In 1980, 22-year-old Shaun Cassidy was seemingly on top of the teen-idol heap. He’d just played a massive concert at Houston’s 55,000-seat Astrodome stadium and released what should have been his critical breakthrough, the Todd Rundgren-produced new wave opus Wasp. And in the breathless four years leading up to what would become a more than 40-year musical hiatus, he’d been unstoppable — scoring three top 10 singles and two top 10 albums, opening the 20th Annual Grammy Awards (where he’d been nominated for Best New Artist, losing to fellow “nepo baby” Debby Boone), and enjoying a successful concurrent career as a TV star in three seasons of the ABC mystery series The Hardy Boys.

But then, Cassidy walked away from superstardom. Or… so it seemed.

“The truth is, I didn’t really walk away from my early career. I just walked into a different lane,” he says, sitting contentedly in his home office/writing room in Santa Barbara, explaining that after his star faded, he never thought, “‘Oh my God, it’s over! What will I do instead?’ My attitude was, ‘Well, that was fun. Now let’s see what I can do.’”

Make no mistake: Shaun’s life after teen fame was no clichéd child-star-syndrome cautionary tale. Nor he did become some sad “where are they now?” footnote, someone who’d peaked professionally and creatively by age 22 and had been trying to recreate or recapture that success ever since. As a member of an esteemed entertainment dynasty (he’s the son of Oscar-winner Shirley Jones and Tony-winner Jack Cassidy, and the younger half-brother of Partridge Family heartthrob David Cassidy), Shaun was destined to work in show business, and he never left it — but some of his greatest showbiz successes actually came after he left the stage.

Shaun simply decided his place was behind the scenes, not in front of thousands of shrieking fans. And so, he reinvented himself as a respected television writer and producer for shows like American Gothic, Roar, Invasion, New Amsterdam… and a cult-classic horror flick about killer felines called Strays, but we’ll get to that in a moment.

However, now Shaun is putting his storytelling skills to use on the concert circuit again, as he surprisingly returns with his Storytellers-style “Road to Us” revue, which he describes as a sort of musical memoir and a tribute to his loyal, exceedingly patient fans. And now, the former pinup boy, who was for many fans their first crush, has released his first new singles in decades, “My First Crush” and “The Last Song,” which he performs in his show.

“How do you go back on the road and not look like you’re trying to replicate the success you had as a kid and embarrass yourself? How do you do it in a way that might be authentic to who I am now, and yet still give an audience that might be longing for some nostalgia that payoff as well? And for me, the key was storytelling,” he explains of his decision to return to the stage.

Shaun certainly did some wild living in his wild ‘70s youth, but he not only lived to quite literally tell the tale, but is living his best life at age 67. In the wildly entertaining video interview above and Q&A below, he shares some of his stories, from stranger-than-fiction teenhood encounters with Phil Spector, Keith Moon, and Carrie Fisher to the lifelong life lessons he learned from his parents, his brother, and his time in and out of the spotlight.

photo courtesy of shauncassidy.com

LYNDSANITY: It has been five years since the first time I interviewed you, about the anniversary of your Wasp album in 2020. You’ve obviously had successful second-act and third-act careers since 1980, but here you are again — not only performing live, but actually releasing new music! So, I’m going to ask the obvious question: You walked away from a pop career quite happily, so what made you return now?

SHAUN CASSIDY: Well, the truth is, I didn’t really walk away from my early career. I just walked into a different lane. I wasn’t like, “I hate that music thing!” I loved it. I still do. But I found other things that not only equally inspired me creatively, but I was able to do and have a good run at. And the truth is, most of the choices I make, even going back to being a young guy, have been based on “what will this do for the quality of my life?” — as opposed to “what will this do for my career?” or “what will this do for my bank account?” or whatever other reasons people make choices. All of my choices has always been: “Is this going to make my life better? Am I going to be happier? Am I going to have more fun? Am I going to be less stressed?” All of those things, even as a young guy, were informing my decisions and the life of a writer, which has been my main job for much of the last three decades.

