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The Best of Rick Springfield
• Jessie's Girl [3:15]
• I've Done Everything For You [3:17]
• Love is Alright Tonite [3:21]
• Don't Talk to Strangers [2:59]
• What Kind of Fool Am I [3:21]
• I Get Excited [2:33]
• Affair of the Heart (Radio Edit) [3:49]
• Human Touch (Extended Mix) [7:15]
• Souls [4:02]
• Love Somebody [3:36]
• Don't Walk Away [3:41]
• Bop Til You Drop (Album Version) [4:20]
• Taxi Dancing [3:42]
• Celebrate Youth [3:55]
• State of the Heart [3:52]
• Rock of Life [3:51]
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It’s 1999 and, among other things, Rick Springfield is turning fifty-impressively youthful-looking fifty, in fact. In the summer of ’98, Springfield hit the road again after a ten-year absence, reprising his hits and debuting new material for his large and loyal following. This wasn’t exactly a comeback because Springfield hadn’t completely gone away; he had been acting on television throughout the nineties. But it was a return to the work that had made him one of the more spectacular pop successes of the early eighties, work he had more or less chosen to set aside before the rigors of the road and the fickle tasters of the marketplace could wear him down. He hadn’t burned out or faded away; he had simply gone home, leaving behind a trail of hits that have renewed relevance in a culture with a growing appetite for all things eighties.
It was the dawn of the MTV era when Rick Springfield hit the top of the charts in 1981. He was certainly telegenic: he was already a rising star of daytime television as Dr. Noah Drake on “General Hospital” and he had adoring female viewers to lure to the record shops. But, with “Jessie’s Girl,” Springfield had also crafted a song that was a remarkable amalgamation of influences. It had an anthemic quality not unlike Bruce Springsteen’s, and it rocked hard in a Van Halen sort of way. It had its roots in the late seventies sound of bands like Thin Lizzy whose alternately tough and tender vocalist, Phil Lynott, Springfield resembled in timbre, yet the arrangement sported many new wave touches à la the Cars. Most of all, though, it had a tremendous friendship versus lust. Springfield plays a standup guy throughout, which made him all the more irresistible. (Rhyming “cute” with “mute” wasn’t a bad touch either.) “Jesse’s Girl” was pure pop longing and it reached Number One, propelling Springfield’s RCA debut, WORKING CLASS DOG, along with it.
Springfield’s seeming overnight success was actually ten years in the making. Although it was his soap opera stardom that helped make him a household name in America, Springfield had always been a rocker. He was born Richard Lewis Springthorpe in 1949 in Sydney, Australia. His dad was a career soldier and his family moved from base to base. The Springthorpes found themselves stationed in England during the early sixties, just in time for the pre-teen Rick to experience the onslaught of Beatlemania firsthand. When he turned thirteen, his parents gave him his first guitar and his fate was sealed. By his own accounts, Springfield was a shy kid who found a refuge in music. Back in Australia as a teenager, he struggled in school before dropping out to pursue the pop life. His first combo, the Jordy Boys, were, according to Springfield, “as hardcore as you can get at 16 years old.” With his next band, Rockhouse, he was offered his first opportunity to go on the road and see a bit more of the world. “We jumped at the chance to earn some money,” Springfield later told The New York Times. Except the part of the world in which they’d be playing was Vietnam. It was 1968, the war was escalating, and they would be performing for U.S. troops. Of course, the eager band went over anyway, running for cover any time someone in the audience yelled “Incoming!”
Safely back in Australia, he joined a very teen-friendly band called Zoot; Springfield played guitar and wrote songs, but the band was fronted by a wavy-haired, baby-faced bond in a bell-bottomed, open-chested jumpsuit. (Well, they all seemed to wear those jumpsuits and sport that hair.) Although Springfield wasn’t center stage, he had presence and energy and he was fast developing into a hit-making songwriter. When Zoot began to fall apart, a pair of Australian managers offered to help the charismatic Springfield develop a solo career. IN 1971, Springfield topped the Australian charts with a sweet and catchy single, “Speak to the Sky.” (“Speak to the sky whenever things go wrong,” went the chorus, “and the world will look better from up there.”) Capitol Records proffered a U.S. deal and Springfield bravely made the leap across a very big pond to Los Angeles and the teen idoldom that seemed to be in his very near future.
