Could It Be Forever? My Story (11 page)

I saw the first teen magazines bearing pictures of me, playing guitar in the Keith Partridge clothes Screen Gems had had custom made. The studio was beginning to craft an image of me as this innocent young singer/guitarist/songwriter. I lost it. That just wasn’t me.

I called Ruth and said I wanted out. I was only 20 and highly concerned with what other people thought about me. You know, you’re just becoming a man, you’re feeling like,
I want to be cool, I want to be accepted, I don’t want to do cute records for young kids, because that’s not cool.
I didn’t want my friends to think less of me. I got into a lengthy argument with Ruth.

I tried to tell her, ‘This isn’t me. I’m into Hendrix and B.B. King. And I want to be thought of as a credible artist, perceived, like my father, as a respected, working actor.’

And she said, ‘You’ll be perceived as a respected, working superstar.’

I had moved out on my own, done what I wanted to do rather than going to college like everyone else. I’d forged my own way as a struggling actor. And suddenly there’s my dad, stepmother and manager standing before me saying, ‘You’ve got to do it. If you don’t, you’ll be sued. You won’t have an agent. You won’t get jobs. You can forget about keeping that house on Laurel Canyon. Bye-bye, baby!’

It was at that point that I gave up and said, ‘OK, I’ll do what I’ve got to do.’

I certainly wasn’t given much, if any, chance to express myself artistically, either on The Partridge Family records or on the solo albums (yes, albums!) I began making under my own name the following year. They were produced by the same producer, also for Bell Records. Contractually, I had to do as I was told. I felt they were using me, and I resented that. As I became more popular, I certainly would have liked
to have had some say over what and how I recorded, and what image I projected to the public.

That said, I’ve also got to acknowledge – as an adult looking back over three decades later – that I have great respect for Farrell and the others who created that music. Farrell didn’t get a lot of recognition for his accomplishments because bubble gum music was not taken seriously. But, I have to say, it was quality bubble gum music. It was innocent but well-crafted. In retrospect, I realise Farrell had a great understanding of the genre. He understood commercial viability and how to translate that into a pop song.

And Wes had a real instinct for spotting talent. The songwriters he brought to The Partridge Family were gifted pros. As Keith, I was supposed to write all of the Partridge Family songs and I’m sure there were some young fans who believed that. In fact, we used the best songwriters in the field.

By the time the air date for the first episode of
The Partridge Family
approached – 25 September 1970 – we all felt confident the show would catch on. I was a little skeptical of how my friends would react to it. I’d been so busy working of late I hadn’t had a chance to hang out much with Kevin Hunter or any of my other pals. I looked forward to us all getting together some time. Maybe we could celebrate what I hoped would be the show’s success. I hoped they wouldn’t think what I was doing was too lame.

At the ‘suggestion’ of the studio, I watched the first episode at my Laurel Canyon house with the editor of
Tiger Beat
,
Sharon Lee. I even cooked (if you want to call it that) macaroni and cheese.

Even though the music (and the show, I have to admit) was a little lightweight for my taste, I thought the basic fantasy we were offering on the show was one any teen would want to buy into. Here we were, a family who all got along well enough to form a band. And this band, organised in our garage, was soon turning out hit records and playing on the road. What kid wouldn’t want to believe in that fantasy? In fact, as soon as the show went on the air, we began getting letters from kids saying they’d been inspired to take up an instrument or form a band. Many of them went out and bought Partridge Family sheet music so that they could play our songs, which I’m sure pleased the Columbia corporate bigwigs, since Screen Gems also owned the publishing rights to all the songs The Partridge Family performed.

Our confidence was shaken somewhat by the first reviews the show received. Upon viewing the initial episode of
The Partridge Family
, in which the family formed the band and achieved its first hit record,
The Christian Science Monitor
’s
Diana Loercher sniped (28 September 1970): ‘The show stacks implausibility upon implausibility from the hit record to the psychedelic bus they tool around in . . . It’s all so predictable that the viewer is left with a sense of wasted time and effort . . .’

And two days later,
Variety
, the showbiz bible, itemised a slew of shortcomings. Their critic complained that Dave Madden ‘overplays unmercifully, only Miss Jones and David
Cassidy look like they’re singing their own roles, the songs (by Shorty Rogers and Kelly Gordon) were nondescript bubble gum tunes with no believable hit potential, and there are just too many loopholes. Even the teenage girls who now buy records will see through the flimsy premise that the “Partridge” kids could make it in today’s record market. Show’s chances look slim.’

We wondered if The Partridge Family records were going to be accepted. After all, the first release,
I Think I Love You
, didn’t seem to be moving the first few days it was out. I’m sure a lot of people believe that if a record company spends enough money on publicity and promotion and payola, it can make any record a hit. But that’s not quite true. The public has to want the record. And some disc jockeys were reluctant to play
I
Think I Love You
because they knew The Partridge Family was a manufactured-for-television group. I actually saw one programme director turn down a hundred dollars that was offered to him by a record promoter to play
I Think I Love You
. Not for any amount of money was he willing to give it air play.

I saw Elvis for the first time at The Forum in Los Angeles. That night he wasn’t electric. I wanted to see him and the boys playing like they did on the 1968 TV special, but the show was very slick and kind of Vegas-y. They made the announcement, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, Elvis has left the building,’ and I remember Wes Farrell turned to me and said, ‘Who cares?’

