The dream comes true for an awkward teenager – join a band and get the girls. Then, after a while, you get that out of your system and you struggle for credibility for your music.

Rick Springfield doesn’t understand why strangers are interested in his underwear. But there he was in Japan, holding a press conference to launch a nationwide concert tour, when out came a truly ridiculous question: “Is it true you don’t wear any underwear?” So he answers the best way he could think of: He stood up and dropped his trousers. Then he wondered why his purple jockey shorts made headlines.

Sure, Rick Springfield knows that the spotlight turns on anyone with a track record like the one he’s assembled since 1980: three hit albums; a string of top ten singles that started with “Jessie’s Girl” and includes the recent “Souls”; a two-year stint on TV’s General Hospital; and a film career that’s just getting underway with Hard to Hold. But when it comes to this sex symbol business, Springfield just doesn’t get it. He’s not a reluctant sex symbol so much as a disbelieving one, one who remembers clearly what it was like for little Rick Springthorpe growing up in Australia.

“I never thought I was good-looking at all,” he says in characteristically soft, measured and quietly intense tones. “I always worried about my looks, and I used to sit in front of a mirror picking myself apart. In fact, it got so bad I’d stay away from school because I didn’t want to face girls.” He grins. “I was one of the last guys in my class to get laid, and I had to join a band to do it, just like everybody else.”

And that, he bluntly admits, is why he got into the business he’s in. It’s the eternal hope of awkward teenager dreamers: Strap on a guitar and you’ll get the girls. “That’s the reason everybody gets into rock ‘n’ roll, isn’t it?” he says with an easy laugh. “So that the birds’ll like ya? Certainly not to do any great things musically. It’s the initial prepubescent urge to do it because the girls go crazy at the guy up on stage. So you join a band and take your guitar case to parties.”

With or without a guitar?

“Sometimes without, because it’s much lighter that way. You can carry it around from girl to girl and say, ‘Hey, I just came from a gig…’” He shakes his head. “Then, hopefully, you get that out of your system and the music takes over.”

As Rick Springfield stretches his lean, lanky six-foot-plus frame and settles into a chair at Los Angeles’ Record Plant recording studio, the music has long since taken over. That music, in fact, is rattling a few walls in this small room; in an adjoining room, a bass guitar is adding his part to an unusually funky, danceable Springfield tune slated for the Hard to Hold soundtrack. Through a window, the bassist is watched by a tiny, effervescent blond named Barbie, Springfield’s girlfriend for the past two years.

The huge, fur-covered boots Springfield has worn to this session are flashier than usual for him, the black pants and sleeveless T-shirt more traditional offstage garb. Easygoing and afflicted with a boyish sense of humor, he nonetheless picks at a fruit platter and becomes visibly uncomfortable as he goes on about the attention his looks have brought him.

“When people ask me what it’s like to have girls after me, I just don’t relate to it,” he says, groping for words. “When I was 15 or 16 and a girl told me I looked like Paul McCarthney, that was a huge thrill. But now,…” He laughs. “Having grown up with me, I just don’t see what they see in me.”

Whatever they see in him, many of them saw it for the first time on General Hospital. In early 1981, a tall young doctor made his debut on that show, his mild, smooth bedside manner a more serious version of Springfield’s own demeanor. Even without a place in any major story line, Dr. Noah Drake caught on, and that’s the main reason why Rick Springfield’s discomfort with his fame goes deeper than a run-of-the-mill “aw shucks, I’m not that good-looking” disclaimer.

Springfield, it seemed was a willing product of the time-honored television tradition: Take a malleable, safe-looking young man, put him on the air and turn him into the fodder for countless pubescent, cotton-candy female fantasies. Presto! – another teenybopper idol. Rick Nelson, Fabian, David Cassidy, Shaun Cassidy, Rick Springfield.

That’s how it looked for awhile. Springfield may have been a veteran musician when he released his breakthrough Working Class Dog (RCA) album, but his track record was overshadowed by his visibility on television and in the likes of Tiger Beat magazine. “I don’t want to be sold on my looks,” he said at the time, and then added a crucial line: “But I’m tired of struggling, and it’s important for as many people as possible to like me.”

So he played along. Well over a year after Working Class Dog came out, he played Carnegie Hall – and if it hadn’t been for the parents, there wouldn’t have been a soul over 18 present. Crammed into every seat box, nook and cranny of Carnegie were 2,800 young girls – most of them adrift somewhere in mid-puberty – fueled by tanks of adolescent adrenaline and equipped with falsettos piercing enough to shatter the heartiest eardrum.

Onstage, wearing a fallout-shelter T-shirt and mismatched yellow and black sneakers, Springfield told the fresh-faced banshees a story. “Stop me if you’ve heard it before,” the rock ‘n’ roll idol said.

Squeal.

“It’s about this girl I was in love with for eight or nine months.”

Shriek.

“But she had a boyfriend.”

Screech.

“Oh yeah? Well then, what was his name?”

“JESSIE!”

That was his name all right, and as he went into his big hit it was a wonder the caterwauling didn’t bring down the top balcony. “Why can’t I find a woman like that?” he sang, and as he hit the final word the room went dark but for a brilliant yellow spot on the singer, who thrust a lean, bare arm toward the rear of the hall. Out went the lights, up came the screams and then he was back into the song, his fists clenched tightly in front of a sweat-drenched face as he softly sang, “You know I feel so dirty when they start actin’ cute/I wanna tell her that I love her but the point is probably moot…” He hit the next chorus, kicked a long leg high into the air and leaped toward the swooning hordes. From somewhere in the audience, a bra came fluttering down onstage. A training bra, no doubt.

The display was as disconcerting as it was astounding. “Jessie’s Girl” happens to be a terrific pop song, a perfectly constructed rocker brimming with tuneful charm and nicely capturing the wrenching feel of a love that can’t be consummated. But at Carnegie, its quality was irrevocably beside the point. Pulchritude was on display, not music, and Springfield knew that part of the problem was his. “Sometimes I push,” he said the following day. “I don’t mean to, but people tell me that I do play differently to a young crowd.”

Then that conversation was interrupted by a small=scale bit of teen mania. Sitting in the lobby of the Parker Meridien hotel in Manhattan, Springfield was accosted by a steady stream of fans interrupting his lunch – a rare glass of wine, a plate of salads and other unanimously healthy tidbits – and asking for autographs. Finally, up came a girl perhaps 10 years old. She was shaking, she was trembling, she was hanging onto an older friend for physical support and quivering in awe at being so close to the guy who undoubtedly adorns her bedroom walls.

Springfield signed his name on a napkin, and she squeezed out a tremulous sentence. “I love you so much,” she whispered. “I really do.” She summoned up all her nerve and asked for a kiss. Springfield proffered a cheek, and she went away sobbing.