Writing and producing TV just seemed so great, compared to being on the road all the time and touring all the time and having all the crazy attention that being a public figure, especially being a young public figure, creates. I didn’t like that part of it. I didn’t like being chased by paparazzi. I didn’t like all the crazy attention and lack of privacy. As a writer, you can have a famous name, so you can still get a great table at a restaurant, but people don’t necessarily recognize you! I was recognized because I was on TV and all that stuff, but as you get older, you get less recognized. And slipping away for 30 or 40 years, depending on how you’re counting, has been wonderful. I’m very grateful that I was able to find another passion that could also put my kids through college. And this is the big “but” to your question…

Wait, was that a Pee-wee Herman reference?

Well, indirectly maybe! But, having sat in an office like this for much of the last four decades, making up imaginary stories and engaging with imaginary characters, I missed real people and I missed real connection. And the penny-dropping for me was: How do you go back on the road and not look like you’re trying to replicate the success you had as a kid and embarrass yourself? How do you do it in a way that might be authentic to who I am now, and yet still give an audience that might be longing for some nostalgia that payoff as well? And for me, the key was storytelling. It felt like, “Oh, that’s what I do for a living. That’s my job. I can go out and tell stories!” And, yes, still sing songs that I don’t hate, because I haven’t been singing them for 40 years. They can still be fresh, and arguably performed better and with more authority and authenticity than maybe they were when I was a kid. It feels like it.

But most importantly, they’re now woven together by stories that perhaps present these songs in a different light, or an unexpected light. … So, it all feels like something new, even though I’m tapping into stuff that’s old. The format is new for me. My concerts back in the day were scream-a-thons. They were Beatlemania, for lack of a better term. Not that I was the Beatles, but the power of those arenas and that experience was much like that. And it was fun, but I didn’t feel like I had much to do with it. I just sort of felt like I was in the middle of a hurricane, which I wrote about in a song called “Teen Dream” — that it was more about the experience of the audience having this shared thing, and I was kind of at the center of it. I had an experience too, of course, but it was different. But now it’s like feels a hundred percent awesome, and people are coming. That’s the other thing: When you take 40 years off, you don’t know if anybody’s going to show up [to your concerts]. But they’re coming!

I keep bringing up Wasp, but that was a new wave record, in 1980. I feel if it had just come out a year or so later, after MTV launched, you would’ve been writing, producing, directing your own music videos. Because those early music videos were like mini-movies. And you had a vision for one actually starring Phil Spector, because you were thinking about stories and visuals even then. That didn’t quite come to fruition, right? You wanted to have Phil Spector involved in one your early music videos…

Oh no, I did have him! He was in the music video! After he kept holding me at gunpoint for six hours in his house — I’m on a long list, unfortunately, of people he held at gunpoint, and as you know, he killed someone, which was a tragedy for him and for [slain actress Lana Clarkson] especially. But yeah, Warner Bros. had this idea: “Let’s do a music video, kind of like a nod to A Hard Day’s Night,” with a bunch of kids chasing me around. And they wanted to shoot at Santa Monica Pier, and they didn’t really have an ending for it. This was to promote “Da Doo Ron Ron,” my first single, and I said, “Let’s get Phil Spector to pull up in a limousine.” And I dive into Phil’s limo and he has one line: He looks at the camera and says, “Who is this kid?” That’s all he had to do. And the record company was like, “No, maybe that’s not a good idea.” I was like, “Why? It’s Phil Spector! He produced the original [version by the Crystals]. He’s produced all these great records!” He was a hero of mine. “You don’t know Phil?” I said, “No, but I want to meet him.”

So, they called him and he said, “Sure, I’d love to.” And I showed up at his house with a film crew. It’s this big, Gothic mansion up Doheny with pinchers and cameras and stay-away signs, pretty ominous. And he says, “You can come in, but nobody else can come in.” So, I go in his house and he slams a gate and door and sits me down and puts on the jukebox, which is filled with only his records. Which sounds great if you’re a Phil Spector fan, until he pulls out a gun and a flask of whiskey and starts talking like W.C. Fields, saying, “Whaddya think of that one?” This went on for hours. And it was scary. And they ultimately called the police. The police came and talked him down, and he went out and did the video with me after this crazy day. I don’t know if that’s a funny story…

I’m laughing and cringing at the same time. It’s a crazy story, though.

