Read Could It Be Forever? My Story Online
Authors: David Cassidy
Ten days before my first concert, I didn’t even have a band. I asked Steve Ross, my old garage band cohort, to join me. I told him he’d have to start learning Partridge Family songs
fast
. No problem! I figured it would be great to have buddies on the road with me.
A guy named Richard Delvy, whom I’d met through Bell Records, was hired to save the day, and he became my musical director. Richard hired some studio musicians, including drummer Ed Green and bassist Emory Gordon – really great players – to back me up. We put together a good-sized road band, including a few horns, plus three back-up singers, who also could serve as a warm-up act for me if need be: Kim Carnes, Dave Ellingson and Brooke Hunnicut. My good friend Sam Hyman was hired, too. He quit his job as an assistant film editor to become my merchandise guy, which, in the beginning, was just selling posters. I think there were 600 posters made for the Seattle show and they were gone in the first hour. He was overwhelmed. We were so innocent.
Sam Hyman:
I made the proposal to him that I manage his merchandising so I could travel with him. The poster was huge. I take great pride in that because I went through thousands of
photographs and just used my gut. Later, I think we produced 10,000, and they were selling quickly. It was a killer picture, you know, because he is so photogenic. He very seldom took a bad picture. That poster was the top-selling poster until Farrah Fawcett’s. Everywhere we went, we would usually sell out of merchandise. There was also a programme, a little photo album and then there were love stickers, that kind of stuff. The vendors would always say, ‘I have never seen anything sell so fast and so much. Do you have more?’
Dave Ellingson:
We got a call from Richard Delvy, who said, ‘Hey, do you wanna do this tour?’ He told us we had to stretch the show and asked if Kim and I could open. We never had a situation where you walk out and the entire sports arena yells in unison, ‘WE WANT DAVID!’ Kim and I just kind of looked at each other and went, ‘Oh, this is gonna be fun.’
For his first show, David did great. He had a big supportive band of really good players. He had background singers and he had horns and so he was able to strut and go out there and do his stuff. He was well taken care of with a good show around him. He just came out and nailed it.
We travelled to our first concert dates with 16 people, including the musicians, singers, road manager and an equipment guy. I thought that was a lot, but eventually I wound up carrying some 30 people on my tours, including security guys.
I was too busy with the TV show to work on an act. I figured we could do every number from
The Partridge Family
Album
(which enjoyed a phenomenal 68-week run on the
Billboard
pop album chart, beginning 31 October 1970). To fill out the bill, I could do songs popularised by Crosby, Stills & Nash and Buffalo Springfield, and maybe a little blues. I figured the kids would be going, ‘What’s that? And who cares?’ because that material was from before their time. But I really only had about an album’s worth of Partridge Family material to use, so what choice did I have?
For the first date, Ruth, Wes Farrell, and seemingly everyone from the record company flew up. It was a big event. Seattle was sold out and it was madness. It was the first time I’d heard mass hysteria. I was petrified because I’d never played a live show before. I didn’t know what I was doing, but instinct took over. I only had one rehearsal, and that was in front of Kenny Lieu, who was taking photographs for
Tiger Beat
,
The Partridge Family
Magazine
and
The David Cassidy Magazine
.
I was nervous to begin with and it didn’t help that Seattle was hit that weekend by the worst storm in ten years. For a while we weren’t even sure any planes would be flying into the area.
I was backstage when Kim and Dave opened the show. When the lights went out after their performance, the whole place went crazy. There was all this screaming from 8,000 girls and boys ranging in age from about seven to 17, with most around 13. I remember the emcee addressing the audience: ‘Give me a D! Give me an A! Give me a V! Give me an I! Give me a D! What does that spell?’ And all of these kids screamed ‘DAVID!’ and generally went berserk.
I was in an outfit that had just been made for me. I bounded out on the stage and was hit with so much light that for a moment I couldn’t see anything. All those kids had cameras and they all wanted pictures. It created a startling, spectacular effect for several minutes – thousands of those big old Sylvania flashbulbs popping off.
