The Ballad of Rick Springfield

Posted Saturday at 03:30 PM4 days

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Among history’s lessons is that great messages don’t always get the messengers you’d expect. Being a form of communal history, this is also true of pop music. However, the relatively low stakes sometimes invite less thoughtful judgments. One expression of this phenomenon concerns the unambiguously great hit single “Jessie’s Girl”, a song overflowing with righteous truth about at least one of the Seven Deadly Sins. In the intervening decades, Rick Springfield’s 1981 hit took on a life of its own that often obscures the quality of the messenger.

Between soundtrack appearances and regular rotation on satellite radio stations, the song looms sufficiently large that Springfield is often labelled a “one-hit wonder”, despite an impressive string of hit singles in the first half of the decade. It didn’t help matters that the release of “Jessie’s Girl” coincided with his debut as Dr. Noah Drake on the daytime soap opera General Hospital.

Though he’d been recording albums for over a decade and paying his acting dues with several years of guest roles on television, the seemingly overnight nature of his fame fostered perceptions that he wasn’t especially serious about either medium. Some critics, such as Greil Marcus – who ranked “Jessie’s Girl” at #1 in his “Real Life Rock Top 10” list for 1981 – showed some appreciation of Springfield’s work, but many others seemed predisposed toward disparagement, often using his good looks and popularity as part of their critique. Bruce Springsteen idolatrist Dave Marsh offered the snide assessment in the 1983 edition of The Rolling Stone Record Guide that Springfield’s “slick sort of listenable pop fodder” was “just for you, if you think Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty would be perfect if only they wore designer jeans.”

One can understand a zealot’s desire to proselytize while decrying others as false prophets, and it isn’t Marsh’s fault that the first of those working class heroes he mentioned went on to be the kind of guy who’d dump his wife and run off with his backup singer. Nevertheless, Marsh unintentionally revealed himself to be Exhibit A for the way many would-be taste makers are so focused on what they feel people ought to listen to that they never consider the possibility that others could have good reasons for enjoying something else. History has, in any event, been kinder to Rick Springfield than to reflexively snarky comments like Marsh’s.

This shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s paid attention over the past 40 years. While Springfield isn’t in the same league as a songwriter as Springsteen or Tom Petty, he has much more talent than detractors suggested. Likewise, soap operas might not represent the pinnacle of acting, but the work ethic needed for a series that airs five days a week is undeniable.

By his own account, especially in his 2010 memoir Late, Late at Night, Springfield sometimes indulged in the hedonistic cliché of rock-star life, but even that’s counterbalanced by the sensitivity and candor with which he discusses his mental health issues and events like the death of his father.

Those thoughtful aspects – along with the aforementioned work ethic – have been on full display this summer during the I Want My 80s tour. A follow-up to a similar excursion from 2023, the tour teamed Springfield up with fellow stars from that decade, such as Paul Young and John Waite. In a July show at the storied Virginia concert venue Wolf Trap, the artists demonstrated how well both they and their songs have aged. Seeing a long-established artist can be a gamble, with memories of one’s youth at stake. Perhaps their voice is a far cry from what it once was, or they seem like they’d rather be somewhere else. Not so with Rick Springfield.

The singer, who was very candid in Late, Late at Night about his fears that he failed to connect with concertgoers earlier in his career, came across as thoroughly engaged and genuinely happy to be there. Springfield drew a connection between those anxieties and his longstanding battle with depression, which he referred to in the book as “the Darkness.” The candor about his mental health isn’t limited to the page, as he related those struggles – including a suicide attempt when he was 16 – on stage before playing “World Start Turning,” a track from his final album of the 1980s, Rock of Life.

“World Start Turning,” a mainstay in his setlist for the past several years, was among the lesser-known tracks played on the I Want My 80s tour. His show as a whole leaned heavily into the hits, delivered in good voice with energy to spare. For all their polish on record, songs like “Affair of the Heart” and “Love Somebody” rock, and “Don’t Talk to Strangers” has entered middle-age sounding far more direct than it did on MTV in 1982. To square the circle between a surplus of hits and a finite amount of stage time, many of them are played as part of a medley, along with the more recent song “What’s Victoria’s Secret?” A brief passage from “Jessie’s Girl” that brings the audience to their feet, but singer and audience alike know it’s just a teaser.

After finishing the main set with “Human Touch,” a Top 20 hit from 1983 that served as a backdrop for him to venture into the crowd, there was no question of what Springfield would play for an encore. More than forty years later, every word of Greil Marcus’ December 1981 assessment still rings true.

Fast, funny, anguished, sexy – and that drum sound! and that guitar solo! Still it may live in history more for these lines, as naturistically odd as anything by Chuck Berry: “And I’m looking in the mirror all the time/Wondering what she don’t see in me.”

“Jessie’s Girl” wasn’t Rick Springfield’s only moment of pop song brilliance, but it’s easy to understand how its shine obscures the rest. Great songs have that way about them.

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This post was previously published on CultureSonar.

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