The record broke first in the smallest markets, not the sophisticated big cities. But before long, public demand ensured that every rock station was playing it. It made its first appearance on the
Cash Box
pop chart on 26 September 1970 and on the
Billboard
chart 14 days later. It enjoyed a 19-week run (with several weeks in the number one position) on both publications’ charts. It turned out to be the biggest-selling record of 1970, with total sales of over three million units in the U.S. and close to five million worldwide.

I Think I Love You
is one of the greatest pop songs ever. It was Tony Romeo’s third gold record in two years and ensured his staying power. I’ll never forget how good I felt when Tony acknowledged that I wasn’t just a teen idol and that my talent was much bigger than my fame. And that was the thing that I always believed would carry me through. I had the goods, and I just needed the opportunity to show it.

Lyrically,
I Think I Love You
deals with that moment in our lives when we’re faced with the fear of commitment, the obsession with love, the obsession with not being alone, not being lonely, not being abandoned, having a partner, having a romantic endeavour. It’s saying,
I’m so afraid of the commitment. I’m afraid to say I don’t know what it’s all about. I don’t know what I’m up against, I have so much to think about, but hey, I think I love you.

It makes me love it all the more knowing that, generations
later, people still carry it with them. As Tony puts it,
I Think I Love You
has been loved, loathed, covered by artists, clobbered by the press, satirised, camped, tramped, muzaked, be-bopped and hip-hopped. To this day, everywhere I go in the world, people come up to me and sing it. A three-year-old kid once left a message on my phone, singing, ‘I’m sleeping, and right in the middle of a sweet dream . . . I think I love you.’ It was so beautiful. You know, great songs stand the test of time.

I occasionally play it in concert as a ballad on guitar. The song has twelve chords and I don’t play all of them correctly because I’m not a sophisticated enough guitarist. My dream would be to play like Eric Clapton, but I don’t have the commitment or talent. I could be better than I am, but I’m good enough to satisfy myself and competent enough to do what I want to do. Sometimes, though, I sure wish I could make the instrument sing and speak like very few people can. Jeff Beck makes it speak. Hendrix made it speak. And every time Clapton plays, you just know it’s Eric. Even on George Harrison’s
While My Guitar Gently Weeps,
you know which guitar licks are Eric’s.

The Partridge Family
TV show was a hit with the public soon enough, too. It became the most popular show Screen Gems had on the air. And I became the focus of a lot of attention. I began getting constant requests for press interviews, which meant my already meagre amount of free time was being further reduced. When was I supposed to be able to see my friends?

Just one week after
I Think I Love You
hit number one, an old friend I hadn’t spoken with in quite a while calls. He starts telling me something about Kevin Hunter having gone down to Westwood Village that day. And I’m remembering how, back when I was younger and had an unlimited supply of free time, Kevin and I used to hang out there almost every day. And this friend is telling me something about Kevin buying some Tuinal from a guy he met down there. Tuinal is a barbiturate. A sleeping pill. And this friend is saying how you never know when you buy drugs on the street what they’ve been cut with, that maybe this Tuinal had been cut with strychnine or something. But whatever it was, Kevin had overdosed. And he was dead.

I heard those words and I went numb. Echoing through my thoughts was all of the anti-drug rhetoric I’d been told for years. All those things people had said about drugs killing you were true. I should have known something like this was going to happen.

All of our old friends gathered at his funeral. Some made small talk with me before it started, trying to say something nice about me having a hit record. They said it didn’t sound like me. It didn’t sound like my voice or my style. One said it didn’t do me justice.
Who gave a damn?
At the time the only thing that was important was the body lying in front of us.

Kevin’s father was looking at us, and maybe at me in particular, sort of glowering. He didn’t say anything to me about it, but my friends and I knew he was thinking that we were to blame for Kevin’s death. I may have been some
guy with a TV show and a hit record now, some guy who was being written up here and there as a new star, but Kevin’s father knew the real me. He knew that it could just as easily have been – and maybe
should
have been – me rather than his son in that coffin.

With Kevin’s death, a chapter of my life closed. Drugs had already begun losing their fascination for me, and now I just felt like avoiding them altogether. I was so shaken by Kevin’s passing. He was such a talent and a true friend. I still think of him a lot.

After Kevin’s funeral, I focused on my work. I was determined not to put anything into my body I shouldn’t. No cigarettes, no pot, no drugs at all if I could help it. The work was the main thing. I was just going to work very hard. Just keep running, boy. Keep running.

I
had never read the fan magazines, the teen magazines. I knew some, like
Tiger Beat
, had been around for ages. Others seemed to come and go. But I let them take all the pictures they wanted. At first it was kind of a kick to see myself on a magazine cover. And, of course, I answered all their questions. Where did I live? Where did I shop? And so on.

That seemed fine, until I walked into the Canyon Country Store after work one night and they told me they had been inundated with nearly a thousand fan letters addressed to me care of the store, simply because one magazine had just printed that I shopped there. And some of the letters the fans wrote were alarming: ‘I’m your
long-lost brother . . .’ ‘You were adopted, I’m your real mother . . .’ Twisted!