Shyly, but with a slight hint of pride, she says, “It was Peter Frampton.” “Peter Frampton, the singer?” I exclaim in horror. Frampton, who is a longtime friend of Jemimah the studio manager, has recently been recording at Sound City and has been Barbara’s girlhood crush since she was thirteen. It all fits—dammit!!! Who am I to deny a young girl the fulfillment of her teenage rock-star crush? But I do, and I’m incredibly resentful, mainly because he’s successful and I’m still sucking mud at the bottom of the pond. It shouldn’t matter, but it does.
The Darkness checks in briefly. “Gonna be pretty tough to measure up to a famous guy, huh, Rickyboy?” I’m feeling strong now, so I push him out. We do end up in bed, Barbara and I. It is the most amazing night, and I will never forget it. We wake in the morning and I think we’re in love. My brand-new, furry soul mate Lethal Ron has propped himself up against the outside of the big bedroom window, looking in at us with a slightly perplexed expression. He’s never been locked outside my bedroom before and is probably wondering what exactly is making that shape next to me where he usually sleeps.
From that very first night, this girl gives me a feeling I’ve never had before. (No, I’ve had that feeling before—I’m talking about one somewhere in and around my heart.) The last thing I want right now is a new girlfriend, but I find myself wondering what she’s doing wanting to phone her. I stop calling other girls because I want to be with her. This girl has really gotten to me. We start seeing each other regularly, much to Ernie’s chagrin, is a good friend nonetheless, and when I sign the deal with RCA and get a $5,000 record advance, I buy a house and he agrees to move in and pay me rent so I can shoulder the burden of a mortgage.
I begin recording at the studio where Barbara still works. She sleeps over at the new house a lot of the time. Before long, I decide I want her to move in. When she questions me about Ernie and his designs on me, I’m astonished. “What? Ernie’s not gay!” She starts laughing; she thinks I’m joking. And then it dawns on me: he’s been making my bed for me, cooking for me, cleaning the house, giving me back rubs whenever I want them—duh! I know now what it will mean to Ernie when I tell him that Barbara’s moving in. And I’m right, because he says that if she’s moving in, then he’s moving out. And he does. Now it’s me, B (my shorthand nickname for her), and Lethal Ron in our little love nest on Broadview Drive, Glendale. Yes, I am definitely in love.
B’s mom, Pat, is a little concerned about this thirty-year-old gentleman (me?) who her young daughter is living with. She wants to meet me. She says later that she was expecting some older guy in a leisure suit telling her he’s “quite fond of young Barbara.” In other words, someone with his act together. When I show up, an immature might-as-well-be-adolescent with a record deal, Pat understands why the relationship is working. Although there is a twelve-year age gap between B and me, it’s obvious to Pat that I’m really the younger one in the equation. She sees how connected we are, not to mention that we can’t keep our hands off each other. Pat is our supporter from that moment on and sees the romance in our relationship that she knows she’s missed in her own. Now I love Barbara’s mom, too.
I get the call to come in and read for General Hospital. I’ve always been a nervous auditioner when it comes to trying out for acting roles. I feel judged (which I am) and under the microscope (again, true). It has very little to do with the art of acting, this reading process, and every actor has to go through it. But something has changed in me since I’ve begun seeing B. She likes who I am, at this moment. She loves our little house and will later confide that she thought we would live there forever. I don’t need to be anything more than I am right now, as far as she is concerned. I see this in her eyes and hear it in her voice. Her complete acceptance gives me great strength and confidence and a “don’t-really-give-a-shit” attitude, so I go in and kill the audition and land the part. Barbara is responsible for that. Her unconditional and perfect love make what is about to happen to me possible.
It’s nearing Christmas, and my mum asks me if I could come home for a visit. So I leave my new girl and new dog and fly to see my old mum and old dad in Australia.
CHAPTER TWELVE
WHAT’S THE POINT OF BEING A DOCTOR
IF EVERYBODY DIES?
