It’s an example of sharp, mechanistically precise early-’70s studio-pop, but it’s also, in its way, a weird song. “I Think I Love You” came from Tony Romeo, a songwriter who’d written tracks for groups like the Everly Brothers and the Seekers. But he never fought for creative control the way the Monkees did.) And the Partridge Family’s biggest hit and only #1 was the first single that they ever released.
(David Cassidy, in true Monkee fashion, felt uncomfortable with his teen-idol status, and he ended up posing naked on the cover of Rolling Stone and pursuing a fairly successful solo career. The Partridge Family ended up making a lot of hits during that four-season run, but this wasn’t a Monkees situation where they became a musical entity unto themselves. The Partridge Family was a hit, so it ended up generating a whole lot of work for America’s pro songwriters and session musicians. Instead, it was just a standard-issue corny ’70s sitcom, with the added twist that every episode featured the members of this family sitting down in their garage or on some park bandshell to sing a song together. But the show ran for four years, and all the reruns I can remember seeing as a kid didn’t really have anything to do with what it’s like to be in a band with your mother or your siblings. The first season of The Partridge Family was apparently about this family out on tour.
(The other Partridge siblings, including future LA Law star Susan Dey and future insane right-wing radio host Danny Bonaduce, were unrelated, but Jones and Cassidy were the only cast members who actually sang on Partridge Family records.) ABC somehow ended up casting Shirley Jones, a stage-musical veteran, as Partridge Family matriarch Shirley, and David Cassidy, her 19-year-old stepson, as her oldest son Keith. The first idea was to make the Cowsills the stars of the show, but the Cowsills couldn’t act. In the late ’60s, the TV executive Bernard Slade had the idea to make a TV show loosely based on the lives of the Cowsills, a band of six Rhode Island siblings who were making hits at the time. The Partridge Family were both a fake family band and, in a weird twist, a real family band.
In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.
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