hey look what I found
David Cassidy - Nassau Coliseum, Long Island
Not the Partridge Family. No, this was solo Dave. On his own. No Shirley Jones or Ruben Kinkaid watching from the sidelines. No Lori banging away on the tambourine. No magic bus. Just David and his flowing hair and penetrating eyes and sultry voice and.....oh yea, I was smitten. Big time.
Come on, look at him. He was hot, in that 70's kind of way. So when my aunt said she was taking a bunch of us to see him at Nassau Coliseum, I got pretty excited. A concert? Way cool. I may have only been about ten at this point, but I was already supplementing my Teen Beat reading with heavy doses of Creem magazine. So going to a concert was high on my list of things I needed to do. At ten, that list is pretty short. Eat ice cream for dinner, burn down the school, go to a concert, marry Lief Garret. The simple things.
On the other hand, we’re talking David Cassidy here. Not something you read about in Creem Magazine. Sure he was gorgeous and beautiful and dreamy, but I didn’t really care for the music. I had already moved on to the Who. Looking at the guy was ok, but listening to his love ballads for two hours? Was it worth it? Well, I was going whether I wanted to or not. My aunt bought the tickets. We were David Cassidy bound.
Nassau Coliseum is a hockey arena. It’s a basketball stadium. A concert venue, it is not. Even though the place still brings in the big shows, it was not built with music in mind. The acoustics are terrible. If you aren’t sitting in the first ten rows on the floor, everything sounds like shit. But I guess when you are going to see an act like David Cassidy, it doesn’t matter. And really, I was kind of excited to be there. A concert. A live show. This was pretty cool, even if it wasn’t The Who.
We got to our seats and you could feel the excitement in the place. Every local girl between the ages of seven and say, 20 was there. All holding signs and banners. Carrying flowers that they wanted to throw on the stage for David. Later, someone would throw a bra on the stage. Girls. Crazy. I remained stoic and quiet. I wasn’t going to swoon or scream or rip my panties off and throw them in the air because I didn’t do stuff like that. Ok, maybe once I wrote to Lief Garret asking him to marry me, but no one knew that. I sat back in my chair and waited for the show to start. I’d spend the time focusing on David. Quietly. Looking at his hair, his gleaming smile, his swaying hips. Just being my cool self. Staring, but not swooning. No swooning. None at all. Nope.
The house lights went down. The stage lights went on. A small ripple of noise started moving throughout the crowd, getting louder and more vibrant by the second, culminating in an ear-piercing, blood curdling, unison scream of 12,000 horny, love struck girls as David Cassidy took the stage. Girls fainting. Crying. Screaming. He broke out into song but you couldn’t hear it over the screaming. I told you the acoustics there were bad. The screams of joy and love reverberated throughout the arena, and completely drowned out the music. No one seemed to care. He swayed and danced and moved and pointed at the crowd and smiled and swayed some more and the screams got louder and the girls got wilder and.....oh my god. What? Was that me? Was that me that just made that sound? Did I scream? I think I did. And then....I swooned. Good lord, I was swooning. I was screaming. I was ready to run down to the stage and throw myself on the altar of David Cassidy. I was one of them. One of the crazy girls. I was half mortified, half caught up in the frenzy. Ashamed but excited. When that one girl threw her bra on the stage I got a hold of myself. Ok, I would never do that. I’m not gonna be that. I am not going to grow up to be a girl who whips out her tits at a concert. But when he broke out singing “I Think I Love You” I knew that if I didn’t control myself here I could be screaming my way down a slippery slope to dancing naked on the speakers at a Who concert.