My heart was pounding. I was sweating profusely. My energy was really flying. The first song was
I Can Hear Your Heartbeat
. A good rockin’ song – high energy. And it builds. Just three minutes long – perfect for an opener. I needn’t have worried about whether the kids were going to like me. They were screaming – and in some cases fainting – before I got my first note out. I rushed through the show. Everything was going 150 miles an hour. I felt overwhelmed by the strength of the reaction I was getting.
Richard Delvy:
I think we had about a week to get a show together before his first concert in Seattle. I put together an Elvis Presley type of show for David: lots of singers, lots of brass, just a knockdown band. The shows in Seattle and Portland went great. The places were packed. David and the band performed great. No one knew what was gonna happen but it worked out very well.
After those shows, David’s touring agency, William Morris, realised that he was a viable live act and felt he was a star. They began booking him and we were playing shows every weekend across the country. I had to wear ear plugs at the show because the little girls would scream so loud that it would hurt your ears. It was so high-pitched that it drove you nuts.
I couldn’t hear any of my vocals. I couldn’t hear my guitar and my amp was turned up to ten. To try to sing when you can’t hear yourself is impossible. I’m sure I sang a lot of songs out of tune because I couldn’t hear the band. The audience never stopped screaming; I never stopped flying. That’s all I remember. That’s the thing about kids in their early teens. They’re out of control with their emotions. It’s insane. When they love you, they let you know it. If they don’t love you they let you know that, too.
I think there were some parents in the audience, but not many. It was too loud for them. Most of them were out in the parking lot, waiting for it to be over. So many kids were stomping their feet to the beat and jumping up and down, you could feel the vibrations. The hysteria hit me like a drug. My adrenaline was working overtime. I could hear the girls closest to the stage screaming at the top of their lungs, ‘David, I love you!’, ‘I want your baby!’ They began throwing stuff at me. And when the spotlights are on you, you can’t see anything coming until it hits you.
I didn’t say much more than, ‘Thank you, thank you very much.’ I just raced through it, from one number to the next, in a style a lot funkier and a lot faster than on the album. By night’s end I was hoarse from trying to scream to be heard. I was really drained; my whole body started feeling sore because I’d expended so much energy. I gave everything I had.
Sam Hyman:
David was nervous before the first show. He kept turning his back to the audience and working with his band. He couldn’t hear. It was his first time being in that kind of venue.
He didn’t do a bad job and he wasn’t forgetting lines. The sound mix was kind of mushy, but the fans didn’t pick up on it. David’s performance was a natural, intuitive thing that he had. You know, it was like the first time Elvis put his guitar on and was straightening it out and his hips moved and the fans all screamed. And he went, ‘Oh, that’s interesting.’ He moved his hips again and they screamed again, and he realised, ‘Oh, OK, I got it.’ And that’s kind of how it happened with David. He learned as he went along what worked. I think any good performer does. Once he got going and could relax a bit so he could then communicate with the audience, it evolved into a decent show. It was not a gimmick show. There were no fireworks or smoke, just basic lighting, a band, back-up singers. For his audience, it was an evangelical experience.
I was skinny to begin with, but I must have lost three or four pounds every time I went out on stage in those days. I still lose weight when I perform. My body was still sore the next day and I had to do it all again at a show in Portland in the midst of this hurricane. It was an insane weekend. Ruth patted me on the back with an almost maternal pride, as if to say she knew that her boy could do it. It’s an amazing high when you’re the focal point of thousands of people screaming ‘I love you!’ at the top of their lungs. They had no idea how much that meant to me. It’s a jolt of energy. I wish everybody could understand what it feels like when people love you that much.
The die was cast. In a matter of days, my guarantee went from $8,000 to $10,000 to $12,500. Eventually, I got as much
as $25,000 and $50,000 for bookings – gigantic figures for the early 70s. At one point, after the second or third year, I was getting as much as Elvis, and in some cases even more. I knew it, and Elvis knew it, because we had the same agents.
Elvis called Sam Weisbord at William Morris, who relayed the conversation to me. He said something like, ‘Who’s this kid stealing all my thunder? He’s making as much money as I am.’
