September 5, 2001: eDiet.com

What do you get when you cross a tasty-looking food product with a can't-get-it-out-of my-mind kind of jingle? You get a commercial that's both annoying and enticing at the same time.

And if you are the marketing maniacs behind Burger King's new Partridge Family-linked ad campaign, you are probably bellowing the lyrics to the '70s pop smash I Think I Love You!

Just this past Monday, Dr. John Sklare noted in his weekly eDiets newsletter column, "Madison Avenue certainly makes its contribution. The marketing of unhealthy fast food is a science. They know exactly what buttons to push to get that food positioned firmly in your mind. The more successful they are, the more unhealthy we become."

Yes, I woke up in love this morning... I woke up in love this morning... went to sleep with you -- my beloved Croissan'wich -- on my mind! If I saw it once, I saw it 100 times this past week. I am talking about the new Burger King ad for its fat-filled breakfast feature: the sausage, egg and cheese Croissan'wich.

Veteran readers may recall that I last discussed this grease-soaked grab-and-go "goodie" way back in January.

Once you read the old article, you'll see why you should roll over and go back to sleep rather than wake up and make a run for the drive-thru window and a Croissan'wich with side of deep-fried hash browns.

I guess my point here is the power of advertising. Today I am out making the mortgage payment and lo and behold where do I stop for lunch? Why Burger King, of course!

It was too late for the breakfast bomb, but not late enough to escape the lure of the roadside restaurant. Two burgers and small fries later -- yes, at least I resisted a Whopper with cheese! -- I am on the road fumbling to eat and drive and stay alive.

And all the way home I am cursing myself for wasting so many calories on something I really didn't want... or need.

So the next time the commercial comes on, lean back, close your eyes and groove to the retro sound of the Partridge Family. I may go find that CD of mine and take a complete trip back to a simpler time... when a visit to Burger King was a very rare treat.

SEVENTIES heartthrob David Cassidy has won an eleventh-hour High Court battle to cancel a British tour - upsetting thousands of fans. US singer Cassidy claimed his former management firm sold tickets for a series of comeback gigs without his consent. And in a message to UK fa ns on his web-site yesterday, Cassidy said 'I am pleased to tell you your justice system works.
     The High Court in London has ordered the promoters to cancel the concerts.' Up to 50,000 tickets had been sold for 10 UK venues in November, including Newcastle, Coventry, Sheffield and Glasgow.
     Fan Helen Tapley, 43, who bought two tickets for Brighton said 'It's a total shambles. I so wanted to see him on tour.'
     Cassidy, 51, starred in US show The Partridge Family and had a string of hits, including Breaking Up Is Hard To Do.
     Ticket firm World Artists Management confirmed that all shows were off. The company, facing a huge compensation bill, said it was still in dispute with Cassidy.

David Cassidy is no Donny Osmond.

Or he wasn't back then, when he was wearing crushed velvet and borrowing the keys to "The Partridge Family" tour bus, when he was better known as the TV family's star son, Keith.

For a couple of years beginning in 1970, Cassidy's innocent alter ego -- the rogue but still squeaky-clean version of "little bit rock-n-roll" Donny -- was on television making young teens' hearts sing. Meanwhile, the real live Cassidy was seriously sowing some oats, living on brown rice and Tetracycline (to nip diseases in the bud) and catching Jimi Hendrix whenever he could.

He was more about "Purple Haze" than "The Puppy Song."

All of which is abundantly clear in Cassidy's cathartic 1994 autobiography, "C'Mon Get Happy: Fear and Loathing on the Partridge Family Bus," co-written with music biz penman Chip Deffaa.

It's not something Cassidy really wants to talk about today.

Reached by phone about appearances Friday and Saturday outside Harrah's New Orleans casino, he didn't really want to talk about his last recording, "Old Trick, New Dog," either.

He would have us believe he's living in the present now.

Splitting his time between a Las Vegas recording studio and a summer concert tour that includes shows at Harrah's Atlantic City and the Arizona State Fair, Cassidy is working on the follow-up to his 1998 recording. This one is titled "Then and Now." Official tour T-shirts (available at his thriving fan site, www.davidcassidy.com) depict the singer in both present and Partridge eras. Alongside the clean-cut 51-year-old David Cassidy image -- honed in successful Las Vegas nostalgia acts including "The Rat Pack Is Back" -- is the silky shag-wearing icon that even without the puka shells screams "Keith."

