General Hospital’s Rick Springfield

He prefers rock to his role
The Australian soap star admits that music is his first love

Rick Springfield is the only musician – turned – actor around today who is in the TV-heartthrob tradition of Rick Nelson and David Cassidy. But the dashing, mild-mannered staff physician on ABC’s General Hospital, Dr. Noah Drake, has nothing to do with the hot rocker who tours the country singing his hits, like “Jessie’s Girl,” and his current smash, “What Kind of Fool Am I.” Springfield, however, makes no secret of which role he likes best. “Acting is such an insecure business that musicians are like bankers compared with actors,” he declares. “I wouldn’t advise anyone to go into acting. At least as a musician, you can support yourself in a band playing someone else’s tunes, but in acting you’re either a star or starving.”

Springfield is familiar with being both. Growing up in Australia, the lanky, green-eyed guitar slinger, 31, was one of those kids so mesmerized by the Beatles that he quit school to play with a band. Then, having made it onto the Australian charts, and lured by the promise of stardom in the States, he naively emigrated to the U.S., where his managers tried to capitalize on his dimples and sell him as the next teen idol. Once, here, he not only “sold his soul to rock and roll,” he lost his shirt. Though his looks were right, his music just wasn’t corny enough to sustain appeal with pubescent girls. In desperation he turned to acting, ultimately landing sporadic guest appearances on TV shows like The Incredible Hulk.

Then-presto, bango! After seven years and much heartache, just as Rick Springfield’s musical career was finally taking off, he nabbed the role on America’s favorite soap. Today, his hectic schedule doesn’t even allow him to keep up with the turbulent churn of events at General Hospital. “I don’t have time to read all the script. You just tear out your pages to memorize and you pass people in the hall and say, ‘Hi,’ but you don’t know who they are unless you watch the show. I see a little of it sometimes in the greenroom.”

He did, however, recognize Elizabeth Taylor during her first stint on General Hospital last fall. First, he bumped into her in the hall while he was eating a peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich; his mouth was so stuffed he couldn’t say hello. A few days later, for the camera, he escorted her into the hospital conference room. “I had to mumble one or two silly lines to her and after it was over she looked up at me and said, ‘Sometimes acting is so stupid’.”

The outspoken Springfield has studied acting for seven years and is conscientious about playing Dr. Noah Drake, but he admits that music is his first love and never far from his mind. He keeps a piano and a guitar in his dressing room and constantly scribbles, on napkins and bits of paper, snatches of future songs.

“Jessie’s Girl” won Springfield a Grammy. It was one of the top “crossover” songs of 1981, No. 1 on both Top 40 and hard-rock radio, and Springfield followed it with more hit singles. His first album, “Working Class Dog,” went platinum; and his next, the aptly named “Success Hasn’t Spoiled Me Yet,” has risen to No. 2 on the Billboard magazine charts. Yet many in the recording industry consider his brand of rock commercial but lightweight. Say one high-ranking recording executive, “If Ronald Reagan wanted inoffensive rock in the White House, he could invite Rick Springfield.” But what is undeniable about Springfield’s songs, and what gives them their staying power – “Jessie’s Girl” was on the hit charts nearly eight months – is the underlying emotion that drives them.

“Jessie’s Girl,” for example, is Springfield’s lament about his lust for the unattainable girl of a good friend. The song is based on a true-life experience he didn’t act on. “I continually fantasized about her,” Springfield says, “but I valued him as a friend. I know Dr. Noah Drake wouldn’t have been so high-minded. He is a bit more of an egotist than I am. But I worry.”

Both Springfield’s drive and his worry are evident in a San Fernando Valley recording studio. He comes charging in, a few minutes late, with Ron, his lovable half Great Dane, half bull terrier, who is now famous because he’s the “Working Class Dog” on Springfield’s album covers.

Springfield immediately apologizes for being late, and quickly orders one of those very California pita-bread-and-alfalfa-sprout sandwiches, to be washed down with a “pineapple smoothie.” Then he launches into the interview while his manager hovers nearby and Ron races around the recording studio happily yelping at his master’s voice. Springfield tries to shush Ron, simultaneously giving instructions to his engineer about the way he wants the particular track he’s recording to sound. He explains it’s a special sound track, to accompany a song he’s written about his late father, an Australian army colonel. The colonel used to gather his family around their player piano at night to sing Broadway show tunes.

