C’mon Everybody, Get Down, Get With It: My Possibly Freudian Preschool Obsession Shaun Cassidy

by Rachel McPadden

From 1976-1978, I was 3, 4, and 5 years old and in pre-sexuality love with Shaun Cassidy. The first non-Sesame Street records I ever owned were Shaun Cassidy and I played them all by myself on a frighteningly psychedelic portable Raggedy Ann & Andy record player.

1970’s Raggedy Ann & Andy as a whole were a horrific acid trip. The 1977 cartoon musical depicted untrustworthy hippie ragdolls who the second you leave, come to life, gobble benzos and drink mushroom tea until everything’s a melted 30s cartoon and they meet a fucking camel. Don’t ever show it to any kids. Raggedy Andy’s like, “I’m freaking out because I’m a BOY doll, but I’m a GIRL’s toy…” Drink some milk, take a bath, and SHUT UP. No one has fun doing drugs around you.

So, anyway: Shaun Cassidy. He would be my first in a long line of obsessions with celebrity offspring. My ultimate at one point being Campbell Scott, a gene combo of Canadian-American off-Broadway queen Colleen Dewhurst and grandpa-sexual extraordinaire George C. Scott. But Campbell’s really a dud, right? Dying Young, Julia Roberts. Be a man. 

Which again brings me back to Shaun Cassidy. Mother, Shirley Jones, a Partridge, brother, David Cassidy, a Partridge, father Jack Cassidy, a bipolar alcoholic proto-Ted Baxter who passed out with a lit cigarette and died in the resulting apartment fire at the exact moment Shaun was becoming the Justin Bieber of 1976.

Of course, none of the father stuff I knew as a preschooler, but I do find it VERY attractive as an adult.

To look at old pictures of Shaun Cassidy now: he’s asymmetrical, has too gummy of a smile, has zero of the sexuality of David Cassidy (not that he was my taste, but I can see how got laid en masse and that near-nude 1972 Rolling Stone cover if you’ve ever seen it, it’s a little outrageous. You can see what the fuss was about). Shaun Cassidy best resembled a hypothetical childhood sketch combining my own young golden hippie dad and a droopy-eyed basset hound puppy. And most likely a plush version of that puppy and not even an actual dog.

That’s some Freud shit right there. Was my first romantic ideal a hybrid of my own hot dad and a vaguely dimwitted appearing stuffed dog? My imaginary friend around the time himself was a shape-shifting teenage boy/convertible sports car/homeless dog that seems now to have so transparently come from my pre-K merging of Shaun Cassidy/my father, Herbie the Love Bug and Benji. Though Herbie could only DREAM of being a convertible.

Christmas Eve, right before I turned 5, I unwrapped a Shaun Cassidy nightgown under my grandparents silver tinsel tree that became my first favorite piece of clothing. I wore to bed, in public, with overalls, tap shoes, cowboy and sailor hats, I slept with it ON TOP of my pillow, I slept with it UNDER my pillow, I snuggled it like Linus’ blanky. I’ve had a lifetime of favorite t-shirts, dresses, shoes, sweaters and jeans since, but none affected me like that little girls short-sleeve ruffle-hem nightgown with that poor half-orphan asymmetrical fuck’s face on it.

I should talk about the music.

‘Born Late’ is the only good record, and it’s mind-numbingly horrible and only slightly less un-revisit-able than the other two (I don’t count anything after ‘Under Wraps’, the album that had Shaun trying to push his way out from behind plastic wrap and legitimately terrified me as a kid because I had somewhat recently made the mistake of putting a dry cleaning bag over my head as a joke and the hippies freaked out on me so thoroughly I believed Shaun Cassidy was sure to suffocate under the packaging of his own record. Not that I was dumb, just acutely anxiety-ridden, the same tendency that would start my road to vegetarianism at age 8, not because I gave a shit about animals, but because a raw chicken had the same translucent skin and blue veins as me).

And You KNOW the only tolerable Shaun Cassidy songs because they were written by Bubblegum Pop supergenius Eric Carmen of The Raspberries. ‘That’s Rock & Roll’ and ‘Hey Deanie.’ A case could be made for ‘Do You Believe in Magic?’ originally by the Lovin’ Spoonful, but it’s had a never-ending career in commercials so I feel it’s always selling me something and not anything I actually want, like ice cream.  ‘That’s Rock & Roll’ with the chorus ‘c’mon everybody, get down, get with it’ I really associate with my grandma at that time. ‘Get down’ because she was a wacky, cut loose kind of lady and ‘get with it’ makes me think of her collection of go-go boots, like ‘heeeyy, I’m with it, look at my go-go boots!’ which I guess was what was going on while we listened to those Shaun Cassidy records on my creepy Raggedy Ann & Andy record player, just rolling around on the floor in go-go boots. THAT IS rock and roll.

In 1978, People Magazine had Shaun Cassidy on the cover and a multi-page feature inside with tons of concert photos. One image moved me then and has stayed with me all my life: he’s mid-song, kind of jump-squatting with his back mainly to the camera with his head turned over his shoulder making a fffffffffftttttt face. I mean, cutting a fart was my personal favorite go-to modeling pose, too, and I knew then we had a real soul-deep kinship.

The Hardy Boys TV show should be mentioned. Naturally I loved it and it kind of explains my attraction to prep school gay-for-pay porn. Of course, the big small screen moment for me was when Shaun Cassidy starred as Roger in Like Normal People, a TV movie about two differently-abled young adults determined to get married against everyone’s objections.

His whole characterization is based around the ‘I’m bringing home a baby bumblebee’ voice and it’s sound bite after sound bite of utter unbelievability.

Fall 1978 I started kindergarten and those kids were stupid babies that didn’t even seem to LIKE music. That was a let down. But then my dad went to see the Ramones and the Runaways at Ricco’s, a tiny dive bar that would soon become my town’s first cable TV office and within 6 months, my next pop crush was Blondie.

My records got better (and at times infinitely worse), but I’ll always be grateful for my first dum-dum farty face asymmetrical moderate-charisma mentally defective Hardy Boy.