Late, Late at Night

by Springfield, Rick

  All the press has had some effect at home, too, and I am besieged with requests for interviews to brag about how well I’ve done in the U.S. Of course I say everything is going splendidly and, yes, I am going back soon … to my apartment … in Hollywood. Cleo is gray and runs up to me like I just came home from a weekend away. Dad is looking a little more chipper and is clearly happy to have his younger son home. I hug him and he feels a lot bonier than I remember, but Mum says he eats like a horse and has been able to take himself, by train, a few stops down the line, to the institute for the blind, so he can read to some of the permanent residents and also sing to the old ladies, who love him, of course. He is a good man, my dad. Even in his nightmare he is doing something worthwhile. They say they’re proud of me, but I see worry in my mum’s eyes.

  One day, I pick up the phone and call Tania, my old high school crush … she of the painful “blue balls” episodes. She’s still at the same number. Her breathy voice answers and I’m shocked into silence. I mumble a hello and tell her I’m back in Australia. She says she knows. I have a hotel room in the city for press and meetings, and she agrees to meet me there later that night. When she arrives she is everything I remember. Beautiful, shy, soft-spoken, and with an appealing dark, enigmatic quality that I can’t quite name. Our affair is finally consummated on the sacred ground of the bed in room 720. It is the longest I have ever waited to have sex with anyone, and it is an unforgettable experience burned into my memory for that reason. She is hot, sweet, soft, angelic, dark, beautiful, and my sixteen-year-old self’s dream finally come true.

  I head back to the U.S. two weeks later and get ready for round two. Tania and I write letters of passion and longing that finally falter and stop. Years later I hear that she has realized she’s gay and is now living with a woman somewhere in Sydney.

  Robie has Louis Vuitton luggage, drives a Caddy, and has been married for five years to a beautiful, if slightly insane, Frenchwoman named Colette, so I figure he must be fairly wealthy. It escapes me that he is also living in my apartment building in central Hollywood. I move on up to the second floor to try and get away from the recurring nightmares I am having of “bad guys” breaking into my ground-floor bedroom while I’m sleeping, to rape and rob me. Obviously I’m still feeling a little threatened by America.

  Not to mention the angry Hispanic guy who wants to beat me up for dinging his car while opening Robie’s heavy Cadillac door. Robie has driven me to an emergency room for one of the myriad times I slice my hand open on something, and when I come back out, Robie and his Caddy are gone and the aforementioned angry Hispanic guy is demanding money from me because the guy I was with (Robie) said that I was the one who dinged his fine automobile. I can’t believe Robie—the fucker has just taken off and left me here at the mercy of this highly agitated and burly dude. I hightail it back into the emergency room, jump a fence, and walk all the way back to my apartment building to avoid (a) forking over cash to this guy or (b) having a confrontation I am certain not to win.

  Although I don’t always like Robie, I do always like his dog, a goofy Irish setter named Yan. I dog-sit for Robie and Colette occasionally, and because Yan will sit and stay really well, I dress him up in coats and hats and scarves from my closet, take photos of him, and generally pee myself laughing until his parents come to pick him up. He is a champ and sits there with the dopiest expression while I snap away. I will draw on this harmless and silly shit years later when I tire of putting my own face on my album covers.

  Capitol Records agrees to go for another round and I get a second chance. I’ve been writing nonstop, listening to all things English and determined to break away from the teen image that has been thrust upon me. When I go to Disneyland I’m recognized and pestered for photos and autographs. Most of these young girls don’t even know I’m a musician, such is the power of the teen press, but they do have posters of me on their bedroom walls, and the truth is, at this point, I’m famous for nothing other than being famous. Kind of a ’70s version of Paris Hilton.

  My future wife, eleven years old at this point in time and living in Wisconsin, is a big fan of Donny Osmond, but she also has a poster of her future husband and the father of her two sons on her wall in all his androgynous, nonthreatening glory. Truly, truly weird.

  And then Jerry Lewis, thank you very much, steps into my corner. My publicist and good friend Fred Skidmore asks his good friend Jerry if he can do anything about “getting this Springfield kid” his green card. I have spent $10,000 (or so I’m led to believe—honestly, I never see a dime) on useless lawyers, and I’ve lugged even more scrapbooks full of articles on my super-specialness to the embassy, plus letters of endearment from the likes of Dick Clark and the president of Capitol Records, and still nothing.

