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Middletown - Richard Cowsill's moment of deliverance is so close, just days away, that he can hardly think about anything else.

The boy who was shunted aside, left out and kicked around is now 51 years old. And if all goes well on Saturday, Cowsill will do something he was denied as a child: He will sing with his brothers and his sister.

He will finally become a "Cowsill."

"I'm a 50-year-old man with a child's dream," he said. "I feel like Christmas is coming. Or it's like whenyou're a kid and you're going to an amusement park and you can't stop thinking about all the rides."

On Saturday and Sunday, Cowsill will sing with the Cowsills, the Newport-based family group that sent four shiny, happy Top 40 hits onto the Billboard charts from 1967 through 1970 and was the prototype for "The Partridge Family." His five brothers and his sister, along with their assorted kids, will be in town to play at the Taste of Rhode Island Festival at the Newport Yachting Center on Saturday and Sunday.

And Richard will make his first official appearance, nearly 40 years after his father first told him he couldn't carry a tune and cast him from the band.

"When we were on the Ed Sullivan Show - I always use 'we' loosely - I stood there in the wings," he said. "It had become a non-issue for me. It wasn't my life. The Cowsills weren't part of my life."

But now they are back in his life, he hopes, as performers and as family.

"That's what I really want, a family. Man, I really want that feeling of a family."

Family affair

These days, Cowsill has his own family. He lives in an apartment in East Bay Village with his wife, Susan, a flight attendant, and his son, Bryan, 14, a student at Middletown High School. He also has a son, Nathan, 28, and a daughter, Barbara, 26, from an earlier marriage.

And he's happy: "This ain't no pitty party, man."

Still, it's the lost family he seeks. The childhood in Newport and Middletown, his exclusion from the band and the regular beatings at the hand of his late father, Bud Cowsill - that's what he's grappled with.

"My father was a very angry man, a sick man," Cowsill said. "He was a sad man. All I can figure is that he hated himself so much that he took it out on us."

Richard Cowsill, nicknamed Dickie as a kid, said everyone was victimized. But his father, a Navy chief petty officer, seemed to take his anger out on him especially; "One of my first recollections is of him breaking his toe kicking me. He broke it right on my fanny."

Before the band took off - and in between stays in Newport - the family lived in Canton, Ohio and Cowsill remembers singing with his brothers at church, feeling confident. "My mother told me I sounded beautiful," he recalled. "But my father then told me that I couldn't sing, that I was lipping it, faking."

When he was 12, Richard lobbied to join the band, maybe singing or playing the drums. His father gave him a "12-second" audition on drums, told him they already had a drummer and that he couldn't sing.

"After that, I didn't care a thing about music," he said. "My life was devoid of music."

From then on, he was the outsider, the limelight blinding him yet never landing on him.

But when your siblings are pop stars, on the radio and courting by Ed Sullivan, there's no getting away from it, either. If Bud Cowsill, an orphan at 15, lacked parenting skills, he compensated with promotional drive. His family, minus one, would be famous - and for a while, wealthy.

The Cowsills came together as a band play school dances and Banister's Wharf clubs. It started with brothers Bill, Bob (Richard's twin), John and Barry. Brother Paul joined and, for marketing purposes, mother Barbara, dubbed "Mini-Mom," and Susan, 7, the kid sister with the pixie cut, were brought in to round things out.

Instead of four brothers who wanted to be the Beatles, it became a family affair on stage.

The four original Cowsills had released some British Invasion flavored 45s that never caught fire. Bud got the full group marketed as an apple-pie and put-on-a-happy-face family, and the record label waned to sweeten the sound a bit.

"People say they were bubble gum," Richard Cowsill said. "They weren't bubble gum. They couldn't help it if my father and the record company decided otherwise."

Bubble gum or not, the sound worked. They sold millions with "The Rain, the Park and Other Things," Which went to No. 2 on the Billboard charts, followed by "We Can Fly," "Indian Lake" and "Hair."