On weekends I’d often fly out to dates in the Midwest. I remember being picked up at the airport for one Ohio date in a 1959 Cadillac hearse; I think the local mortuary owner was the only guy with fancy cars for rent. We played big auditoriums, which got bigger as time went on. I couldn’t have worked any harder than I was working. Every minute of every day of my life was booked. And I wasn’t even sure how much I was really making. It was expensive carrying all of the people I carried. But money wasn’t why I was doing it. I didn’t know or care about the money.
On Mondays I’d get back to
The
Partridge Family
set and tell Danny Bonaduce and Susan Dey how the concerts had gone. They were both popular as well, Danny because he played such a feisty, wisecracking kid and Susan because she was so great-looking and idealistic, but theirs was a much different experience from mine. They didn’t have the screaming fans and all of these magazines going gaga over them.
The first time they got to share in what I was experiencing came when Susan, Danny and I flew out to Cleveland for
the city’s Thanksgiving Day parade. We’d been booked as grand marshals before our TV show even went on the air, but I don’t think anyone could have anticipated how quickly the show would have created this kind of hysteria.
We got to downtown Cleveland and led the parade riding in a fire truck. The event turned into sheer pandemonium. We had to get on our hands and knees and duck because people were trying to grab us. By the end, an estimated 60,000 to 80,000 kids were following us down the streets of Cleveland, screaming and yelling. No thought had been given to security, to how we were supposed to make our exit when the parade was over. No one had anticipated there’d be any fuss over our appearance. Ah, the power of television and records! At the end, when we had to run 20 feet from this fire truck to a waiting room, it was really dangerous. People were nearly trampled.
There were times, during my tours, when I was afraid for my life, because I saw fans turn into a mob, and a mob can’t easily be controlled. I knew the fans loved me – they didn’t want to kill me – but their emotions were at fever pitch. And they all wanted a piece of me.
That parade was the first time I’d had my clothes ripped. That was the first and last time I ever went anywhere without people whose job it was to get me in and out safely. I think the parade was a turning point for Danny. That’s when he saw me as having the fame he wanted. He started really looking up to me from that time. He was very young, maybe 11 or 12, so it made an impression on him.
And the fan madness just kept escalating. It had seemed
like a lot when there were 40 fans crowding around the studio every morning. It grew to where there were hundreds of them. Who were all these people getting up at six in the morning just to see me? I couldn’t really go anywhere in public any more without being hassled.
I needed to get away, so I took a week off. Steve Ross and I hiked in the forest of Big Sur. We spent three days doing absolutely nothing but getting in touch with nature, living
au naturel
. It was really cool, the antithesis of Hollywood. We lived off the land, bathed in a stream.
When it was over, we hiked back to our car and drove down to the Big Sur lodge, a rustic place that had no customers when we arrived that afternoon. We had beard growth, our hair was filthy. We washed the dirt and mosquito oil off our hands and faces so we could at last sit down and have something proper to eat. Oh, baby, was I ripe!
We sat in a back corner of this huge, empty cafeteria. Because of the fans, I had become completely paranoid about being in public. So I sat facing the wall, reading the menu, thinking how I didn’t want the waitress to notice me. I just wanted to be a regular guy. I kept my shades on even though it was dark in this joint.
Steve ordered for us. I breathed a sigh of relief at not being recognised. I turned and saw that a camp bus was pulling up in front of the lodge. A hundred or more Girl Scouts came rushing out of the bus and poured into the cafeteria.
There’s no way these girls are not going to notice us. We’re the only patrons. We’re 20-year-old males. These are
11- and 12-year-old girls, who would notice any young guys, especially hippies with long hair. And my friend Steve was an attractive guy; girls called him ‘cute’.
I kept thinking that if I was recognised, aside from the pandemonium that it would create, all these girls would leave and tell everyone they knew, ‘We saw David Cassidy in person, and he’s really gross!’ I was thinking,
David Cassidy simply cannot be this person. He cannot be seen like this.
I’d built up the persona of this David Cassidy guy that the public knew from TV and, even though I didn’t particularly relate to that character, I had to protect him. Realising I was now a role model, I took it very seriously.