What seems like ambivalence is simply someone incorporating two distinct lives, Cassidy might say.

"I've been out on concerts all summer, and audience reaction has been fantastic. Overwhelming," he said.

"Originally in the ‘70s when my fans were teen-agers they would come to my concerts and their parents wouldn't want to know about it. Now they come together, sometimes three generations of females.

"It's just like the ‘70s, only the voices have dropped an octave," he said.

And so has his, sort of.

In November 1970, when the Partridge Family single "I Think I Love You" hit No. 1 -- sandwiched between the Jackson 5's "I'll Be There" (late October) and Smokey Robinson's "Tears of a Clown" (mid-December) -- studio whizzes were pitching Cassidy's voice up an octave to appeal to the stampede of teen fans (which, incidentally, Cassidy recalls with fright in that autobiography; at times he thought he might actually be killed).

It may have been the beginnings of the teen-idol packaging phenomenon driven to exponential heights in today's boy bands *NSYNC and the Backstreet Boys.

"It's a marketing business now," Cassidy said. "When I started recording, at 19, ‘marketing' was going to the grocery store.

"There was one (pop) radio station that played every hit song, from Cream to Hendrix to Marvin Gaye and Petula Clark and Tony Bennett. Now radio's completely fragmented. There were three television stations; now there are 120. You can't have the impact that we were able to have."

And that impact was enormous.

For several years, Cassidy -- or rather Keith, since "the world perceived me as something I wasn't" -- was on the cover of every teen magazine and his image was everywhere, from lunch boxes to coloring books, dolls, comic books, T-shirts, books, records and even bubble gum packs.

In fact, in April and May of 1971, sales of Partridge Family bubble gum alone plunked $59,000 worth of royalties into the jaws of licensing agent Screen Gems. But the dotted line on which Cassidy signed apparently was a sticking point.

Somehow, he never received a cent from the bubble gum or nearly anything else, he says in his book. Although he was supposed to get a cut from the sales of Partridge products, when it was all over in 1974, he had earned about $15,000.

Although he eventually amassed $8 million, mostly through concerts from 1970 to ‘74, Cassidy spent it all in a reportedly hard-living period in the ‘80s. That and the royalty losses of those early years still gnaw at him.

Well, it does and it doesn't.

"I made those people hundreds of millions of dollars. And where were those people when it was over?" Cassidy said.

"But it was another world. You've got to look back and learn from your mistakes."

He hit the crossroads between then and now while running in Venice Beach in the late ‘80s.

"I was $800,000 in debt, with no place to go, and I was going through a divorce (his second; he and third wife Sue Shifrin, a songwriter, are the parents of a 10-year-old son, Beau). The only way for me to begin was the beginning, so I began learning. I went through three years of intense analysis.

"And I'd go in the mornings, and in Venice Beach, there are a lot of homeless people -- alcoholics and mentally ill people. I'd say to myself, ‘You're one step away from that, and one step away from everything you had and can have again. It's my choice, and I can re-create it.' It made me feel very lucky, as opposed to pissed off and angry."

Although some may still find it hard to feel sorry for a former superstar who's reaching for a second helping of salad days, his book makes the tough times pretty convincing.

Besides being somewhat skunked by the industry, Cassidy had a manic-depressive, alcoholic father, stage actor Jack Cassidy, who was, the book says, a mean-spirited man who competed with his son for years, even bad-mouthing him to the press. He and Evelyn Ward, David's mother, finally told their son they were getting a divorce when Cassidy was 6, two years after Jack Cassidy left Ward and suburban West Orange, N.J., for Los Angeles. Before then, Cassidy writes, there were drunken Cub Scout camp-outs and family feuds.

But those days, like Pet Rocks and Tab, really are over.

Cassidy wrote kindly of his stepmother, "Partridge" co-star Shirley Jones, and his half-brothers, including follow-up teen heartthrob Shaun, one of three sons Jack Cassidy fathered with Jones. He appears in family photos on Shirley Jones' own fan site.

And although he still sings "Cherish" and "I Think I Love You" -- which sounds sultry and adult on "Old Trick, New Dog" -- don't look for him to get back on the psychedelic bus.

