David Cassidy on the Web
Teen idol David Cassidy performs April 13 in Treasure Island
April 9, 2012
By Eric Deggans
Times TV/Media Critic
www.tampabay.com/
As David Cassidy tells it, he was in the second year of his classic sitcom The Partridge Family — which would place the year about 1971 or 1972 — when a familiar face showed up at the front door of his rented Hollywood Hills home.
Davy Jones, the dreamy lead singer for TV-bred popsters The Monkees.
David, meet Davy.
"His manager lived in a house above mine in the Hills . . . all of sudden he's standing at the front door," said Cassidy, 61, calling by cell phone from his South Florida homebase.
"I learned much later, like in the last couple of years, that shortly after that, he had written a song about me," he added. "It was like a message to me. I don't remember the song, but it was really interesting for him to be that . . . forthcoming, and to be that open."
either man knew it back then, but they would start a friendship, rekindled in recent years, that would last until Jones' death at age 66 of a heart attack Feb. 29 near his home in Indiantown.
Cassidy said the two also bonded over their love for horses; he breeds thoroughbreds and Jones specialized in training, riding and jump-racing. Meeting again at the horse track in Saratoga, N.Y., five years ago, they talked of working together.
The two Davids were scheduled to appear together Saturday in Miami. Now Cassidy plans instead to offer a tribute to Jones, singing a few hits from the former Monkees star's catalog, including I'm a Believer.
And he'll try them out here at the Club in Treasure Island on Friday — one day after his 62nd birthday.
"Let's say you're the dress rehearsal," said Cassidy, who has been dinged in past concert reviews for forgetting the words to some songs. "You may think you know a song from listening to it as a teenager . . . until you realize you don't really know the lyric. And the fans absolutely know. . . . They will bust you."
Cassidy and Jones shared space on that sharpest of double-edged swords; success as a teen idol for baby boomers.
"It's a shame (for some people); after two years, nobody can remember who that guy was, except for those little girls who were 13 years old," said Cassidy, whose post-Partridge Family resume includes stage performances on Broadway and London's West End, several successful Las Vegas shows, and lots of touring. "You have to create a lot of your own opportunities, by being a creator and producer and writer. There's a big difference between that and being on the cover of a teen magazine."
One recent bruising show biz experience for Cassidy was his time last year on NBC's Celebrity Apprentice, where he was the first contestant fired after an argument with Survivor winner Richard Hatch.
The low point: where Hatch called Cassidy a "little person."
"First, I turned it down and then (host) Donald Trump called me and said 'You can make a million dollars for charity doing this,' " Cassidy said. "Naively, I did it, even though, when your instinct says don't do something . . ."
Just an occupational hazard for a guy who, along with a select few others, is literally defining how a teen idol gets old in show business.
"There's not many of us that survive," he noted. "You have to have had real impact and the fear, that ultimate fear that . . . (success) only came out of the way you looked. As my father (actor Jack Cassidy) once said to me . . . 'The only commodity that remains, when all this goes away, is talent. And you got it.' "
