DAVID CASSIDY – "Daydreamer"/"The Puppy Song"

Superior metaphysical wetness from Cassidy – on “Daydreamer” his thin voice sounds utterly wrung-out, a flopping ineffectual adenoidal rag of a thing. It would be intolerable except that it suits the song so well. Effective touches abound – the switch from “ecstasy” to “make-believe”; the lovely flute at the end, piping lotus-eater David further into dreamland. On the flip we have the grotesque bonus of “The Puppy Song”, a whimsical ditty which Cassidy attacks with sneers, whines, and gurgles. The combination borders on disturbing – hard to think of a teenpop single where the singer sounds so honestly unhappy with the whole process. If this had been the start of a trajectory into existential art-pop a la Scott Walker, I wouldn’t have been in the least surprised (though given the limitations of Cassidy’s voice, perhaps we’re lucky it wasn’t).

Score: 6

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THE SIMON PARK ORCHESTRA – "Eye Level"

GARY GLITTER – "I Love You Love Me Love"

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Tom

28 September 2007 10:03

This reads a lot more dismissive than I meant it to! Oh well, blame an early rise.

Marcello Carlin

28 September 2007 10:14

David Cassidy/early rise – are you sure that’s a wise juxtaposition, Tom?

I remember well the film made for this song which appeared on TOTP featuring a yellow-tinted Cassidy wandering moodily through Kew Gardens. On the Cassidy/Partridge compilation CD I have at home “The Puppy Song” is conspicuously absent (though I do have it on the CD issue of his Dreams Are Nothin’ More Than Wishes album) which may have indicated he had second thoughts about going in that direction (the only number one for Nilsson as composer?).

“Daydreamer,” though, is very pleasant indeed…and hello, George Michael…the only real minus point is that it was one of two number ones which kept the Osmonds’ nearly perfect “Let Me In” at number two.

intothefireuk

28 September 2007 11:12

Donny vs Dave ? There really was no competition was there ? Donny’s accomplished but souless 60s covers vs Dave’s anguished pondering over his own existence. Daydreamer also features a lovely arrangement which seems to owe a little to The Carpenters and leaves young David plenty of room to stretch out his husky vocals. My only complaint would be it sounds too short clocking in at only 2:46.

While Dave & Donny are knocking six bells out of each other at the top – one of the top selling artists of 1973 (without actually attaining a number 1), David Bowie is enjoying the luxury of two simultaneous top ten singles – the excellent Merseys cover, ‘Sorrow’ and of course the embarrassing ‘Laughing Gnome’.

intothefireuk

28 September 2007 11:17

For NME readers & Radio Luxembourg listeners ‘Let Me In’ did indeed reach the number one slot along with ‘Rock On’ and even ‘Ballroom Blitz’ – which all seems fairly believable and makes you wonder how representative of total sales the UK singles chart really was.

Marcello Carlin

28 September 2007 11:59

More representative than either the NME or Luxembourg charts; the BMRB lists collated data from 650 record shops, and after they won the franchise for the “official” chart many of the shops sending in their diaries to the NME changed over to the BMRB. By 1973 the NME sample of record shops was about 150. As the exclusion of “Eye Level” confirmed, the Fab 208 lists were more or less fiction concocted in an attempt to be “ahead” of the other charts; you could work out their chart fairly accurately with simple studying of the week’s BMRB list, with the exception of the occasional Powerplay which mysteriously never appeared on any other charts. They certainly shouldn’t be considered authoritative.

jeff w

28 September 2007 12:01

I finally got hold of Dreams Are Nothin’ More Than Wishes earlier this year. Had to order the CD from Japan in the end. Well worth it though! “Puppy Song” sounds nothing like I expected it to from the title.

jeff w

28 September 2007 12:04

And yes, “Let Me In” is Plan-tastic arf.

Tom

28 September 2007 12:10

Does anyone know when the charts franchise is next up for renewal? I always wonder about the Official Charts Company’s business model – can it really be the only thing they do??

Marcello Carlin

28 September 2007 12:19

The OCC is jointly set up by the BPI and the British Association of Record Dealers, rather than being an independent marketing research company like BMRB or Gallup, so theoretically they could run the charts in perpetuity since they’re not on a formal contract (at least I don’t think they are).

Tom

28 September 2007 12:30

Ah OK – that explains that!

