“Well,” he says slowly, “I’ve certainly done all of those things at one time or another. It’s hard not to, because most musicians have that kind of experimental nature.”

He pauses – this is, after all, the man who in the past curtly said that he paid no attention to press reports of his mid-seventies relationship with Linda Blair because “most of it is false, I don’t talk about my private life and nobody really knows what’s going on.”

Then, with a nod toward the control room where Barbie sits, he picks up the conversation. “Yeah, this is the most settled I’ve been, absolutely. I get a real strength from that feeling. When I’m not with someone, I’m real scattered, you know? There is certainly joys in being single, but for me it distracts from the music, because I get caught up in chasing women. A good relationship, like the one I have now, keeps my power going in the right direction.”

He laughs. “Of course, it depends on the person. I’ve been in some relationships where I made terrible career moves and wrote the worst songs of my life.”

Another thing that’s settled down lately, he says, is his nuclear nightmare. It used to come regularly; he’d be on Catalina Island when missiles would streak over the hillside, shoot toward Los Angeles and raise mushroom clouds. But while the real day after may be getting closer, dreams like that haven’t come in a long time.

“For one thing, “ he says, “I don’t get stoned anymore, especially in L.A. That used to make me real paranoid. It’s easy to get into the fever of that, and it’s unbelievably scary. Not to have a Ralphs supermarket to go to at midnight. It’s like facing death, which for the most part of the would it would be.”

When Rick Springfield became a successful musician and a certified sex symbol – perhaps not in that order – other amenities began arriving as well. First, there was the lakeside, hilltop Los Angeles home he bought a few years ago – after the phone company shattered his quiet suburban life in Glendale by inadvertently listing his address and phone number, which prompted all-night teenage vigils on his front lawn. The new house was the site for what must have been a satisfying fame of nonvindictive “I told you so’s”: In the first flush of fame, he brought his mother up from Australia to live with him for a couple of months. He flew her to the biggest concerts. He escorted her to the Grammys, where he won. He showed her that he and his guitar had made good.

Then there’s his black 1948 Buick Roadmaster, a car he spotted in a parking lot after a day at the beach with Barbie and Ron; he immediately pulled over and struck a deal. Before, he’d been driving a battered red Ford Fiesta, its interior often a shambles of dangling tape-deck wires (he installed it himself) and stacks of garbage. It was hardly a transportation that befitted someone with several gold records.

On the way to the house and the far and the girls, Springfield fought his share of battles – battles to get his music heard, to gain some credibility, to stop worrying about creditability.

Thing, he says, are looking up. Certainly, some of Springfield’s recent shows have had a nicely unguarded spirit, a noticeable lack of awkward posing and plenty of instances of the kind of explicit sex that might permanently bounce him out of the teenybopper camp if enough mothers find out. “I get excited/Just thinking what you might be like,” he sings fervently, and then “angel’s gonna spread her wings tonight,” and he demonstrates with his arms just how she’s gonna spread.

And then there was the time at L.A.’s Universal Amphitheater last summer when he rubbed his crotch onstage. He didn’t run his hand along the inside of his thigh, the way he often does; he placed it quite deliberately on the front of his faded blue jeans – and he rubbed.

It wasn’t one of his finer moves, and he knows it. “I’m very sorry about that,” he says quickly when the incident is mentioned. “It was in very poor taste and I cut it from the show. It was basically a dumb move, plain and simple. I got bored rubbing my leg, so I experimented. For me, going onstage is like going to a party: Sometimes I do fun things and sometimes I do stupid things, like at any party. That was one of the stupid things.”

In a way, that may be the most encouraging sing of all: Rick Springfield hasn’t let his worries about his image, his credibility or his audience bother him long enough to interfere with what is still a big party. It’s the kind of party that young Rick Springthorpe could only fantasize about. The kind where even a serious musician has to admit getting a kick out of knowing that guests are interested in both his music and his purple shorts.