"I'm a creative person," Cassidy said. "I don't want to make the same TV show or the same record over again.

"I've turned down a ‘Partridge Family' sequel for two decades now. I don't want to ruin it. It was good and people will always remember it that way. But we do one reunion show and people say, ‘Ugh. Look what happened to that guy or that girl.' "
 
 

David Cassidy
Date: 9/21 - 9/22
Time: 8:00 p.m.
Venue: Harrah's Casino
Area: CBD
Cost: Free and open to the public
Contact: 1-800-HARRAHS

“I Think I Love You!” -- Relive the 70’s to the present with the former teen idol best known as Keith Partridge on the hit show “The Partridge Family.” Cassidy will perform decades of hits during two exclusive concerts for Harrah’s New Orleans Casino.

David Cassidy became an international star when his Partridge Family recordings topped the charts. By age 21, Cassidy was the highest paid solo performer in the U.S. and had a fan club bigger than Elvis or the Beatles. He was nominated for several Grammy awards and had seven chart-topping singles. Cassidy has sold more than 25 million recordings to date and has toured the world countless times. He has had equal success on Broadway and in Las Vegas.

Harrah’s will provide food and drink at cash bars during the events.The concerts will be canceled in the event of extreme weather conditions.

Come November, Happy Harry's, to be located in the Flamingo-Arville Plaza, could become the new day-night hangout to have hot-baked designer sub sandwiches named for and created by celebrities ... Mayor Oscar Goodman, Siegfried & Roy, Rita Rudner, Marty Allen, David Cassidy, Frank Marino, Melinda and Phyllis McGuire are a few of the celebs who have committed.

Time magazine declared last week that the Age of Irony is over. If that's the case, then I am out of a job.

I told my wife that if I didn't soon write a frivolous and catty article about some overindulged celebrity, my head would explode.

And then David Cassidy walked into my life. Thank heaven for little prayers answered.

Cassidy is a Type A former child star of the ‘70s: Petulant about his past identities and bitter about how it all ended. I've watched just about every TV interview Cassidy has given in recent years and, each time, he lashes out at everyone who kept him from developing artistically -- from the network to the record companies to the press to the fans, even, who won't let him forget that he always will be, in their minds, the saccharine-sweet teen crooner Keith Partridge.

And in these interviews he always says, "I'm not bitter," but that's like when someone looks you in the eye and says: "It's not about the money."

This just in: It's about the money.

So Harrah's booked Cassidy last week for a couple of free concerts downtown and when I went to Friday's sound check, I was just going to hang back unobtrusively and listen in on his interviews with local TV and radio stations because my emotions are too frayed these days to contradance on my own with cranky celebs.

Problem was, no TV or radio people showed up to interview him. I guess Cassidy is old news or, worse, no news. I was the only member of the media there, so when Cassidy's press agent said the star was available for an interview, I caught the eye of a Harrah's press agent and discreetly shook my head.

The Harrah's rep then wanted to know why I bothered to show up at all if I wasn't going to interview Cassidy and I made this admission: He scares me. Little angry people intimidate me and I know that, in these troubled times, Americans are supposed to show what they're made of, stand tall against their fears, but I completely wussed out.

I guess we know what I'm made of.

I have approached some of the most powerful people in American politics and the entertainment industry and asked them all kinds of dumb questions, but I didn't have the guts to talk to David Cassidy.

Much of this has to do with a meeting earlier during the sound check with an intensely well-connected teen-idol groupie named Laura Horrigan. Though she's only 22, much of her life seems consumed by encounters with bubble-gum boy pop stars whose careers peaked long before she was born.

Case in point: She saw the Monkees reunion tour 21 times this spring and summer.

Anyway, Horrigan warned me: "Whatever you do, DO NOT CALL HIM KEITH PARTRIDGE! And DO NOT ASK ANYTHING ABOUT ‘THE PARTRIDGE FAMILY' AT ALL. And especially DO NOT ask anything about Susan Dey," Cassidy's former "Partridge Family" co-star with whom he may or may not have had a tumble in the hay back in the day. (Whichever it was, it seems to be a point of contention between them. Or so I'm told. By people who know.)

Whatever.

