I book a flight home to Australia leaving that afternoon and I arrive on the ABC set at 8:00 a.m. as I’m supposed to do. The only one I tell is Gloria Monty, who moves my scenes forward in the daily schedule so I can finish early and get to the airport in time for my flight home. It’s still all so raw and new that I just can’t talk about it, because I know if someone comes up to me and hugs me or offers words of condolence, I will crumble. So I make my face into a mask, finish the scripted scenes, and get myself to the airport. General Hospital gives me four days to fly to Australia, attend the service for my dad, and then fly back to resume my shift as Dr. Noah Drake. I take the fourteen-hour journey home once again. I’m in shock, as are Mum and Mike, even though we knew it was coming, and my two days at home go by like moments spent in someone else’s life.
We have a service at my mum’s church, then family and friends convene at our house to talk, to cry, to miss him together, and to prove to ourselves that life goes on. The doorbell rings, my brother answers, and I watch through a fog as our dad’s ashes, all that remain of him, cross over our threshold one final time. We rent a little fishing boat to take us out on the bay the following morning—it’s gray and stormy, the sort of sea my dad loved—and we cast his ashes into the waves that are threatening to overturn our craft. For lack of any initiative from the rest of us, Mike steps into the breach and does the deed, intoning “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” I don’t know what these words mean, but I have nothing to say myself. I’m numb. My champion is gone, and I begin to lose what small remaining faith I have in God.
My spirit commences a long, slow spiral down. Meanwhile, forces already in play on the other side of the world are conspiring to launch my usually sub-sea-level ego toward the stratosphere. In America, Working Class Dog is actually climbing the charts. It’s the kind of success I’ve been longing to savor for what feels like my whole life. I’ve fought for this overture to success for so long that to just roll into a ball and fully absorb my father’s death is not an option. If four days is all I’m given by GH, then four days is all I will allow myself to grieve. After that, I will again grab the brass ring that is about to yank me up. My champion would understand.
But on the plane on my way home, I end up curled in a fetal position on the floor in front of my seat with my stomach writhing and twisting. My body is trying instinctively to roll me into that ball, but when the plane lands, I straighten myself up and walk down the jet bridge to my new life.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
WE HAVE IGNITION
ON THE ROAD
The ’80s
I feel better once I’m home with Barbara and Ronnie, but there are schedules to meet and work to be done, so I’m soon on another plane, this time to New York.
If I thought I was doing pretty well with women up until this point, I am in delighted awe at how I am suddenly doing pretty fucking amazingly well. And I see no problem, nor do I feel any guilt, in continuing with my “musician’s lifestyle,” even though I have a girl at home that I am truly in love with and by whose abandonment I would be crushed. Looking back, sometimes I’m amazed at my disconnect. But possibly my behavior can be excused, for a short while at least, based on the “kid in a candy store” defense, Your Honor. Although there is enough sex for me on this New York trip, I experience something completely new and alien. I am really missing Barbara in a deeper way than just companionship and familiarity. I make a decision, though based on my antics in New York, it seems almost ludicrous. But it is heartfelt.
I arrive home, euphoric. After dealing with Ronnie’s over-the-top welcome—“Oh my God, it’s YOU! You’re really home! WhoooHoooooo! Ring the bells, break open the champagne, alert the fucking media. This is INCREDIBLE!!!”—is there any wonder we keep our dogs around?—I sit Barbara on the bed and simply ask her to marry me. It’s a question I have never asked anyone before and only plan to ask this once in my life. Praise Jesus, she says yes or the toilet would have flushed on my life right here. She doesn’t know what she’s getting into, and frankly, neither do I.
We call our respective mothers. Hers is ecstatic, mine sounds miserable. I realize my mum is having trouble with more than the fact that her son is marrying someone he’s only been dating for a couple of months, a girl she’s never met; my father has been dead only four months at this point. I immediately arrange for my old mum to come over and stay with us in our little shack. She does. She seems a bit down when we greet her at LAX, but I don’t recognize the Darkness in her at this point. I just think she’s understandably missing Dad. Things are happening so fast in my career that I don’t have time to sit and contemplate my own belly button, let alone my mother’s. I go back to work.
Fans of Noah Drake, my character on General Hospital, and fans of “Jessie’s Girl” put together that it’s the same guy behind both—so the rocket fuse is lit and we have liftoff. I am not holding on when the afterburners kick in and am almost thrown when, instead of four fans at a record signing, there are suddenly 4,000 threatening to smash and overturn the police car I’m in. And instead of twelve people at a gig, there are 12,000. I am high as a frigging kite from this dramatic and unexpected leap forward. It is what I have been waiting for and feared might never come. And yes, the Darkness is nowhere to be seen. I believed that success would heal me. Apparently I am correct. But the Darkness is just biding his time, the son of a bitch.
I’m filming General Hospital—a show that is now drawing twelve million viewers a day, five days a week—then jumping on a plane Friday night and flying out to meet my band in some part of the U.S., playing a show that night, flying to another city Saturday, doing a show, flying to a third city Sunday, doing a show, then getting up at 3:30 Monday morning to catch another plane back to Los Angeles in time to walk onto the set at ABC for the next week of GH. I’m on the phone doing radio interviews at lunchtime and from my home at night, and in my dressing room between filming scenes, I have a keyboard, guitar, and tape recorder and I’m writing songs for my next album. I am going sixteen hours a day, seven days a week. It’s a brutal schedule, but I’m up for the challenge and never want it to stop.