Crazy, but again, not unique. He did it to John Lennon. He did it to many, many people, and obviously was very troubled. But I’ve got a lot of those stories. Some of them I tell in my show. They may weave into a song, or put a song in a much different lane than people probably expect it to be.

Have you ever thought about doing a biopic, The Shaun Cassidy Story —but you write it, you direct it, you produce it, and you cast it? Surely that would be a full-circle development, with all of your stories and crazy life. You have to put your story on the screen!

Well, my story can’t be told without telling my family’s story. And there may very well be a story in David and my mother and father and me and my younger brothers, and our family is kind of unique that way. People often ask me, “Why do you seem grounded? How did that happen?” And I think if I am grounded, the reason is I had these models in my father and my mother and my older brother to watch and learn from — the good, bad, and everything in between. I got to see how their choices not only creatively, but in terms of how they lived their lives, affected their lives. And again, going back to my earlier point about “choose life,” make the choice that will give you the better life, that felt like the biggest win. That felt more important than having another No. 1 record or winning whatever award that the business will give you.

You said in one interviews that watching how David handled similarly meteoric teen idol fame, a few years before you did, kind of gave you an example of what not to do, or what pitfalls to be aware of.

I mean, not always what not to do. David did a lot of good things, and despite the meteoric opening act that he had, and I had, both of us managed to survive that in different ways. David had a very long career in the theater and then in Las Vegas, and I was able to really fortunately transition into this whole other area that there wasn’t any precedent for in my family, in terms of writing and producing. And I am still having a great run. I’m writing two pilots right now, even while I’m touring, so I’m really a blessed guy. But to your point about David, David just felt differently about the whole experience. He felt kind of trapped by a character he was playing on a television show, and he always wanted to be something else — which I never understood. It’s like, “What you are is great! Millions of people love you! What’s so bad?” But this goes to a deeper thing: that so many performers think that success is going to heal whatever wound they walked into the arena with, and it just doesn’t. In fact, it often makes it worse, because they discover, “Oh, I just won the Oscar, and I’m still not happy. I thought the Oscar would cure everything.”

And it’s only been in recent years that we’ve even started talking about child star syndrome, or mental health in general. The way someone like Chappell Roan will talk quite openly about the downsides of extreme, sudden fame, people didn’t really talk about that in the 70s.

No. And artists are often trying to use whatever their art form is to work out their stuff, and when you have to work it out in public, it’s a lot harder.

So yes, I was going to ask you about how grounded you are. Obviously besides your brother, some of your Tiger Beat-era peers, like Andy Gibb and Leif Garrett, had their struggles. You did some seemingly fast living, or were adjacent to it — I’m fascinated to hear about how you were hanging out at CBGB or Rodney’s English Disco with rock stars like Iggy Pop. With someone your age, unsupervised, hanging out in that world, it could have gone very south. I don’t know if you did drugs or whatever, but…

You’ll never know! [laughs]

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Well, maybe when your biopic comes out! But you were hanging out with the Hollywood Vampires and Alice Cooper, all that, but it seems like you had enough sense to not let things get too out of hand.

That period of my life was really exciting. It was Dickensian. Because my parents… I didn’t have bad parents, but they were absentee a lot because of their work. My father was in New York doing Broadway shows, my mother was off doing movies or doing television or whatever she was doing, and I was the oldest in my house. David had a different mom, so he grew up in a different house. And I was with a group of friends that had similar parents that weren’t really around. So, we were kind of having this Peanuts existence without any adult supervision. And yes, that could go in many different ways. In my case, though, I was going into some deep, dark, interesting — interesting being the key word — places, and I always felt like an observer. Cameron Crowe was kind of doing the same thing, except getting paid for it by Rolling Stone. And I’m 15 years old. There’s a great picture I think Bob Greun took at the Hyatt House with me and the New York Dolls and Iggy Pop and Kim Fowley and my band at the time. I don’t know how we ended up there. I have braces [in the photo]!

 

 

 

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Wow! Were you not well-known yet at the time?

