80's pop star tries to revive career in midlife

By Robert Digiacomo

Rick Springfield turned 50 last year - a milestone for anyone, let alone a pop-rock musician, former soap star and reluctant teen idol.

But the singer/songwriter of "Jessie's Girl" fame says "the big 5-0" was not his time for a midlife crisis.

"It was fine - I had my midlife crisis at 37, it happens early for musicians," says Springfield, who is appearing 9 p.m., Saturday, Jan. 22, at Resorts Casino Hotel.

"Fifty was no big deal. I'm proud to be 50 in a sick way. I figured at 50, I'd be bent over and gray, and shuffling off to the office. It's a very different 50 than my parents or their friends."

Instead of slowing down, Springfield has revved up his career by releasing "Karma" (Platinum Entertainment), his first album of new material in 10 years, and spending much of the year touring behind it.

His approach to the recording project after so long an absence from the studio was as straightforward as his guitar-driven licks.

"All I've ever done, when I've finished a bunch of songs, if I liked them, I recorded them - nothing deeper than that," he says. "I've never watched the charts to see if it fit. I've written what I've liked and recorded it. How it pleased me - the writer is the only judge.

"I felt very confident and happy with what I'd written. It expressed a lot that had happened to me. As I get older, there seems to be more to write about. I thought it was the right time."

The new album, along with his being featured on VH-1's "Behind the Music," signaled a career resurgence for Springfield, but not a return to his overheated celebrity of the early '80's.

"It's much more sane," he says. "Back in the '80's, it was a constant party, like boys' camp on the road. Now, everyone has families and your priorities change. Most of my friends are in A.A. and life changes. It's more fun in that I get more out of it. It's a real healthy thing on the road. I come off in great shape. It was a very selfish show throughout the '80's, very much what we could get out of it. Now, I feel like something is really being exchanged with the show. It probably comes with the audience - and me - getting older."

While the Sydney, Australia, native never wants to return to the kind of overnight fame he experienced in the 1980's when his role as Dr. Noah Drake on ABC's "General Hospital" granted him instant teen-idol status, he doesn't regret that time, either.

"I don't have any regrets - I did when people would automatically slam the music," he says. "I would read reviews saying basically that some producer found me and gave me a bunch of songs because I was successful on a TV series. Music had always been the most important thing. I had been writing since I was 15. It was a very deep thing for me. That hurt, but I understood it was just people's perceptions. I knew going in, it was going to be a double-edged-sword."

Still, for a musician whose first four albums hadn't even cracked the Top 100, his soap hunk status got him noticed - if sometimes for the wrong reasons.

With "General Hospital" as the springboard, Springfield went on to score six platinum albums and 17 top 20 singles, including "Don't Talk to Strangers," "Affair of the Heart," "Human Touch" and "I've Done Everything for You."

"I never had any steady money my whole life - the show was my first regular paycheck," Springfield says. "I've always said I've always been a bit of a whore with my acting, and that was the start of it. The timing couldn't have been better. No one could have planned that that would be the most popular show of that summer when I had a record."

Despite being dismissed by some critics as a musical wannabe, he earned multiple honors, including a 1981 Grammy Award for best rock vocal performance for "Jessie's Girl," and three American Music Awards.

While his career was peaking in the mid-1980's Springfield was also on the verge of a personal crisis, an event finally triggered by the death of his father.

"I was completely and utterly burned out from touring," he recalls. "I hit a wall. I started looking at a mirror saying, who am I... and started getting into therapy - pretty deep therapy. It was very helpful and very painful. I decided to take the time off to do it. I didn't think it would go quite as long as it would, but I needed to do it."

Springfield, who has been married for 15 years and has 2 children, plans to make up for lost time by not letting another decade elapse between recordings - he has plans to release this year to follow-up to "Karma."

He also wants to keep up his schedule of live performances - partly for the chance to see his multigenerations of fans, who now bring their own teenagers to his concerts - and to show he can still rock.

"The touring's been fabulous," he says. "It's been a real treat."