From the album
Title: “Rock Me Baby”
Artist: David Cassidy
Year: 1972
Writer(s): Johnny Cymbal/ Peggy Clinger
Genre: Pop
Highest chart position (if applicable) 11 (UK) 38 (US)
Album: Rock Me Baby
Did I own it? No way!
Album, single, both or neither? Neither, but I reckon my elder sister did: she was a huge David Cassidy fan
Opinion then: Don’t remember it
Opinion now: Positive
These days: Completely forgotten about, as is he
If you were to walk up to any teenage girl in the early 1970s and ask who their favourite singer/pop artist was, you would probably find yourself cooling your heels in the local nick. But after you explained it was all a terrible misunderstanding and they let you go with the tradition kick in the nuts you could expect from the constabulary in the seventies, the answer would have been likely to have been David Cassidy. Although he is hardly known today, back then you couldn’t move without his smiling face and good-looking, girlish curls adorning every girl’s bedroom (what you would be doing in any girl’s bedroom might be a question the police would be eager to have an answer for, of course, complete with another complimentary kicking) looking at you. Cassidy was the epitome of the “safe” pop star, the nice young boy who was the very antithesis of people like Hendrix, Bowie, Marc Bolan and other rock stars whom mothers frowned on their daughters following.
Cassidy’s fame began in the very popular TV series
The Partridge Family, which was a quasi-soap about a musical family, spawning albums as the eponymous family released their recordings to great acclaim, providing a springboard for David to launch his own solo music career and become not only a TV heart-throb but a pop one too. His first solo album gave him a number 2 single in the UK while his second, from which this single is taken, pushed him all the way to the top spot, though not with this song. Still making a respectable showing just outside the top ten, it was a mere blip on Cassidy’s chart career as he went on to have another number one hit and no less than six top twenty singles over the next five years.
Of course, to all things there is a season, as they say, and to all pop stars there is very much a lifespan, and Cassidy’s more or less ran out after 1975, when he had his last hit. He did engineer an unlikely comeback (somewhat like Donnie Osmond, who had also enjoyed enormous popularity throughout the early 1970s) in 1985, when his “The Last Kiss” reached number 6 in the UK, but that was a real blip, and since then, though he continued to release albums, the charts ignored them and nobody cared. The world had moved on, and there was no longer any room in it for David Cassidy.
I’m kind of gratified to see that, despite his clean-cut image, Cassidy was already rebelling in 1972, at the height of his fame, by posing naked on the cover of
Playb - uh
Rolling Stone (?) and taking drugs and drinking. In fact, it turned out he had a serious alcohol problem, which, combined with the onset of hereditary dementia, led to his retirement from music in 2017, hospitalisation and eventually his death. He passed away in 2017, at the age of only sixty-seven.
As for the song (yes, I’m not forgetting!) I was of course mixing it up with George MacRae’s “Rock
Your Baby”, a splendiferous song, but not his one. So what was his like? Well to be completely fair, it’s not what I had expected, a sort of bluesy rock tune with some sweet piano, and I think I remember it now. Definitely more in the rock than pop arena. Melody reminds me of something, can’t quite place it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wltbgc0G2Ec