Aside from an occasional gleeful invocation of the masterfully confused romantic indignation in "Jessie's Girl", I hadn't had much use for Rick Springfield until, on a random human-potential whim the day of two Colorado teenagers' random human-frailty whim, I bought his 1999 album Karma. The virulent alienation of Columbine and the petulant frustration of "Jessie's Girl" are fairly diametrical, but perhaps for just this reason, Karma became tightly entwined in my attempt to extract sense from that event, a defiant record on which to try to start rebuilding some kind of functional optimism. Crucible experiences are often transient, and indeed the association gradually faded for me, but I kept finding myself pulling the record out anyway, and by the end of the year it seemed like an even more magnificent pop album than it did while it felt like part of my salvation, so I put it in my top ten. I also, after liking Karma, went back and replaced my old vinyl copy of Working Class Dog with a CD. I liked that a lot, too, so I bought Success Hasn't Spoiled Me Yet, the following one. It had several more brilliant songs, but as I listened to them I remembered three or four others that weren't on either of those albums, so before long (as one could have safely predicted from the start) I'd tracked down more or less everything Rick ever released, straight back to some bedraggled LPs he put out at home in Australia in the Seventies. The early ones were sporadically interesting to me, but the entire run through the Eighties, Working Class Dog, Success Hasn't Spoiled Me Yet, Living in Oz, Tao, and Rock of Life, left me thoroughly astonished. I'd heard a few songs from each, but one at a time, on the radio amidst other things, I'd been able to dismiss them each as an anomaly. Sure, "State of the Heart" is engaging, for example, but there've been lots of crappy, overproduced corporate shills who managed a couple decent songs. Sitting down and listening to the albums all the way through, however, I quickly realize that there are precious few anomalous Rick Springfield songs, and none of the ones you've heard are among them. He is, I am now convinced, somewhere not far behind Per Gessle as a master of mainstream pop songwriting, and not far behind Tom Scholz as a master of mainstream studio craftsmanship. Maybe those are lower arts than Mark Eitzel's and Richard Thompson's, or Steve Albini's and JD Foster's, but they are no less necessary, and no less worth doing well.

There are a wearying number of minorly different Rick Springfield compilations, none of which I recommend, since the original albums are so good and, with a very small handful of exceptions (I'm not sure I can think of another single album that reaches such polar extremes of my tastes as Working Class Dog does with "Jessie's Girl", which to me is nearly perfect, and "Red Hot & Blue Love", which sends me into a violent rage), so consistent. This new live album, recorded last May, is subtitled "The Greatest Hits", which only adds to the confusion. Live albums often amount to greatest-hits collections, of course, particularly ones by artists who had this many hits. And I don't recommend this as the starting point of a critical reevaluation of Rick Springfield, either, since he does have a wider songwriting range than is displayed in a strict parade of singles. As a demonstration that the old songs are still good, though, and perhaps more importantly, that Springfield himself still remembers why, I find this set electrifyingly reassuring, and if you don't think reassurance can be electrifying, maybe you need to learn to love these songs again as badly as I did. The selection is largely predictable, by nature, including half of Working Class Dog ("Love Is Alright Tonite", "Jessie's Girl", "Carry Me Away", "Everybody's Girl" and Sammy Hagar's "I've Done Everything for You"), half of Success Hasn't Spoiled Me Yet ("Calling All Girls", "I Get Excited", "What Kind of Fool Am I?", "Kristina", "Don't Talk to Strangers", "April 24, 1981"), the first four songs from Living in Oz ("Human Touch", "Alyson", "Affair of the Heart" and the title track), two from Tao ("State of the Heart", "My Father's Chair"), "Rock of Life" itself, two from the Hard to Hold soundtrack ("Love Somebody" and "Don't Walk Away"), two from Karma ("Free" and "Itsalwaysomething"), and an unnecessary, time-killing cover of Van Morrison's "Gloria". The standout live moments, to me, are the dense, almost Rainbow-grade rock solidity and hoarse crowd sing-along on "Affair of the Heart", the brash acceleration from the hesitant quasi-reggae verses of "Alyson" to the charging choruses, the ostentatious stop-start grind through "I Get Excited", the dead halt the record comes to in the middle for "April 24th/My Father's Chair" (recorded in the shelter of a studio, actually, lest a concert crowd be asked to make the wrenching emotional transition to a Joe-Jackson-esque ballad about Rick's father's death in the middle of a sweaty nostalgia rave), the steady pulse of "State of the Heart" (which I might like almost as much as I like "Jessie's Girl"), the medley (remember when all pop concert albums had to have at least one medley?), the arena roar of "Kristina" (like a cross between Tommy Keene and Styx), and the fact that "Itsalwaysomething" sounds just fine alongside the songs the charts endorsed. And "Jessie's Girl" is just as close to perfect as it's ever been. If this set doesn't quite show Rick's range, it does clearly and repeatedly demonstrate the two qualities that all his hits share. One is that, structurally, most of his verses would qualify as choruses for anybody else short of Wagner. The other is that although his lyrics are rarely good poetry, and frequently simplistic to the point of juvenilia, especially early on, he invests even the most banal desire with enough spirit that I'm convinced, for at least the duration of the song, that however trivial these yearnings, people still have them, and still want to hear them in songs to know they aren't having them alone.

-Glenn McDonald