Could It Be Forever? My Story (23 page)
Read Could It Be Forever? My Story Online
Authors: David Cassidy
By the third show, in the evening, I hid my hair under a hat which I pulled down over my face, put on a pair of shades and raised the collar of my windbreaker up as high as possible. I walked with one of my publicists, a girl named Bryna, as if we were a couple. I put my arm around her. I looked right at her as I walked. I think we even kissed a little. Nobody paid attention to us as we worked our way through the crowd. My heart was pounding because the fans were packed all around me. I was actually touching them, rubbing shoulders with them. Finally, when I was just a few steps away from the stage door, somebody spotted me and grabbed my hat. My hair came tumbling down and everybody could see it was me. Instant insanity! Chaos. Screaming. I managed to make it inside the building, slam the door shut and yell for security. If it had happened a few seconds earlier,
I would have been dead. The fans were on poor Bryna, who hadn’t made it inside the building.
Kim Carnes:
I remember one show in Detroit. It was an outdoor gig in the summer and it was really, really hot. All the kids in the audience were pushing each other to get closer to the stage and girls were getting crushed. Standing on the stage, all we could see was a constant flow of bodies being handed over the heads of the crowd to get them out of there. These were girls that had fainted or passed out or had the wind knocked out of them. All night long at the hotels, the girls walked up and down the halls, knocking on doors trying to find where David’s room was.
Sam Hyman:
Because he had that very distinctive shag haircut, he had to hide the hair with a hat, put on glasses too and I believe at times we used a beard. As for decoys, we would get a nondescript automobile that had lots of room in the back. David would be soaking wet from his performance and we’d put him on the floor, give him a towel, cover him with blankets and then send the limo out one way and this car out the other way. It’s very claustrophobic when a car gets surrounded by a thousand people. People are pressing against the windows and you see the glass starting to bend, like it’s going to break. Or the fans start jumping on the car and you see the ceiling coming down. It’s very scary.
Henry Diltz:
Very often, I would be in the back seat of the decoy limo and all the girls would be screaming thinking it was David Cassidy. And then, behind them, would come some delivery
truck with David in it wearing a deliveryman’s outfit with a big hat pulled over his eyes. He did that a lot.
When we were travelling and in airports, sometimes his disguises would be so elaborate that you would say, ‘Oh my God, look at that guy with the great big straw hat and the huge sunglasses and the overcoat. That’s got to be somebody famous.’ Sometimes he would try a little bit too hard, you know?
I always tried to get out of a concert hall before the fans realised I’d left. I’d do my last number, fly off the stage and make it to a waiting car while the band was still playing and the audience was still roaring, hoping for another encore.
I got used to breaking box office records at my concerts. I filled some of the biggest stadiums in the world. I broke the Rolling Stones’ record of five consecutive shows at Wembley Stadium. I did six or eight sold-out shows there.
The first time I went to England, everyone in the press was great. They loved me. I was unknown, new and they treated me like a hero. The colour supplement of the
Evening Standard
put my face on the cover with a headline reading simply, ‘Welcome David Cassidy’.
I had no idea what England was actually like until I went back in 1984, when all of that early 70s public hysteria over me was just a faint memory. I had never been through Heathrow Airport as an ordinary person until then, although I’d been there six times.
On my second trip to England, about a year after the first, the hysteria of the fans was even greater. After the
Dorchester fiasco on my first trip, no hotel in London would take me. So my manager had rented the yacht that Liz Taylor and Richard Burton had rented when no hotel would take their dogs.
You know what my fans did? They jumped into the filthy, freezing, contaminated Thames. There was pandemonium. On every dock, there were cars, boats. I had to be picked up by a police boat, which took me to a dock where they’d have a car and security waiting to take me to the television studios for my appearances.
