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David Cassidy interview

Whenever singer David Cassidy plays New Jersey, it's a homecoming.

The onetime teen idol — remembered by a generation of swooning teens as guitar-strumming Keith Partridge in the '70s musical sitcom, "The Partridge Family" — lived in West Orange with his maternal grandparents from age 5 to 11.

"I played Little League," Cassidy says in a recent call. "There was a field that's still there. I went back and took my son (Beau) through there a couple of years ago. We drove all through where I grew up. We visited the house my grandparents owned. My mom was raised there.

"I had a lot of very religious influences — Christian religious," he says, launching into his conservative, blue-collar credentials.

His grandfather, a Methodist, and grandmother, an Episcopalian, were involved in their respective churches. Cassidy became the soloist in the junior choir; his grandmother was a pianist and soloist in the senior choir. There was a lot of Bible school, according to the singer.

"It probably was subconsciously something that — later on in life, as I went through becoming extremely successful early on — helped to keep me grounded," he says.

Cassidy — a recent "Celebrity Apprentice" participant who is scheduled to perform in Englewood on Wednesday and Red Bank on Oct. 6 — wants to tell his fans that he is still grounded, despite his DUI bust in Florida in November. He doesn't deny culpability in the incident, which he calls "a great wake-up."