RICK SPRINGFIELD
SURVIVAL OF AN IMAGE

I had met Rick Springfield a few times before. We had talked about America. About Australia (from whence he comes.) About wine (I talk with everybody about wine, whether they like it or not.) About British humor, which Rick knows well and loves. About a lot of things. But we had not talked much about music. Especially not about his own music. Which is, now that I think on it, one of the things I like best about him. Talk to your average, everyday up-and-coming rock star, and what does the conversation consist of? Me, me, me, and furthermore, me. People can be so damn limited, you know? But Rick Springfield knows about other things, cares about other things, talks about other things. All of which relates in fact, very specifically to his music.

The greatest gift a singer/songwriter can have, other than a listenable voice and come rudimentary knowledge of how music works, is the gift that so very many of them lack" the gift of vision. Rick Springfield, I think (am I'm basing this on his songs as well as on what little I know of him personally) has vision, has a way of seeing the world around him and then translating what he sees - the people, the places, the experiences - into song. He is very wide-eyed, very eager to be surprised, to be amazed by the world and its inhabitants. William James (I think) said "Try to be one of those people on whom nothing is wasted." Rick Springfield tries to be one of those.

Anyway, we got together again, Rick Springfield and I, this time to talk specifically about Rick Springfield. And, after no more than an hour or two of trading Goon Show and Monty Python bits back and forth, we got down to just that. We met at The Greenhouse, a fantastical arboretum of a restaurant, to sip flinty white California wine as the windy sunlight faded outside. Rick is tall, animated, and very pretty in a cuddly, teeny-bopper's-dream kind of way. With us was his chaperon/advisor/p.r. wonder-worker, a striking redhead named Marsa Hightower, who is part Southern-Gothic-heroine and part flash-rock-star in bearing and demeanor, and who has a formidable facility with free-association word games and a thoroughly respectable knowledge of medieval English history, which manifests itself at the most extraordinary times.

These two points - Rick's appearance and the presence of Marsa Hightower - relate to an important part of Rick Springfield's story. But more of that in a moment. First, Rick Springfield"

He was born in Sydney, Australia, on August 23, 1949. He has always liked music, he says, but he didn't get involved with it on anything approaching a serious level until he was 15. His family had moved to England (where they were to stay for five years), and it was just about the time that truly exciting things were starting to happen to popular music in the British Isles. He came under the spell, quite naturally enough, of the new music that was growing all around him. He taught himself to play guitar, and later added piano and harmonica to his repertoire.

His first appearances were in Australia, with various high school bands. After graduation, he started jamming with local musicians, learning all he could from them and developing his technical musical skills. His first steady job was with the house band at the Whisky A Go Go in Melbourne, and, since that time, he has been playing and singing virtually without interruption.

In the late 60's, he toured the Far East with the MPD Band, and , upon his return, joined a group called Zoot ("Think pink, think Zoot".) They were into heavy rock and affectionate renderings of classic American R&B of the 50's and 60's. At this point, Rick began writing songs seriously, and in 1970, Zoot became, indisputably, Australia's number one group. By the middle of '71, though, Rick realized that the band's direction and his own direction as a songwriter were not the same, so he elected to try a solo career.

His first single on his own was Speak to the Sky, and it promptly qualified as a gold record. Of course, in Australia, a gold record means a mere 50,000 sold...But still. There really wasn't too much further he could go in his own country, though. As he points out, there are only five cities large and important enough to be worthwhile for a performing artist. Most of the major clubs throughout the country are strictly middle-of-the-road-oriented - Tom Jones and the like do marvelously on these circuits, but sincere young singer/songwriters don't. Bt the time he was 21, Rick has won nationwide music polls as the country's best guitarist twice, and garnered similar honors as best songwriter in 1972. But he was in Australia, cut off from much of the music world, as it was cut off from him. (PRM's trusty editor, Martin Cerf, was surprised to learn that Rick had not, in the summer of this year, heard of performers like David Bowie and Alice Cooper. New developments take some time to reach Australia, and some never show up there, especially those that might run afoul of the government's rather stringent polices of censorship in the arts.)

Clearly, if Rick Springfield was to make his own unique contributions to contemporary music, he would have to go further afield. Enter Steve Binder and Robie Porter, who met Rick and heard him perform, who encouraged him to come to the U.S., and whose Binder/Porter Organization "direct," manages, and produces Rick today. Which brings us back to the way Rick looks and the way Marsa Hightower (a Binder/Porter surrogate with Rick) looks after him.

A local magazine, a few months ago, suggested that Rick might become "the latest victim of misdirected pop music image-making," due largely to the fact that Rick Springfield promotional material tends to make him look like "a pretty-boy David Cassidy-type teen idol, a soft-skinned gamin with puppy-dog eyes and a Jane Fonda haircut." The way he is, in fact, being presented is the work of Binder/Porter, and there are those of us who think that it's a shame. I mean, if you've got someone who might one day turn out to be another Neil Young or another Jackson Browne or whatever, why try to make him into another Donny Osmand?

His first album, BEGINNINGS (Capitol SMAS-11047) certainly isn't an unqualified masterpiece, but it's very, very nice in places, and it's certainly a respectable way to begin. It's overproduced, and the famous Springfield guitar is heard far too seldom, and Rick's voice sounds a bit constricted, a bit restrained in some places, and The Unhappy Ending sounds a little too much like early Elton John (which sounds like Jose Feliciano) - but these are minor quibbles. He has a superb sense of writing songs as songs, a good knowledge of how to fashion words and music together. When his voice is relaxed, it's most pleasance, and - more important - it's extremely believable. When he sings an emotion, one's tendency is to accept it, because he doesn't sound as though he's just mouthing the syllables; he sounds like he means it.

But. You'd probably never pick up his album if you saw it in the store, not knowing who he was. The cover photos are straight out of Flip or Teen. A little judicious application of the magical airbrush has even taken away such un-teeny unpleasantries as the merest hint of body hair. In order to get fair reviews of the album, in fact, (i.e., reviews that dealt honestly with the form and content of the music and that were not distracted by the gleam of glossy adolescence on the album jacket), Capitol Records even resorted to sending out plain-white-jacketed review copies to certain writers. (The album got good reviews on this basis, by the way.)

On the other hand...Marsa Hightower makes a good point: Binder/Porter know precisely what they're doing, she says. They have no intention whatsoever of letting Rick get held down to teenzeen idolatry. They are being very careful, very selective, about when and where material on Rick appears. And they have, it cannot be denied, done one thing: they have given Rick Springfield a good strong start towards success. What happened, she asks, to all the other promising young singer/songwriters whose albums were probably released at the same time Rick's was? Have you heard of them since? Do they have a hit single? (This version of Speak to the Sky, but the way, is not the same version that was released in Australia.)

Perhaps image-making, however unfortunate it made seem to comparative outsiders, is practically essential these days. Perhaps true talent is little more than a convenient adjust to skillful public relations. Perhaps Binder/Porter are absolutely dead on right. Or perhaps not, Rick himself says, "I trust Steve and Robie completely."

I just hope that Rick Springfield can survive his image. Images don't make good music, Rick Springfield does.