Erithian

28 September 2007 13:02

Agree with the consensus that this is superior teen heart-throb material. TOTP was enjoying itself with their presentation of this sort of thing – IIRC “Daydreamer” was number one on the 500th edition of TOTP, and they marked the occasion by having David Cassidy fly over – complete with supposedly in-air pictures of his plane – then lip-synch the song on the runway the minute he landed. (I didn’t just imagine this, did I?) On another occasion, to save him having to battle through a horde of screaming teenies, they had him lying in a box at the front of the stage, emerging once his name was announced (you had to resist wishing a U2 “Lemon”-style malfunction on him.)

Marcello – didn’t realise that was Kew Gardens. That was one of the memorable film clips they used to slip into TOTP which gives the lie to the idea that They Didn’t Invent Videos Until 1975.

Strange to think that David’s next single “If I Didn’t Care” limped to No 9 and was his last top ten hit for over a decade, and a month after “Daydreamer”, yet another oldie cover, “When I Fall In Love” was Donny’s last solo top ten hit for 30 years. The next teen idols were at that very moment tuning their guitars somewhere near Edinburgh – or rather, getting the session musicians to do it for them…

Brian

28 September 2007 20:56

I find it incredible that the last two songs were # 1 in the UK.

Donny & The Osmonds were charting in Canada but the top spot for the same week was ” Angie ” by The Stones.

Erithain says “TOTP was enjoying itself with their presentation of this sort of thing “…….but the kind of pseudo-hysteria and the TOTP presentation of Cassidy leads me to think the the UK was suffering from a Beatle hangover. Or was it the only way to market to the ” boppers ” ?

Cathy

29 September 2007 11:34

David’s voice on both songs was fantastic. You must have been a Donny fan:(

Waldo

29 September 2007 12:36

These two songs collide rather amusingly. In “Daydreamer”, David is walking around in the rain wishing he had a girlfriend “to call (his) very own”. Well, okay, that’s standard teenaged angst and I too was to do several such damp strolls in the coming years. So fair play. On the flip of this Double-A, however, Cassidy suddenly veers off beam and starts pining for a little doggy (no doubt to call his very own). His second verse, substituting “dog” for “friend” is like bolting the stable door, I’m afraid, as the damage has already been done. It’s all there. Basically, girls are no good but dogs will stick with you through thick and thin. This inevitably puts one in mind of Brel’s superb “The Girls and The Dogs”, which I don’t think Germaine Greer cared for too much.

Nor did my sister-in-law Janet, come to think of it.

Waldo

30 September 2007 09:55

Another ballot cast for the wonderful “Let Me In”. Class performance from the brothers. I still had my voodoo pins into Donny at the time so I wouldn’t have admitted this back in the day. I was an idiot.

Bowie, of course, has long since disowned “The Laughing Gnome”, which is just plain bad and should have been given to dear old Bernard Cribbins. Instead we get a wretched giggling Bowie singing about putting a deranged dwarf on a train to the town which has been my home since 1989. Just wrong.

Marcello Carlin

1 October 2007 07:21

Another of the many memorable singles which owed their top ten success to Stewpot and Junior Choice.

mike

1 October 2007 10:00

Ah, Stewpot and Junior Choice – which was exhumed for an hour on Radio 2 yesterday morning (MOR-NINNG!) as part of the station’s 40th anniversary celebrations, and which I listened to with decidely mixed emotions (Stewpot himself failing to mask the essential bitter grumpiness of the Yesterday’s Man, which seems to be shared by so many former national radio DJs, but why did “Two Little Boys” reduce me to tears at the breakfast table?)

Looking back, they must have relied on a fairly tight central playlist, year in year out, as all of the songs I predicted got a least a partial airing: Sparky’s Magic Piano, Hello Muddah Hello Faddah, My Bruvver, Right Said Fred, The Ugly Bug Ball etc. And they must have hammered “The Puppy Song” at the time, hence allowing Dreamy David to hoover up the weeny-bopper market as well as the usual staring-vacantly-into-the-misty-middle-distance early-to-mid teens.

Dreamy David’s 2005 performance at the Nottingham Arena, where he headlined over David Essex, The Osmonds (sans Donny, avec Jimmy) and Les McKeown’s latest pick-up band, ranks as the most grotesquely creepy and disturbing performance I have ever witnessed. Literally hundreds of people walked out early, any lingering teenage dreams cruelly shattered (as an impromptu vox pop outside the venue confirmed).

Marcello Carlin

1 October 2007 10:22

I caught yesterday’s show as well. Astounding how “Ernie” became so popular on Junior Choice with its hot rolls, crumpet and past-your-eyes. “Sparky’s Magic Piano” always gets me though, and I note that about an hour later on the archive Kenny Everett show he played “O Superman” (as a new release!) as if to prove where that particular road ended up leading.