Not well-known. Not known at all, only by virtue of a famous family. But most people didn’t know me from Adam. And yet I was at CBGB with Danny Fields, watching the Ramones at 15, because I went to some goofy boarding school [on the East Coast] that my parents thought would protect me from the “evils” of Hollywood and Beverly Hills. And it was actually much more dangerous! But again, I landed in these situations where I met David Bowie, and I met Debbie Harry at Max’s Kansas City before she was “Debbie Harry,” and Andy Warhol. And I’m just a kid at the club.

Did people know your lineage? Did they know you were a “Cassidy”?

Every once in a while, if they asked me. But no, I was just one of the kids. But it was a great education — musically, culturally. I didn’t know this going to be a time that people looked back on, like the ‘20s or something, but it was definitely game-changing culturally. … All of this sort of glitter-rock, punk-rock, theatrical rock became a thing. And that felt like a great intersection of where I’d come from in my family, literally in my DNA with my mom and dad, and what I was interested in doing musically. It made sense that I would be drawn to that spectacle. I saw Rocky Horror at the Roxy like 15 times, with Tim Curry. The Roxy was a mile from my house. I would go all the time and I just thought it was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen.

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You should do a rock musical as well!

I’m working on a Broadway musical right now! I’m not going to tell you what it is, but it’s awesome.

Ooh! Is it rock?

At times, yes. [laughs] And by the way, going full-circle with you to Wasp, Wasp was an exercise in theatricality — just trying different characters and sounds and different things in my voice, and attitudinal things that I had never done before.

I always thought that was a really credible, cool, ballsy, risky record to do. And it was the last full album you did. Obviously all the life choices you’ve made since then have been great for your personal life as well as for your career, but…

Not all of them! I’ve learned along the way. But I’ve gotten most of it right.

Yes, but surely you’ve wondered what might’ve happened, what kind of career you might’ve had, if you hadn’t put music to the side for so long. Would you have made a credible transition like, to use some modern-day examples, Harry Styles or Justin Timberlake? Or to use an older example, even like Ricky Nelson? All of them made a successful transition from teen idol to respected musician.

Well, yes, maybe. And I did think about that. And people advised me. I mean, that is the normal course of events, if you’re a kid and you’ve got a bunch of hit records and then your flame starts cooling. The record company literally said to me, “Go away for a while” — not for 40 years! — “just go away and come back.” And had I done that, it might’ve worked out great, because yes, MTV was suddenly on. I was a cute kid, and I could go on [MTV] and, with a lot of help, look cuter! And who knows that might’ve happened?

But that isn’t the career I wanted. I didn’t want to be Justin Timberlake — or Frank Sinatra, for that matter. I mean, he was the original one who did that. And to a certain extent, the Beatles did it. But the Beatles did it by changing the culture, and because they were wildly talented as songwriters, and they just led the way becoming adult entertainers or whatever. I mean, a teen idol by its very nature has a short shelf life. You’re not going to be a teenager very long, and neither is the audience. So, what are you going to be? You’re either going to be an adult entertainer, whatever that manifests into, or you’re going to step back, as I did, and go, “Maybe there’s something else I can do that is equally creative, maybe even more creative.” I had certainly a lot more control over the television shows I was creating and casting and running than I did over my early records. My early records, I had a vote, but it often wasn’t the leading vote. So again, being able to take the time away, I didn’t know I would take as long as I did. … And I don’t know why it has happened this way. It is unique. I really don’t know of anyone else who took this long a break and then just stepped back into it. But I’m grateful that they’re having me.

I’m grateful you’re back! But since we are talking about how you had this whole career as a screenwriter, there’s something on your IMDB that I did not know about until recently. It might have been the first script you ever wrote, and if I’m not mistaken, you might’ve even written it in Walt Disney’s old office. It’s a TV horror movie about cats called Strays. It’s definitely unique that Strays was your transition project into this big career that you ended up having for the last 40 years.

Ha! It wasn’t the first [script I did], but it was definitely very important. I’ll put this in context. I was doing a play in London called Bus Stop with Jerry Hall, based on the old Marilyn Monroe film…

The Jerry Hall?

