Teen idolism in the ‘70s was synonymous with one surname in particular: Cassidy. At the onset of the decade, it was David Cassidy, with his feathered locks and his trademark puka shell necklaces, that was all the rage. As the star and focus of hit television series “The Partridge Family,” Cassidy was riding high on TV ratings as the eldest brother of the fictional singing family while benefiting from gold and platinum record sales, fueled by the songs the family performed on the weekly, primetime sitcom.
Fast forward to the latter part of the decade, and it was a different Cassidy who got the lion’s share of the fleeting spotlight that is briefly shone on those elusive teen pinup idols. As the half-brother of David Cassidy, Shaun Cassidy seemed bound for superstardom. The real-life son of Academy Award-winning actress and singer Shirley Jones (who portrayed the matriarch and the voice of reason on “The Partridge Family”) and Tony Award-winning Broadway star Jack Cassidy, Shaun Cassidy was born with the show business gene. In similar fashion as his half-brother’s ascent to stardom, the younger Cassidy landed a role in the weekly, primetime mystery television series “The Hardy Boys,” which certainly helped bolster his exposure and his popularity. A string of hit records helped propel him to the top of singles charts all around the world and led to several concert tours that found him performing in enormous arenas to throngs of screaming fans.
But, then he walked away; on his own accord and on his own terms. Fascinated by other mediums in the entertainment industry, Shaun Cassidy took to writing and producing and continued his career in the field in a manner that allowed him to concentrate on the other talents he possesses, including a stint on Broadway.
After a long time away from a concert stage, Cassidy has decided to give live performance another go and recently took time away from his schedule to speak to Creative Loafing Tampa Bay about his family, his life, his upcoming tour (which makes a stop at the Nancy and David Bilheimer Capitol Theatre in Clearwater), and that underrated pop/new wave album he created with Todd Rundgren at the tail-end of the 1970s.
Tickets to see Shaun Cassidy play Bilheimer Capitol Theatre in Clearwater on Friday, Nov. 24 are still available and start at $45.
Your current tour is bringing you to Clearwater. It’s been a long time since you’ve been to Florida to perform a live concert. Can you tell me a little bit about your current shows and what local fans can expect when you come to town?
Absolutely. This is kind of a very new/old experience for me. As a young guy I had a bunch of records and toured quite a bit in a kind of a short period of time, like a three-year window. My last concert was at the Houston Astrodome in 1980 for 55,000 people. I said “good night,” thinking I’ll do another concert in a few months and I never did because I kind of fell into a kind of another line of work as a writer, producer but first as an actor in the theater and I started working with these playwrights and, this is a long-winded answer to your question, but, I took a lot of time off from performing and I developed a successful career as a writer/producer in television, which I continue to do. But in 2019, someone had been asking me to write a memoir and, every time I sat down to write a memoir, again, I spend my days writing, and I thought, I don’t want another assignment at my desk, I wanna get up and do stuff, and, honestly, I wanted to talk to people. And every time I started writing, I thought, I just would rather go out on the road and see and reconnect with an audience I haven’t seen in decades and maybe meet new people. And, initially, I thought I’d just do a purely storytelling show. I ran that idea by my friends and they got mad at me and they said no, people are gonna be yelling “Sing ‘Da Doo Ron Ron’” or whatever. So, I managed to incorporate a lot of songs that people know into this narrative, so hopefully some of the songs are presented in new and surprising ways, but that’s my long-winded answer to what am I doing in Florida. I’m doing the latest incarnation of the show that I called “The Magic of a Midnight Sky,” which is a line from a song called “Hey Deanie” that was a hit for me and magic is a theme in the show as well, because I had been a magician when I was a young teenager and, there is something magical about this music journey I’ve taken and the shared journey with the audience and you feel that in the show. The show has a lot of humor. It’s also an emotional ride for people, and it’s a lot of fun. The latest incarnation is a holiday version of the show because we will be approaching the holidays in November and December. I haven’t played Florida since the late seventies, so I’m looking forward to this.
When I mentioned to some friends that I’d be interviewing you, a lot of them came back and said that seeing you live was their very first concert experience, having seen you here in Florida many, many years ago.
