By Shane Rodgers
In a world before Tik Tok and Snapchat there were teen magazines. The currency of teen magazines was a small number of young men known as teen idols.
These idols were responsible for mania, a disease caught mostly by teenage girls searching for someone cute to scream at. Anyone who caught mania became known as a teenybopper.
Growing up in the late 60s, 70s and maybe the 80s, you could not enter a newsagent without seeing a wall of magazines with the same group of clean cut young singers staring out at you.
Tiger Beat, Teen Beat, 16 Magazine, Melanie, Fave, Flip and Smash Hits produced dozens of articles, pieces of merchandise and posters designed for teen walls.
The headlines wailed: “Donny’s secret bedtime stories”, “David’s private heartache”, “Bobby could be your pen pal”, “Win a date with…”
Most of the stories were made up but they fuelled an insatiable teen machine that probably made somebody a lot of money.
That was then. Each year we lose more and more of the boys who became men, and then old men. And then they were gone.
The latest to pass away (last month) was Bobby Sherman. In recent years the world also lost David Cassidy, three out of four Monkees, nearly half of the Bay City Rollers and an Osmond brother.
While there are still plenty of singers who attract big followings, the era of mania seems long gone. Back then literally thousands of fans would hang outside hotel rooms and airports so they could scream in person at their idols.
There was no internet coverage of everyone’s daily lives, so the only connection with the teen idols was magazines, buying records and occasional television appearances.
When these performers arrived in your country it was like some sort of apparition coming to life. Pop culture was a real mass market and the teen market was the heart of this action.
So whatever happened to all of those teen idols?
Bobby Sherman
Sherman had a string of top 40 hits in the late sixties and early seventies as well as appearing in heaps of television shows including a staring role in Here Comes the Brides. After his star faded he become a paramedic and deputy sheriff before coming back to do some teen idol tours. He died of kidney cancer in June this year.
David Cassidy
At one point Cassidy had the largest fan club ever seen in the world. He found fame with the television show The Partridge Family, in which he was lead singer of the family band. The TV fame morphed into a real music career which was stellar in the early 70s and produced more hits in the mid-1980s and early 90s. Cassidy had issues with alcohol for much of his career and died of kidney and liver failure in 2017.
Donny Osmond
Osmond was a staple of the teen magazines in 1970s as a solo performer, a member of the Osmond Brothers (later known as The Osmonds) and a duet with his sister Marie. Donny and Marie hosted a television variety show in the late 1970s. Osmond’s career tanked in the 1980s but had a reset in 1988-89 when he released a single under a different name and it went to number two in the US. Since then, he has performed in successful musicals, hosted a talk show with his sister and he is still performing very successfully (at age 67) as a resident act in Las Vegas.
The Osmonds
With and without Donny, the Osmond family has been making music ever since their prime hit-making years in the 1970s. Wayne Osmond passed away this year at age 73 from a stroke. His other brothers are still alive but the eldest, Alan, has been suffering multiple sclerosis since 1987 and seldom performs. The youngest, Jimmy (who had some hits in the 1970s as Little Jimmy Osmond), survived a stroke in 2018.
Shaun Cassidy
Shaun Cassidy is a half brother to David Cassidy and managed his own string of top ten hits and magazine covers in the 1970s. He also starred in the prime-time Hardy Boys mysteries television series. Cassidy has mostly done television production in the years since, but, at age 66, he is currently touring his music in the US.
Leif Garrett
Garrett attracted a big female teenage following after being cast in the 1970s television show Three for the Road and then had some big hits, most doing covers of 60s songs like Surfin USA. At 64, Garrett still tours sometimes in the US. He has done odds and ends of movies and television over the years, but also received unwanted attention for drug problems.
The Monkees
The Monkees were a made for television rock group that filled plenty of teen magazine ink in the late 1960s. Only Micky Dolenz, who still tours continuously at 80, is still alive. Davy Jones, who was one of the original teen idols, died of a heart attack at age 66 in 2012. Peter Tork (77) died in 2019 after battling cancer and Michael Nesmith died in 2021 after experiencing heart trouble. After their early success, the Monkees made several successful comebacks as a group. They had a big resurgence in the 1980s after MTV played a Monkees marathon and found chart success again in 2016 with the Good Times album, written by some of the best writers in the business.
Bay City Rollers
In the 1970s, nothing said teen mania in Australia more than the Scottish group The Bay City Rollers. They had teenagers dressing in tartan and screaming until their voices were shredded. Sadly, the group has experienced a lot of tragedy since. Lead singer Les McKeown (65) died suddenly in his home in 2021, three years after the death of founding member Alan Longmuir (70). Ian Mitchell, who joined the line-up at the tail end of their most successful years, died in 2020 at age 62 from throat cancer. The surviving rollers have continued to perform in different configurations of the band over the years.
Duran Duran
Teen mania returned to some extent in the 1980s with Duranmania. British group Duran Duran had a string of hits in what was sometimes called the second British invasion in the US (after the big success of The Beatles and others in the first wave in the 1960s). The group reformed for a while in 2001 to strong success and was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2022. They still tour and release music in various configurations.