Of course David C more or less drew a line under his teenybop career after the White City Stadium gig he did in ’74 where one girl got crushed in the mass rush to the stage. I can’t recall whether his live cover of “Please Please Me” was a hit before or after White City but it noticeably didn’t do that well (#19).

mike

1 October 2007 10:45

Yes, the “O Superman” link was never more apparent – I hadn’t spotted the direct attribution before. We weren’t a “Sparky” household, though – indeed, my sister texted me as it was playing: “I never liked this one!”

I was very pleased that they dug out the full children’s hospital soundclip from whence “Ello darling!” was pulled, as I remember it going out at the time, on a Christmas show.

The Bernadette Whelan tragedy also spawned a cash-in tribute single (“Crushed in the front, it was no publicity stunt”) from Michael Des Barres, then of Silverhead, later of the Power Station, which went out on Deep Purple’s vanity label. You can imagine the outrage.

Marcello Carlin

1 October 2007 11:17

It certainly does ring a bell.

I had no idea that the first record played on Radio 2 was Julie and “the hills are alive” but of course it all makes perfect sense.

jeff w

1 October 2007 11:23

I caught yesterday’s show as well…
Yep, me too… and Paul Hollingdale, and Everett – an amazing broadcast, a useful lesson in how music radio can engage and involve the listener without having to be literally interactive – and as much of Smashie and Nicey as I could stand (about half).

I confess I only listened to Junior Choice to hear “My Bruvver” – and of course it just had to be the last song Stewart played. It still stands up, though: great comic timing by Terry Scott throughout.

mike

1 October 2007 11:29

Re. that TOTP airport appearance, I remember DC looking off to the side and grinning during the “we could be so happy together, yodely-odely-odely-oh!” section of “The Puppy Song”, and thinking that the backing vocals were being supplied impromptu by a bunch of cheery baggage handlers, or some such.

Marcello Carlin

1 October 2007 11:29

I only kept on with Smashie and Nicey because the underlying chart was so strong (Sept ’67 – 15 out of the top 20 total classics, and even the MoR penny dreadfuls didn’t bother me that much) but their routine was staler than the Streatham Hill Somerfield breadbin on the average Sunday afternoon.

Waldo

1 October 2007 12:40

Yes, that chart was strong, wasn’t it? One of Popular’s icons, Anita Harris, featured and it was good to hear Frankie Vaughan’s “There Must Be A Way” (a drunk’s song indeed, and I should know), the first time I’ve heard that since snooker player Joe Johnson amusingly started crooning it during a match when faced with a more than tricky shot.

Less sure about the chart countdown, when Smashie and Nicey featured “The dead Jimi Hendrix”, “The blind Stevie Wonder” and “The Jewish Frankie Vaughan” etc; all very un-PC from Leading Lefty Harry Enfied, who was probably forgiven by the Guardianista by taking a swipe at “Call Me Dave”.

Marcello Carlin

1 October 2007 12:51

“The unheard of Box Tops,” “the not Fred West Keith West.” Sidesplitting.

Waldo

1 October 2007 13:14

Precisely. Totally awful. “The Letter” may have been over in about thirty seconds but what an absolute cracker. It was number one in the US at this time. The only guys of our generation NOT to have heard of The Box Tops were those two “comedians”. Very disappointing. Low grade humour from a couple of guys who should have done better.

See me…

Brian

1 October 2007 15:14

There is a great cover of ” The Letter ” by Joe Cocker on the ” Mad Dogs & Englisman ” LP. One of the better live albums. I generally hate live albums – but love going to concerts. Anybody else feel the same ?

Andy

2 October 2007 08:24

I remember being jealous of what my younger sister had with David Cassidy because despite my love of Sweet and Slade it wasn’t the strange, unconditional love that a pre-teen girl has for a pretty young boy. I guess my brother was jealous as well because he took a compass to my sisters Cassidy collection.

BTW Sparky’s Magic Piano is probably the scariest record ever made – I heard it Sunday morning and it still sent shivers up my spine…weird controlling talking pianos are not a good thing!

Marcello Carlin

2 October 2007 08:36

David’s heartfelt columns in Fab 208 magazine – “DAVID ASKS: WHAT ARE WE DOING TO THIS WORLD?”

Billy Smart

2 October 2007 09:25

I always think of Cassidy as the Prince Hamlet of teenpop – a golden boy laid down by a very grown-up sense of doubt, regret and confusion. It somehow seems inevitable that the White City death would cast shadows over Cassidy’s career, rather than happen to the Osmonds – who have always struck me as a ruthlessly efficient entertainment machine by comparison.