So I figured if I couldn't talk about Susan Dey, then I had to figure Danny Bonaduce and his strange post-Partridge life were way out of bounds and that left only two topics of interest to me:

One is Jeremy Gelbwaks, the original doe-eyed "Partridge Family" drummer, Chris, who has shunned his former Partridge identity in the decades following the show and was last known to be living in New Orleans -- right here in River City! -- as a computer consultant.

The other local connection is Barry Cowsill, Cassidy's real-life counterpart in the Cowsill family singers, the pop family sensation on whom the Partridge family was modeled, in much the same way the Monkees were modeled on the Beatles. He, too, lives in New Orleans now, but not so obscurely: You can catch him growling the blues at Kerry Irish Pub from time to time.

But I chose not to ask Cassidy about these guys since they definitely came under the DO NOT ASK ANYTHING ABOUT "THE PARTRIDGE FAMILY" heading. (Nor did I see either of them at the show that night, but then again, I have no idea what Gelbwaks looks like; I think he was 9 last time I saw him.)

So I stood silent. I was fully prepared to loathe Cassidy and figured he would be a cantankerous prima donna during sound check but he was, in fact, positively genteel. Loose. He cut up with band mates and when it was over and he was heading off back to the hotel, he gave the little group I stood among a wave that positively said: "Hey, how you doin'? Nice to see you."

Nice to see you.

I was amazed how tiny he was. David Cassidy is a sprite, and onstage that night, he was a kid; a little boy with a red guitar, grinding out those bubble-gum anthems: "I Woke Up in Love This Morning," "Cherish," "C'mon Get Happy" (in a bizarre hip-hop re-mix!), etc.

Cassidy was a prince. He was open to banter with his fans and smiled a lot and truly managed to avoid looking jaded, though he must do the same show every night, don't you suppose? He was the very essence of his former teen-age lust and energy, making the same LOVE ME TONIGHT gestures he made 30 years ago.

Why grow up, I was thinking? Never give in. It ain't me, but it's cool. He's 10 years older than me and acts 20 years younger and I can sort of admire that.

Cassidy was clearly moved by the evening. It was his first performance since the events of Sept. 11 and he broke from routine several times between songs to talk about it. "For 12 days I have been so sad," he said, and he told the crowd many times how therapeutic it was for him to be sweating and rocking with a group of people -- strangers all -- because: "I've never felt that we were all brothers and sisters as much as I do now."

He paused. "We've shown those bastards that there is no fear in here," and he punched his heart through his sweat-soaked maroon disco-feely shirt, which he had put on to replace his sweat-soaked green disco-feely shirt.

After Cassidy closed his show with the requisite "I Think I Love You," he returned for what was to be an encore selection of Bob Seger's "Hollywood Nights," but on the opening notes, Cassidy turned abruptly and waved off his nine-piece band and they looked at one another puzzled and I figured this is where he throws his tantrum.

On a silent stage, before a puzzled crowd, he approached the microphone.

"I have never done this song in concert, but I've done it a number of times at football and baseball games, and if you'd like to join me," he began. And then, after another patriotic speech about these troubled times, he launched into "The Star-Spangled Banner."

And he killed it. Out of the park. Touchdown. He showed pipes like he hadn't shown all evening, roaring like a lion cub, his voice bouncing off the streets and buildings and up into the night over downtown New Orleans and it was the best and the worst I had felt all night.

That's the way it gets now.

Walking to my car, I wished I had met him after all. Maybe we could have gone to see Barry Cowsill and drink beer and cut up, telling "Brady Bunch" jokes and walking silly drunk down Bourbon Street like the Monkees walk on the beach during the opening credits of their old TV show.

Now that would have been different.

Maybe David Cassidy is a prima donna and a royal pain in the butt in other times and other places, but not on this night, thankfully. Not in this town.

Last night, I fulfilled a childhood fantasy when I attended - with backstage access - the recording of tonight's Top of the Pops.
 
Think before you smirk at that statement. Now 37 years old, TOTP is exported to more than 90 countries, and has spawned a website, a magazine, a sister series called TOTP2 and - this year - its own awards. Forget MTV, Top of the Pops has been compulsory teatime viewing, even at its worst, for four generations of British music fans. Any decent band you can name has appeared on it. It is, as producer and director Chris Cowey says, "a British institution, a national treasure".

