Cubby O'Brien - Career

Career

O'Brien, like Annette Funicello, was personally selected to audition for The Mickey Mouse Club by Walt Disney, in the spring of 1955. Disney had been alerted to him by a staff member, who caught his live performance at a charity gala.

Though he had little prior experience in singing or dancing, O'Brien was placed on The Mickey Mouse Club's first-string "Red Team" right from the start. He quickly picked up enough dance skills to perform in musical numbers, though his solo performances remained centered around his drums. He remained with the show for all three seasons (1955–1958) of original programming, and after filming stopped, went on live-performance tours with other Mouseketeers to Australia in 1959 and 1960.

Following Disney, he joined the Lawrence Welk organization for two years, having performed with the "Little Band", doing guest bits on the maestro's show, as well as other television series. After graduating from high school, Cubby started touring with Spike Jones, playing show tunes and dance music with the formerly manic bandleader's final group. He then played for Ann-Margret in her live performances, and in the late sixties returned to television as the sometime on-camera drummer for CBS's The Carol Burnett Show.

O'Brien also acted as Music Director for LA touring companies of the Broadway hits Hair and Oh, Calcutta! in the early seventies, and often fulfilled the same role for other engagements where his primary responsibility was drumming.

Beginning in 1973, O'Brien played drums for The Carpenters during tours, through the early eighties. Karen Carpenter usually played them herself on recordings, but for live performances sometimes needed a substitute, so she could sing. The two drummers became quite close, in a platonic, professional sense, with O'Brien introducing Karen Carpenter to drumming-legend Buddy Rich.

O'Brien was a contestant on the ABC game show The Big Showdown in the mid-1970s, winning $5,000 for rolling "Show Down" during the timed dice roll round.

In 1980, O'Brien reunited with his fellow Mouseketeers for a television special, in which he sang and danced, and, of course, played drums. He also joined some of these same Mouseketeers for live shows on fall weekends at Disneyland during the early 1980s.

Since the eighties, O'Brien's career has predominated around performing for Broadway productions, as well as for live shows by performers like Bernadette Peters. He based himself out of New York City instead of the West Coast for many years, though he has since moved back.