On the back of a tender hit, David Cassidy left a smaller, more restless confession—a B-side that says as much about his moment in 1972 as the single everyone remembers.
Released in 1972 as the B-side to David Cassidy’s solo version of “Cherish”, “All I Wanna Do Is Touch You” belongs to that fascinating corner of pop history where the song on the reverse side can tell the deeper story. “Cherish”, drawn from Cassidy’s solo album Cherish, was the kind of title that fit his public image beautifully: romantic, soft-edged, familiar, easy to imagine floating out of a radio on a warm afternoon. But flip the record over, and the mood changes. Not dramatically, not with rebellion for its own sake, but with a kind of directness that feels revealing.
That is what makes this B-side worth returning to. In the early 1970s, Cassidy was living inside one of the most intense forms of fame pop music could produce. He was adored on television, mobbed in person, and often talked about more as an object of fantasy than as a working singer trying to shape a real recording career. His solo releases mattered because they were one of the few places where he could begin to separate himself, even slightly, from the machinery around him. A B-side like “All I Wanna Do Is Touch You” may not have been promoted as the main event, but it carries a different charge precisely because it was not asked to carry the entire public narrative.
What stands out in the song is its title alone. “All I Wanna Do Is Touch You” is much more immediate than “Cherish.” One title suggests devotion wrapped in sweetness and distance; the other moves closer, reducing romance to impulse, nearness, and physical longing. That contrast matters. It shows how a single release could contain two versions of the same star: the carefully framed dream on the A-side, and something more candid, more earthbound, on the back. For an artist like Cassidy, whose image was so heavily managed by public demand, that difference feels especially telling.
The song also reminds us what B-sides used to do. They were not always grand statements, and they were not always hidden masterpieces. But they often offered a side door into an artist’s catalog. They could be looser, stranger, tougher, more intimate, or simply less burdened by expectation. In Cassidy’s case, “All I Wanna Do Is Touch You” works as a subtle corrective to the idea that his early solo work was all polish and surface. There is polish here too, of course; this is still early-70s pop, designed for records, radio, and fans who knew every sleeve by heart. Yet there is also a sharper emotional outline. The song feels less like a soft-focus portrait and more like a voice leaning forward.
That shift is important when thinking about Cassidy as a vocalist. He was often underestimated because his fame arrived in such a blinding package. But listening back to material like this, you can hear how much of his appeal depended on control rather than excess. He did not need to over-sing a line to make it land. Part of his effectiveness came from sounding youthful without sounding careless, eager without losing melody. On “All I Wanna Do Is Touch You”, that balance becomes part of the song’s meaning. The performance lives in that narrow space between innocence and urgency, which is exactly why it lingers.
There is also something revealing in the fact that this song sat behind a cover as well known as “Cherish,” first made famous by The Association. A familiar A-side gives listeners comfort; a lesser-known B-side gives them context. If “Cherish” offered reassurance, “All I Wanna Do Is Touch You” offered friction. Not scandal, not rupture—just a little more human pressure. It suggests desire without dressing it up too carefully, and in doing so it edges Cassidy a step away from the poster on the wall and closer to a young pop singer with instincts of his own.
That may be the real pleasure of revisiting it now. The song is not valuable merely because it is obscure, and not because every overlooked B-side must be rescued into greatness. It matters because it sharpens the picture. It lets us hear David Cassidy in a less protected frame, during a year when his solo career was trying to hold both mass appeal and personal identity in the same pair of hands. Records from that era often asked artists to be many things at once. On one side, tenderness. On the other, touch. On one side, idealized romance. On the other, a more immediate pulse.
So if “Cherish” remains the remembered title, “All I Wanna Do Is Touch You” remains the revealing one. It does not overturn the single that carried it, and it does not need to. Its power lies in how quietly it changes the proportions of the story. Flip the record, and the image becomes less distant, less decorative, more alive. That is often what the best B-sides do: they do not argue with the hit so much as complete it.
