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The Lost Teen Idol
Barry Cowsill has lost his way before. But now he's missing.
A member of the 1960s family singing group, The Cowsills, Barry Cowsill had recently moved to New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina ripped through on Aug. 29. He left a message on his sister Susan's cell phone that was retrieved a few days later. He said he was holed up in his apartment. He said he'd seen looting. He asked for help.
That was the last his siblings heard from Barry Cowsill.
That was nearly two months ago.
"Barry is not the only one," says Vicky Sedgwick, a friend of the Cowsills, and Webmaster of the band's official site turned search tool, Cowsill.com. "There are thousands of people still missing."
At the National Center for Missing Adults, the scroll of people missing from Katrina runs 165 pages long. Barry Cowsill is on page 33.
Barry Cowsill's name also turns up in just about every online database for Katrina victims. The pleas, placed by family and friends, are the same: Please call us. Please let us come get you.
In a way, the Cowsills have been looking for Barry for years.
"Barry is the sweetest guy you could ever meet," Sedgwick says. "He's very charismatic, very funny. [But] Barry had trouble dealing with the family image...He never really wanted to be a teen idol."
Before the Jackson Five, before the Osmonds, the first first family of the pop charts was the Cowsills. The group consisted of brothers Billy, Bob, John, Barry and, later, in its most popular incarnation, Paul, another brother, sister Susan, and mother Barbara. Before he was 15, Barry had toured, harmonized on Ed Sullivan and shared in two gold records for the hits "Hair" and "The Rain, the Park and Other Things."
By the time he was 16, Barry's and the Cowsills' story was being told in sitcom form on The Partridge Family. It could be said Danny Bonaduce was the de facto Barry--like Barry Cowsill, Bonaduce's Danny Partridge was the bass player.
The crash came for the famously troubled Bonaduce after the cancellation of The Partridge Family in 1974; the crash for Barry Cowsill came even sooner. Before the TV show they'd inspired--and almost starred in--was even three months old, the Cowsills were dropped from their record label.
When Katrina hit New Orleans, Sedgwick says, Barry Cowsill, now 51, was preparing to check himself into alcohol rehab. He had a one-way ticket to Los Angeles. The flight was the next day. And then the storm came.
"Of course, that plane wasn't going," Sedgwick says.
Susan Cowsill, also a New Orleans resident and a regular on the local music scene, returned to the washed-away city in mid-September to check on her house, and to check for her brother. The house was still there, though damaged; her brother was nowhere to be found. She even checked the only open-for-business bar, Sedgwick says.
There have been some leads, some reputed sightings, including one that had Barry Cowsill showing up on CNN, but nothing that as of yet has reunited the siblings. (Mom Barbara died in 1985; father Bud, the band's manager, died in 1992.)
"Where is Barry?" the front door of Cowsill.com asks. Nearly two months after Katrina, the family still wants to know.
"If he's out there," Sedgwick says, "maybe he's singing somewhere."
Tips on Barry Cowsill's whereabouts can be sent to Cowsill.com, via cowsillfan@aol.com.
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