Reading the latest books on Prince and Lenny Kravitz for this Rock Reads segment brought me back to one I’d read when it came out twenty-six years ago, David Cassidy’s C’mon, Get Happy: Fear and Loathing on the Partridge Family Bus. Of course, I would. Cassidy’s iconic Keith Partridge, the feather-haired, guitar-slinging, pukka-shell sporting lead singer-songwriter of the fictional Partridge Family was as important a figure in the third wave of rock history than almost anyone. The Partridge Family television show about a family that rides around in a multi-colored Ken Kesey-style bus playing music and getting into adventures reached millions of kids – the aforementioned Prince and Kravitz, as well as Green Day’s Billie Joe, who continues to cite it as an influence – and your humble reviewer, sitting in his Bronx apartment gawking at how damn cool long hair, playing guitar and attracting screaming girls could be. Keith Partridge was our Elvis, our Beatles. We had little Michael Jackson and his cartoon Jackson 5 and Keith.
Before his untimely death in 2017, Cassidy aged well, still acting, performing in Vegas, making the talk-show circuit and explaining what the hell it was like to live in a kiddy pool while experimenting with drugs, dreaming of being Jimi Hendrix, and posing nude for a cover of Rolling Stone. The Partridge Family released many albums throughout the early Seventies, as did Cassidy, and he went on tour, and those tours were a mixture of Beatlemania and Satyricon, and then it was back on set Monday morning at 5:00a.m. to play a teenager.
Cassidy, son of the famous (actors Jack Cassidy and Evelyn Ward) and careening through his youth with reckless abandon is a fine storyteller; self-depreciating and exacting. He tells it like it is, copping Gonzo journalist Hunter Thompson’s infamous phrase for the subtitle of his book, and writes with a helping measure of empathy for his demented father and his Partridge Family co-star, the inimitable dumpster fire that is Danny Bonaduce.
C’mon, Get Happy is a fun and eye-opening read. It takes you to a time when pop culture and the underground would meet oddly to form the 1970s and beyond.