Read Could It Be Forever? My Story Online
Authors: David Cassidy
Could It Be Forever? My Story (29 page)
Sam Hyman:
The English revere their rock stars more than we do and put them on a higher plateau. From the Beatles on, the music industry was a great source of revenue for the country and a great source of national pride. Also, David’s teenybopper image was not as much of a turn-off in England as it was here. The Beatles were teenyboppers when they started. David was much bigger in England than he was in the U.S. It was Davidmania, and in some ways it was bigger than Beatlemania. When he did his concerts, he broke the records set by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones at Wembley Arena.
Musically, 1973 was a fantastic time for me. In October 1973 I topped the British charts for several weeks with a single combining
Daydreamer
and
The Puppy Song
, neither of which were hits in the U.S. And in December 1973 my album
Dreams Are Nuthin’ More Than Wishes
, which I thought was the best of my first three solo albums, became the number one album in England.
After my second album,
Rock Me Baby
, came out and it was clear that Wes wanted me just to record songs by his writers, I called my manager and said, ‘I want another record producer,’ which became a point of tremendous contention. Unbeknownst to me, the president of Bell Records, Larry Uttal, had signed an agreement with Wes Farrell that said, ‘You can produce The Partridge Family and any of its
members for the remainder of our contract.’ This was at a time when artists were totally controlled by the record companies.
Larry Uttal then had to pay Wes Farrell a sum of money to let me go. And, at that point, I became a bad boy. I became the unruly, undisciplined artist who was causing Bell Records a lot of problems. Larry Uttal said, ‘How dare David elect to have another record producer?’ It was insane. But understand, I was their puppet. I was nothing more to them than someone who would keep the change rattling in the register.
So I personally called Rick Jarrad. Rick had produced two or three of my favourite albums of all time: Jefferson Airplane’s first album and Harry Nilsson’s
Aerial Ballet
and
Harry
, which were two masterpieces. I was a huge Nilsson fan and got to know him very well, eventually singing and writing with him a few years later. I had all Harry’s demos because I was such a fan.
The Puppy Song
, which I recorded for
Dreams Are Nuthin’ More Than Wishes
, was his song.
Rick Jarrad brought
Daydreamer
to me. A writer from South Africa named Terry Dempsey wrote it and it’s a really good song. After Rick played it to me we looked at each other and I just high-fived him and said, ‘That’s a smash.’
Daydreamer
is just as good a pop song for the time as anything I’ve ever recorded, except for maybe
I Think I Love You.
I’d been living in this bubble, cut off from most of the rest of the world. But finally I had the time and space to be creative. I called Tony Romeo and said, ‘Tony, I’m gonna make an album without Wes. I want you to write a song for
me. I want it to be kind of autobiographical, to reflect where I came from, who I am. So he wrote
Sing Me.
He sent me the demo with him playing this funky piano and singing. The lyrics go: ‘I have some pictures of us, we’re all at the shore. I must’ve been four then, I couldn’t have been more. My father was holding me up just for show, my mother was posing like Marilyn Monroe.’ It was like Tony had taken my life and written about it. We’d never talked about it. But I remembered being at the beach with my parents as a kid and I wept.
Tony wrote a song for
The Partridge Family
Christmas album,
My Christmas Card to You
. That is one of the greatest Christmas songs ever written, and I would love to re-record it. I re-recorded
Summer Days
, also written by Tony, because I wanted it to be mine!
Rick brought in a young guy named Michael McDonald, whom he had just signed to a publishing deal; he was working with Steely Dan. He came over to my house with Rick, sat down at the piano and played a little bit of
Hold On
, and I said, ‘I love that. That’s just a beautiful, beautiful melody.’ Michael was very shy and extremely talented. When I first met Michael, he was living over a garage and I think I was the first person to record one of his songs. Michael played on every track on my
Dreams Are Nuthin’ More Than Wishes
album.
Bali Hai
is a tribute to my father, mother and stepmother for my musical upbringing.
Gary Montgomery wrote
Mae
. Kim Carnes, Dave Ellingson and I were over at a writer’s house and Gary
Montgomery was there. He said he thought the song was perfect for me and played it to me. The next thing I knew, I was singing it in the studio.
