Meadowlands, New Jersey

In the press room at Meadowlands, things are getting white hot. Rick Springfield is about to 'regally' enter the cupboard and greet the assembled throng, representing all facets of the New York music hang-gliding industry, from writers to RCA personages. The excitement is high - and I'm sitting in a corner throwing pebbles at the glasshouse!

Quite honestly, the scene depresses me, RCA's marketing manager, a man of singularly miniscule intelligence, has decided that everyone must line up from the 'honour' of shaking hands with the great money-spinning idol/wallet that is Mr. Springfield. Dutifully most comply, 'playing the game' as they call it. I refuse, partly because I'm a stubborn old donkey, but mainly because it perpetuates the myth of Springfield the tennytots' scream dream when in reality he's now grown up and flown the nest.

Onstage an hour later, the problem is merely compounded and fractured. An SRO audience of some 17,000 dominated by the sort of pubescent girlies who are just beginning to soil their first pair of softly-softly underskin, goes bersekely as the two massive video screens flanking the open-plan stage buzz into almost surreal action, showing brief, tantalizing glimpses of their hero in some of his near-renowned promotional footage as a prelude to Springfield taking to the boards.

It's an inspired opening, designed to create exactly the right level of anticipation among the fans before the cameras go 'live' backstage and follow Rick through the neanderthal corridors that lead from the dressing room to the stage. There's an air of total jungle fever as Springfield troops out front and settles into gear.

As a teenybob mudpack experience the show is masterful. The sound is clear if rather muted, the lighting magnificently Greco and Springfield contorts/gyrates with knowing sexual grace as he leads his backcloth band through such glorious pop/rock happy trails as Love Somebody, Human Touch, Jessie's Girl, and Living in Oz.

The video screens hum and burst with well-constructed twilight-framed 'beefcake' images of the main man and everything seems hunky-dory. But it isn't!

Rick is a sensitive man, intelligent adult who has now grown up and is beginning to reach into the depths of his vast talent. His most recent album, Tao, proves this in great abundance. Yet because he is still being promoted as the wetdream machine by those around him who live by the rule of the thumbnail fast dollar, his audience has not been allowed to mature and develop with him.

Consequently, the man is forced to pander to a section of the pop/rock culture with whom his links are now tenuous in the extreme.

This becomes painfully obvious when he tries to present newer and more serious material to a crown who simply want to hop, yell and wave their knickers in the air.

Put simply, unless he can find a method of taking his present fans with him on a journey into the unknown whilst picking up the more difficult-to-please hard rock fraternity the within two years there won't be a Rick Springfield because he'll be deserted by the transient teenysop market and will lack the crowd-pulling credibility to force himself into the rock field.

I know he has it in him to break away from these chains, but he has to learn how to balance our obligations to the past with a duty to the future. Personally, I have such a great deal of respect for Rick that I'll continue to champion his cause and bat in the red corner but...well, it needs more than me to make the dimension jump happen.

Perhaps what summed up this evening best for me was the emotional moment when Springfield sat on the edge of the stage and sang his heart through the pain of My Father's Chair, accompanying himself on portable piano...and constantly interrupted by the screams of those too young to comprehend the personal significance of the song. As "Larry the Lamb' Oliver so succinctly said: "Why are they cheering when he's singing about his father dying from cancer?" Why indeed?

Perhaps the RCA image - fashioning department and Springfield's management would care to comment on this?