A Conversation with Rick Springfield – HuffPost 5.5.14

Mike Ragogna: Rick, anything that starts with a son looking at his mom dressed for church leading into a wise guy conversation with God… You had me hooked from the beginning.

Rick Springfield: [laughs] Oh good, I’m glad.

MR: We don’t want to give away any spoilers, but we have to go into some of the content of Magnificent Vibration. I love that you set up the parents and then you set up the parallel with your life, but where do you see “you”–Rick Springfield–fitting into this cast of characters?

RS: Well I think there’s a bit of me in every character. My family was very different from this guy’s family, but there are elements of my family in there and there are elements of me in even his jerk of a wife. I think to make a character be real you have to use what’s real for you. Obviously, it’s a work of fiction, but I found that characters tended to come from stuff that either I felt or that I didn’t like or that I particularly disliked. I guess that’s how you form a character.

MR: Were you making any conjectures or conclusions about yourself through some of these characters?

RS: Yeah, definitely. Obviously at some point the character and the story take over but the initial idea started from me. I love dogs, and I’ve always loved the fact that were there gods we’d all get a hug and a pet from God, like dogs do from us. I always thought how great it would be to actually have a friggin’ conversation. That’s where the story started out, it was originally called Conversations With God, where this guy has conversations with God, but it took on its own life and went the way it went.

MR: With your latest, it seems like you still “Speak To The Sky.”

RS: [laughs] I’ve always been a very, very spiritual searcher, and I was certainly raised church-wise the way this guy was raised, obviously. I think that’s why a lot of Stephen King’s heroes are writers, because he starts from a point of truth and takes off from there.

MR: Your memoirs–the book Late, Late At Night–have the same tone in certain spots as this book. The Rick Springfield character, as much as you’ve played Doctor Noah Drake or Zac from Battlestar Galactica–talk about the shortest-lived, most-loved character on TV…

RS: [laughs] Yeah, he was only in there for a few seconds.

MR: But “Rick Springfield” is front and center regardless of who you’re playing, that being a good thing, a solid identifiable character. My feeling is your roles–be they acting, writing, music–are totally believable because Rick Springfield is in every single thing you do.

RS: I think that comes from discovering songwriting, when I finally realized I didn’t just have to make stuff up about girls I’d never met, that I could actually use moments of my life. It actually came when my dad first got sick. I was about 20, and at that time I was just starting to really get into writing songs. I wrote a song about my family and how his getting really sick affected us and it really stood out to me because it was kind of a change of writing for me, when I started to write about what was really going on in my head rather than just, “Okay, The Beatles wrote a song about ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand,’ how can I write a song like that?” It became internal for me from that point on, and that’s when I think my songwriting certainly took off.

MR: And your songs like “Believe In Me,” and “Mother Can You Carry Me,” it seems like you couldn’t write them without inserting yourself personally.

RS: Yeah, I definitely, definitely agree. My favorite writers were always real personal writers. I loved Jackson Browne’s early stuff and John Lennon’s stuff where you thought he was singing about you when he sang “Help,” but he was really singing about himself.

MR: Bringing it back to Magnificent Vibration, by the end of the book, were you changed? Was it cathartic for you? Do you understand the personal situations you were writing about better now?

RS: I definitely did, I think. The book really wrote itself, I’d write a passage and didn’t know how it was going to fit in but I was excited to find out. It was a journey for me to write it as well and I’m writing the sequel now and it’s even more interesting to me, all the stuff that’s coming out. I realized I had inserted a lot of myself into the book even though it’s fiction, my views of how we’ve been bad stewards of the world and that eventually there’s going to be a payback whether we want it or not. In the end, I hope the world wins because we haven’t done the right thing and we continue not to do the right thing and we continue, in fact, to work our hardest to do the wrong thing with each other and with the world. I think that’s the basic view of the whole thing. I was raised believing that God punished you when you were bad and if something good happened you turned around and thanked him. I never understood that concept of God. After reading a book called When Bad Things Happen To Good People, I formed what I thought was a reasonable view of a spiritual being and that’s who showed up in the book.

MR: Could that really have been Cotton speaking to himself?

RS: Yeah, and I think that happens a lot. I think spiritually we have a lot of conversations with our higher selves.

MR: You mentioned before the concept of “steward to the world” and it seems there are people who say we should conserve the planet and those who say it was given to us so we should work with it. It seems like there’s a question of whose idea of stewardship is the right one.

RS: It is a choice, and that’s what the book says. We have to choose and not have our lives guided, or else what would be the point?

MR: You’ve been an actor, you’ve been a writer, a musician, performer, guitarist, songwriter. It seems like when an opportunity is thrown at you, you go for it.