Peggy Lee’s version of
Fever
was played a lot in my home when I was growing up and I always thought it was cool. I tried to put a different take on it. Ron Tutt, who was Elvis’s drummer, played on that track.
I got some of the folky influences from Kim and Dave. They had come out of The New Christy Minstrels folk thing. Henry Diltz and the Modern Folk Quartet and all those guys were also friends of mine and they came out of that New York coffee shop, coffee vibe. Kim, Dave and I wrote a couple of songs together,
Can’t Go Home Again
and
Preying on My Mind. Preying on My Mind
was more their creation.
Can’t Go Home Again
was more mine. I brought the musical changes. At the time I wrote it, I was remembering when I was 18. It was 1968. I had just moved back to New York from L.A. I was on a bus from Port Authority to West Orange, New Jersey. I remember leaning against the window and looking out and remembering how many times my mom had driven me the same way. I hadn’t lived there since I was 11. I saw a couple of guys I’d known who were now married. It was really odd. I felt so out of place.
Dave Ellingson:
It goes back to the old Thomas Wolfe line, ‘You can’t go home again.’ For me personally, as we wrote it, my input was I lived in an old town in Minnesota. I’d gone back to that town years later and it was very nostalgic. As we wrote the song it was very real to me.
Kim Carnes:
Whenever we got together to write with David, there was an ease in it. We’d all become very close friends after touring around the world together, plus we had similar tastes in music. We laughed a lot together. Writing with David was the way it was supposed to be. It was a really neat experience. The songs came easily. He wanted so much to be proud of his music. He had great integrity and knew what he liked. He really wanted to show people more what he was about musically. He wanted to stretch out.
Can’t Go Home Again
came from a conversation we all had about what it would be like to go back to your hometown. Anyone who listened to the song who’d left their home and moved away could relate to it.
Our best times with David were when he’d come over to the house and just hang out until the wee hours of the morning, laughing and playing lots of music. Those were the times when nobody else was around and he could just be David.
In the summer of 1974 I had two hit singles on the British charts,
If I Didn’t Care
(peaking at number nine) and a cover of the Beatles’
Please, Please Me
(peaking at 16), plus one hit album,
Cassidy Live!
(peaking at nine), none of which made a ripple in the U.S. I was more popular in England than I’d ever been but I wasn’t going to overstay my welcome.
My routine continued pretty much as normal. I’d do the TV show weekdays. I’d record at night. On weekends I’d tour. And on Monday mornings I’d be back on the set,
telling Susan how the security guards had had to hide me in the trunk of a car so I could escape my frenzied fans, how many chicks I’d had sex with, how frustrating it was for me that I couldn’t form any kind of meaningful relationship with a woman. I moaned a lot to Susan, who seemed to understand so perfectly.
‘You’ve got to be careful about Susan,’ Shirley said to me one day.
I said, ‘What are you talking about?’
‘You’ve got to be careful how you talk to her about all of the other women in your life. You don’t want to hurt her.’
I didn’t get what Shirley was driving at.
Susan knew me well. She was the sister I never had, my best female friend. I just couldn’t imagine how my talking openly to her about anything could hurt her. I was so blind.
Shirley Jones:
Susan had a giant crush on David. She was just mad about him. And David didn’t see it coming. They were friends first. They worked together and confided in one another throughout the years. It was over a long period of time that her feelings for David developed. He wasn’t aware of it at all. Susan would say things to me and make little hints about it.
Just after the final wrap party for
The Partridge Family
I took Susan out to dinner. We were now through with the show for good; the cast members were all moving off in different directions. I wanted to keep our friendship alive. I knew I’d be going on a world tour shortly and then retiring from the business for the foreseeable future. Susan didn’t know where
she’d be working next. Maybe that sense of things coming to an end helped draw us closer together.
After dinner, we drove by my old high school. We talked about the past years, from when we’d first met when she was a 15-year-old trying out for the show. We both started weeping. We must have spent three hours sitting there. She told me in great detail how she felt about me and how afraid she was of what was going to happen in the future.