I hear that from a lot of people: first concert, first record… so it’s nice to see people again!
I have to imagine you get approached and that you hear that a lot. You must hear a lot of stories from people’s personal journeys and how you kind of were there at the start of their musical exploration. That’s got to be a great feeling.
It is. And I remember hearing that from the executives at Warner Brothers back in the day. They said I was responsible for getting a lot of kids into record stores for their first trip. And that was cool. Again, I’ve taken a kind of circuitous journey in my career and I’ve been lucky to be able to do a lot of different things, but I’ve always felt a connection with that audience that has never left. And kind of to my astonishment, I didn’t know when I wrote this little show that anybody would come. I had no expectation that people would show up.
I just wanted to kind of do it, to see if I even felt comfortable on the stage after so long and, and to see if I was missing something and I realized very quickly that it was kind of an unfinished chapter in my life and the connection I had with the audience who magically did show up in droves. They felt the same way and now, because I’ve been doing it, and I had impeccable timing: I started just as the pandemic kicked in, basically. So I wasn’t really able to tour. I could only do it sporadically and I’ve been writing and producing a [television] show called “New Amsterdam” up until very recently, the last five years, so I could only get out on the road so often.
I have a bunch of kids, a family, so the road life was not the reason I decided to do this, but I did wanna connect with the audience and see the people and check in with them. The show has been very cathartic and very successful and I honestly had no expectation of either of those things. So I’m really grateful that I’m able to come to Florida in the winter and share it with everyone there. My wife grew up in the Redlands, like basically the Everglades and she went to University of Florida. She’s a Gator! So, she’s like, “It’s about time!”
So she’s happy! It sounds like you’re getting as much out of it as some of these folks who maybe haven’t seen you live in decades. It sounds like both the audience and you, as the performer, are kind of getting that reconnection and it sounds like it’s very meaningful.
It is. And again, so many of them bring their kids or their husbands. My favorite audience is the husband who gets dragged along reluctantly and they end up having a great time too because, again, a lot of the show is funny and it’s kind of universal. The stories I tell, I do tell a lot of stories, are less about like showbizzy stuff and more about just family because, I have a family that people know: my mother, and my father, and my brother David and a lot of people kind of grew up with all of us and the stories in my family are really not unique.
But the audience knows the players, so I think the stories resonate for them and, yeah, it’s a miraculous thing. I don’t know anyone who has my weird resume of doing this and then stopping at 21 and then picking it up at 61. But I think it is so fresh for me. I mean, had I been singing, you know, “That’s Rock and Roll” for forty years, it might not have the same allure or level of fun as it does for me now because it still is relatively fresh. And, surprisingly, I can actually sing better than I sang when I was a kid because I think I didn’t burn my throat up after four years, you know.
So, that break kind of helped keep it fresh and keep it kind of exciting for you rather than, like you said, running the risk of getting burnt out by it. You stepped away and came back and you have a new-found enthusiasm, it sounds like.
It was not only that; one of the reasons I never went out, because I was offered to play Vegas when I was, you know, 30. Every few years I’d get a call to do something. And then, in the last few years, it was all legacy shows and legacy shows. And in my brain, I was like I know what that is and I don’t think I wanna be doing that. I don’t wanna be the guy out there, trying to pretend he’s 20, just singing old songs and not bringing anything new to the party.
But because I am a writer and because I come from the theater, I felt like, well, I can attack this in a new way where the audience gets everything they’re hoping for. They get all the songs they wanna hear and there was certainly a nostalgic component to the show, but they get something more that I don’t think they expect to get, which is a show that feels relevant to who I am now and who they are now.
Well, it sounds like you’re approaching it from a very honest, genuine standpoint rather than, like you said, trying to mimic or emulate something that you were when you were very young in your life. I think that honesty probably rings true to the audience and they realize what you’re doing.
I think that they do too. They tell me they do and it’s an experience I’ve never had before because this is not what it was like at the Astrodome or Madison Square Garden, when they were kids and I was pretty much a kid myself and it was a scream- a-thon all night! I could hardly say hello then.