  Jerry, God bless him, makes a phone call and I am a “resident alien” at last!!! Now that I’m legal and can finally work in America, we head to England again to record my second album for Capitol. The songs are more light teenage fare that the twelve-year-old readers of 16 Magazine can readily identify with. Songs about fear of failure (“Why Are You Waiting?”), dead women coming back to life (“Misty Water Woman”), young girls getting pregnant out of wedlock (“Weep No More”), a girl caught up in drugs (“The Liar”), and my love affair with an eighty-year-old woman (“Born Out of Time”). Yes, I’m in love once more, but with no chance whatsoever of consummation. Fred, my publicist, a man twenty years my senior, has turned me on to old Greta Garbo movies. I watch them all, have posters and photos of her all over my apartment, and am highly pissed at fate for the bad timing of our births. There’s nothing I can do except fantasize. And write a song or two.

  Off to London Robie and I go to hook up with Del Newman again, but in a different studio and with a different recording engineer. Although I’m staying in a tiny hotel this time, I go to see Michelle as soon as I arrive. Not wanting to go through the whole hallucination/sleep deprivation thing again, I ask if she has any sleeping pills. She gives me a big blue pill (am I Alice?) and advises me to take it just before bed. The next thing I know it’s two in the afternoon of the next day, all the lights in the apartment are on, the faucet is running in the bathroom, and I’m lying facedown on the bed, fully dressed. It’s amazing what we are prepared to swallow in the ’70s.

  We record the eleven new songs quickly and, apart from some frustrated tears from me now and then, it goes pretty smoothly. Again we’re working with great English musicians and singers and of course the London Symphony. I’ve given up trying to get laid in England—I don’t know, maybe they can sense my desperation, or did Heather Flint put the word out that I’m a geek?—so we hotfoot it back to the U.S., where I continue to have much better luck in love and Heather Flint’s warnings have no influence.

  I come up with what I think is a cool concept for the album cover. Having always loved comic-book art, I decide to have an actual comic book artist draw me as a superhero on the cover and further illustrate the songs on the inside gatefold. I name the record Comic Book Heroes. It’s released with some fanfare on Capitol and gets a great review in Rolling Stone magazine, but the general public evidently looks on the comic book theme as childish and very, very teen. Comic books? Teen? Wha … ? Then Capitol gets busted for payola (really?) and somehow I end up as the scapegoat. I still don’t understand what happened, but we are squarely handed the blame, and it is claimed that management has been busing in loads of kids to buy my record to get it on the charts. We try to fight it, but the word is on the street.

  Steve and Robie pull me from Capitol, and Columbia Records snaps me up. I later learn that I’ve been sold to Columbia as the next—yep, you guessed it—David Cassidy. So Comic Book Heroes comes out a second time, this version on Columbia. More promotional trips to Europe and all around the U.S., more teen press … but to no avail. The record dies a quick death. What is going on? I should be famous by now, at least according to all the movies I’ve ever seen and that life insurance guy, goddammit!

&nb
sp; The constant diet of TV dinners hasn’t helped my mood and is playing havoc with my system. I am tired and emaciated, and my face has broken out in painful red lumps. I look like some teenager’s nightmare, and I feel sick all the time. I eventually seek a doctor’s advice and he tells me to start going to restaurants and eating real food.

  Things are starting to truly unravel. The Darkness speaks to me late at night from my bathroom mirror. Whispering balefully, in my own voice, he tells me, “Your record really flopped, huh? And you’re not getting any younger. I think the teen fans see you as an old guy now.” And, intentionally or not, I have spent three long years cultivating this frigging teen image. I can’t just throw all that away, can I? I book a flight to Melbourne for a few weeks away.

  It’s great to see my family again, but I’m under the gun. I don’t tell anyone that I’m going to see a plastic surgeon in Melbourne. This surgeon looks at my soft, unwrinkled, unlined twenty-three-year-old face and says, without a hint of sarcasm, “Yes, I can help you. I can get rid of those lines and bags under your eyes. It will make you look years younger.” I go under the knife, sure that this is the cure for everything. Is it the thousand and one schools I went to, the roots I could never lay down, the girls I couldn’t connect with, the animals I failed to stand by, some confirmation I didn’t get from my mother? God knows at this point, but I am desperate and on the verge of losing it again.