Yeah, Mick Jagger’s wife. Did that for six months in London. This is like 1990, and I’m already deep into writing and talking to Universal, where I had worked as an actor on The Hardy Boys. Andliterally like the kid on the set of The Hardy Boys going, “You guys want some coffee?” was now President of Television there. So, I’m talking to him, going, “I really want to write stuff and produce stuff.” And they said, “Well, bring us stuff.” So, I’m like, “What stuff do I bring?” So, I’m doing this play in London, and they gave me their old catalog at Universal. “Look at all our old movies. Maybe we can redo something, remake something.”

And I found this Deanna Durbin [project]. She was a big musical star in the ‘40s. … She had made this movie called Lady on a Train. … I though this could be like a Murder He Wrote series. So, I pitch it to Universal, and I’m pitching them what they already own, so I’m not really even bringing anything to the party. But now here I am as a producer, and they don’t know what to do with me. They bought the idea and gave it to Edward Woodward, the guy who had starred in the Equalizer series. It was a show called Over My Dead Body. It actually was written by a great writer on the lot named David Chisholm. It was overseen by Levinson & Link, the guys who created Colombo and Murder She Wrote. And there I am, and what can I do? I hadn’t written anything yet. I hadn’t produced anything. I’m just the old actor from The Hardy Boys on the set at Universal, except now I’m 32.

Four weeks later, I turned in a script, which they all expected to hate. I mean, what business did I have writing a good script? But what they didn’t know is all during The Hardy Boys and [the 1980-81 television series starring Shaun] Breaking Away and my time acting, I was spending a lot of time in the writers’ room. This is what I wanted to do. And I wrote a pretty good script [for Over My Dead Body], and they were astonished. And they brought me in with the showrunners and I said, “Is it really good?” They said, “It’s so good. We’re going to show you how much rewriting we’re going to do, and it’s not going to be much. You can sit with us and watch us rewrite it.” And they did all sort of their crossing T’s and dotting I’s in like two hours, and said, “It’s ready.” And they started casting my episodes, and I’m going to be on my own show, writing stuff. And then… they canceled the show.

Oh no!

Yeah, my show never got shot. But suddenly, I have this script that I’ve been paid to write. Universal knows about it. Word got out: “Cassidy actually can write!” So, one of the people there, Barbara Fisher, ran the Movie of the Week division, and she called me and said, “Would you like to write a thriller?” These USA movies, usually like women-in-jeopardy movies, as they were called, were doing really well. I said, “I don’t really want to write a movie about some stalker chasing a woman around, but let me see if I can come up with something.” And I’m sitting at home. We had three cats, and I’m sitting at my computer and I look over, and all three cats are staring at me, intently. And I love cats, but I don’t necessarily trust them all the time. And I suddenly realized, “Oh, there’s something inherently good with this, rich with this.” And then someone had told me this story about If you have a baby, you have to be careful of the baby in the crib because the cats can go and smother a baby accidentally. I thought, “Hmmm, I can use that in a scary movie.” So, I went in to pitch this movie. Basically, it was The Birds, but with cats. It was “Hitchcock’s The Birds With Cats.”

That’s a good elevator pitch, right there.

And they bought it, and I wrote it. Niki Marvin produced it, and she was working on another movie at the same time, called The Shawshank Redemption — producing that while she’s producing my little Strays movie! It became the No. 1 movie of 1991 on the USA network, and I was off and running. And then I ended up on Broadway with my brother David, which I was reluctant to do because I was afraid it was going to blow up this new writing career. But while I was there, I came up with a show called American Gothic, which I sold as my first series, with Sarah Paulson… and that’s why I’m talking to you today. That show was a game-changer in every way, and I’ve had a show on almost every year or other year since then.

That’s awesome. American Gothic was Sarah Paulson’s first series. And you were very early on in casting Heath Ledger and Austin Butler, too. Heath and Austin were teen heartthrobs. Did you ever have conversations with them about navigating young stardom?