Capitol Records sent him to London to record his album; there he was viewed as a credible rocker who just happened to have, as Melody Maker put it, “the wide-eyed look school girls cherish deeper than good music.” In the U.S., however, teen magazines like Sixteen and Tiger Beat had decided Springfield has the potential to be the new David Cassidy and they undertook a massive campaign to install him as their next major pinup boy. In 1972, a re-recorded version of “Speak to the Sky” became a Top 20 hit in the U.S. and his debut album, BEGINNINGS, made a rapid ascent up the charts. Springfield was making eminently radio-worthy tunes, but his growing “bop-ularity,” as one pundit described his teen scene fame, began to put off radio programmers and the more serious elements of the industry. Despite the very real sales figures, Springfield’s sudden success was labeled hype, and he soon found himself unwelcome at radio. Without the support of radio and plagued by visa problems that prevented him from touring properly, Springfield watched his album plunge from the charts as quickly as it had risen.
Looking back on that time, Springfield told Billboard that naivetè was to blame: “To me, it was all just publicity. I would do these long interviews with teen magazines about my music and it would come out “Rick Springfield, is he too tall to love?”
His chart disaster cut short the Capitol deal, but Columbia Records immediately picked him up and sent him back to England to record another album, COMIC BOOK HEROES. Beyond the teen rags, Springfield became tabloid fodder when he embarked on a live-in relationship with Linda Blair, the young actress from The Exorcist. And he literally became a cartoon hero, which ABC television created an animated series around him called “Mission: Magic!” for which Springfield supplied a likeness, a voice and a new song each week. Despite all these efforts, he never enjoyed enough radio airplay to sell a significant amount of records; he had a face everyone could recognize but a sound no one had heard.
Springfield’s career seemed to take on almost a surreal cast, like some crazy combination of “The Partridge Family” and Velvet Goldmine. In 1974, Columbia Records decided to showcase Springfield with another one of their acts, the free jazz violinist Michael Urbaniak, at Max’s Kansas City. That mismatched lineup, in that notoriously hip venue, was enough to single trouble. But during soundtcheck on opening night matters went from potentially bad to definitely worse when Springfield touched a poorly grounded microphone and received an electrical shock that sent him reeling, head-first, into a piano – and that sent him to the hospital. Springfield’s New York debut had to be delayed.
The following night Springfield did appear to a room firmly divided between devotees of free jazz and young Sixteen subscribers. A Melody Maker reporter recorded the details of Springfield’s appearance: “Springfield chose to wear a chamois leather tunic, which coupled with furry boots and a furry armband, gave him the air of a caveman. His thighs were bare from the groin to the knee and most of his chest was similarly exposed, a sight which was not lost on the girls in the front row.” It was in just such an outfit that Linda Blair, in a VH-1 interview, first recalled seeing Springfield, and that’s when she was smitten. So the little girls obviously did understand.
As he told Billboard, “I decided it was best to dump everything because the pull of what people expected and what I wanted would have destroyed me. I had to do something, so I went to acting school.”
For Springfield, this was as momentous a break with his past as his emigration to L.A. He parted ways with his managers, which led to legal wrangles. He was already facing financial hardships. He later recalled in an interview being at L.A.’s Starwood Club in 1975 when “a guy leaned over and said, ‘You used to be Rick Springfield. You should have gone farther.’ He meant well so all I could say was ‘gee, thanks.’”
Springfield fared better as an actor, landing roles on the sort of television shows that fans of seventies pop culture still swoon over: “The Rockford Files,” “Wonder Woman,” “The Six Million Dollar Man,” “The Incredible Hulk,” even a recurring role on “Battlestar Galactica.”
He attempted a musical comeback with WAIT FOR NIGHT, an album he recorded for the Chelsea label with Elton John’s rhythm section of Nigel Olson and Dee Murray. However, as Springfield’s luck as the time would have it, the label folded not long after the album was released. But, with a new management team in place, Springfield continued to develop his music while he built an acting career. In 1980, RCA signed him.
