I was stranded in Disco. I went to dozens of darkened places with enough flashing lights to drive the average person mad. I felt lost in the pulse of sheer panic.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
All of a sudden to get all of this attention, and to be away from home and working all the time was hard. I was on planes all the time. I didn't see my friends. I cried a lot. It was quite terrifying.
When I was younger, I was ready to go off at any time. My wife, Linda, and I would go out to the Limelight in New York, and I would see people and be able to freeze them with a look. People were even too scared of me to tell me that people were scared of me.
It was like being in the eye of a hurricane. You'd wake up in a concert and think, Wow, how did I get here?
I don't remember what was going through my mind, but what was going through my body was fear and terror. I had been on the road with Johnny and working gigs and playing a lot of the organ clubs.
I had people sleeping in front of my home. I couldn't go anywhere. It confronted me from the moment I woke up. There would be 100 people at the lot where we shot 'The Partridge Family.'
I was brought up in a very open, rural countryside in the middle of nowhere. There were no cell phones. If your lights went out, you were lit by candlelight for a good four days before they can get to you. And so, my imagination was crazy.
We turned the switch, saw the flashes, watched for ten minutes, then switched everything off and went home. That night I knew the world was headed for sorrow.
In the beginning, I was frightened to death of going solo. Especially when doing live shows, I was so used to my brothers being next to me. It felt like the crowd was just looking at me, waiting for me to either mess up or prove myself.
For the first time, I lived alone... in a luxury apartment on Sunset Strip. For a few days I loved the idea, but I got lonely and restless.
I once spent an entire night in a hotel in New York looking across the way into someone's apartment where nothing was happening but daily life, a phone call, television watching, staring into the fridge. Seeing how those strangers lived over that small distance and in absolute silence moved me deeply.