#2550 - Rick Springfield

The hard part of the alien idea isn’t crossing the universe. Maybe they bend space somehow. It’s whether any species lasts long enough to get that advanced. We’re getting nearer to destroying ourselves and we’re nowhere near that travel, so I hope we make it. It’s debatable.

Maybe a civilization elsewhere didn’t come up through our violent, competitive mess. But then what makes them push forward? The interesting possibility is they’re watching us through this adolescent, nuclear-base-and-shit phase, seeing whether we get past it.

Man, it’s wild meeting you. I listened to your music in high school, and at 77 you look incredible. Seeing “Jessie’s Girl,” you sounded like you’d just written it. A lot of musicians lose the love.

Thank you. I’m still crazy passionate about playing. After a song a million times, the crowd supplies the charge. I wrote it to feel that reaction. Since I first held a guitar at 11, this is what I wanted. Guitar is still the thing I love most, though writing gave me somewhere to aim beyond just playing.

I started performing around 15 with a school band, and got thrown out in 11th grade because I stopped showing up. I had serious depression. School was the world where I was failing badly, and I couldn’t face it. Guitar and horror writers became my education. I’d lived in Australia until 10, then England until about 13; that’s when girls and guitars arrived and changed everything.

After England I went back to Australia, and at 18 our band took a Vietnam job entertaining GIs. We thought we’d make money; instead we got four months in a war zone. From Saigon and Da Nang, we played up toward the DMZ after Tet. Rockets and mortars came in while we played. At Marble Mountain, Navy guys sheltered us; we played Hendrix and gave them a little connection to home.

You were 18, playing music, and suddenly in bunkers under fire. You weren’t walking point, but it sounds like a nightmare you couldn’t switch off after coming home.

Fear was the atmosphere. We slept in hootches, woke under dust, and everybody was stoned until something happened and panic went through the roof. At Marble Mountain, radio reported movement with no friendlies there. I was in a John Wayne headspace, excited to fire something, and sent five or six mortars down. Next morning they told me one hit a VC. I didn’t understand what I was doing, but I was involved in the end of a life. I still haven’t found a place for that to sit.

When I came back, Mum said a car backfire made me jump and my eyes looked haunted. I write about Vietnam in my autobiography, but not songs yet. My new record is more about aging, death somewhere down the road, and what I think about now. There’s still sex in there, just not like when I was 29.

It’s remarkable that rock stars can keep going into their seventies. Mick Jagger is still singing with emotion, dancing nonstop, training like an athlete. When I saw the Stones in Austin, he was fucking incredible.

Mick’s the canary in the coal mine for how far you can push it. His voice is ridiculous. Paul McCartney is still amazing too. Getting in front of thousands isn’t a normal human situation. A concert is sort of church now: at sport people face opposite sides; at a show everybody faces the same direction. My job is to give people a couple of hours away from the crap in their heads. It frees me from the monkeys in mine too.

For the first hit years, I thought it was about me. Then I learned it was about the audience. Teen magazines turned songwriting interviews into “cuddle up with Rick” rubbish, and I leaned into it briefly. The music went nowhere. I had to leave managers pushing that version of me and write what mattered.

I work out six days a week, eat clean, get blood work, and pay attention because my dad didn’t. He ignored symptoms, had a catastrophic bleed at 51, and came back with profound damage. Helping him remember his family was heartbreaking. I ran for years, lift now, and don’t pretend nothing is happening inside me.

I’m an American citizen now; I’ve lived here since 1972, and my family and life are here. I love this country. I still write novels, songs, an autobiography, and a book about the health choices that got me here. I see myself as a writer before anything else. I performed because nobody else would record my songs. I can’t sit on a beach without a little guitar or something to write.

“Jessie’s Girl” happened because DJs still had taste and freedom. The label initially picked a Sammy Hagar song as the single. DJs began playing “Jessie’s Girl,” phones lit up, and they told the label to release it. It crawled up the charts until Joe Gottfried from Sound City came with cheap champagne to say we were number one. I’d taken General Hospital because I feared the album would never come out.

I wrote it after seeing a beautiful woman at a stained-glass class with her boyfriend. I never learned her name. Her boyfriend was Gary, but that didn’t sing. Jesse worked. Guitar helped because I was never smooth with girls; I couldn’t just walk up and do the “hey babe” thing.

Luck is huge, but it shows up when you stay in the game. You need craft, competence, and enough belief to step up when the opening comes. In my first proper band, I played with my back to the crowd for three months. I was 15 among older blues guys, shy as hell. Eventually I turned around—probably because there was a girl. But I stayed there.

You’ve had a hell of a life, man, and it’s awesome seeing you still out there crushing it. Go see Rick Springfield live, ladies and gentlemen. He’s still kicking ass.

I really enjoyed this. Thank you very much, and congratulations. It’s been great.