  I wake up in a strange hospital bed, my head heavy from the aftereffects of the anesthesia. Afternoon light filters through the blinds. I struggle up to the mirror (why are they always in a bathroom?) and gaze on a nightmare face that looks as though it’s gone a few rounds with Snowy from the Moppa Blues and some of his fellow inmates. My eyes are black and swollen and there are stitches poking through the flesh of my lower eyelids. Dried blood is caked in the corners of my half-open eyes, and I feel like shit. I stumble to the phone and call the one person on whom I can always depend, my brother Mike. When he arrives he is shocked and alarmed by what he sees. He helps me to the car and drives me home. I wait while he goes inside and breaks the news to our mum. I lie on the living room floor for two weeks with cold compresses on my eyes, and when the swelling and bruising has subsided, I don’t really see any difference, apart from the still-red scarring. “Nice try, numb-nuts,” says the Darkness.

  CHAPTER NINE

  AMERICA ON $180 A MONTH

  HOLLYWOOD HIGH LIFE

  1974–1978

  Three weeks later, I fly back to the States, where nothing is mentioned about what I’ve just done, except by Fred, my publicist and friend, who says, “You look better.” I think I actually look a little worse, but I appreciate his supportive words. My face has still not quite recovered from the procedure and there’s a puffy red incision line under each of my eyes. I’m depressed because I don’t know if the marks will dissipate with time or be there for life. God, I’m a fucking idiot!

  Lynne Randell is an Australian singer who now lives in LA and is married to an American lawyer. She has an exceptional voice but has never cracked it here in the States. She is cute, blond, and a bit of a wild one. Out of the blue, ostensibly because we’re both Aussies, she calls me up and invites me to a porno movie. I’m still too young and horny to see the fault in this adultery, and anyway, I figure it’s up to the husband to keep the wife happy, so I accept.

  Halfway through the movie she grabs my hand, leads me out of the theater, and drives us back to my apartment, where we proceed to screw our brains out, fired up by the hard-core movie. It’s my first encounter with a girl who gets turned on by porn, and my mind is blown. Girls like this stuff?

  I become Lynne’s illicit boyfriend, along with, honestly, half the Los Angeles music world, but there is no fidelity implied or expected. In fact, she often invites me over to her house when her husband is away and arranges trysts for me with other girls, all fueled by a new drug she has also turned me on to: LSD. Acid is a pharmaceutical that lifts my spirits, throws a lights-up on the Darkness, and makes me laugh like a fool. And a “trip” lasts a hell of a long time. A lot of bang for the buck.

  Another Elton John moment occurs at one of Lynne’s alcohol- and drug-fueled parties. A young pretty boy who’s arrived with Elton corners me in an upstairs bathroom. It’s the mid-70’s, with rumors of rock stars like David Bowie and Mick Jagger dabbling in homosexuality and musicians generally pushing the androgynous envelope, it’s actually cool to be gay. I think, “Maybe I should take this kid for a test run and see if I like it.” But I gather my very stoned wits and move back into the party, thankful that the drugs haven’t fully kicked in yet. Lynne always seems to have celebs at her parties—Judy Garland’s daughter Lorna Luft with Peter Allen—and I meet Dusty Springfield (she of my first-ever concert as a kid). She runs up and hugs me and says, “My long-lost brother!” It’s a funny moment (and cool for me) because “Springfield” isn’t either of our real last names.

  Lynne also has had a momentary fling with one of the members of Led Zeppelin (ain’t tellin’ which one), so they all show up one night and head to a vacant bedroom with some lucky or unlucky girl, depending on how the night turned out. Lynne also mentions a brief affair with Jimi Hendrix, which further stokes the fires of my drive for fame. At times she appears to be the new Michelle in my life, pushing me to go further with my now-stalled music career. I play her songs I’ve written and she bemoans the teen direction I’ve taken. She’s seen me in Zoot in Oz and says she always thought I would pursue rock and roll over here, not the teen dream. I tell her that’s what I thought too!