Stalking the stages, the corridors and the dressing rooms of TOTP is a strange experience. The programme is so deeply embedded in my innocent youth, I still half-believe that each eight-song, 29-minute show is shot as seen: the revelation that many of the turns are recorded in advance, and that presenter Gail Porter's links are scripted, taped and edited in, is a shock.

The backstage areas of Riverside Studios in Hammersmith - which TOTP will vacate on 18 October for a purpose-built studio at Television Centre - are downright shabby. The atmosphere is casual, the crew businesslike and offhand, the invited audience a meagre 150. Yet every act generates absurd, undeniable excitement. Even Steps.

During the recording, everyone - the crew, the audience, the other artists, and me - is waiting for a woman who will mime an awful single that has already been spanked down the chart by the sublime Kylie. We are waiting for Posh, for Victoria Beckham.

An hour before recording, though, the only artist in evidence is David Cassidy. The Seventies teen idol is attempting a comeback via a new album and a slot on TOTP2. He sits in Riverside's bar, pointedly strumming a guitar, while the audience flows around him, oblivious. Their tickets state "over-18s, but no wrinklies".

Most of them weren't even born the last time Cassidy was famous. Any older fans that do get into the studio will have their grey heads edited out of the broadcast. Inside the empty studio, on one of the four Top of the Pops stages, Ian Brown, formerly of the Stone Roses, is rehearsing his song, F.E.A.R. He has an extensive, all female band, but he is the only one performing live. In TOTP terms, this is called "Live Vox". What Steps do is called "Full Track", meaning, they mime.

Some artists, like Samantha Mumba, can handle pure live performance, but many can't. One extremely popular female singer cannot, according to a TOTP insider, sing a note. Similarly, the members of one boy band were so nervous on their first appearance that after three or four tries at a live rendition, the producers "forced them to mime".

(The stage that Brown is standing on, by the way, is known as "Paul". The other three are called John, George and Ringo. The new studio at Television Centre has five stages, which will cause problems.)

In the make-up room, tiny, saucer-eyed Gail Porter is enthusing about the friendly atmosphere of the show. "Often, Steps will just bust into your room," she says. I look round, and there is H from Steps, sorting out his jacket. He's tiny too.

Outside, Chris Cowey is shouting for someone. Upstairs, Victoria Beckham's dressing-room door is soundly shut. David Cassidy's is open, but he says he can't talk to me now. Later, he will send an acolyte out to say he doesn't do photographs, or interviews. Later still, he will be seen trying to get to the Gents through a crowd heedless of his identity.

In the studio, Ian Brown is taping. Danny, the warm-up man, has told the crowd to "applaud like mad and dance your pants off", and they do. Next up are Steps. They record a plug for the Australian TOTP, and then mime their version of Diana Ross's Chain Reaction, doing their funny, sign-language dances as dry-ice plumes flare.

Steps are followed by Sum 41, a loud but charming bunch of 20-year-olds from Vancouver, who perform their song Fat Lip defiantly live. Afterwards, bass player Cone seems underawed by his TOTP debut: the show isn't shown in Canada. "I hear Victoria Beckham's here, though," he says.

"I'd sure like to meet her."

Back in the studio the audience are already drifting away from the excellent Goldfrapp toward the stage they expect Mrs B to occupy. Sure enough, a slender figure in a shockingly tasteless white suit steps onto the stage, waiting patiently amid six dancers while Danny warns the audience about fallout from the "glitter cannons". It is Posh.

The crowd go dutifully wild, and she sings - mimes - Not Just an Innocent Girl. A toddler who may be Posh's son Brooklyn is held up to watch. The cannons fire glitter at the audience as a ghastly "VB" symbol rotates on the video screen behind this jerking figure, whose every frantic dance move reveals a (new?) navel piercing.

This is what we have all waited to see, and it represents celebrity in its purest form; the song is bad, the miming worse. Posh has to do it again, but I don't see it. I'm lurking outside her dressing room, hoping to snatch a few post-performance words. After 10 minutes, I'm moved downstairs by security, and after another 10 minutes, Goldfrapp's lead singer has mistaken me for a bouncer, and David Cassidy is hanging around again. Obviously Posh has scarpered (and, according to my insider, Hear'Say are the only other act who regularly avoid the main exit and the autograph-hunters). So it's time for me to leave, too. I didn't meet Posh, but I don't care. You see, I was there. I was at Top of the Pops.

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