Waldo

2 October 2007 10:59

I think Billy’s comparison is touching. Without a doubt Bernadette Whelan’s death devestated Cassidy and was “outragious fortune” indeed.
On a lighter note but still on Shakesperian pair-offs and since The Who will not be troubling us and are therefore a spoiler-free zone, how about Keith Moon for Caliban?

Erithian

2 October 2007 11:21

If pop stars were Shakespearean characters – love it – more please.

A favourite quiz question – who has had a UK number 1 single and also has (genuinely it seems) an ancestor in the dramatis personae of Shakespeare’s “King John”?

Billy Smart

2 October 2007 11:41

I do know that in the 1970s there were plans to stage a rock’n’roll Othello on Broadway starring Sammy Davis Jr. with Jerry Lee Lewis as Iago!

Whenever I hear Johnny Cash’s version of I Can See a Darkness, I imagine him as Prospero, throwing away his book and staff.

Marcello Carlin

2 October 2007 11:47

Catch My Soul, written by Jack Good and directed for the screen by Patrick McGoohan, with Richie Havens as Othello and Tony Joe White as Cassio. Jerry Lee may well have played Iago in the stage version but in the film it was one Lance LeGault.

Waldo

2 October 2007 12:27

Johnny Cash as Prospero. Good. I can see it.

Lemmy flitting around as Ariel I probably couldn’t…

Waldo

2 October 2007 13:45

Bonnie as Lady Macbeth. She’ll scweam and scweam and scweam…the noo!

Erithian

2 October 2007 15:18

I take it from the “scweam and scweam” bit that you mean Bonnie Langford. Now Bonnie Tyler would make a terrific Lady M.

How about Meatloaf as Falstaff?

Snif

3 October 2007 04:10

“Now Bonnie Tyler would make a terrific Lady M.”

Walking down corridors at night, with curtains blowing, singing “Out, damn Spot”….and Banquo’s ghost played by a schoolboy with glowing eyes?

Brian

4 October 2007 16:29

Johnny Rotten as Puck.

Brian

4 October 2007 16:29

or Johnny, rotten as puck.

Erithian

4 October 2007 16:41

Nobody took up the quiz question at #32 (or everybody knew it, perhaps) – the answer is Chris de Burgh. Look forward to a lively discussion about him in due course…

Rosie

5 October 2007 11:13

Was this really a double A side? I remember Puppy Song much more vividly than Daydreamer, mainly I suppose because it’s such a terrific bouncy tune that wriggles in the head without being intrusive. Still prefer Harry Nilsson’s version though (he wrote it, didn’t he?) which made a nice counterpoint to Without You

mike

15 October 2007 15:19

According to a friend of mine who used to be in her fan club, “The Puppy Song” was actually written by Harry Nilsson for…

…Mary Hopkin!

trevor

3 January 2008 00:49

The OFFICIAL CHARTS COMPANY do not compile the chart…the chart is compiled by MILWARD BROWN for the OFFICIAL CHARTS COMPANY.

punctum

1 September 2011 20:31

TPL: just when I thought I could not be stopped, when my chance came to be king…

http://nobilliards.blogspot.com/2011/09/david-cassidy-dreams-are-nuthin-more.html

lonepilgrim

1 September 2011 22:21

that is another wonderful piece of writing Marcello – DC always did have a melancholy air about him

Lena

5 November 2013 15:57

In which David Bowie misses trouble: http://musicsoundsbetterwithtwo.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/irresistible-david-bowie-sorrow.html Thanks for reading, everyone!

Christian Louboutin

13 October 2014 14:18

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Lazarus

22 November 2017 08:47

So … we say goodbye to another 70s icon – RIP David, my sister will be especially upset. I’ve come back to his music a bit in recent years – ‘Could it be Forever’ stands up well to this day I think. He did eventually get to do his own thing, with a long career in musical theatre, but perhaps what he really wanted was to be a rock star. He had a troubled post-fame life it has to be said.

lonepilgrim

19 October 2019 20:58

I remember watching the 500th TOTP which ended with DC singing these songs vainly hoping that the surprise American guest would be Alice Cooper who I was fixated on at the time. I was outraged when the guest was revealed but in retrospect it was inevitable, given David’s adulation at the time. I think I found The Puppy Song a bit twee then but it seems slightly strange as teen fodder in retrospect. Daydreamer is less esoteric but pleasant nonetheless.

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DAVID CASSIDY – "Daydreamer"/"The Puppy Song"

THE SIMON PARK ORCHESTRA – "Eye Level"

GARY GLITTER – "I Love You Love Me Love"

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