Oh, yes. And I mean, it’s not even young stardom — it’s just any kind of fame, when you haven’t experienced it before, or if you didn’t grow up in a family that has experienced it. Fame is going to be a massive game-changer, in terms of the way not only strangers and your friends treat you, but often the way your family treats you. If you are suddenly making more money than your mother or father ever dreamt of, it’s going to upset the family dynamic pretty dramatically, I think. And if you are suddenly way more popular than any of your siblings, even if your siblings might’ve been the most popular in school, suddenly the whole dynamic has been shifted. It’s going to mess things up. And I would talk to Heath about it. I talked to Austin about it. I talked to all the actors about it, not just the young ones. And because I had been an actor and because I had a degree of success as a young guy, they’re often interested in talking to me about it. Also, a lot of them end up going, “Hey how do we get your job?” [laughs]

Start by writing a horror movie about cats! But were you speaking from experience. Obviously you came from a showbiz family, so in your family it was more “normal” to go into this line of work. And everyone in your family had experienced their own success, but when your star was rising, did you experience a power dynamic shift in your family, like any jealousy or competitiveness?

Well, my mom didn’t have to give me my allowance anymore [laughs]! But my father passed away when I was doing the pilot for The Hardy Boys, so he never saw my success in that way — which may have been a good thing, honestly. Not that I wanted to lose my father. I didn’t. But he had a hard time with David’s success, and he’d been kind of in the shadow of my mother too. That was a problem my father had to overcome. But my dad was a very revered Broadway actor who’d put in his time, although he’d had, ironically, overnight success too. He was a matinee idol at 18 years old on Broadway in a show called Wish You Were Here. And so, when it happened to David, it wasn’t like, “Wow, that’s out of nowhere.” My mother was 18 in Oklahoma. There was this precedent, this crazy precedent, for big success at a young age for three people in my family. So, by the time it happened to me, it’s like there was nothing novel about it. Which was good for me.

It probably would have seemed weirder to your family if you’d become a veterinarian or dentist…

Maybe. But the version of “veterinarian” in my family, I think, is becoming a writer.

The term “nepo baby” was not a thing in the ‘70s, but you would’ve been called that in 1978, had that term existed. On a subconscious level, did your desire to do something more behind the scenes come from not wanting to known as “so-and-so’s younger brother” or “so-and-so’s son”?

Yes. Secondary to thinking that being a writer is a better life, absolutely. I think the reason, honestly, that I was a performer at all is because I didn’t want to be known as someone’s kid or someone’s brother. So, when people kept saying, “You really should do this, you could sing, you’re cute, you can act,” I thought, “Well, OK.” But that attitude saved me from, “Oh my God, it’s over! What will I do instead?” My attitude [after 1980] was, “Well, that was fun. Now let’s see what I can do.”

I don’t think “nepo baby” has a negative connotation. I think it’d kind of ridiculous, because if your family owns a business and you learn that business and you end up taking over that business, it feels like the natural order of things. But if you’re incompetent at running that business, you’re not going to last. So, if you have a foot in the door because your parents have had certain success, if you can get in the door, great. Then it’s what you do with it that ultimately matters. And the people who can’t do something with it will not be known as nepo babies, because they won’t be successful.

Good point. But in your pop-idol years, you had some real adventures. When you look back and think, “Wow, the ‘70s were a crazy time,” what are some of the craziest things that you got to experience?

Keith Moon sleeping over at my house. I met him at the Rainbow. I was like 15, talking to two young women who were probably closer to my age than his, a lot closer to my age. But he clearly liked them and he was clearly drunk, which was his usual Keith Moon thing. But he was sweet as can be, a lovely guy. And I’m talking to the drummer of the Who, so I’m just thrilled to be anywhere near this situation! And he said, “Let’s all go back to my house.” So, we go downstairs, limo pulls up, he opens the door, two young women get in the car, he slams the door, car takes off. I look at him: “Keith, aren’t we supposed to be in that car?” “No, let’s take your car.” “I don’t have a car. I don’t even have a driver’s license!” “Oh.” This is before cell phones, so who knows where [the girls] went.

But I’m now here with Keith Moon, who can barely stand, and I don’t have a car. So, I walk him home to my house, which is like a mile and a half away, at 2 in the morning. I don’t know where my parents are again. I was alone a lot. They were out of town, whatever. I walk him up to my room. I have a little couch in my bedroom that he passes out on, which is right underneath my Who poster. And I am calling my friends and waking them up: “Keith Moon is sleeping over at my house!” The next morning, he wakes up, looks around. He’s groggy, understandably. He sees a picture of my mother. “Shirley Jones! Do you know Shirley Jones?” I say, “Yeah, she’s my mom.” “Your mother? I love Shirley Jones! Can I meet her?” I say, “Um, I don’t think she’s here.”

