Late, Late at Night

by Springfield, Rick

  I’m told that Binder/Porter have lined up a photo session with 16 Magazine, the biggest weekly in the country. I’ve never heard of it, but figure it must be some trendy U.S. music magazine. I’m to take the red-eye to New York (New York? Jesus wow) and meet Gloria Stavers, the head honcho herself at the 16 Magazine offices. Unbeknownst to me, Gloria has had great results sexualizing Jim Morrison of the Doors for the young girl readers of 16, and has also gotten into fights with Donny Osmond’s mother for trying to do the same thing with little Donny.

  I get on that plane to New York and I do not sleep a wink.

  When I land early in the morning, a limousine is waiting to take me into the city. Never having ridden in a limo before, I jump in the front passenger seat next to the driver, leaving the vast expanse of seating area in the back vacant. It’s cramped up front and not really what I expected from the stories I’d heard about limos. The driver gives me an odd sidelong look, shakes his head, and proceeds to take me into New York City. The place is gigantic, sits right on the edge of the water, and looks like the biggest and most realistic movie backdrop I have ever seen. Golly gee whiz!

  I check into the Warwick Hotel and walk myself to the 16 offices. It’s now about twenty-four hours since I’ve slept, and I’m running on pure adrenaline. I’m also convinced—based on the stories I’ve heard of how violent the city is—that I will be mugged at some point before I reach my destination. I must look like an idiot walking down a major New York thoroughfare glancing timidly and furtively over one shoulder, then the other, giving side streets a wide berth, and generally acting like a fruitcake. Or maybe people just think I’m a junkie. Probably. To my shock and gratitude I arrive unscathed at the 16 Magazine offices and meet everyone there, including Gloria, who, I later understand, takes an instant “liking” to me. Some quick photos are taken, they conduct a rather in-depth interview about my musical beginnings in Australia, and I’m herded back to the hotel, then to the airport, and onto another plane, this time pointed for London, England. I’m going home!

  I’m somewhat nonplussed when the 16 Magazine article is sent to me in England a few weeks later and the photos show a rather tired-looking me along with an article entitled “Rick Springfield: Is He Too Tall to Love?” Huh? It details what my favorite color is (blue), where I like to go on a first date (bowling … bowling?), and what kind of girl I like. (“Sporty”?) I don’t remember answering any of the questions in the article, and I wonder where the in-depth stuff about my music went. Only much later will I grasp the full ramifications of this teen-press path I have been set on.

  I don’t sleep on the plane to London, either. It seems to me a bit obscene to kip out in public, and anyway, I’m pumped up from everything that’s happened. My life is moving so fast, I don’t want to miss a second of it. We land and the only two things I remember feeling as I step through the open door of the airplane into a brisk, misty English morning are (a) I am HOME, and (b) What’s for breakfast? (Bangers and mash, I hope.)

  But there’s something different about London that I can’t quite put my finger on. I get the feeling much later that is has to do with the mass influx of immigrants and the beginning of the melting pot most Western countries will experience. It’s a natural progression, for any country in the free world worth living in, that travelers from across the seas bring with them their own magic but slowly erase some of the original identity of the new land they are now part of. I see it in Australia these days, too. It’s not a bad thing; it’s just change. Inexorable change. Maybe it will help prevent wars over the color of a flag, but I doubt it. And nothing will ever stop us all fighting over the true name of God.

  Where was I? Oh yes, home.

  I am beyond peeing myself with excitement to be back in England. I end up at the Earls Court flat of Michelle O’Driscoll, God bless her (though at this point I’m still not sure which side she bats for). Michelle has moved to London sometime before me and says I can stay with her and another Aussie girl who is her flatmate while I’m recording my first solo album. And that’s why I’m here. To record, in England, my first long-playing record.

