Ep. 11: 6 Rick Springfield Songs You'll Dig If You Like "Jessie's Girl"

RockPopandRoll / Episode 11

Remember Jessie’s Girl? #1 in 1981? It is the iconic power pop song that threw musician Rick Springfield, a musician on lean times, back into the music game. He’d been in music since the late 60’s in Australia. A rocker, blessed and cursed. Great looking dude, with the “I’m on a TV show albatross” to carry. He was a career songwriter and guitar guy who had already waded through the teen idol swamp and come out OK. Mostly.

This week on RockPopandRoll, our show is: Power Pop and Rick Springfield: Here’s 6 Songs You’ll Love if you Dig Jessie’s Girl”

Host Rob Nichols, a radio vet and longtime music writer, revisits rock and roll and pop music from the playlist of the decade of the 80s

I get it. Here’s the common word on Rick Springfield - he isn’t a legitimate rock and roll guy. I call bullshit. If you take the music he has made, especially from 1981 to now, he qualifies. A couple bigtime hits. A dozen stellar pop, rock, and power pop songs that cracked the top 40. And a career that he revived in the late 90s and still has rolling.

Springfield sometimes tries too hard with overwrought lyrics. Heavy handed. A bit cliché. And some of his music, when he is not trafficking in the sugary, rocking thing, it doesn’t work well. There’s stuff he has put out – in his heyday of 1981-86 or so, and in some of his more recent albums, that is sincere but just doesn’t hit it his pocket for me. Like he tries too hard.

But then there’s the Rick Springfield that is a star because of the Working Class Dog record, a wholly under-appreciated power pop album – a genre part of rock and roll and radio rock in the late 70s through 1983 or so. The album had “Jessie’s Girl”, “I’ve Done Everything For You”, a minor hit in “Love Is Alright Tonight”, and a bucketful of non-hit, guitar rock and pop songs. It was as good as it really got if you liked the Cars, Rockpile, Cheap Trick, The Greg Kihn band, the Knack, the Romantics, Phil Seymour, and Dwight Twilley. Harmonies, guitars, big drums, some 80s keyboards, and songs about love, girls, and heartache.

If you turn it up when the guitar power chord solo comes around in the middle of “Jessie’s Girl”, here are 6 songs you will love. He’s at best when guitars dominate in a poppy, rocky, throwback-to-FM-radio hits way. Turn it up

SONGS

“Love Screws Me Up”

“Light This Party Up “

“It’s Always Something” “Bruce”

“Kristina”

“I Hate Myself”

LINKS

Hear Spotify playlist: Rick Springfield / Six songs you’ll dig if you like “Jessie’s Girl” plus bonus cuts.

Read review of Rick Springfield show at Indiana State Fair / 2010

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One Last Fact We Learned: “I’ve Done Everything For You”

The Working Class Dog rocker first appeared on Sammy Hagar’s 1978 concert album All Night Long before it would be a Top 10 hit for Springfield, a follow up to “Jessie’s Girl.”

Springfield wasn’t the first person to consider “I’ve Done Everything For You” as cover material. Hagar says producer Keith Olsen brought it to Springfield after first trying to get Pat Benatar to do the track. They made of a demo of it, but they decided to use their own song, “Heartbreaker.

Rick got the song.