But now, it’s really a conversation. My show has a narrative. It has this kind of a beginning, middle and end and it is one long connected story. It doesn’t play as dramatically as I’m describing it. Hopefully it plays more conversationally than scripted, but a lot of it is scripted and, and a lot of the songs, as I say, are introduced or performed in a way that ties into the narrative. So it is as much of kind of a theater piece, I think, as it is a concert or an evening of storytelling.
Well, I’m certainly looking forward to it. It sounds great. I wanted to ask, you brought up your family earlier and obviously, your family is very famous and well known. Did you feel pressured when you were a kid to go into this line of business, because that was your lineage? Or was it kind of something that you felt was natural?
I think my answer is yes to both of those questions. I think I felt pressure. I know I felt pressure because when you come from a family of plumbers and everybody’s in plumbing, everybody’s always assuming you’re gonna become a plumber. So it was the case in my business, our business. My mother, my father, my brother, all actors and singers, and by the time I was in junior high school, “The Partridge Family” had kind of exploded, so I’m getting it from all sides. Are you gonna do it? Are you gonna do it? And honestly, had I not come from this family, I don’t know that I would have become a performer. I certainly would have become a writer, that’s always been who I am.
But I think the performer thing was like everyone, from professional people to my friends, to anybody who would meet me and find out who I was would be saying, well, you’re gonna do this, aren’t you? I signed a record contract when I was 17. I’m certain not because I was a musical genius at 17, but because the record people recognized that I had a path to success. There was precedent already in my family and, yes, I could sing and I was a cute kid and all that stuff.
And I was writing songs even then. I was interested, but I was almost more interested in writing and specifically the lyrics of the songs, then I was in performing. Performing was like, OK, I’ll do that. I know how. I can sing. I didn’t know much about acting. But my second audition was “The Hardy Boy”s and I got the job, so I learned. But I didn’t have the fire in the belly to be a performer, so by the time other opportunities presented themselves, I was so ok with letting it go. And also, I’d gone to school. I’d watched my father, I’d watched my mother, I’d watched David and seen the highs and lows.
And seeing my father and David, both had a much bigger need. They were trying to fill some hole with their success, whereas my mother had this God-given talent of an incredible singing voice and could act and was a beautiful woman, but could have left it all in eight seconds to become a veterinarian, happily. So their wasn’t the cologne of desperation in the air with my mother about show business. I think I modeled her that way. I looked at our family’s business and a good job if you can get it and if you can deal with all the extracurricular stuff.
But my identity was so not wrapped up in having a number one record or playing stadiums. I was like, “Oh, that’s amazing. What a novelty” and “This won’t last long,” because, you know, teen idol by its nature is short shelf life, so I’ll just sort of enjoy this ride and see what’s at the end of the tunnel for me and see if I can find my true passion. And I did. Early on, I knew I wanted to be a writer. I didn’t know how to do it yet, but I was rewriting Hardy Boys scripts. I was like, bothering the writing staff because words meant more to me and intention meant more to me.
And I think I found some, honestly, like psychological healing through writing, which I know, from a lot of writers I’ve spoken to, at any keyboard, I can sit down at the piano for five hours and take a healing journey and I can do it at the computer when I’m writing scripts. And I was fortunate that I could do it. I sold my first script when I was in my early thirties on Broadway when I was working on Broadway. I spent a lot of time in the theater, working with playwrights, and kind of being dazzled by that process.
And I’ve gone full circle. I’m writing a Broadway musical right now, not the music, the book, and I’ve written 100 scripts for different television shows and created a bunch of shows. So writing is really my job, and now that I get to, like after 40 years, go out on the road and sing and, in all humility, sing well, that’s just a joy. It is not a job at all. It’s purely for the joy of the connection with the audience and the shared experience with the audience
That sounds like an incredibly grounded and mature outlook you had at that age, to think, I can walk away from this and I have some other options and other things that interest me.
Well, I didn’t know what my options would be. I knew I was comfortable letting go of it and stepping into the unknown. I talk about this in my show too. It’s like I had to find my story, and everybody in their life has to find their story. But if you’re in the middle of a story that you know isn’t really authentic to who you are…I was a producer in my brain even at 17 and 18 when this kid, whose body I happened to inhabit was being pulled into all of these different performing lanes.