  I haven’t slept since the flight from New Zealand to Los Angeles and have now been awake for forty-eight hours straight. I drop my bags in the bedroom I’ll be sharing with Michelle’s cute friend and flop down on her couch while she starts telling me all the things I should be doing now that I’m in the big leagues. I stare, exhausted, at the carpet with my face in my hands and suddenly the carpet turns into a fully functioning, clear-as-crystal, three-dimensional street scene. I marvel at the guy riding the bike straight toward me and am about to tell Michelle to come and have a look when I realize I’m hallucinating. I drag myself off to bed and sleep for fourteen hours straight.

  The next afternoon I go knocking on the door of Del Newman, the arranger who will be doing the strings for the album. I’ve talked to him on the phone and he has a rich, deep, Very British voice that makes him sound a bit like a stuffy English bank manager. I’m a little concerned. But when he opens the front door of his flat, I see a thin, 6'4" black guy with a wry smile on his lips. He’s seen the look I now have on my own face before. Del is of African descent (born in London), with a lean face and long rangy body that looks like it would be at home on the African savannah. He’s wearing jeans, slippers, and a big woolen sweater with elbow pads, and is smoking a pipe. Clouds of sweet tobacco smoke drift through the cozy, firelit living room. He is charming and easy to like. Del is currently writing all the orchestral arrangements on the Cat Stevens records that are bouncing up and down the charts. He is a real gentleman and offers me tea.

  Del’s favorite line is, “I think a nice deep brown sound would be good here, yes?” He means the deeper part of the orchestra—double basses, cellos, and the low end of the violas. He is a trip and also an excellent arranger. He plays me a half-finished demo he’s just received: Simon and Garfunkel’s “America,” which he’s also arranging. Again, I am duly impressed. Even more so than I was riding in Robie Porter’s Cadillac.

  We are to begin recording at Trident Studios right away. Is this really happening? Yes, sir, little Ricky. And you better watch out.

  Michelle writes me a poem that I still have with me forty years later. It refers to, basically, taking the high road in my pursuit of success; something I come to find is not always an easy choice. Its opening lines are:

  Now begins your race with the devil

  Do you understand the demon of evil?

  I’m not referring to any mortal man

  This demon being is greater than …

  These simple words have become more and more poignant as I’ve followed my path. But at the moment she gives me the poem, I think she means “don’t get a big head.” She doesn’t, and she is much wiser than I, at that time, give her credit for.

  Robie joins me in London and the battle and the sessions begin. He isn’t a great producer, per se, but he does have an ear for a good tune. And no, I don’t get to score with Michelle’s cute friend, even though we share a bedroom.

  We walk into Trident Studios for our first day of recording and in the control room sits a thin young man with an angry red scar running through his left eye and down the side of his face. Robin Geoffrey Cable has just gone through the extremely disconcerting experience of waking up in a hospital bed in London one morning, unable to remember anything about himself, his life, or how he got there. The hospital staff gently informed him that he was in a near-fatal car accident and has some residual brain damage. He has to be told that he’s a recording engineer and has the Number 1 album on the charts right now, Elton John’s Madman Across the Water. “Who’s Elton John?” he asked.

  In another of many path-crossings with Elton and his circle, my album is the first one Geoffrey engineers after his recovery. He is brilliant. He is also deeply depressed and troubled about the loss of his memories. We become friends, and I think we see in each other a very similar darkness, though from different circumstances. A brot
her from another mother … but with the same father.

  We record the ten songs I have written—mostly ballads—with the great English session musicians and singers and even the London freaking Symphony Orchestra, then we pack up and get ready to head back to the U.S. to do my lead vocals now that the expensive part of the recording is finished. I see myself as a ballad writer at this point and figure that any success I have will most likely come from one of the ballads that seem so easy for me to write. Wrong again.

  Michelle is heavily into the English music scene of 1972 with skinny little English blokes like the guys in Roxy Music and even skinnier and smaller ones like David Bowie and even skinnier and smaller still, like Marc Bolan of T. Rex. I get up one morning and stretch my 6'2" self and Michelle tells me I have a big ass and I need to be much “smaller.” So I begin buying way-too-small shirts and pants for myself that I squeeze into in order to look the part of the waiflike English rock star. Photos from that era show a very skinny me trying to appear even skinnier, especially in the ass area.

