RockPopandRoll / Episode 11
Remember Jessie’s Girl? #1 in 1981? It is the iconic power pop song that threw musician Rick Springfield, a musician on lean times, back into the music game. He’d been in music since the late 60’s in Australia. A rocker, blessed and cursed. Great looking dude, with the “I’m on a TV show albatross” to carry. He was a career songwriter and guitar guy who had already waded through the teen idol swamp and come out OK. Mostly.
This week on RockPopandRoll, our show is:
Power Pop and Rick Springfield: Here’s 6 Songs You’ll Love if you Dig Jessie’s Girl”
Host Rob Nichols, a radio vet and longtime music writer, revisits rock and roll and pop music from the playlist of the decade of the 80s
I get it. Here’s the common word on Rick Springfield – he isn’t a legitimate rock and roll guy. I call bullshit. If you take the music he has made, especially from 1981 to now, he qualifies. A couple bigtime hits. A dozen stellar pop, rock, and power pop songs that cracked the top 40. And a career that he revived in the late 90s and still has rolling.
Springfield sometimes tries too hard with overwrought lyrics. Heavy handed. A bit cliché. And some of his music, when he is not trafficking in the sugary, rocking thing, it doesn’t work well. There’s stuff he has put out – in his heyday of 1981-86 or so, and in some of his more recent albums, that is sincere but just doesn’t hit it his pocket for me. Like he tries too hard.
But then there’s the Rick Springfield that is a star because of the Working Class Dog record, a wholly under-appreciated power pop album – a genre part of rock and roll and radio rock in the late 70s through 1983 or so. The album had “Jessie’s Girl”, “I’ve Done Everything For You”, a minor hit in “Love Is Alright Tonight”, and a bucketful of non-hit, guitar rock and pop songs. It was as good as it really got if you liked the Cars, Rockpile, Cheap Trick, The Greg Kihn band, the Knack, the Romantics, Phil Seymour, and Dwight Twilley. Harmonies, guitars, big drums, some 80s keyboards, and songs about love, girls, and heartache.
If you turn it up when the guitar power chord solo comes around in the middle of “Jessie’s Girl”, here are 6 songs you will love. He’s at best when guitars dominate in a poppy, rocky, throwback-to-FM-radio hits way. Turn it up
SONGS
“Love Screws Me Up”
“Light This Party Up “
“It’s Always Something”
“Bruce”
“Kristina”
“I Hate Myself”
LINKS
Hear Spotify playlist: Rick Springfield / Six songs you’ll dig if you like “Jessie’s Girl” plus bonus cuts.
Read review of Rick Springfield show at Indiana State Fair / 2010
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One Last Fact We Learned:
“I’ve Done Everything For You”
The Working Class Dog rocker first appeared on Sammy Hagar’s 1978 concert album All Night Long before it would be a Top 10 hit for Springfield, a follow up to “Jessie’s Girl.”
Springfield wasn’t the first person to consider “I’ve Done Everything For You” as cover material. Hagar says producer Keith Olsen brought it to Springfield after first trying to get Pat Benatar to do the track. They made of a demo of it, but they decided to use their own song, “Heartbreaker.
Rick got the song.
Rob, I knew there was a reason we always had a connection. Now I know, it was Rick Springfield. You nailed it – he gets short changed even though he practically invented the power pop genre. Working Class Dog is a BRILLIANT album, if not a masterpiece. Channeling all his hopes dreams and energy – instinctively knowing this was his do or die moment – Rick delivers; Carry Me Away, Everybody’s Girl, Light of Love, Red Hot and Blue Love (with the blistering double-time solo). Ok, so Inside Sylvia is treacle, but the melody and production are solid at least.
We’ll gloss over Success Hasn’t Spoiled, although it featured passable singles Don’t Talk to Strangers, What Kind of Fool Am I, I Get Excited and the standout album cut Kristina. RCA probably pushed too fast for a follow up.
Springfield’s best start-to-finish album came next: the revealing Living In Oz. The churning title track details Rick’s Australian upbringing: “Ever since I was a kid
I remember having dreams of grandeur, I was gonna be someone.” His rebellious phase seemingly chronicled in Me & Johnny. The groupie gets revenge fantasy Motel Eyes. Rick singing from personal soap-opera experience in Alyson? The barn burning guitar screams as he sings “your husband’s in the front row, I couldn’t look him in the face?” The power pop guitars equally blistering in I Can’t Stop Hurting You, hintIHG at Rick struggling with hIs own self-control. Then, Souls, the production and tempo structured for maximum effect, building on lyrics which could be purely auto-biographical.
The inevitable leading man movie offer came next, resulting in the mess that is Hard To Hold, perhaps notable for Tony Bennett’s cameo and Rick’s willingness to bare all. The SOUNDTRACK however yielded the adrenaline rush generator that is Love Somebody, maybe the defining track of power pop. As in the film, Rick’s search for “the right sound” results in the synth-rock of Don’t Walk Away, the dance-rock of Bop Til You Drop and the soft-rock duet Taxi Dancing (with the great under-appreciated Randy Crawford). Buried deep on side 2 is a gem, The Great Lost Art of Conversation.
The general public was pretty much done with Rick at this point, although as you describe he continues putting out content – raising his profile during quarantine with a series of hilarious video shorts about how to play Jessie’s Girl, and throwing Zoom chats with lucky fans. Power pop equals Rick Springfield, simple as that.