Born on September 27, 1958 in Los Angeles, Shaun Cassidy was
still in High School when he was offered a recording contract by Mike Curb, the
musician, arranger, producer and – sadly – politician who I first featured on
this blog back way in 2009.
Riding on the coattails of half-brother David, Shaun was
just 18 when he scored his first hit, a cover of the Tupper Saussy song Morning
Girl. Saussy has also featured on this
blog before; he was also responsible for the reprehensible The
Prophet: Predictions by David Hoy 45 by
psych-rock group The Wayward Bus. Instantly young Shaun’s face was all over the
place, on magazine covers, on lunch boxes and on posters pinned to teenyboppers
walls. For a brief time he was all-but ubiquitous.
Anyway, Shaun scored a few hits, in both the US (where his first
two albums sold more than five million copies) and in Europe, but his career as
a teen pin-up didn’t last; luckily TV stardom beckoned with a couple of series of The
Hardy Boys Mysteries, but the pop hits had
completely dried up by 1978. His last notable chart placing at home was yet
another cover, this time of the Lovin’ Spoonful’s Do You Believe in Magic.
Then he met Todd Rundgren.
Then he met Todd Rundgren.
Unsurprisingly I’ve also featured Todd before, of course. It
was Todd who performed the diabolically awful version of the XTC classic Dear
God on his album (re)Production
and it was Todd who tried to turn the one-time teen idol Shaun Cassidy into a New Wave star.
The results, predictably, are awful.
Wasp, the album Todd
put together for Shaun, is just dreadful. Backed by the then-current Utopia
line-up, the album is stacked with piss-poor cover versions of songs originally
recorded by the Four Tops, Talking Heads, The Who, Ian Hunter, the Animals and
David Bowie, alongside a few new songs written or co-written by Rundgren
himself.
Wasp would be the last album that Shaun the pop star released. He has continued to act though (he also sang, in the US stage
version of Blood Brothers with his older
sibling David) but has proved much more successful off-screen, writing,
producing and creating such shows as American Gothic, Invasion
and Emerald City.
Anyway, here are a couple of tracks from Wasp, with Shaun (and Todd) attempting to destroy the
careers of Talking Heads and David Bowie. Thankfully they didn’t succeed.
My god, that version of Rebel Rebel is just appalling. Awful. I've three of his albums in stock; wasting precious space. Take 'em off my hands. Please.
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