“My parents were really the best,” Springfield declares, “and I was fortunate I grew up without a TV. We didn’t have one until I was 9, so I learned all the words to all the shows from ‘Carousel’ to ‘South Pacific’.” Then, as he keeps one eye on the crew, gulps down his sandwich and paces behind the control panel, he candidly begins the tale of his music career. In a business commonly filled with horror stories about the mishandling of young talent, Rick Springfield’s account of his travails is downright horrendous.

After an early success in his native Australia with a band called Rock House, Springfield helped entertain troops in Vietnam, sometimes under fire. He was brought to the States in 1972 by managers who completely took over his life. Then 21, he admits he was “very green.” “I remember that when I first landed in the L.A. airport from Australia,” he says, “I was so naïve I spent the whole ride to my hotel playing with the electric windows on my manager’s Cadillac.”

Soon after, Springfield flew to New York and had his first interview with a teen “fanzine.” His managers had decided he ought to become the next big teen fantasy. In the super-hip music business, such an image is almost always an anathema, but he was too inexperienced to know it. “People would say, ‘Hey, I really like your music – too bad you’re trying to make it as the next Donny Osmond’,” Springfield recalls. “Something happened to my musical credibility.”

When his next record label, Columbia, tried to pigeonhole him the same way, Springfield took a bold step; he split with his managers, to whom he had signed away all rights to his music-publishing royalties, and he refused to record for Columbia. “I’ll never forget watching my shaking hand reaching to pick up the phone to say I wanted out,” says Springfield. “They had sunk a lot of money into me.” Three and a half years of litigation followed, during which he could not record at all. His old managers still own all of his music publishing worldwide through the end of this year.

After he fired his managers, Springfield was all alone. “I found myself having to pay the light bill, and it freaked me out. I didn’t know how to do anything in the U.S. That’s when I started to learn about life. A lot of young performers are like that. Their managers make them depend on them. It’s not done out of deceit – it’s just the way they operate.”

In 1976 Springfield was allowed to record again, but this third label, Chelsea, went bankrupt right in the middle of his promotional tour for an album to which he had given his all – writing songs and playing most of the instruments himself. “I sold my soul for rock and roll,” Springfield ruefully admits. Finally, in the summer of 1980, he signed a contract with RCA, and “Working Class Dog” was released early in 1981.

Between his first and second recording contracts, Springfield turned to acting. He was living in a rundown part of Hollywood during what he terms a “very seedy” period in his life. Actress Linda Blair was then his girl friend, and she and other friends encouraged him to try acting lessons. He did, and lost most of his Australian accent. But it wasn’t until a few years later, when a Universal talent scout caught him in a little-theater production he and a friend had specially mounted to serve as an audition, that he was put under contract to Universal Television. Universal in turn loaned him out to other production companies and he appeared on The Rockford Files and Wonder Woman. But when Universal phased out its contract program, it also dropped Springfield. He hadn’t worked for six months when he got the call in early 1981 from General Hospital. The show’s producer had no idea he could sing.

Today Rick Springfield wants to be a movie star, but in the tradition of Cary Grant. “I basically want to play characters that are themselves the way Cary Grant or Robert Redford is,” Springfield says. “I’m not some genius character actor like Robert De Niro or Al Pacino.” Next fall, Springfield plans to star in his first movie, a love story with music written especially for him (working title: “Traveling Light”), to be produced by Hollywood kingmaker Ray Stark for Columbia Pictures.

But just as Springfield recognizes his limitations as an actor, he is under no illusion about what you sacrifice to become famous. He’s found it hard to maintain a relationship because he doesn’t have much time for one. His career comes first. “I like a very stable home life,” Springfield says. “I like everything to be all together when I come home. Maybe I should just marry a maid.”

Despite the drawbacks of fame, Rick Springfield is going to go right on pursuing it. After all, he’s struggled for it. “When I get to the point in my show when I sing ‘Jessie’s Girl,’ we spin the house lights around and I see 5000 people jumping up in the air and clapping their hands to a song I wrote. It’s incredible. It’s a great feeling.” Until a better feeling comes along, Rick Springfield will continue to give his soul to rock and roll.

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