OPPOSITE ENDS OF THE EARTH: LA AND AUSTRALIA
1981
I’m beginning to feel like a visitor in my homeland. Going back to Oz has less of the sensation of a homecoming; it’s more like I’m looking through a box of old photos from a dusty attic. In my upstairs bedroom, I rummage through songs I wrote when I was a teenager (thankfully they’ll never see the light of day), drawings I made, poems I wrote, and dumb things I collected, and I go to sleep in the same bed I’ve always slept in at my parents’ house. Downstairs my dad battles the cancer and my mum picks up after him like he’s her child. No one talks of dying. I long to ask my father how he’s dealing with it, but how do you talk to a five-year-old about death? Instead, we pull out the tinfoil Christmas tree my mother bought years ago in order to save a few real trees, decorate it, and quietly slip our presents to each other beneath its aluminum branches.
My dad always wanted a pocket watch. I give him an antique one that I bought for him at the Pasadena Rose Bowl on one of the days I was out there hawking my mirrors. I spent way more than I made that day. I’ve had his initials—NJS—engraved on the inside along with the sentiment, “To Dad, love, Rick.” I feel like something is missing in our house now that Cleo is gone and I go to a shelter and get them a puppy—with paws the size of snowshoes—that my mum names “Flora,” another frigging name from another century. (Flora will soon grow too big for their yard, and my mum, already overwhelmed with my dad, will decide to give her away four months later. My lifelong atrocious luck with the family-dog combo holds true to form.) We take photos and I hug and hold my dad and wish him healing. He says “Go get ’em, son.” I board the plane that will take me back “home.” I can’t bring myself to say “Good-bye, Dad,” so I say “I’ll see you later.”
I wish it were true.
Barbara is waiting for me at LAX with Lethal Ron in the car. I’m excited to be back. “Lethal Ron” soon wears out its welcome as a name, so I shorten it to Ron, then lengthen it to Ronnie, then modify that to Arnie, then distort that to Arnfarn, and so on and so on. It seems my old man’s trait for endlessly evolving loopy dog nicknames is alive and well in his second son.
And his second son is definitely in love with the feisty little firecracker of a girlfriend he has miraculously managed to keep interested in him. So I do the right thing and go meet Barbara’s dad, having already met her mom. Her mom loves me; her dad, not so much. I figure one out of two isn’t bad.
The album is complete, but I have a concern about something. I’m giving serious thought to releasing the new record under a “band” name, as I’m worried about all the baggage that goes along with “Rick Springfield.” I’m gun-shy about my own name (or at least, Pete Watson’s version of my own name) after all the teen-idol crap from the ’70s. Joe and RCA talk me into keeping the RS moniker on the album, but I’m adamant that I won’t have another “beauty” shot of me on the front cover. Instead, I tell them that I’m dressing my dog up in a shirt and tie (thank you, Yan the snappy dresser), putting him on the cover, and calling the record Working Class Dog. RCA thinks I’m joking. I am soon to be the new face on a national TV show that’s fast becoming a summer phenomenon and I want my dog on the cover? I’m determined not to be swayed this time. I’ll mock up a cover and show them what I mean.
I measure Ronnie’s neck—eighteen inches around—and head off to a big-and-tall men’s store to get him a shirt. The conversation goes something like this:
Me: I’d like a white dress shirt with an eighteen-inch neck, please.
Sales guy: Certainly. And what length sleeves are we talking here?
Me: It doesn’t matter.
Sales guy: Well, just give me a ballpark number. Is he a thirty-inch sleeve—a thirty-five?
&n
bsp; I know he’s not going to let up.
Me: Twelve.
Sales guy: Twelve? Twelve what?
Me: Twelve inches. His arm length is twelve inches.
We stare at each other for a moment or two. Somewhere in the distance a lonely cricket chirps and a train whistle blows.
Sales guy: How ’bout a short-sleeved shirt, then?
Me: Sounds good.
More to their credit, when I show RCA the mocked-up cover, the suits get the idea and we are off and running. We do a hilarious photo session with my patient dog, who’s dressed for hours in the shirt and tie. I tempt and reward him with dog cookies and at the last minute I shove a black-and-white photo of me in his shirt pocket as a kind of joke to the RCA art department, who are still insisting that I be on the cover.