David Bridger:
The yacht was parked in the middle of the Thames just down from Tower Bridge. We arranged with the Metropolitan Water Police department to come to the boat and pick the party up any place along the river within a five-mile stretch. Every evening I would come out on deck. There was a launch slip and we’d have five, six, seven hundred kids lined up there. They’d all stand on the edge of the wharf and I’d come out with a big old bullhorn and say, ‘Good evening, everybody!’ And they’d say ‘Good evening, David!’ I’d say, ‘Hey, guys, would you like David to come out and say goodnight?’ and they’d scream ‘YES!’ David would come out from below deck and this incredible noise from the fans would echo across the river. On a couple of those occasions, kids dived into the water and we had to have the police boat pick them up.
Sam Hyman:
At that time, the boat we were on was the largest privately owned yacht in England. It was like 110 feet and we each had a stateroom. We were not roughing it. The Thames
was so polluted that if you went into the water you had to have your stomach pumped. We stayed between Tower Bridge and London Bridge and there’d be patrols of shore police in these little boats that would go along the docks to keep the kids from jumping in, even though some of them did. We would have to go to a different dock each day to be picked up or dropped off. The fans lined the shore until late at night.
It’s boating protocol that the largest ship in the area has the right to have its flag raised first. There was a big Navy ship in the area that had precedence over us to show its colours. The Navy guys were jealous that all these girls lining the banks of the river were screaming, ‘We love you, David!’ So they would yell insulting things at us. ‘David’s a fag, right?’ And so one night we said, ‘This is bull. We’ve got to get back at them.’ The crew on our boat felt like, ‘Hey, how dare you say that about our mate David? He’s a good bloke.’ So we came up with a plan to steal their colours. Two of the crewmen dressed in black and snuck on to the Navy ship while we watched. They went into the wheelhouse and stole the colours of the ship and then came back and presented them to David. At that point, they realised their ship had been breached. This is the British Navy. Sirens are going off and they’re going crazy and we thought, ‘Oh, this is gonna be interesting in the morning.’ We couldn’t wait to see what they did when they tried to raise their colours. They ended up leaving the harbour that night.
This time around the press wasn’t quite as kind to me. They tried to find little things about me to criticise. They wanted to hit a nerve. I think they began to feel resentful of the
fact that I was an American doing so well in England and maybe taking away some attention from British pop attractions who’d dominated the music business for years.
Dick Leahy:
In England the press concentrated on the phenomenon, not David’s music. The music press in England,
Melody Maker
and the
New Musical Express
, was into Rolling Stones type of rock. They dismissed David’s music, but put him on the front pages because he sold newspapers. Musically, he was never treated like the Beatles or Stones. I could sense David’s dissatisfaction with that. It was like being treated like a piece of meat. Forgetting the phenomenon, David Cassidy was a very good singer.
One thing that was frustrating to me was that writers rarely seemed to write thoughtful critiques of my show, or even bother to review my talent or the material at all. They were more interested in covering the spectacle: the money I was making, the fans I was drawing, the number of people who fainted or were injured at my concerts – almost anything other than how well or poorly I performed.
Some British and American writers began to put me down because I appealed to younger fans. I grew defensive. So what if my records were aimed primarily at 13- to 16-year-olds? Why is it that adults believe their taste is more meaningful? I still don’t buy that one! When critics belittled me, saying I appealed only to kids, I felt they were putting down my fans, not just me. And most of us, if we admit it, are still kids at heart and are just playing
at being adults. I know I am. I always empathised with my young fans.
What I tried to get across was that our teen years are no less significant than other periods of our lives. I think teenagers are often treated as second-class citizens. Adults say dismissively, ‘Oh, you know it’s just puppy love, it doesn’t mean anything.’ But when you’re 13, it’s the most important thing in your life.
I came to understand, too, that even the lightweight pop songs I recorded could have an enormous value to my fans. Songs like
I Think I Love You
and
Cherish
may have been dismissed by some adults as simplistic, but I know that millions of teens, whose sexuality was just awakening, found those songs really articulated their feelings. I gave voice to emotions associated with adolescent relationships.