I gave her all the help that she wanted with her career. I connected her with people who’d been guiding my career, whom I believed could help her get the work she wanted. And they did. Ruth became Susan’s manager and saw to it that she was soon signed to another TV show. My agent at William Morris Agency, Lenny Hirshan, took a strong interest in Susan, both professionally and personally. Eventually, Lenny and Susan married. Susan actually went on to have the most successful post-
Partridge Family
acting career of all of us.
I took it for granted that Susan and I would always be very close friends; I knew her about as well as anyone did. And for some years afterwards, we did periodically get in touch. Don’t ask me what’s happened between us in more recent years, though, because I honestly don’t know. We just don’t talk any more. Communications were terminated from her end, not mine. I still love Susan in some special way. I can never let that go.
Perhaps the speculation that Susan and I had been lovers or boyfriend and girlfriend, which persists to this day and still appears in tabloids, made it too uncomfortable for her
to communicate with me or any of our co-workers on the show.
It breaks my heart that someone I felt so close to is unreachable at this stage of our lives. Hollywood can be a wicked place. Relationships with co-workers go from intimate friendships to non-existent. Susan was one of the few people I thought I would know and see for ever. Sadly, it was not to be.
T
he last world tour turned out to be a circus. We were all partying hard – the band, the security people, everybody – just blowing off steam before we packed it all in for good. If you ask me what I remember from that tour, the hijinks and escapades come to mind before any of the concerts themselves.
That trip was a free-flying sexual playground. Three incredible Dutch stewardesses were provided with the private jet we chartered in Europe. Someone must have handpicked those girls for us. They partied with everyone. And when it was time for them to do their regular jobs on board the jet, they were thoroughly professional.
I remember hanging around Gina Lollobrigida over a period of several days in Australia. The Italian sex goddess was about twice my age, but very attractive. The first time she met me she said, ‘I hear you’re a monster. I want to meet the monster.’ And she looked down at my crotch. She said she was doing a book of photographs – she’d gotten into photography after retiring from the screen – and asked me to pose for her. I’m glad she included me in her book, along with Henry Kissinger and other interesting men she’d known.
Henry Diltz:
Gina Lollobrigida . . . became very enamored with David when we were in Melbourne. She came to the show and was there on stage with me, standing in the wings, shooting as David was out in the middle of this screaming crowd of girls at a soccer field. And then she wanted to do a private shooting with David, with David lying in bed surrounded by, as she said, ‘fruits’. She ordered hundreds of dollars worth of grapes, bananas and other fruit, asked David to take his clothes off and drape a sheet around himself. We didn’t get it, but she thought,
Here he is, all the girls are outside screaming. They want to see him and where is he? He’s in bed with fruits
. She just thought the image of that was kind of interesting.
Gina Lollobrigida introduced me to the audience of 65,000 people when I played the Melbourne Cricket Ground. I really got a kick out of that, even though I’m sure my younger fans probably didn’t know who she was. I was the last performer to play there until Paul McCartney in 1993, 19 years later.
Sam Hyman:
We kicked off the Australasian leg of the tour in New Zealand. From there, it was Australia and then up to Asia. Elton John had toured the opposite route. He started in Asia and worked his way down, ending up in New Zealand. Elton and David were in Auckland on the same day, although their concerts were on different days. Elton came to David’s show. And when David came off stage before his encore, Elton’s back there going, ‘Oh, great show, mate.’ David said, ‘Do you want to come out?’ And Elton said, ‘Sure. What are you going to play?’ David told him the song and gave Elton the key, and Elton said, ‘Got it.’ David ran back out. ‘I want to bring on a good friend of mine. Somebody you may have heard of. Anybody know of Elton John?’ The crowd screamed, ‘Yeah!’ Elton went over to the piano player and said, ‘Would you give up your seat, just for this song?’ Elton took his place at the piano and played with the band and performed the song with David. The place was rocking and the fans were going nuts. It was great.
Dave Ellingson:
Elton was at his absolute peak. He was red hot. He jammed with David at our show and that was a real big deal. For Elton to jam with him gave David more credibility as an artist. After the show, the hotel we were staying in had a bar and a big lounge. Elton came along and there was a piano and a stage and he took over. David and some of the players in the band got up and jammed and it went on and on.