  Due to Lynne’s constant prodding and goading, I begin to contemplate a way out of the teen-magazine-lined dead-end path I’ve been following. Meanwhile, Gloria Stavers of 16 Magazine takes to pushing the erotic envelope in the pages of her periodical. Steve Binder tells me that Gloria, who is quite a bit older than I am, has confided in him that all she wants is a weekend with me in a motel room, so I’m a bit nervous when she asks me to take off my shirt and unzip my pants a little at the next photo session in New York. I’m not quite sure what age group she’s aiming for with this approach, but I’m pretty certain it’s not twelve-year-olds. When the photos are printed in the magazine, incensed mothers from across the country write to the editor complaining about the terrifying impropriety of it all. So now, not only are the kids not buying my records, but their mothers think I’m a deviant. It’s time to get a band together and leave this shit behind.

  In 1974, I move to Malibu with my very first American band, which I assemble through the age-old process of advertising and auditions. Our new digs are an unfurnished house that Steve and Robie have rented—possibly with my advance money. We set up our gear in the huge living room, drag in a few mattresses, and get to work. The house is in what at the time is the very unpopular, very remote, very un-chic Point Dume area of equally undesirable Malibu, just across the street from Bob Dylan’s ungroomed compound, and that’s pretty much it for the neighborhood. The house looks out across a wide, overgrown canyon with redwing hawks circling lazily overhead. It’s beautiful, but it feels like the boonies. We practice day and night, stopping only to eat or to have sex with any visiting female. It is a veritable young lad’s dream.

  I write a bunch of new songs, much heavier and more guitar-based than those on the previous albums. The band consists of seriously good musicians, and I’m anxious to break away from the teen rep I’ve been saddled with. We are young men full of testosterone and drive, the music is the reason we’re here, and the sky’s the limit. We focus on music twenty-four hours a day—except when girls show up. Lynne brings girls, clothes, a guitar, and underwear for me, and she’s really starting to push for me to leave Binder/Porter. I feel it’s time, but I’m terrified of being alone in the States. Almost everyone I know is connected to them in one way or another.

  My band and I start playing gigs … for free, anywhere there’s an audience. In an unfortunate choice of stage wear, I make the giant miscalculation of thinking that a
Fred Flintstone–style caveman outfit would really help things along. I don’t know if it does, but it gets a lot of laughs from the band. I drop it pretty fast.

  I move back to my apartment in Hollywood, and Columbia agrees to finance one more album. Into the recording studio we go again, Robie and me, this time to Crystal Studios in Hollywood. My band and I work long hard hours tracking and overdubbing, and I begin to see a stronger, truer direction for my music. Unfortunately, Columbia does not. When they hear the finished tracks, all at least four or five minutes long, with extended and complex instrumental jams, double guitar solos, and a church pipe organ stuck somewhere in the middle, they flip out and pull the plug. I hear the “We thought we were getting the next David Cassidy” line yet again.

  My record dies an orphan, landing with a bruised thud on the Hollywood sidewalk after a year and a half of loving care from me. If I didn’t know it already, I learn it now: this game is not for wusses. The album, tentatively titled Springfield—Rocks Off! (yikes) is put in a warehouse somewhere, along with the crated Ark of the Covenant, never to be seen or heard again. The letter arrives to inform me (just like in high school) that my services are no longer required at Columbia Records, thank you very much, now fuck off.

  This is a big blow to me. I dive deep into the darker side of life. I do things with Lynne and the people she brings around that are downright destructive, illegal, and bad for all concerned. A beautiful young girl named Suzette who I am involved with through this scene commits suicide. It is the end that Lynne will choose for herself as well, many years down the line.

  I think now about the unhappy results that some of my exes have met with and wonder if it’s me or just that I’m attracted to a certain type who gives off a dark signal. I hope for my soul’s sake it’s the latter. I think I have a lot to answer for in some of my dealings with girls/women through this period and even beyond. There are so many higher roads not taken. It unsettles me still. I decide to break it off with Lynne, who unfortunately has a key to my apartment. I come home one night and my place is trashed. The guitar she bought me is gone, as are the clothes and underwear. The threads I don’t mind losing, and I still have my main guitar, but I could really use the underwear. I never see her again, and I wish I could have made peace with her before she died.