Partridge Family singles, given great exposure by our show, sold millions.
I Woke Up in Love This Morning
made
Billboard
’s Top Pop Singles charts for 11 weeks from 14 August 1971.
It’s One of Those Nights (Yes Love)
did the same for 8 weeks from 18 December 1971.
Cherish
was also the name of my first solo album. I wanted to record some material that was more me, although I knew that I had to stay within the parameters of
The Partridge Family
and that Wes Farrell was ultimately going to be in control of the material. I was pretty much trapped by the Wes Farrell/
Partridge Family
lock and key.
I thought
Cherish
was a really good song when Wes presented it to me. And it turned out to be a really good
record. When I perform it now I do it a little bit differently, a little more acoustically, a little more organically. A few years ago, when I returned to touring, I asked members of my fan club which songs they would most like me to perform in concert and
Cherish
was their first choice by a huge margin, which shows how timeless it is.
I called Tony Romeo when I was looking for songs and he wrote
I Am a Clown.
Tony knew me well and saw what I was going through and put it to music. It describes the circus that my life had become, with me as the clown. It was a huge hit around the world, especially in England.
My First Night Alone Without You
was a song written by Kin Vassy, who was a friend of Kim Carnes and had been in The First Edition with Kenny Rogers. Kin stayed up all night at the piano and wrote this magnificent song that is so emotional and powerful. I think the record is fantastic, but the pop strings background vocal part should have been more one-on-one, more raw.
Mike Melvoin:
The sound on those records moved from saxophones to flutes. That was one of the hallmarks of David’s solo arrangements. They were more orchestral, less band. It was more grown-up. The rhythm section on David’s solo work was more transparent, less electronic sounding, more mellow.
The first song I ever wrote and recorded on my own without anyone’s permission was
Ricky’s Tune
. I wrote it in about five minutes the day before I was about to go on a tour.
Ricky’s Tune
is about a wonderful, sad, lost boy who’s saying
goodbye to his dog. The dog is a metaphor; it was about saying goodbye to a relationship that I couldn’t have, saying goodbye to someone who didn’t exist, but who I wished could have been there. I closed my eyes and imagined what it would be like to be in love, to be connected with someone. The song just fell out of me. As soon as I wrote it, I decided I was going
to record it. I held on to it. I played it a few times on the tour, came back and booked a little eight-track studio. I also recorded two other songs I had written much earlier. I got a few musicians together, went in this little studio and played guitar and sang the demo. Alas, the tape no longer exists.
The
Cherish
album went gold. It made the charts for 23 weeks (peaking at number 15) from 12 February 1972. The single sold nearly two million units. And I was giving sold-out concerts in the biggest halls, arenas and stadiums in the world, like the Houston Astrodome. The level of success just blew me away. I was swept up in it. To become that famous all over the world was pretty phenomenal. To capture the imagination of a whole generation of people is a difficult thing to do. Very few people have had that kind of impact.
I knew there were some people who hated me as a performer, who viewed me with utter contempt. They were entitled to their feelings. People seemed to either love me or hate me. Fortunately for me, the percentage that did love me loved me a lot. There’s an old saying in the business that if you get one per cent of the population to really love you, you’re the biggest star in the world.
My second album,
Rock Me Baby,
charted for 17 weeks,
peaking at number 41. After
Cherish
, I had three more solo singles in the charts in 1972:
Could It Be Forever?, How Can I Be Sure?
and
Rock Me Baby.
Rock Me Baby
was more of a departure. It was more me. I was becoming more and more difficult to keep under lock and key, in a musical sense. At that time, I was so successful that I finally said, ‘Hey, look, I want to make a record that’s more to my own taste. You guys are making millions of dollars on anything that has my name on it, at least let me do something I like.’
Rock Me Baby
is a good pop song that scared the hell out of everybody because I said the words ‘get down’ in it. All of the entities involved in the David Cassidy business thought,
Uh oh, he’s being sexually explicit
.