Years Of BS
Happy birthday, Bobby Sherman. Some time between the Monkees and David Cassidy, he was the biggest teen pop idol around.
He was around in the mid-60s, performing as the house singer at Shindig!.
He also appeared around that time as an obnoxious pop star on a Monkees episode. Watch them mess with him. (Pardon the length.)
But it was when he got on Here Come The Brides in the late 60s, as the stammering young Jeremy (with older brothers David "Hutch" Soul and Robert "Alternative Factor" Brown), that the teen girls started screaming.
From 1969 to 1971 he recorded a bunch of hit singles, found in record stores as well as the back of cereal boxes. Sure, it was bubblegum. There are worse genres. If I had to pick his best, it'd be "Easy Come, Easy Go," which went to #9 in 1970.
The title is a good reminder of show biz careers for teen idols. By 1971, his popularity was waning. He got to star in his own series that year, Getting Together (a Partridge Family spinoff), playing the composing half of a songwriting team.
He also got married in 1971, to Patti Carnel. They had two kids, but divorced in 1979. Former co-star David Soul married Patti and, later, beat her.
Sherman's sitcom flopped. Up against the hottest show on TV, All In The Family, Getting Together was canceled after half a season. Bobby appeared in TV guest shots now and then over the next 15 years, but his career never really recovered, and he eventually made the transition into police and emergency work.
He's mostly forgotten today. But among women of a certain age, they remember.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:04 AM
3 Comments:
Police and emergency work? Seem s like a strange lateral move from show business. Had he been interested in this field before he got the singing bug?
Even a short career as a pop idol, and I assume royalties from at least commercial and film use of his songs now and then, should provide a living, so I find it interesting that he has a career so far removed from his start.
I'm guessing he would have continued in show biz if show biz had allowed it.
I don't know what kind of contracts he signed, but a few reasonably successful years in show biz forty years ago (or even today) is probably not enough to set you for life. (Also, I don't think he wrote his own songs.) With bad management, it might not even give you a decent nest egg.
From what I've learned, he became really rich during his career and still is. Unlike many teen idols, he had good management and good advice, and he invested the money well. He also was pretty solidly middle-class and 'square' and didn't throw his money away. There was a hell of a lot of Bobby Sherman-related merchandise sold during his heyday, and he earned a lot from that. I have heard that he does not keep the money he earns as a police officer (he turns back his paychecks); for him, it's an avocation, not a job.
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