By SCOTT HARRELL
Bradenton Herald
It's been 26 years since Rick Springfield took pop music by storm with "Jessie's Girl." Which means it's been about 25 years, 11 months, three weeks, six days, 23 hours and 40 minutes since the Australia-born star was first roundly derided as a wannabe musician, a pretty-faced actor churning out insubstantial hooks in order to bolster his surely fleeting fame.
Were that the case, it's doubtful that you could find kids who hadn't been born when "Jessie's Girl" and Springfield's other hits ruled the airwaves dancing and singing the words to them more than a quarter-century later. But you can, at any '80s Nite or karaoke bar or local dive with a great jukebox. Guilty or not, his tunes continue to bring pleasure to listeners of all ages, something in which the songwriter must find more than a little validation.
"I'm proud of it," he says. "It's great to see. We're seeing a lot of younger fans coming to the live shows, too, 'cause it's a pretty hard-rocking kind of thing."
At 58 years old, Springfield will never again experience the sort of pop-cultural deity status that accompanied the release of his American debut, "Working Class Dog," and his stint playing Dr. Noah Drake on "General Hospital."
For some artists, the realization that their glory days - in terms of mass popularity, at least - are behind them can be difficult, even impossible, to accept. But, for Springfield, who wrote the vast majority of his own music, including "Jessie's Girl," the joy has always been more in creating and playing the music than the peripheral notoriety; he understands that most of his fans view him through the memory-tinted lens of nostalgia.
"It's very understandable, and I have exactly the same attachment to the music of the '60s that I grew up with," he says. "I think there's a window for most people. It opens when you first discover music, when you're 12 or 13, and it goes until you get a career or a family. Other than musicians and people who work in music professionally, when the window closes, that's sort of the music you live your life with. It comes with the territory."
That doesn't mean Springfield himself hasn't moved on, however. The songwriter returned to the marketplace in 1999 after a decadelong hiatus with the full-length "Karma," and has produced a new album every three or four years since. His latest, this month's "Christmas with You," is a surprisingly mellow and largely reverent collection of traditional seasonal songs anchored by its title track, an original that tells the story of a protagonist stuck far from loved ones during the holidays. The tune is obviously relevant when experienced against the backdrop of the ongoing war in Iraq, and all proceeds from it are going to American Gold Star Mothers, an organization of parents who have lost a son or daughter to military conflict.
Whether the timely "Christmas with You" endures to become the kind of evergreen seasonal song folks are still playing this time of year 26 years from now remains to be seen. And Springfield has already assured himself a place in the annals of pop history in any case. But for him, that's not the point. He's still writing tracks and performing for the people who want to hear them.
"I don't think any writer who's written anything that lasted sat down to write something that was going to last," he says. "They wrote what was in 'em. Even when my first record hit, I didn't feel pressured to re-write 'Jessie's Girl.' I've always had that approach and don't know anybody who's written anything meaningful that didn't have that approach.
"Which isn't to say that a writer doesn't want to leave his mark," he adds. "But that's different from the day to day toil of the joy and pain of creating something. Even a banker wants to leave his mark, you know?"
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