Ask Shaun Cassidy what he does for a living, and he won’t claim to be a teen idol, a singer/actor or even a performer. Instead he prefers to think of himself as a storyteller.
“I’m an introvert by nature and I probably wouldn’t have been a performer if I hadn’t been part of this family,” says Cassidy, who’s famously the son of actors Shirley Jones and Jack Cassidy and the half-brother of the late David Cassidy. “Even back when I was acting in ‘The Hardy Boys,’ I was most interested in hanging out in the writers’ room and learning about what they did. If I had more of a passion for performing, I might have worked harder and tried to Justin Timberlake my career, but that’s not what I wanted to do.”
So he kissed off his performing career around 1980, and for the last three decades has been a successful writer/producer of TV shows, starting with ”American Gothic” for CBS in 1995. He only returned to live performing with an autobiographical show in 2019, and returns to City Winery for a holiday-themed show on New Years Eve — one of only four he’s doing on this stretch. Expect some Christmas songs mixed in with the old hits and quite a few reflections.
“This show is the antithesis of what I did last time, which was a meticulously crafted show that put the songs into a context. This time it’s more like a holiday slam-jam. I tell some Christmas stories, do some improv theater, and basically pretend that I’m in the living room with my friends. It’s a beautiful mess, but I may do a more polished version next year if it jells.”
Cassidy made his name with a few hits that evinced his good taste in pop songwriting (his two biggies, “That’s Rock & Roll” and “Hey Deanie,” were written by the Raspberries’ Eric Carmen). But his recording career ended abruptly with the 1980 album “Wasp,” which was full of unlikely cover tunes (David Bowie, Talking Heads) and has become a cult hit among fans of its producer, Todd Rundgren.
“The album before that hadn’t sold so well, and everybody said I needed to try something different. So I handed the ball to Todd and said ‘If you were me, what kind of album would you make?’ And he said ‘You’re an actor, right? So let’s play some characters. Some of this will be great, some of it might be lame, but none of it will be safe.’ And a lot of people do like it, even though it sold about eight copies.”
The returning point came after he spent some time with Rick Nelson, who was looking to shake his teen-idol image. “That was also around the time Elvis Presley died. And I’m not in any way comparing myself to Elvis, but at the time I was walking in the same shoes. And I was thinking, ‘So he died at 42? Maybe those aren’t the shoes I want to walk in.’
“So after 1980 I spent eight years sitting at home reading plays. I studied how those scripts were being written, and then I started writing one-act plays. I sold my first script in 1995 and then I was on my way.” A cult and critical success, “American Gothic” was the first of a handful that he created and produced. “At the time some of the TV executives knew what I’d done, maybe the female ones had been to my concerts. But it’s not that way anymore. After 30 years as a writer-producer, they don’t know me from anything else. And they say, ‘Why are you talking about doing live shows?’ ”
Cassidy says that his success as a writer made him feel good about coming back onstage. “There were times when someone would offer me Vegas, what they call legacy shows, and I was fortunate that I never had to do that. I’m not trying to recreate some past version of myself, but I can tell the stories and assimilate my past into the life I have now. One of the lightbulb moments for me was when someone said ‘Hey dude, you’re not the only one who’s been through marriage and divorce, who’d had emotions and experiences. Your story is universal because other people have lives too’.”
Shaun Cassidy performs at City Winery Dec. 31