In 1981, his chart success came as swiftly as it has with BEGINNINGS; this time, however, Springfield wasn’t going to disappear. WORKING CLASS DOG was an album Springfield labored over, along with producer Keith Olsen, who also made hits with Fleetwood Mac and Foreigner. Shortly before the record was released, Springfield had been offered a role on “General Hospital,” which was the hottest soap opera of its day, and Springfield rapidly became its hottest star. For once, Springfield’s timing was perfect, and at the ripe old age of 32 he because the radio-ruling, chart-topping teen dream he was suppose to have been ten years earlier.
When he hit the stage in New York City again, it was no Max’s Kansas City debacle, but three sold-out nights at Carnegie Hall. In The New York Times, Stephen Holden observed, “Unlike many pop idols with very young audiences, Rick Springfield offered a lot more than boyish good looks and charisma. He is a rock singer of considerable power and impressive control, as well as an adept guitarist and writer of catchy, commercial songs. And there were times when his sprinting athleticism suggested a soften version of Bruce Springsteen’s heroic antics.
In addition to “Jessie’s Girl,” the platinum-plus WORKING CLASS DOG yielded the Sammy Hagar-penned “I’ve Done Everything For You” and “Love Is Alright Tonite.” Springfield won a Grammy as Best Male Rock Vocalist for “Jessie’s Girl”; the award was presented to him on TV by Adam Ant and Ted Nugent. The million-selling follow-up, SUCCESS HASN’T SPOILED ME YET, was also produced by Olsen and, like its predecessor, featured Springfield’s dog Ron on the cover. It contained the Top Ten single, “Don’t Talk To Strangers, “ along with “What Kind of Fool Am I,” and “I Get Excited.” In late ’82, Springfield left “General Hospital” to concentrate on his skyrocketing musical career. The pace of his double life had become unbearable: taping television episodes all week, then dashing around the country for weekend concerts. He co-produced his third album, the synthesizer-driven LIVING IN OZ, with engineer/mixer Bill Drescher, and this time he tried to get more personal. “Oz” was Australia as well as the state he was in. It too was not lacking in hits, with “Affair of the Heart” and “Human Touch.”
Springfield had always expressed a desire to work in films. Out of the many offers he was getting, he chose a lightweight romantic comedy, Hard to Hold, about a pop star not unlike himself falling for a painfully square woman with no knowledge or love of the rock world. This ill-conceived project, which was about as goofy as rock movies come, may have been a misstep in Springfield’s acting career, but the soundtrack was a smash and contained one of Springfield’s most insidiously catchy tunes, “Love Somebody.” The soundtrack was his fourth million-selling album in less than four years. His audience hung in there with him, as Stephen Holden remarked in The New York Times after Springfield’s three-night, sold-out stand at Radio City Music Hall in 1984: “It is a more loyal and sophisticated claque than yesterday’s fickly teeny-bopper fans of the likes of David Cassidy and Andy Gibb.
When his career was just about to explode, Springfield cautiously told Rolling Stone, “I could simmer down or I could go through the roof.” With TAO, a 1985 release that RCA promoted with an ambitious audio/video campaign, he started to simmer down (although “Celebrate Youth” was a Top 40 single.) But Springfield had already gone through the roof and he seemed ready to put the brakes on his frantic schedule. He turned his attentions to his wife and the family they were starting to raise. An older, wiser, more introspective Springfield returned to the charts in 1988 with ROCK OF LIFE. Although the album has a respectable run, Springfield’s momentum was gone. On the ever of a tour he’d booked to support the record, Springfield was seriously sidelined by an accident while riding an All Terrain Vehicle and the tour never happened. As he had once done in the seventies, Springfield decided not to look back. He was ready to get a life.
In the early seventies, when a Melody Maker reporter asked Springfield what kind of music he liked, he expressed his admiration for the English band Free, whose biggest hit was the classic rock standard, “All Right Now.” He felt they wrote “good and simple songs” and they were “a great band to rock to.” The same applies to the songs on this collection, which are good, simple, exuberant, confident, superbly crafted, and a tremendous amount of fun. Springfield remains a great guy to rock to. And that’s all he ever wanted – Michael Hill, January 1999
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