Could It Be Forever? My Story (30 page)

I took maybe 25 of my own people with me as we toured, plus around 25 members of the press. I played for audiences of 20,000, 40,000, 60,000 people. Although by the last
concerts of the tour I felt totally burned out, totally exhausted, when I’d hit the stage, the crowd would give me instant energy. There’s a certain sense of power, too, communicating with tens of thousands of people. If you shout out, ‘I think I love you,’ you’ll get countless shouts of ‘I love you’ back. If you reach out, as if trying to make contact, tens of thousands of fans will move, as if drawn toward you.

After a few hundred fans were hurt at one of my Australian shows, a government official declared me a hazard to public health. I was thinking,
Hey, listen up. We’re just trying to give everybody a little entertainment.
It wasn’t as if mine were the first rock concerts at which anyone had ever been injured. But to a significant portion of the press, I became this villain who brought mayhem to tranquil Australia. The press called it pandemonium. And that started to get to me, seeing the way the press could manipulate public sentiment to make me look bad. The way the press could turn on you, that was another reason I was glad I’d be getting out of the game soon.

The final stops on my tour were in the U.K. I played three huge stadiums in Scotland and England, the type of places the Beatles had played, but that no one else was playing. So that in itself guaranteed massive press attention. I arrived like a conquering hero. Approaching Glasgow, my first stop, the fans lined the road from the airport for miles, giving me the kind of reception they’d give to royalty.

Then I played White City Stadium in London. There were 40,000 fans inside in the bleachers and packed standing in the field, and perhaps as many outside. They went wild when I came on stage and every time I opened my mouth to sing or speak to them. I kept saying, ‘Get back, get back, you’ve got to stop pushing! They’re going to stop the show. You’ve got to cool it!’ But when you tell people who are that worked up, ‘Stop going berserk!’ they only go further overboard. They were so loud, I didn’t even know if they could hear me. The promoter and the managers even came out in the middle of songs shouting for the crowds to back up.

There was gridlock outside the stadium. Cars were parked six deep. I never had a harder time making a getaway. My security guys told me a lot of girls had fainted and some had been taken to the hospital, but I had no idea how severe the situation was. We always anticipated some fans would faint, due to all the excitement. We had first-aid people standing by. But I could already anticipate the press making me out to be the heavy, as they had in Australia, because the crowd at my White City Stadium concert had gotten so out of control.

One of my fans, unfortunately, did not come through alive. Bernadette Whelan, a 14-year-old British schoolgirl, was fatally injured at that concert. She was among those taken from the stadium by ambulance to a nearby hospital, where she managed to hold on for four days before dying. I had no idea the night I gave my concert that one of my fans had been carried out in a coma.

Her death received extensive coverage. The press, which would otherwise have focused attention on my retirement, understandably focused instead on her, casting a pall over my whole concert career. At the time, I was very unhappy and upset over the coverage, feeling I was being unfairly blamed for a young girl’s death. I couldn’t even bring myself to read all the things that were written, they were so painful. My people assured me repeatedly that we had in no way
been responsible for Bernadette’s death. They told me that she had known heart problems and that she suffered a heart attack during the chaos of the concert. But when I was reviewing newspaper coverage of the event in preparation for writing this book, I realised that what I was told about her death – what I’ve always found comforting to believe – was simply not true.

For one thing, the government held a formal inquest into her death, which would not have happened had her doctor reported that she had died from a routine heart attack.
The
Times
reported on 18 June 1979 that, at the inquest into Bernadette Whelan’s death, ‘Dr Rufus Compton, a pathologist, said the girl died of traumatic asphyxia. Obstruction of respiration was mainly a result of compression of the body. Her brain had been damaged by cardiac arrest.’ In layman’s terms, she had been crushed to death by the crowd. Her father,
The
Times
reported, testified that the girl had gone to the concert ‘in perfectly good health’. He received word some time later that she’d been taken by ambulance to Hammersmith Hospital. According to
The Times
, ‘St John Ambulance workers dealt with 500 casualties, and 30 people were taken to the hospital.’

Hammersmith coroner Dr John Burton testified that 10,000 young fans had been ‘crowded up against a barrier in the centre of the arena, with no means of getting out’, in a highly charged situation, with hysteria spreading through the crowd. Burton cautioned those attending the inquest that he was going to play a tape-recording of a 20-minute portion of the concert which was so disturbing that some
people might want to leave. On the tape, girls could be heard shouting, ‘Please get me out,’ while loudspeaker appeals were made in vain for the crowd to stop pressing forwards.

Disc jockey Tony Blackburn, who had served as an emcee at the concert, testified that he had never before seen so many people removed from a concert on stretchers, nor had he ever been at a concert at which seating had not been provided for everybody.

I certainly did not want to believe that I could in any way have been responsible for the death of one of my fans. Although I was devastated, I still to this day believe that my security and I did everything we could to keep my fans safe. However, had you seen the thousands of fans pushing
hysterically toward the stage that night, you would have concluded, as I did, that you simply can’t contain teenage girls who are out of control. We did everything we could, but failed.

