. This was the big time. This would wash from my soul the still remaining black karma from my antics at the David Cassidy concert. I had joined the KISS army and I was ready to serve. I don't know what I was expecting. Something completely different from the Cassidy show, that's for sure. A different type of crowd. A different type of reaction.
The house lights dimmed. The stage lights went up. Maybe there were some explosions and laser beams and whatnot. KISS took the stage.
Oh lord, the screaming. The screaming! Not just the girls, but the guys, too. Girls were holding up signs declaring their love for Peter Criss or yelling out things they wanted to do with Gene Simmons' tongue. Guys were whipping off their shirts, screaming out "Fucking KISS! Fuck yea!" in some orgasmic frenzy. Bras on the stage. Panties on the stage. Girls swooning. Swooning! What the hell was this? This was not what I expected at all. I was confused, lost and frightened. This was rock and roll, not David Cassidy. This was the real deal, the stuff I read about in Rolling Stone. I wanted to take each of these frenzied kids by the shoulder and shake some sense into them: Why aren't you throwing beer bottles at each other and lighting fires and kicking chairs around? Why the HELL are you swooning? Damn. I had this all wrong.
It wasn't until many years and hundreds of concerts later that I would realize KISS was nothing more than a clownish boy band, just four David Cassidys with make up and heavy grooves. A manufactured, press-ready, photo friendly boy band. That I had the same experience at a David Cassidy concert as I did at a KISS concert and that my daughter did years later upon seeing NSYNC is pretty telling.
I've seen about 400 bands since that time. I've been to awesome shows and horrible shows. I've fallen asleep during a Rush concert and passed out during an Allman Brothers jam. I banged my knee up in a pit when I was clearly too old to be in the pit anymore, and I sat in the pouring rain for an hour watching some mediocre new wave band play their hearts out. I sat with Peter Steele's grandmother during a Type O Negative show, I've been close enough to David Lee Roth to see the split in his spandex pants. Yet these shows - David Cassidy and KISS, both so long ago - that remain the most memorable.
You never forget your first time.