RS: Yeah, I love a challenge. That’s what really keeps me alive, I think. Doing the Sound City thing with the Foo Fighters is something that came to me. I know a couple of people bowed out of that for different reasons, but it was a very scary thing stepping into somebody else’s studio with a bunch of bands that know each other and have a thing going on and saying, “Okay, let’s write a song.” It’s a very personal thing, writing a song. But I accepted the challenge and was very happy with the end result, the song that we wrote. I think any time a challenge comes up, any time I’ve not risen to it I’ve beaten myself up for years afterwards. It’s much easier just to rise to the challenge, even if it hurts.

MR: You and Pat Benatar and Neil Giraldo will be on the road soon. And there’s the Stripped Down theme.

RS: It’s a whole tour that we’re doing over the summer. Stripped Down is just me by myself, a sort of storytelling kind of thing that came out of the autobiography where I realized I had a lot of stories and most of those stories ended up as songs, so it seemed like a natural fit. It’s kind of a humorous thing, like the approach I have to most things. But it’s really fun, it’s very laid back and different from the band show which is loud and high energy, this is very much a sit down relaxed talk thing.

MR: And the Pat Benatar/Neil Giraldo part?

RS: That’s the full band and I’m looking forward to that because Neil played the guitar on the original recording of “Jesse’s Girl,” so this tour is kind of a long time coming.

MR: Yeah, you also know how to rock, though you were originally marketed sort of like David Cassidy. And your insisting, “No, this is Rick Springfield,” won you a Grammy.

RS: Yeah, well I started out as a guitar player, that was really my roots. I’ve been in bands since I was fifteen but I think a lot of people got the idea that I was an actor, had some success on General Hospital and then said, “You know what? I think I’ll try singing now.” My career was taken with a grain of salt, but I hung in there and knew that if I kept writing and performing and doing stuff the truth would come out one way or the other. It’s really all you can do when public opinion says one thing and you say something different, all you can do is just hung in there and see if what you think is true or not. That’s all I did basically.

MR: Lately, it seems like your acting is coming back too. You’ve been onCalifornication and you’ve also revisited General Hospital.

RS: Yeah, I went back for the fiftieth anniversary. They were definitely a big part of my initial career. I went back for a couple of days recently. I went back for a year a while ago, back in the late nineties, I think it was, early 2000s, and then I went back for the fiftieth anniversary. I’d do it more, but it’s just a real lot of work. People don’t realize how hard soap opera actors work. It’s really intense. A lot of it ends up being about line memorization for me, which is not acting, so I don’t get a lot of pleasure out of that. There are some actors on there that totally kill it, they’re great at it, but I’m not one of them. I have to really slog over the words to get through my way a lot of the time.

MR: Would you have an easier time if you were Eli Love again?

RS: [laughs] That was fun. They couldn’t really change anything about him because soap operas move so fast they don’t have time for makeup changes or clothing changes, but it was fun doing a different character on there.

MR: What advice do you have for new artists?

RS: Obviously develop your talent as much as you can, hang with other people with like minds, hopefully they’re better so you can learn, and don’t stop performing or playing or writing or whatever it is you do, and don’t put a time limit on it, focus on the end goal and go for that. Never give up, basically, is all you can do. There’s always tough times, but you have to find the strength inside you when the shit hits the fan to stay in there.

MR: Did you ever run into Bruce Springsteen and did he ever have a comment about your song “Bruce” to you?

RS: [laughs] I never have, actually, but I actually did a pilot with Clarence Clemons a long time ago and we knew Roy Bittan for a while, we lived in the same town, but those were the only two guys I really had any contact with.

MR: You’re on Californication, you’ve got the book, you’re still making music, you’ll be on tour… How do you juggle everything and where is this all heading? That’s a lot of stuff!

RS: I just love doing what I’m doing and I’m lucky that I can do it. Now that my kids are out of the house I’ve got a lot of time.

MR: And you’re still having fun with it all.

RS: Yeah, very much so. Occasionally, I get overwhelmed by it and just blow everything off and take a day to be at home, but most of the time I’ve got a lot of energy for it. I actually draw energy from it, the more I work the more energy I seem to have. Sometimes if I take a couple of weeks to do something I get lethargic and could just sit there for the rest of my life. It’s really important for me to keep moving and keep trying to do better. I’m just trying to do what I do better.

MR: And continue to be a good steward of the world.

RS: Well, as much as I can, sure.

MR: If they ever make a movie out of Magnificent Vibration, it seems like George Carlin would’ve been the best Cotton.

RS: [laughs] Yeah, that’s right! He would’ve gotten it.

MR: I really appreciate your time, all the best.

RS: I appreciate your time, too, man.

MR: Is Comic Book Heroes Part II coming soon?

RS: [laughs] The best review I ever got in Rolling Stone was for that record. For the people who get into it, it seems to stick with them, but not a lot of people got into it. I appreciate it.

Transcribed By Galen Hawthorne