  I’ve also taken to wearing makeup, as is the fashion of the day. I say “makeup,” but what I really mean is Magic Marker. I’m too embarrassed to go to a cosmetics counter and ask for actual women’s eyeliner, so this is my compromise: a big black felt-pen mark along both lower eyelids. I get a lot of looks at the LA airport when we arrive back, not all of them good.

  I move into a ground-floor apartment in the same building as Robie’s on Poinsettia Avenue in Hollywood. The building has colored lights out front that illuminate the palm trees (wowee, Sport!), and I proudly write to my friends back in Oz just so I can list my return address as: Hollywood, California, USA!!!! That alone makes the whole trip worth it.

  In what will be typical of my few years with Binder/Porter, I have seen no money from advances or whatever, but my rent is paid. I still have to buy my own food, and I make regular trips to the Ralph’s supermarket on the corner that’s open 24 hours and buy the first of my many TV dinners. I write an enthusiastic letter home: “Mum and Dad, it’s amazing. They have whole dinners you just take out of the freezer and stick in an oven, and in thirty minutes, you have a meal PLUS dessert!” I can’t anticipate it, but I’m about to make myself very, very unwell on a steady diet of these “miracle” TV dinners. Kind of like existing on regular servings of Australia’s barren topsoil.

  We finish the vocals and some guitar solos in a local LA studio and the record is done. Unfortunately, the recording tape’s journey from London to LA has produced thousands of unwanted pops and noises, so a new guy is brought in to laboriously edit the million and one clicks out of the finished mixes. He’s a young guy named Keith Olsen. I think chopping out the unwanted blips and bleeps from my first album was his first real gig at a big studio.

  We take photos for the front cover and they shoot me through not one but two windows of the photographer’s house, probably to make me look younger and prettier than I am. We call the album Beginnings. To my horror, they also remove the hair on my arms in the big gatefold center photo, because they think my hairy ape-man arms will scare the little girls.

  The teen press machine revs up, the single “Speak to the Sky” is released on Capitol Records, I take to the road and go on an endless parade of meetings and dinners with all the rack jobbers (people who stock the records in the stores), the promotion guys (people who try to get the record played on the radio), the radio program directors (people who choose whether or not to play the record), and of course the DJs (who actually play the damn thing) and tell them all how freakin’ awesome they are and what a fan-fucking-tastic job they’re doing for my humble little single, “Speak to the Sky.” I end up kissing ass beyond my wildest expectations. If I wasn’t so young and eager, I’d be totally embarrassed for myself.

  “Speak to the Sky,” a nice pop tune with a bit of a message, sails into the Billboard Top 10. But my album, with songs about a guy committing suicide (“The Unhappy Ending”), a wife who keeps her failed marriage together for her kids’ sake (“What Would the Children Think?”), and a homosexual wanting to come out of the closet—no, not me—called “Why?” is hardly young teen fare and lands with a soft thud in the lower 30s of the Top 100 chart.

  Gloria Stavers starts calling Steve Binder and Robie Porter to scream at them. “We’re giving Springfield all this fucking publicity in our teen magazines, so where’s his ‘Doesn’t Somebody Want to Be Wanted’? Where’s his ‘I Think I Love You,’ dammit!” (These are hit songs by major teen heartthrob David Cassidy. Not the last time someone will compare me to this guy.)

  Capitol smells that it’s on the verge of young teen blood and kicks things up a notch with radio contests, “Meet Rick” opportunities, and more dragging my apparently teen ass all over America on radio promotional tours. Since I’m illegally working in the U.S. on a visitor’s visa, it is advised that I not put a band together to go out and actually play real music, as it could bring unwanted attention to my illegal status, or so the lawyers say. Meanwhile I am making trips to the American embassy with scrapbooks full of clippings about how fabulous I am—but not so fabulous that I’d put an American out of work—so I can get the highly valued “green card” that will allow me to stay and work here as an alien resident. Or I could do it the easy way and marry an American girl. But I am terminally single at this point.