And as 16 Magazine and Tiger Beat came calling, brother Richard stayed on the sidelines, lugging equipment. "Your siblings are teen idols and you're told you're inadequate," he said. "That's something that stays with you."

Escape to Vietnam

Cowsill didn't stay around long once he turned 18. He was an indifferent student at Middletown High School ("Bob got the As and that left me with the Cs and Ds") and was more interested in surfing than school.

He admits he was not the easiest kid to handle. He struggled with attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder, not diagnosed until years later. "They didn't have a name for it the," he said. "They just thought you were a royal pain I the ass."

After he graduated from Middletown High, there was a final confrontation with Bud. Richard showed up late with a borrowed car and Bud let loose with a torrent of violence. This time, he told his son to hit the road.

Richard Cowsill joined the Army and found solace in the unlikeliest of places - the jungles of Vietnam. "The military, that was my father's idea," Cowsills said. "And it was the background we had, 'yes sir' and 'no sir.' You didn't question him. My only thing was that I joined the Army instead of the Navy."

In Vietnam, he shed his childhood stutter. The Viet Cong were scary. But his father was terrifying.

"The thing in Vietnam was that you could fight back," Cowsill said. "I never would have done that with my father. You would never even think of challenging that man."

But even in the jungle, the Cowsills were hard to shake. Richard came from a famous pop music family and guys wanted to hassle him, even fight him, because of it.

"Because I was a Cowsill I was getting my ass kicked," he said. "Even though I really wasn't a Cowsill, so to speak."

While he lost his stutter, he gained a heroin habit. A drug-using Cowsill decided he no longer wanted to be there, and told his commanding officer the same. "I just went into my CO - a West Pointer - and told him I wanted to go home," Cowsill recalled. "I did my best to get them to send me home. I convinced them. I might've been on drugs but I was good."

During his crusade to go home, Cowsill racked up a string of conduct violations and was busted from sergeant to private. They sent him to a bas in Arizona ("where they sent all the crazies"), from which he went AWOL to attend his brother Bob's wedding. Upon his return, they sent him to the stockade and bounced him from the Army with an "undesirable" discharge. He eventually earned back his honorable discharge, medals and GI Bill benefits through a military appeal.

This may be the only publicity photo of the Cowsills to show Richard 'Dickie' Cowsill, at the left. The photo was taken circa 1967 at the Ida Lewis Yacht Club in Newport. Cowsill is shown with his five brothers, father, mother and sister.

Richard Cowsill is the only Cowsill child who did not get to play in the famous 1960s group.

"I don't like to talk that much about Vietnam," he said. "It took me 12 years to feel comfortable talking about it. In Vietnam, they put you on a plane, drop you into a jungle and say they'll see you in a year."

After Vietnam, Cowsill became what he now sings of in a song by his brother Bill - "Vagabond." He drifted from state to state, still hooked on drugs and peddling chocolate cake mix blended with baking soda as "organic mescaline," selling the fake drugs to feed his own habit.

"It cost me $2.50 and I made $90. The way I look at it now," he said with a smile, "I was saving those people from a life of drugs."

He married young and began, at an inch-by inch pace, to realize the dangers in his heroin addicted lifestyle. In San Francisco, Cowsill swiped a bottle of wine from a store and ended up in the Santa Rita prison farm for 35 days. He rubbed pepper in his eyes and purposely hyperventilated to get sent to the infirmary. They pumped him with thorazine for the rest of his stay and he was excused from work details.

"Through the haze, I thin I was beginning to see kind of clearly," he said. "But it would be a while."

From top to bottom

As Richard Cowsill wandered the country, the Cowsills unraveled. The band fell apart and the family fractured like brittle bone, members scattering across the country. Things soured fast for the group once featured in a nationwide milk campaign. The fame outlasted the money. There was a bad land deal, excessive spending and wrongheaded investments. Richard Cowsill said his father trusted dishonest people.

In a 1990 interview with "People" magazine, John Cowsill said he found a grand total of $1,800 in his trust fund. Brother Richard watched the demise from afar.

"I was slowly starting to put my life together," he said. "I'd been to the bottom and was heading up as they were heading to the bottom."