I was like, OK, I can run with this kid. I remember thinking like, this kid could sing and he can get up on a stage and interact with an audience and act his way reasonably well through a television show. But I was never like, this is my dream, my be-all, end-all. I know there’s something else for me. I knew it would be creative. I wasn’t certain, but the minute I started acting and reading scripts and talking to writers, I knew that’s what I wanted. I also wanted the life of a writer. I didn’t want to be on the road my whole life. I like being home. I’m a homebody and I’m basically more of an introvert. I’m way more of an introvert than an extrovert.
Is it fair to say now, getting back into performing, that you’re equally comfortable in the spotlight as you are behind the scenes writing?
Yes! For the first time in my life, though. Because I feel I’m in the spotlight on my own terms. And I feel like I’m not pretending to be something I’m not. Not that I wasn’t who I was, for the most part, when I was 18 or 20, but, you know, nobody knows who they are when they’re 18 or 20. I’m just trying to figure it out and I got a lot of people telling me who I am, but I needed to spend 10 years working in the theater and sitting in rooms alone, writing stuff to figure out really who I was or what I wanted. My father, who I don’t think was ever really happy because he never was whatever he thought he was supposed to be, he never had it.
The recipe for misery is comparing yourself to others and looking at other people and what they’ve got; like ‘he’s more successful than I am,” but there’s always gonna be someone and you’re always gonna be better off than a million other people, but that is a losing game and my dad could never shake that, I think.
So, he ultimately was always unsettled but he was always talking about this life, this fantasy he had of living on a farm and moving us out of Los Angeles and not being so invested in show business success, or finding success in other ways, and the importance of family. He talked this game, my dad, for as long as he was around and he wasn’t around long. He died at 49 when I was 18. But all of those messages got into me. And the irony is, I basically live that life that he told me was important and couldn’t find a way to live himself.
I now live on, it’s not quite a farm, but it’s a little farmette, we got a bunch of animals. I have a great family, a very solid family. I’ve been married to the same woman for 20 years and have 4 young kids and three older kids. I’m a really genuinely happy guy and I can’t imagine having a better life. I’m not the wealthiest guy. I’m certainly not the most successful guy, but I’m the happiest, most fortunate person I know. And, I feel that, because the message my dad gave me landed, even though it didn’t land for him, it landed for me and he was right. So, again, not a perfect father by any measure. And I talk about this in the show, but as an inspirational figure, unsurpassed and my mom as a grounding figure, unsurpassed. And neither were like in any way, prototypical parents.
I think what you’re describing is kind of more valuable than fame and money.
No contest!
It sounds like you’re incredibly grateful and you feel fortunate for what you have around you, which is such a great message. I wish there were more people who felt that way in the world.
But again, I feel like I, because I got to go to school in this business, and the effects of fame and money, or no money, rich, poor, I saw it all around me as a young guy. So by the time it actually happened to me, I had already had like 18 years of school in this.
And so I feel like I’ve gotten to live like three more lifetimes than most people who are on this road because so many people who wanna be in show business, or in whatever they wanna do, are coming from somewhere else with no connection to it. They don’t have any family in it or some uncle who, you know, works at Warner Brothers or whatever, and they get on the plane or the boat or the train and they come to Los Angeles or New York and they’re starry eyed and they’re looking to reinvent themselves because they’re often running from something. In the reinvention, I mean, it’s the Marilyn Monroe story or Elvis or any wildly successful, ultimately tragic tale. It’s because, they can’t find that thing that they think fame will give them because it’s not there.
The most unhappy day in a performer’s life, and I’ve known many, is the day after they’ve won the Academy Award because, now, what do they focus on? Because they thought that thing was gonna be the thing and it’s just not.
It’s like you reach the pinnacle, so where do you go from there?
