TEEN YOUR ENTHUSIASM (4)

By: Joshua Glenn
April 11, 2023

One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of heartthrobs from our adolescences). Series edited by Heather Quinlan.

SHAUN CASSIDY

In June and then October 1977, Shaun Cassidy released his first two records; both went platinum. His cover of “Da Doo Ron Ron,” from the first record, went to #1 on the pop charts; and “That’s Rock ‘n’ Roll,” a new song by Eric Carmen (“All By Myself”), went to #3. Carmen’s “Hey Deanie,” from Cassidy’s second record, would go to #7. At the time Shaun was co-star of The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries; he performed his hits on the show. (Frank Hardy never stuck around for Joe’s performances… one wonders, now, if this was a David Cassidy-referencing inside joke.) Although I did enjoy the show, I don’t recall ever asking for the records. But somehow I came into possession of them anyway. How? Were they issued to us?

The first record included a fold-out poster… which I obediently folded out and taped to my bedroom wall. It was one of only two music posters I’d ever own. I don’t believe that I had a crush on Shaun… yet there I was, at age 11, contemplating his face as I sang along to the songs. What was happening?

Shaun, whose “liquid-sweet vibrato” (as Robert Christgau put it in 1978, after attending a Cassidy concert with his under-10 daughters) never strains or cracks, always sounds as though he’s doing karaoke versions of someone else’s music. So singing along with Shaun, it occurs to me, is karaoke-squared — which may cause a kind of hypnotic drone effect to occur. Christgau calls Shaun’s voice “gooey”; which brings to mind Mucho Maas — in The Crying of Lot 49 — freaking out at the thought of infinite radio pitchmen intoning the phrase “rich, chocolaty goodness.” Was I literally stuck on Shaun Cassidy, then, like Bre’er Rabbit was stuck on the Tar Baby? Hard to tell: Who can say what goes on inside the head of an 11-year-old?

The CIA, perhaps — their “cultural Cold War” agents in particular. I like to imagine the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the anti-communist advocacy group covertly established by the CIA and funded, c. 1977–1979, by the Ford Foundation, overseeing Carmen’s songwriting in an anonymous Bethesda office. “It’s when they’re smokin’ / And the heat / How ’bout your heart / Pounding right with the beat”: Such anodyne pseudo-enthusiasm can only have been designed for a sinister purpose. Perhaps this and other instances of the era’s Fifties nostalgia (Cassidy’s second album was titled Born Late) was intended to cause disaffected youth to appreciate American-style liberties without rebelling against capitalism? Were we pre-teen Shaun Cassidy fans accidentally caught up in a glasnost-era psyop campaign aimed at our immediate elders in foreign lands?

But I come to praise the Manchurian heartthrob, not to bury him. At age 15, one hears, he was in a punk band — hanging out with Iggy Pop and the New York Dolls on Sunset. In 1980, he released Wasp, a Todd Rundgren-produced album on which he gamely if ill-advisedly covered Bowie and Talking Heads. Before and after the CIA intervened in his career, it seems like Shaun was a legitimately cool guy. Weird.

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TEEN YOUR ENTHUSIASM (4)

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