So, we ended up playing air hockey for like three hours. He calls his driver. Apparently the girls were taken home, whatever; they were fine. “You ought to come over to my house. We will play pool at my house!” He’s making a solo album in L.A., so he invites me. I’m like his new best friend. He invites me to all these recording sessions, and I’m meeting all these fancy musicians. And again, I’m just a kid. But I think he wanted to meet Shirley Jones.

Did he ever meet your mom? Did you ever hook that up?

Maybe he did. Yeah, I have a lot of stories like that.

Lay ‘em on me! It seems like you hung out with a lot of your idols, and they respected you. They didn’t look at you as a nepo baby or some fluffy teen pinup.

I don’t know what they thought, but I could hit the ball back with them, conversation-wise. I was a pretty smart kid. My mother called me an old soul. I liked hanging with older people. The girls I dated were always older than me. My first wife was older than me.

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Didn’t you date Carrie Fisher? She was your date for Grammy Awards.

She was a good friend. We didn’t really date. She lived down the street and we had similar backstories, in terms of our moms being musical/movie people. Carrie was really smart and really funny, and we hung out and laughed a lot. And when I was nominated for Best New Artist at the Grammys and was asked to open the Grammys, Carrie had just opened in this little movie called Star Wars. So, we were hot tickets in 1977 or 1978 or whatever, and I asked her if she wanted to go with me as my date to the Grammys. She said, “Sure, we’ll have fun. We’ll cause some trouble.” And we did.

Again, we need your biopic! Or a memoir.

There’s a way of doing that. The live show I’m doing now started as me sitting down to write a memoir. Then I realized I’d spent hours and hours in this office and a hundred other offices, including Walt Disney’s office as you’d mentioned earlier. I was in [Walt Disney’s former office in Burbank] for four years — crazy, but it happened. And I realized I’m spending hours and hours of my life writing, and I want to talk to people. I want to actually engage and get something back. So, I’ve managed to have a bit of the memoir in my show. Maybe when I’m done with this [tour], maybe I’ll write a book — again, not just about me, but about my family. Because David and my mother both had books written by other people, and they didn’t sound like them. They don’t feel they were properly represented. I think both of them are much more interesting than their books offered. So, maybe I’ll do that.

We haven’t even really talked about the fact that you have two new songs in your show, “The Last Song” and “My First Crush.” Is there a full Road to Us album in the works?

I don’t really know what an album is in 2025! But I wrote these two new songs for my show, because I had stories that didn’t have songs to support them. Both of them are kind of thank-you notes to the audience, in a way. One of them is pretty big and theatrical, and it’s sort of at the end of the show. But yeah, I recorded them. I hadn’t recorded in forever, either, and it was great. I loved it. So, maybe I’ll make some more, and by the time I’ve recorded 12 songs, I’ll have an “album” or whatever.

Well, I will be interested in an album, a rock musical, or whatever you decide to do next. Strays 2, maybe?

Ooh, how about Strays: The Musical? That would be good. Although they already did that Cats…

It’ll be better than Cats. I assure you.

This Q&A has been edited for brevity and clarity. Was Shaun’s entire conversation in the video at the top of this article.

This past weekend, veteran actor Kevin Bacon returned to Payson High School — the small-town Utah campus where he filmed Footloose‘s iconic, Kenny Loggins-soundtracked final scene 40 years ago — responding to students’ #BaconToPayson social media campaign to convince him to attend their real-life senior prom.

But in an alternate universe, Payson’s Class of 2024 could have been tweeting #CassidyToPayson instead. And it might have been a maroon-tuxedo’d Shaun Cassidy, not Bacon, shouting, “Let’s daaaance!” in that school gymnasium back in 1984… if Cassidy’s self-described “really embarrassing audition” for the hit musical movie had gone more smoothly.