A few nights later, I gave my very last concert, in Manchester. The crowd, knowing it was my absolute farewell show, made more noise than any I’d ever heard. I had to stuff cotton in my ears. I had a Marshall amp turned all the way up to ten to try to project over all the screaming. I could barely hear anything I was doing. That was an amazing night. The crowd gave me so much energy. I remember running off the stage. Then I came back and said, ‘I love you, it’s been incredible. You’re not going to see me for a while, but someday I’ll be back. I just want you to know how much it’s meant to me.’ Then I sang
It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue
for the final encore.

I ran the whole length of the field into a waiting car, while 40,000 people were screaming and crying. I left happy, but with a sense of disbelief that, after four years, I was leaving a stadium with fans still screaming for me, knowing I was never going to do this again.

The
Cassidy Live!
album was recorded at the White City Stadium show, and it was done on the fly. The most difficult part was keeping the screaming and shouting from the audience out of the recordings. We had to edit out all the times that I was saying, ‘Push back! Push back! People are getting crushed.’ That album depicts the madness of touring.

The world tour lasted nine months. It became nothing more than a love letter to everyone and everything I had
experienced: the fans, the people who had supported me and the music. I could walk away from it at that point. And I’m glad that recording exists so that if I ever forget, I can go back and listen to it.

It was time, I felt, definitely time. I breathed a giant sigh of relief,
Thank God I made it.

The years from my retirement in May 1974, at the age of 24, up to about 1980 were the darkest I’ve ever known.

I walked away from the unnatural success I’d had. I don’t think I could have stood it if it had walked away from me. That would have felt, again, like abandonment, and that
is why I chose to leave while I was still at the top. I needed to find a way to be happy that had nothing to do with gold records and breaking attendance records. I was emotionally stunted.

When I retired, I suffered a breakdown. Or several successive breakdowns, it felt like, because each time I thought I’d fallen as low as I could go, the bottom would drop out from under me again.

For the first six months I locked myself in my room. I sat alone, talking to myself, trying to figure out what had happened. I can’t remember a whole lot about that period. I just remember feeling bleak. Empty. I increasingly found solace in drinking. I wanted to anaesthetise myself. I was so lost.

The pain I was trying to numb was rooted in the reality that I didn’t have the kind of career I’d wanted. And the career I’d had, I never wanted. Sure, I still had plenty of fans. But did they love
me
or just the image of me, which had been totally manufactured and marketed? I thought I’d like to sing songs that truly expressed who I was. But who was I? I hadn’t a clue. And would the fans have any interest in the real me, anyway?

I regretted having ever climbed aboard
The Partridge Family
bus. Sure, I’d become a star. But I was also trapped, cut off from everyone else, unable to go anywhere, unable to interact with others in a normal way. I’d lost the ability to really relate to people.

I had no idea how to start rebuilding the real me, not the pop star. The easiest course to take was to just shut
down. To withdraw into my cocoon and hope that time would help me heal.

I was an insomniac to begin with and I now found the problem was getting worse. I was staying up later and later. I couldn’t sleep and there was no joy in being awake, so I tried to dull my existence one way or another. The clean-living, hard-working vegetarian turned into this guy who was willing to try anything to take him outside of himself. I didn’t care.

My mother saw me spinning out, drowning in my sorrows, and made a couple of attempts to intervene. I didn’t want to hear it. Like a teenage brat, I’d tell her, ‘Leave me alone, Ma.’ My mother actually moved in with me for a couple of months, but that was a mistake. When you’re an adult, you can’t live with your mother. If I wanted to play drums at five in the morning, I wanted to be able to do that without my mother saying, ‘Go to sleep.’ And I often liked to play music all through the night. I had a few musician friends I felt comfortable with who would stay up all night with me, partying and playing. I told my mom, ‘This is my house. You can’t tell me what to do.’

I’d replay in my mind the events leading up to me quitting the business, trying to analyse what I’d done. I thought
, I don’t know what I want to do, or if I want to do anything at all.
I became very undisciplined.

After I retired, my father was in the spotlight a bit more, which I hope brought him some happiness. He got some of the best roles of his career, including recurring guest-starring
appearances on
Columbo
and he particularly delighted in portraying his idol, John Barrymore, in the film
W.C. Fields and Me
(1976).

He said he wanted to become closer to me. Maybe he was worried about what was happening to me; I don’t know. Instead of starting slow, maybe suggesting we have dinner together, he brought my brother Ryan out to my house in Encino and spent the weekend with me. As we talked, I realised that I had nothing in common with him, except for the fact that we’d both become pretty heavy drinkers. But I didn’t want to drink with my father. Or do much of anything else with him. I couldn’t wait for our weekend together to be over.

And yet, I found myself unexpectedly feeling sorry for him. There was something frighteningly desperate in the way he was trying to hang on to a relationship with me that really wasn’t there. You could never talk about what he did wrong. He could never admit his mistakes. If you disagreed with my father, he basically cut you out of his life. If you didn’t see the world the way he saw it, he couldn’t have a relationship with you. He did that to one of his brothers in the end, to his sister, to my mother and eventually to Shirley. And to me.