Where do you go? But, the problem is that’s not the pinnacle. That’s what I’m saying to you. It’s just an illusion and, by the way, this is not just in show business. This applies to any person who’s killing themself to get whatever brass ring and whatever business at the expense of actually truly living their life and finding out who they are. I have a theory about our lives. We, if we’re smart, we get two: we get the one we’re born into, and we get the one we make. And the one we make is really the important one, because so many of us spend our lives running from stuff that happened to us as kids.
We’re trying to figure out or work through our issues with our parents, with our spouses or whatever it is. But if you can do that fairly young, then you actually get to make your own choices about the life you wanna live. And as I say, my career, if you look at it on a like a bio, it’s a weird journey. It’s a strange trajectory. There isn’t really a model for it. I don’t know anyone who stopped singing and performing for 40 years and just started again, and people showed up. That’s even more miraculous.
But that’s what happened and, and I don’t know how long I’ll keep doing it. I’ve done this “Magic of a Midnight Sky” show, which has changed every time I’ve been rewriting it and trading out songs and trading out different stories since I started. So the show I’m doing in Florida is not the same show I did in Maine a month ago or I did for five nights in New York in June; that was a very different show. I leaned more into the theater and my father there because that was his place.
But in Florida, it’s holiday time. And it’s not that I’ve got like 27 dancing girls in elf costumes. But I am going to sing some Christmas songs that have resonance in my life. For example, Rosemary Clooney was like my second mom. I wrote a lot of songs in her house when I was a teenager and spent a lot of time there and spent a lot of Christmases there. So, yeah, I am gonna sing “White Christmas” because that was Rosie’s song. But I’m not just singing it because it’s Christmas time, it’s because it’s a beautiful song. I’m singing because it has personal resonance for me. And it’s part of my story. and that’s kind of how all the songs lay in, you know?
It sounds like it’s a really well put together show and a very thoughtful expression of where you are and how far you’ve come and what you’ve achieved, so I’m sure folks are going to really love this show when they get to see it here in Clearwater. Speaking about the new Broadway show that you said you’re writing. When can we expect to see that? When do you think that’ll surface?
Well, I can’t really talk about it. It’s highly confidential, but the fact that I’m doing it at all is like a dream come true and it’s not something I’m in. I’m just what they call the librettist. I’m writing the book. I just can’t wait to see it realized. These journeys take a couple of years though. Broadway is a slow haul. But I’m involved with television shows too. I have a deal at NBC Universal Studios to write and produce TV. And that’s where I worked on “New Amsterdam” for the last five years. And now that the writer’s strike is over, it’s development time again. So I got a bunch of shows in the hopper.
Sounds like you got a lot going on, which is awesome. I wanted to ask you about something specific that is really meaningful to me. The album you did in 1980, Wasp, with Todd Rundgren and Utopia is a record that I’ve loved for many, many years. I’ve turned a lot of people onto it. It seems to have gotten a cult following. It got reissued for Record Store Day in 2021, and was seemingly introduced to a whole new audience. Where were you at the time of that record’s creation? Was that album more representative of the music you were into at time? How did it all come about?
Yeah, again, even my musical trajectory is unique. My bands, like my high school bands, were like proto- punk bands, were very influenced by glam rock: David Bowie, New York Dolls, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop. I lived in New York and went to boarding school in New York, so I used to, basically, ditch and get on the train and go into the city and hang out at Max’s Kansas City and CBGB. I saw The Ramones at CBGB a bunch of times. So that whole meld of rock and roll and theater felt very organic to my DNA. And I loved that.
I was writing kind of theatrical rock songs when Mike Curb heard about me or my manager who had been, my family’s manager, contacted somebody and said “You should see this kid.” I played them some of those songs and they looked at me and I think they thought (laughs) “Hmm…he’s not going to be Iggy Pop, but we might be able to clean him up and do something else with him”…and that’s kind of what they did. And again, I kind of went along, like, I’m singing, and I did write a fair bit of my early material. And I confess my favorite songs, to this day, that I recorded back then were the ones I got to write because they just had more meaning to me, although I love “Hey Deanie” and “That’s Rock and Roll.” Eric Carmen wrote those and he’s a terrific writer and I loved the Raspberries back in the day and I loved Phil Spector records. I heard “Da Doo Ron Ron” on a school bus when I was five years old and I heard The Crystals and it went into my head and heart and lived there for a long time. It was my idea to record it when we finally did.