Cowsill worked construction in California on Hollywood sets and built houses. He and second wife, Susan, whom he married 18 years ago, moved to Arizona, where his mother lived her final years before dying in 1985. During an interview, just mentioning his mother brought Cowsill to tears. He said Barbara Cowsill died wishing she'd taken the kids and left her husband when the money was still flowing.

"I don't blame my mother for a thing, he said. "She was in line for the blows like the rest of us."

When Bud Cowsill, who moved to Mexico and kept away from his children, died in the early 1990s, Richard Cowsill said he never shed a tear. "We were more like a business than a family," he said. "We were sort of individual cells. There was no love. We were not allowed to think. We didn't understand love. There was no kind of sibling bonding. That was not allowed."

After Barbara Cowsill died, Richard and Susan moved to Massapequa, Long Island. When the Cowsills played reunion shows in Newport in 1990, he came in to see them.

"At one of the shows, I started to pick up the equipment," he said. "That drove my brother Bob crazy. But that was my reflex, that's what I'd always done."

Three years ago, he moved his family back to Middletown. "It was my heart that brought me back. I wanted to come back. The quality of life here is unbelievable. I live here and the others wish they could. I have a son who goes to Middletown High School. How cool is that?"

Cowsill is an engaging man with a high-octane exuberance, a broad smile and a generous laugh. An executive director for the Excel electronics corporation, he said his main goals are to be a good husband a a good dad.

He said he seldom drinks and the only drugs he uses are from the pharmacy. His only addition appears to be cigarettes.

"If nothing else, the thing I am most proud of is that I have never raised a finger to my kids. We've broken the cycle of violence."

Sibling reunion

Proud of his own family, Cowsill wants to reconnect with the ones he left at 18, the siblings he's not seen, for the most part, in 10 and even 15 years.

Cowsill thinks this very public family reunion can spark a return to glory. He envisions the Cowsills playing "Late Night With David Letterman," in the old Ed Sullivan Theater where they played in the late '60s. And a visit to the Rosie O'Donnell show would be nice, too.

Cowsill has learned the songs from the band's 1988 CD "Global" (on Robin Records via the Internet) and will sing Manfred Mann's "Do Wah Diddy Diddy" and "Vagabond" this weekend. He visited his brother Bob in California recently and is excited about making music with his family.

"Music was never a part of my life," he said. "I didn't care about it. I didn't follow it. I was in the best studios in American and met all these famous people back then. But I didn't care. It was probably a childish way to deal with everything."

But he picked up little through osmosis. When he went into a recording studio to record "Vagabond," he found he knew things singers take for granted, about singing flat from singing sharp or what key he was in.

"They told me to go back and sing the bridge," he said with a laugh. "I asked if they meant Verrazzano or Mount Hope."

Despite his father's view, Richard can sing, said his brother, Bob Cowsill. "I can't imagine what it was like in his shoes. He has a real gift. But at the time no one asked him what he thought about not being in the group and he never said anything.

"We've kind of analyzed through the years. It had to be a horrible feeling for him, to be the only one," Bob Cowsill said. "But this is a good thing we're doing. This is a chance to rework the ending."

Richard Cowsill can't wait for Saturday. He has a habit of referring to the Cowsills as "we" when talking about th egroup and said it's just easier than saying "they." When people hear his last name, they ask what instrument he played, when song he wrote.

"If I were a synical and bitter person, maybe I woudn't care tht much," he aid. "But I thin I jsut want everyone to be doing OK. That's how I feel. We're like wounded warriors coming back from the war."

On Saturday, Cowsill will take th stage for the first time with his siblings. He is a littl nervous, jumpy and absolutely delighted that he will no longer have to explain that he is a Cowsill, but not a "Cowsill."

He won't use "we" so loosley anymore.

"My wife had the radio on," he said last week, "and there ws a commercial for Taste of Rhode Island and they mentioned the Cowsills. I was saying, 'That's me. I'm a Cowsill. Tht's me.' It's so cool."