  In fact, the only fun for me on these lame radio and promotion tours is the sex I am having with young, pretty, and very American girls. The ’70s are the real “summer of love” when everybody is doing everyone. The ’60s were just the warm-up act before experience, better drugs, and what appear to be no real consequences to the lifestyle emerge. The ’80s would be the consequences, but here in the early ’70s it’s all fun and games (’til someone gets the clap).

  In St. Louis I have sex in my photographer’s hotel room with one girl, then move into the living room of my suite and bang the little schoolteacher who just can’t get enough, then continue on to my bedroom where a girl has wandered in (yes, all doors are open) looking for the photographer (who I say has gone to bed), so I fuck her, too. Being young has its downside but also its upside (as it were). I crash and get up at 8 a.m. to catch a plane to Dallas and begin it all again.

  Honestly, I have no idea what bearing any of this has on my record’s success, but the powers that be seem to think this is working (the promotion and meetings, not the fucking). I take a young and beautiful Susan Dey out one night on a date; Marie Osmond and I stare at each other across a restaurant dining room table; a very young Valerie Bertinelli and I roll around on someone’s apartment living room floor while her TV sister, Mackenzie Phillips, watches; but the real sex is left in the hands of the unsung heroines at parties and record and radio events. I am getting distracted by it.

  A second single, “What Would the Children Think?” is released, and I’m booked on The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour to perform the song and also to be involved in some comedy skits. They don’t even ask if I can act … or maybe they’ve read some excellent reviews of my star turn in Captain Scuttleboom’s Treasure that perhaps I missed. I handle myself okay on the show, I guess, but I’m starting to get serious self-doubts about all this attention paid to the way I look. Guess who steps up and into the vacuum … my Darkness. He whispers to me late at night from my apartment bathroom mirror—always the darkest mirror in my house—“Is that a zit on your face? Why, yes, I believe it is. And it’s big! You remember that radio guy last week who said you weren’t as good-looking as your album cover? Do you think he’s right?” He continues in a siren’s voice that drags me down. “Those circles under your eyes make you look so much older, too. And I know you’ve always thought you had a big … ugly … nose.”

  I start getting more zits, and I’m seeing them show up more and more in photos. I’m feeling the pressure of trying to be something I know very well I’m not. I do more teen press, and it starts to dawn on me what direction my career is taking. And then …

  ABC television
takes a poll of all the teen magazines and asks them who they think is going to be the next David Cassidy. Oh no … they think it’s me! At this point it seems like lunacy to throw away the tons of free press I’ve had in Tiger Beat and 16 Magazine and countless other teen fanzines, so I bite. “What’cha got, ABC?”

  What they have is a brilliant and novel idea for a Saturday morning TV cartoon. It will be part Yellow Submarine, part The Hobbit/Lord of the Rings, and I will write a song per episode and play myself in this remarkable, groundbreaking show. I meet with some of the artists who worked on Fantasia for Disney and we talk about Tolkien and the Beatles at their psychedelic best. Scripts are written, artwork is done, and then the network gets a hold of it. And what comes out of their boardroom after all this cutting-edge, imaginative homework is another Xeroxed piece of absolutely run-of-the-mill shit called Mission: Magic. (Quentin Tarantino did tell me he used to watch it as a kid and loved it. Oops, sorry, dropped that one without a warning—my bad.)

  It has a place in kitschdom today, certainly, but truly, what were I and my management thinking? That this was a good career move and a way to some real music street cred? Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. It ran for two seasons, I wrote some cute pop songs, and you can now get it on DVD. Nothing in the digital world is ever forgotten or forgiven.

  After almost eleven months in the U.S., I have to go back to Australia. My tourist visa is up and I can’t risk pissing off those who will one day deign to let me stay in this land. I must go out of the country for a few weeks while a temporary work visa is issued (still no frigging green card). So I board a jet, this time pointed the wrong way … back to Australia. But inside, I realize that I need a breather and am looking forward to going home. I miss my family and Cleo and would like to taste some good old Aussie meat pies once again.