A vow to choose tenderness over cynicism, set to a sleek West Coast pulse.
On Get It Up for Love, David Cassidy folds a buoyant AOR groove into The Higher They Climb, The Harder They Fall (1975), the RCA debut he co-produced with Bruce Johnston. Issued in Britain and Ireland as a double-A side with I Write the Songs, the single climbed into the U.K. Top 20, peaking at No. 11 during an eight-week chart run; it also proved sturdy abroad, reaching the South African Top 10 (No. 7) and making the Irish Top 20 (No. 13). Together, these numbers marked a clear signal that Cassidy’s post-teen-idol recalibration had commercial legs.
The song’s lineage is a story of Los Angeles songcraft passing from hand to hand. Written by Ned Doheny, it first surfaced on record in 1974 via Stephen Michael Schwartz before Cassidy cut it for The Higher They Climb; only later did Ned Doheny issue his own now-canonical reading on Hard Candy (1976). As a timeline, that arc is revealing: Cassidy wasn’t chasing a trend so much as catching a live current running through mid-’70s Laurel Canyon and studio-A corridors—adult pop with R&B lean, polished but warm.
Lyrically, Get It Up for Love resists cheap wink-wink; the double entendre is the doorway, not the destination. The verses sketch a world frayed by “tricky situation[s],” where the choices are flight, fight, or faith. The chorus reframes everything as an insistence on generosity—“get it up” as a call to raise one’s emotional voltage against the drag of disillusion. That’s why the record lands as grown-man pop rather than leftover teen fizz: the need is urgent, but the tone is stoic, even companionable. Cassidy’s phrasing—ease up the vowel, grit the tail of the line—sells resolve, not conquest, and threads perfectly with the West Coast instrumentation.
That instrumentation matters. Bruce Johnston’s pop instincts anchor the arrangement, but the personnel list reads like a map of L.A. session royalty: guitars by Danny Kortchmar (with Ned Doheny lending his own), bass lines from Leland Sklar, Willie Weeks, or Emory Gordy Jr., and drums from timekeepers like Jim Keltner, Jim Gordon, Ricky Fataar, and Gary Mallaber. The effect is weightless propulsion—rhythm that glides rather than stomps, with air between the kick and the keys so Cassidy’s vocal can sit forward. It’s the same studio ecosystem that, by decade’s end, listeners would dub “yacht,” but here the seams still show just enough to feel human.
There’s also context to the single pairing. Coupled with I Write the Songs—Bruce Johnston’s gracefully meta hymn that later became a U.S. smash for Barry Manilow—Get It Up for Love announced where Cassidy wanted to live: adult material written by serious craftsmen, framed by A-team players. The U.K. chart run of the double-A underscored that message; audiences were willing to follow him past pin-up iconography into songs that carried a little philosophy in their pockets.
The tune’s afterlife confirms its sturdiness. When Ned Doheny finally put his version on Hard Candy, the composition slipped effortlessly into the soft-soul continuum and later found disco-floor traction via covers (notably Táta Vega). But it’s Cassidy’s 1975 cut that captures the pivot point—teen idol no longer, adult stylist emerging—wrapping an ethic of generosity in three minutes of lacquered sunlight. Half a century later, Get It Up for Love still reads like a small manifesto: if the world sours, don’t harden—turn the heart’s fader up and meet it head-on.