In the photo we finally choose, Ronnie’s smiling broadly and looks like he’s having a blast. But now the label is having concerns about the album itself. Although everyone can sense disco is wearing out its welcome (thank the gods of music), as are the big syrupy ballads, no one can guess that they will both shortly be replaced on the radio waves by rock and roll. RCA is hesitating to release Working Class Dog, for fear it will fall on deaf ears. I start getting anxious too. I know the album is good, but honestly, I just don’t want all our hard work wasted again.
Another week goes by and RCA pushes the album’s release to the following month. This happens again no less than three times. I am freaking out. Thank God I at least have the TV thing starting up soon. For the first time in my life, I’ll have a pretty decent and regular income, and that eases some of the frustration I’m feeling about the record. RCA finally sets a release date for WCD and assures me they will keep to it. I’m relieved, excited, and truly happy.
Then my mum calls to say my father’s cancer has now metastasized to his brain. They’ve shaved his head of all the hair he was so proud to have kept through his many chemo treatments, in order to focus the radiation more directly on the tumor. She sends photos. He’s sitting in his chair in our tiny TV room, smiling sweetly and looking like a big bald baby. Because I’m not living there with them, I can conveniently shift the pain and fear back a little in my awareness. I must get on with my life.
On March 3, 1981, I go into the General Hospital set for my first day of shooting. I am beyond nervous. The show has been running for years, with pretty much the same cast, and everyone is in the flow and has their cliques and friendships. Oh, no, it’s the first day at a new school again! I struggle through day one just as I’ve done so many times before in other settings, and, as has always happened, it gradually gets easier; I make friends and begin to find my place. I’m elated to be working regularly. After two weeks on the show, people are starting to stare at me on the street. It’s unnerving at first, and unexpected. I am learning that this is the power of TV. I keep checking myself in store windows to see if I have an errant booger or maybe my fly is open.
Meanwhile, RCA finally keeps its word and, without much fanfare, they release Working Class Dog. Again the promotion department of a record company kicks into overdrive on a record of mine, but things are feeling different this time around. As I fly to New York to do radio and press, word starts coming in that stations across the country are playing different cuts from the album. I’ve never had this happen before. Usually you have to kiss their ball sacks morning, noon, and night just to have them play the damn single, but stations are picking their own favorites and playing them and writing about them in the trade papers. And something else is happening. I’m starting to get decent amounts of fan mail at ABC, something TV producers take big note of. Gloria Monty, GH’s producer/Svengali and the woman who hired me, starts putting my character into more episodes.
RCA releases the first single. No, not that song. With nine of the ten tracks on the record written by me, they release the only one that isn’t—“I’ve Done Everything for You.” I think they figure it will have a better shot because Sammy Hagar’s name is attached to it as the writer. I’m okay with it. I think it’s a good song. I would have preferred that one of my own be the single, but all that matters is that we launch the album with a hit. The thing is, radio doesn’t pick up “I’ve Done Everything for You,” and although other tracks from Working Class Dog are being played, “I’ve Done Everything for You” isn’t making the rotations. It bombs.
Then something magical happens. A gift. Word starts coming in to RCA that radio is starting to get strong “phones” on a particular song off the album. And in a move that couldn’t happen today because of radio’s tight playlists and corporate fingers in the pie, the radio stations of America choose the single, and that single is “Jessie’s Girl.” RCA releases the song, and it begins its tortuously slow climb up the charts.
RCA gives me $1,500 to shoot two videos. For what purpose, I don’t know. I write up a script and storyboard the “Jessie’s Girl” video, but I leave the “I’ve Done Everything for You” video to the cameraman/director, Mark Stinson. We shoot everything in three days. It’s guerrilla video-filming at its finest. At 3:00 a.m. we’re shooting the opening scenes to “Jessie’s Girl” in a Hollywood alleyway with the song blasting through portable speakers when someone yells that the cops are coming. We toss our gear into the van and tear off into the night. It’s so fucking cool.
Our big expense in special effects is the twenty-four bathroom mirrors I break in the middle section of the song. No one, including myself at this point, understands my reasoning for smashing the mirror in a bathroom setting. They certainly don’t know about my adolescent years spent staring into that depressing thing. And that it’s precisely there where the Darkness lives and breathes. Looking at the video now, I see a lot of real pain on my face in that scene as I splinter the mirrors with the headstock of my guitar.