Cassidy, a much-adored teen idol who charted pop smashes like “Da Doo Ron Ron” and “Hey Deanie” in the late ’70s, quit music in 1980 — after releasing the risky glam/new wave album Wasp, produced by Todd Rundgren — to focus on acting. He eventually pivoted to a hugely successful behind-the-scenes career in television, but before that, he found success in front of the camera in projects like The Hardy Boys, Like Normal People, Breaking Away, and General Hospital, and even more so in multiple Broadway and West End stage productions, including Blood Brothers co-starring his older half-brother and fellow ’70s heartthrob, David.

But the film world seemed closed off to Shaun… until he got a call, about playing a certain footloose-and-fancy-free big-city rebel, that seemed like it might be his big-screen break.

“I had a lot of crazy auditions. I auditioned for a zillion things,” Cassidy chucklingly told me in 2022, when he was promoting his first concert tour in four decades, The Magic of a Midnight Sky, during a SiriusXM interview. “I mean, amazing auditions, great movies, but I didn’t get those parts. Maybe it was because I wasn’t that good an actor, but it may also have been the fact that people could not see past the ‘poster,’ you know? … I carried all that pop stuff around with me wherever I went. So, they weren’t going put me in Silence of the Lambs — which I auditioned for, by the way! Yes, for the part of the serial killer. For Buffalo Bill.”

Perhaps Buffalo Bill was casting too against type, but the skinny-tied, fleet-footed Ren McCormack, at least on paper, seemed like a good fit for a charismatic blond pop phenom like Cassidy. “I auditioned for Footloose,” he confessed. “Kevin Bacon had been on Broadway in a play called Slab Boys, which I also auditioned for and did not get, but Kevin was not known yet, really. My agent called me and said, ‘There’s this musical [film], and it’s a really good script. I think you’d be really right for the part.’ I said, ‘Well, Footloose — is that like a dancing show?’ I mean, I kind of move well, but I am not remotely a dancer. Not at all a dancer. But he said, ‘Oh, yeah, but you just have to move a bit.’”

However, it turned out that the Footloose choreography was a bit more advanced than the step-touch, step-touch that Cassidy had expected. “Oh, they send me off to this audition, and the audition is literally like a Broadway, Bob Fosse danceline: ‘Everybody, 1, 2, 3, 4!’ and ‘We’re gonna do this move’ and that move and this move. And some friends of mine who I happened to have been having lunch with came and were outside, looking in the door of the dancehall, watching. And it was literally the worst audition. So embarrassing. And they were laughing their asses off.”

Everything obviously worked out in the end. Bacon’s Footloose breakout led to so many other movie roles that he eventually inspired his own “Six Degrees” trivia game, while Cassidy went on to create, produce, and write hit television series like Roar, Invasion, and New Amsterdam. Cassidy’s first TV pilot, CBS’s American Gothic in 1995, wasn’t quite as terrifying as Silence of the Lambs, but “it was a very, very dark show with a very dark lead… so it got a lot of attention, and a lot of that attention was [because] people couldn’t put their heads around the fact that Shaun Cassidy had written this terribly dark thing!” Cassidy laughed. “The great thing about writing is that ultimately the script has to stand on its own merit. It doesn’t matter who wrote it.”

And so, Cassidy has zero regrets about not dancing down a more expected pop career path. “You know, there was some part of me that just wasn’t even comfortable being that [celebrity/performer type of] person. I didn’t want to be that center of attention. I wanted to produce the movie, or write the movie,” he explained. “My brain is more like a writer. I think, in a way, a lot of performers can’t see themselves, but I always felt like I was watching myself, like, ‘Oh, I’ll just do this and see what happens.’

“And I had famous people in my house from the time I was little [Shaun's parents are Shirley Jones, who just celebrated her 90th birthday, and the late Jack Cassidy]. … And all of that was like school for me on not only how to manage a career in the business, but how to prioritize life over career, and use your career to make your life better,” Shaun continued. “I would watch how the business would affect their lives, the hills and valleys of it all, the uncertainty of it all. I don’t care if you’re the most successful actor in the world, you are still at the mercy of people wanting to hire you. And I did not like that as an actor. … I was really fortunate that I kind of saw that fairly early and got to step back. And yes, my early success afforded me that. I basically stayed home for my twenties and read books and did little plays, and then came out again in the ’90s.

“But anyway,” Cassidy added with a laugh, “God bless Kevin Bacon.”

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