So, I’m fine with all that stuff. But pop music was like a sliver of what I was interested in. So, when I changed producers, I wanted to work with Todd because I’d been a big fan of his. Something/Anything remains one of my favorite records of all time.
Same here!
Right? And, and I know he produced a lot of eclectic acts. He didn’t follow the same formula with everyone. So I called him and we met and he was interested and I said “Should I write all this?” He said, no, and said “It’s not like you have this great reputation as a songwriter to uphold, but what you could do…,” because again, I was really starting to lean into acting in the theater and playing different roles. I played a lot of very, very different, often dark roles on the stage. He said “You should create characters for these songs. Let’s see what you can do. We’ll basically create like a potpourri of different singing styles, different songs.”
And half the songs on that record he introduced me to, I’d never heard, like “So Sad About Us” by The Who, but I was a big Who fan. “Rebel Rebel” was kind of life I was living: Bowie, even though a lot of people think it’s a very strange interpretation of those songs. I’m singing like a chipmunk for the first dose but that was like, let’s like take the gloves off and just try shit and see what happens. I think 75% of that record is really good and I think 25% is not so good. But hey, you know, “A” for effort, “T” for trying, that was kind of like my attitude and like, again, the trajectory of my records. The first three albums sold very well. But AM radio, literally, as my third album was coming out, said, “We’re not playing pop music anymore.” AM said we’re news, weather and sports now.” And you know, you better be on FM radio, or you’re not getting any airplay.
Well, I was not a Steely Dan person. I was a Steely Dan fan, but I was not making Steely Dan records. So they weren’t gonna be playing me on FM radio in 1979. So I had no airplay and basically the records dried up. The last album I made before Todd was my least favorite because I feel like the pressure from all corners to like lean into disco, because disco had just swallowed everything in ‘78/’79. And I like disco, but I didn’t wanna make a disco record. It felt completely foreign to me, but I did make kind of a quasi-disco record. It, again, it’s not really a disco record, but it has a lot of that backbeat in it. And I think that record sold 12 copies. So I said I don’t need to do anything that doesn’t feel authentic to me right now.
And, what was authentic to me was creating roles in songs, interpreting songs as a character in the songs. And Todd wrote some really good songs. We wrote a song together, which is one of my favorites on the record, “Cool Fire” and with Utopia were the backing band, and they were great. I lived at Todd’s house in Woodstock, New York for two months while we made that record and we record and write all day then we’d sit and watch TV and eat vegetarian sandwiches at night (laughs). It was a fun adventure. And when Wasp came out, it got some very good reviews and some terrible reviews and eight people bought it. And I was like, ok, that’s fine. I’m proud of what I did, and again, I was off and running in a whole other area.
So I just let it go. And I remember talking to Russ Thyret who was the head of promotion at Warner Brothers at the time. I said, “What should I do?” He said “You should disappear.” And he said, “When you wanna come back, there’ll be an audience for you, but you take some time away. Now, let them forget about you for a while” and he was absolutely right. The only thing I didn’t take of the advice is that I didn’t come back. I just stayed away because, again, I found something else I loved and I saw no reason to come back. I talk about this in my show. It’s like I never wanted to come back in anything. I always wanted to go forward because coming back, the best thing I could do was have another number one record which, to me, was like I did that already; try do something different. Wasp is a different thing. I’m proud of it.
And yes, thank you for saying it. In the last five or 10 years, a lot of people have discovered it and asked me about it and enjoyed it and think a lot of it’s really cool and, you know, it’s nice to have that in that early body of work because it basically announces that this young man is not going to stay on a conventional path. He’s not gonna be playing the lounge at Caesars Palace for the next 30 years.
I think you’ve proven that in many, many ways over the years. I commend you for kind of sticking to your guns and doing what felt right and felt natural. And I’m one of those eight people that bought that record. I’ve played that record for so many people because I love it so much.
Thank you so much. I appreciate it!
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This article appears in Nov 9-15, 2023.