I walk onto the GH set one morning and everyone’s talking about the “Jessie’s Girl” video. It turns out that the night before, heavyweight champion Larry Holmes defended his title against Leon Spinks. The fight was broadcast on cable. Lucky for me and for Holmes, Spinks was knocked out in the third round. When the fight ended much earlier than expected, some desperate TV guy had gone scrambling for anything to fill the empty airspace and his incredibly-lucky-for-me fingers landed on my videocassette. So everyone has seen it. And then MTV calls to say they’d like to interview me and play the video. “What is MTV?” I ask. Nobody seems to know, but it’s press, so next time I’m in New York I find myself in a tiny hole-in-the-wall in a not-great neighborhood talking to a kid named Martha Quinn who looks like she’s twelve. She asks me questions about the video of “Jessie’s Girl.” I believe she is the first to ask the questions I’ve answered more than any other: “So, was there really a Jessie’s girl?” I’m suddenly flying all over the place doing TV and radio interviews and playing “Jessie’s Girl” for whoever will listen.
I soon find out that it’s more than blue-haired little old ladies who watch General Hospital. Our audience includes colleges full of young adults, high schools full of kids, houses full of stay-at-home mothers and, yes, blue-haired little old ladies as well. Stars watch it, too, they tell me when I meet Elizabeth Taylor (when she guests on GH), Sammy Davis, Jr. (who approaches me as we walk down the red carpet for the first Night of 100 Stars), Brian Wilson (when we do a gig with the Beach Boys), and Little Richard (who sits with me at Sound City one night, singing to me and trying to convince me to record a song of his), just to drop some more names. Come on, you know it’s expected.
Gloria Monty sidles up to me one day on the set and says, “I hear you’re a musician, too. We’d like you to sing on the show.” I’ve already started to hear that a few of the album-oriented stations have stopped playing “Jessie’s Girl” as soon as they found out I’m on a soap opera. It’s the double-edged sword that Keith Olsen warned me about. I refuse to sing on GH, as I will later refuse to allow the licensing of Rick Springfield lunch boxes and girls’ swimsuits, and as I’ll say no to doing Converse ads and singing on a McDonald
’s commercial. I need to keep my music separate from the degree of cheesiness attached to “Daytime Drama.”
Jack White, my spirited drummer, has rounded up a few musicians and we’re all busy rehearsing for some upcoming shows that promise to actually have an audience that actually hasn’t just wandered in off the street, when Joe breaks into the rehearsal room carrying some glasses and a cheap bottle of champagne. “Jessie’s Girl” has just reached Number 1 on the Billboard charts and is looking like it could become a worldwide hit. Cheap champagne never tasted so good. I am on the way to what I always felt was my destiny—that thing I believed I was saved for when the rope came unraveled long ago in the backyard shed. But there’s still a painful detour I have to make just up ahead.
I come home from GH one evening and the message light is blinking on my ’70s-style PhoneMate answering machine. I hit the playback button and my brother Mike’s voice, broken and dire, comes out of the small speaker. “Rick. Call home. Dad is gravely ill.” I call Mike back. On the other side of the world, my champion sleeps in a stark hospital bed, drugged against the pain. Mum has been sitting with him night and day for two weeks, but she needs to go home so she can get some clean clothes and check on the house. She dashes out, hoping to be back by her husband’s side within three hours. My dad, I think, has stayed around at this point because he knows his wife is desperate not to lose him. But it’s time to go.
And an hour after his best girl has left the hospital grounds, my father, my champ, my sweet old man, leaves this world forever. Eileen Louise Springthorpe, née Evennett, arrives home to the phone ringing, answers it, and hears the words she has prepared herself for years to hear, but they still shatter her. Our man is dead for the second and final time. Normie at last makes it home. I am woken in the early hours of a Friday morning by my brother’s second phone call. He tells me Dad is gone. I am at least twenty hours away from my family in Melbourne, and I’m scheduled to be on the set of General Hospital in three hours. I think about what my dad would do in my place. His work ethic would say, “Finish your job, Son.” His heart would say, “Take care of your mum.” So I do both.
Late, Late at Night Page 20
