It must be a supreme pain in the ass to be adored by millions of teenage girls one minute and then ignored by them the next. I wouldn't know, as I only experienced the latter growing up, but Donny Osmond could surely hum a few bars.
From 1971 to 1973, there was no bigger teen idol in the U.S. and, seemingly, no issue of Tiger Beat magazine without his toothy grin on the cover, but then, like all teen idols before and after, Osmond fell back to earth with a cruel ferocity that we normal folks take for granted.
1974: Donny and Michael Jackson upstaged by Gary Coleman? Nope that's Rodney Allen Rippy.
I am reminded of the time that Donny Osmond was booked to appear at the opening of a shopping mall in the mid-70's that was met with all the enthusiasm of a summer school class without air conditioning.
The excited throngs of teenage girls that the mall's management had surely expected to materialize when the gig was booked a year or so earlier had since moved on to bigger and hunkier things (the Sweathogs, maybe?) and the empty space in front of the stage while Donny sang to a backing track of his new single, appropriately titled "Where Did All The Good Times Go?", was hastily filled with mall and city officials who'd obviously not planned to be called into such action.
It was like watching aliens attempt to dance and clap for the first time, yet Donny unleashed the teeth and pretended to sing his ass off for the duration of the one song as shoppers stopped momentarily to gawk at the odd spectacle before continuing on to Hickory Farms to gaze in wide-eyed wonder at blocks of cheese.
As the song ended, there was a smattering of polite applause and then a lone voice yelled "Where's Marie?"
For this young whipper snapper, it was an eye opening realization that what goes up must come down and when it does, its rarely pretty.
Buoyed temporarily by the country's love affair with his cute sis Marie, Osmond's own star continued to plunge for the next two decades until, finally, he had seemingly run out of options for re-igniting his stalled career. When the down-on-his-luck Osmond asked Michael Jackson for some friendly advice on how to jump-start his career, Jackson reportedly replied, "Change your name."
While initially shocked by Jackson's brutal honesty, Osmond's last-ditch attempt to become relevant again would ultimately take Jackson's advice to heart, albeit many years later and only after finding support from a very unlikely source.
For whatever reason, ex-Genesis singer Peter Gabriel took an unlikely interest in the former pop star and invited him to his secluded UK recording studio where such hit albums as Security and So had been recorded. There, Osmond met Gabriel cohort George Ocogny, who woukld go on to produce several tracks on what would become Osmond's 1989 comeback album, entitled simply Donny Osmond.
Of course, all the connections in the world won't help without a little good old-fashioned luck, which arrived in the form of WPLJ DJ Jessica Ettinger, who crafted a scheme to add the song to her daily playlist that involved challenging listeners to name the "mystery artist" behind the song.
After weeks of airplay had successfully piqued the interest of her audience, she announced the identity of the song's artist with Osmond, himself, in the studio for the unveiling.
Capitol Records signed Osmond and released the album, along with 1990's Eyes Don't Lie, thereby making Osmond employable yet again. He would later be offered the starring role in Tim Rice's production of "Joseph And The Technicolor Dreamcoat", first with theatrical runs in Toronto (1992) and here in Chicago (1994), and finally in the 1999 film version.
Now, of course, there's no getting rid of Osmond and, for that, we all have Peter Gabriel to thank.
Nobody's more aware of that than Osmond, who fittingly covered Peter Gabriel's "Don't Give Up" on his 2014 album The Soundtrack Of My Life.