There were loud incongruous squeals of delight coming from the bottom level of the Bay-Bloor Indigo bookstore on Monday night. Somebody was making a book-signing appearance somebody who wrote a song called Jessie’s Girl.
Hundreds of fans, predominately female, formed a snaking line through the store’s basement waiting for Rick Springfield to pose for photos and sign copies of his new guts-spilling memoir, Late, Late At Night. There was a hype man revving up the situation. “We are only minutes away from bringing out Rick,” he would tease.
The 61-year-old Australian musician/actor finally emerged to a flutter of flashes and, in true rock star fashion, passed on sitting behind the desk and chair provided on stage, opting rather to casually sit atop the desk. It brought him closer to the eager horde awaiting their purchased moment with him as a looped version of Jessie’s Girl played over the speakers.
In Springfield’s autobiography he reveals a lifelong battle, and triumphant emergence, from debilitating depression the opening chapter is a recollection of a failed suicide attempt at age 17. You can’t help worrying if hearing his relentlessly ubiquitous 80s hit Jessie’s Girl looped for hours at every singing on his book tour might throw him back into a dark place.
The book has a surprisingly significant amount of buzz going for it, considering the last time Springfield was musically relevant was arguably 1984’s Hard to Hold. But Jessie Girl’s, which appeared on 81’s Working Class Dog, has been given a totally unnecessary new pair of legs thanks to the bland television show, Glee. Is there no overplayed hit that Glee won’t further beat to death?
And speaking of death, the juiciest bit of Springfield’s book isn’t the lurid details of a rapacious sexual appetite that almost cost him his marriage, but a guilty admission to killing a man in 1968.
Springfield was an Aussie musician at the time entertaining American troops in Vietnam when all hell broke loose. He was called into battle and helped load mortars for the U.S. against its attackers. One of the mortars, according to Springfield, killed a Vietnamese soldier.
“That was a war situation but it is still something that to this day sends a shiver down my spine,” Springfield said, according to Reuters.
On a sunnier note, whatever happened to that girl who Springfield wanted to steal away from Jessie? The book doesn’t reveal anything because Springfield has no idea himself. He lost touch with his friend, Gary, who he renamed Jessie in the song, four months after he met the couple in the late 70s. Even Oprah’s people couldn’t track them down.
It’s probably for the best. If the girl ever found out she was the subject of this immortal hit it would have likely driven her insane and to that same suicidal place Springfield was at.
