- Tom Kipp – “Understanding David Cassidy: Appreciating the Artistry and Tragedy in a Fifty-Year Career in Music and Show Business!”
For David Cassidy, rocketed to unfathomable worldwide stardom during Fall 1970, there was nevertheless always a haunted sense of failure and frustration. As a successful 20-year-old actor/musician much more avid about B.B. King and
Electric Ladyland than the mainstream Pop he cut in his role as breakout star of TV’s
The Partridge Family, he came to loathe the oft-hideous contractual demands made of him.
Later, at just the moment he’d freed himself from both the show and the strict, formulaic recording methods it enforced, he was driven into immediate retirement from live performance by the death of a young female fan (along with the injuries suffered by hundreds of other attendees) at a May 26th, 1974 London solo concert.
Just 24, Cassidy now faced the prospect of never escaping his legacy as “Teen Idol of the ‘70s”, and soon afterwards the impossibility of reconciliation with his supremely talented, infamously combative, alcoholic father (singer/actor Jack Cassidy), who was burned to death in a horrifying accident two years later at 49.
The performative inheritance from his father, mother (actress Evelyn Ward), and actual stepmother/TV mom (Shirley Jones) weighed heavily, but when David died in late-2017, he left behind decades of memorable portrayals on television and the Broadway stage, fine solo music, and nine vastly-underappreciated 1970-73 Partridge Family albums, on which his vocals themselves serve as the
auteurist “glue”, in perfect collaboration with the finest songwriters of The Brill Building and the cream of The Wrecking Crew.
David Cassidy’s is a voice whose soulful, vulnerable melancholy could shift effortlessly into husky celebration, with an easy sensuality entirely befitting the sexiest teen icon since Elvis! His virtually-accidental rise to Pop Star #1 marks him as The Ultimate American Idol, but the price he paid for this unsought fame bears witnessing and careful analysis, casting aside several decades of misguided critical opprobrium.
My presentation will explore the multiple rebirths that characterize Cassidy’s
sui generis life and career, and will attempt to properly memorialize his wildly-varied accomplishments, at long last!
- Tim Quirk – “The Hidden Depths (And Odd Backstory) of the Literally Mortifying ‘Seasons in the Sun’”
Terry Jacks' recording of "Seasons in the Sun" is one of those songs whose massive success in the moment makes later generations wonder what the hell was wrong with everybody in olden times. His tale of a dying man saying goodbye to his friend, his father, and his wife sold over five million copies in the 1970s, but has appeared near the top of "Worst Songs of All Time Lists" ever since, due to its demonic combination of an infectious melody, bathetic lyrics and a vocal performance sung entirely in the register of a pet owner asking if doggie wants a treat.
But "Seasons in the Sun" is deep, dammit. It began life as "Le Moribund," a very cynical, and very French, Jaques Brel song, before Rod McKuen cleaned it up a bit for American audiences and turned it into semi-tuneful Beat Poetry in 1963. A decade later, Terry Jacks did his best to excise every last bit of misanthropy from his AM-radio dominating version, but this presentation will argue that Jacks' recording was so massive not because he succeeded, but because no amount of studio sweetening and lyrical mainstreaming can disguise the t
