A conversation with Rick Springfield

A conversation with Rick Springfield

By Clay Howard
“Jessie’s Girl” was a huge hit for Rick Springfield in 1981. It also won him a grammy. Springfield had been in the music business for 12 years by this time. He had already enjoyed success in his homeland of Australia as a member of the band Zoot, and had visited the coveted Top 40 charts in the USA with the No. 14 1972 hit, “Speak to the Sky.” He even had a cartoon series on ABC in 1973. This when there were only three networks, and not very many people got anything on network television.

Rick Springfield has sold more than 19 million albums and written and performed 17 Top-40 hits. However, It has never been “cool” to be a fan of Rick Springfield. Probably due to the “General Hospital” thing, who knows?
It may not be “cool”, but I will bet you that “Jessie’s Girl” is present on more iPods than other song from the top 100 of 1981. My point is this, the staying power of “Jessie’s Girl” and numerous other Springfield songs, like “Love Somebody” and “What Kind of Fool am I?”, demonstrate something that the harbingers of cool do not want you to realize: A good song is a good song. Whether the writer of the song is a daytime soap-opera star or a Dylan devotee from the Jersey shore, a good song is a good song. By the way, Springfield not only released hit albums in 1981, his latest release debuted at No. 28 in July 2008.
All this is simply to introduce a conversation I had with Mr. Springfield recently. In it we discussed his new CD, Venus in Overdrive; his thoughts on the state of the music industry, illegal downloading and whatever else I could squeeze into 30 minutes.

For the complete article (including a Q&A) go to:
http://www.yesweekly.com/article-831-a-conversation-with-rick-springfield.html