Hear our full conversation on my podcast “Beyond the Fame.”
He won a Grammy for Best Male Rock Vocal with his 1981 breakthrough hit “Jessie’s Girl.”
On Friday, Rick Springfield hits Hollywood Casino at Charles Town Races in West Virginia.
“It’s a very intimate, audience-interactive show,” Springfield told WTOP. “I tell stories about the hits, what created the songs, where they came from. … A couple of songs I wrote especially for the solo show that I don’t do for any other show. … I do the obvious hits, but there’s some surprises. It’s very laid back and I can actually talk to the audience.”
He admits it’s been touch-and-go getting back out on the road during the pandemic.
“It’s been hit or miss,” Springfield told WTOP. “Some places were shut down, some gigs would cancel because band members of crew members of the band we were going to play with got COVID, I canceled one show because I got COVID, so it’s been difficult to get any kind of momentum going, but we’ve been so anxious to play, it’s been amazing.”
Born outside of Sydney, Australia in 1949, Springfield got into music at an early age.
“My dad was in the Army, but he was also a singer,” Springfield said. “We didn’t have TV when I was little … so after dinner we’d sit around the piano and sing songs. It was pretty amazing, now that I think about it. … It was all my parents’ songs like Rodgers & Hammerstein and all of the show tunes, but it got me interested in music early.”
Soon, he began writing music himself and taking it more seriously.
“I started writing pretty early, once The Beatles showed us we could do it,” Springfield said. “It looked easy when they did it, but it was a lot harder when you actually tried it!”
He formed the Australian pop rock group Zoot from 1969 to 1971.
“It was a three-piece band kind of like The Who,” Springfield said. “They were a teen band, but I wanted it to go heavier, so I pushed them in a heavier direction and ended up doing an arrangement of ‘Eleanor Rigby,’ which you can actually find on YouTube. It’s pretty weird, a 21-year-old Ricky trying to be Pete Townshend and Hendrix at the same time.”
After the band split up, he found solo success with the hit song “Speak to the Sky” off his debut album “Beginnings” (1972), released by Sparmac in Australia and Capitol in the U.S.
“It was a hit over there and became a hit over here and brought me to America,” he said.
In 1973, he signed to Columbia Records for his second album, “Comic Book Heroes,” followed by his third album “Mission: Magic!” (1974), his sound evolving all the while.
“I think I started to write more truthfully and also from frustration,” Springfield said. “I had one hit single in ’72, then nothing. … The teen magazines were pushing me as the next David Cassidy, but I wasn’t writing those songs, I was writing songs for my own age.”
After his fourth album “Wait for Night” (1976), he found a foothold in the L.A. clubs.
“The L.A. club scene was really starting to happen, so I thought I’d get a three-piece band together and start writing some power-pop songs and just go out and start playing,” Springfield said. “Radio was still playing disco and ballads at the time and this was a guitar-based pop-rock album, but it happened to be just at the right time when it switched.”
Indeed, his fifth album “Working Class Dog” (1981) exploded thanks to the smash hit single “Jessie’s Girl,” which was inspired by a girl in his stained-glass class.
“I had pretty much given up the thought of getting a record deal so I was looking for other things to do,” Springfield said. “I thought I could support myself as a stained-glass master. … I started going to stained-glass class. … I met a girl there, she had a boyfriend in this class and she wanted nothing to do with me, so I went home and wrote a song about it.”
It topped the Billboard Hot 100 and ranked No. 20 on VH1’s Greatest Songs of the ’80s.
“It’s a double-edged sword,” Springfield said. “It’s great to have that song, but it does still tend to overshadow new stuff. I’ll go on TV to promote a new album and they’ll play ‘Jessie’s Girl’ as the play-on [music]. I get it. It’s a very good song. I’m mostly proud of it.”
He followed with four more Top 10 hits: “I’ve Done Everything for You,” “Don’t Talk to Strangers,” “Affair of the Heart” and “Love Somebody” from the film “Hard to Hold” (1984).
“It was during filming … I wrote it in the hotel room,” Springfield said. “We were filming the hotel scenes, and in between filming, I had a guitar and I wrote it then. For some reason I was thinking it would be great for Bob Weir. I have no idea why. Then I thought, ‘I think I’ll keep it for myself and I think it works in the context of the film,’ so I kept it for me.”
“Hard to Hold” also provided his acting breakthrough in a career ranging from Dr. Noah Drake in “General Hospital” (1981-1983) to Vince/Lucifer in “Supernatural” (2016).
“That was the golden age of soaps,” Springfield said. “I’ve played a couple of weird characters like a doctor on ‘True Detective’ and some weird guy on ‘American Horror Story,’ then ‘Ricki and the Flash’ with Meryl Streep, I played her boyfriend. … The best writing is on TV now. In the ’70s, all those shows I did were awful. … Terrible scripts.”
These days, he has his own Rum label with Sammy Hagar called Beach Bar Rum.
“That started over COVID during the lockdown,” Springfield said. “I started thinking about getting into the alcohol business and he said, ‘Instead of being a competitor, why don’t you come on board and be a partner in the Beach Bar Rum?’ … We can promote it organically because rum equals party and that equals rock ‘n roll. … It’s been with us forever.”
Most recently, he’s found a passion as an author, first in his autobiography “Late Late at Night” and now in several fiction works, “Magnificent Vibration” and “World on Fire.”
“It’s about a plague that destroys half the world,” Springfield said. “I finished it during the pandemic. … I got a lot of things right, but it’s really dark humor. It involves aliens, God, a lot of stuff I’m interested in. … It’s really about the mistreatment of the earth. … What we’re doing to the planet, animals and ourselves. The plague was just kind of a MacGuffin.”
Hear our full conversation on my podcast “Beyond the Fame.”