We play theaters, colleges, parks, and even three nights at Carnegie Hall, and all the shows are sold out. The noise level of the audience is insane and it’s sometimes hard to hear the band, even with the stage monitors cranked up full. I’m distressed that the teen magazines have picked up on me again. I’m not doing any interviews with them so they’re taking old ones from the early ’70s and surrounding the articles with new photos. It seems that “Is Rick Springfield too tall to love?” is still a burning question in the minds of young America, at least according to the much older writers of teen magazines. Jack White does an interview with Tiger Beat on the sly and I am pissed. I’m trying my damnedest to stay away from these magazines that earlier in the ’70s almost spelled my doom.
I’m starting to have to fight this credibility issue on several fronts. Because young girls are the most vocal and most observable force at my shows, record signings, and radio and TV appearances, some members of the press start to get the idea that I’m a soap actor who some clever producer found a song for and got to sing on key for three minutes and fifteen seconds. Even when “I’ve Done Everything for You” is released a second time, followed by “Love Is Alright Tonite,” both of which are hits, there is this undercurrent than I’m merely a synthetic musical confection designed to ride the coattails (or surgical scrubs) of Noah Drake. People’s confusion about who I really am is highlighted for me when on a plane trip (again) to New York, there is a mid-flight request over the intercom for a doctor. The whole cabin looks at me. I want to jump up and shout, “It’s a fucking TV show!”
Not everybody is enjoying my career, though. I wake up one morning and walk outside to see obscenities and references to my possible alternate sexual orientation spray-painted on the driveway. Another morning, I’m on a run and a woman swerves her car at me, missing by inches. People in my camp—yes, I now have a “c
amp”—are starting to tell me that I should live in a bigger house with more security and that maybe my crap heap Ford Fiesta isn’t the ideal vehicle for a young rock star. Okay, not in so many words, but I’m being swayed from the fact that I really couldn’t care any less at this point about a fancier house or more expensive car.
I remember meeting a friend at a party in the early ’70s, who’d just had a big hit with the song “Baby Come Back.” He was telling me that the first thing he did was go out and buy a Ferrari. Six months later he was asking me if I knew anyone who wanted to buy it. That stuck in my head, and although it’s a relief not to have to worry about paying the electric bill every month, for me, money is just a way of keeping score of how well I am or am not doing. What it’s really about is the joy of writing music people want to hear, playing to people who want to celebrate with me; of being in a career I’m passionate about … and having sex with lots of strangers. (Yep, I’m still doing it. Hard habit to break.)
I find a bigger, more expensive house, more to please my manager Joe than anything else. It’s in Toluca Lake, in full view of the Universal tourist trams that ride around the park on the overlooking mountain, and my house becomes one of the regular attractions on their tour. Ronnie is not pleased, and he barks and barks and barks until he sets off the house alarm that my camp has also talked me into buying, and the cops arrive. At least the car I get is cool, a 1948 Buick Roadmaster. Ronnie and I tool around LA in it and are often sighted and chased. I soon realize that driving through LA in a 1948 Buick Roadmaster is not unlike riding around with a neon sign that says “Hey, look over here!” I get another car this time, one with a lower profile.
Money can’t buy happiness, but it can sometimes buy cool things that can get you pretty close. On B’s twenty-first birthday, I wake her up in our back bedroom in the early hours of the morning and hand her one end of a long string. I tell her to follow it. (My mum and dad did this to my brother and me one Christmas morning when we were kids and living in England. I’ve never forgotten it.) Barbara, sleepy eyed but exhilarated and laughing, giddily follows the string as it leads her out the bedroom, down the hallway, through the living room and the kitchen, and out the side door and gate to the front of the house, where the other end is tied to the grill of a brand-new black Mercedes 350SL coupe. She squeals with joy and jumps into my arms. The whole thing is caught on tape by my tour manager, hiding in his car across the way. Needless to say, the strings my brother and I were handed did not lead to a brand-new German automobile that chilly Christmas morning in 1961, but the string idea stuck with me nonetheless. The only downside is that I have set the bar really fucking high for all future birthday mornings.
My mum’s sister Pat comes over to the U.S. to see her big sis. Pat is worried about how my mum sounds on the phone even after having spent three months with us. I haven’t yet heard the word depression relating to me or anyone I know, so I’m confused when Pat tells me she thinks my mum is “depressed.” She says she was feeling the same way about losing my dad and a doctor gave her some pills. The Rolling Stones song “Mother’s Little Helper” leaps into my head, and I have sudden images of my gray-haired old mum stoned out of her brain, stumbling around the house, high on happy pills. Pat gives Eileen a few of her pills and in a week my mum is looking and sounding much better. The old kick-ass energy she has always owned is back in force. I’m pretty amazed and recognize this as a significant event. Maybe science is the answer to all our ills. But I have no time to analyze this; too much else is going on.
I’ve just been nominated for a bunch of Grammy Awards (including Best Album Cover—yay us, Ronnie), and it’s time for the next album. Working Class Dog has gone double platinum (in record biz parlance that means it sold more than two million copies), and RCA wants another one, please and thank you. I have managed to write enough songs (even more than enough, so we can cut the chaff) in my dressing room at GH and in my music room at home, so I play the demos for Keith Olsen, who wants to produce the whole next album. We pick out the best songs, but there’s one Keith doesn’t like, that I resist dumping. It’s a song about my fear of Barbara doing exactly what I’m doing on the road: having sex with people who aren’t your significant other.
I’ve had the title “Don’t Talk to Strangers” on a piece of paper on my piano for a while, and in fact it was the original title of “Jessie’s Girl” before I got into that song and fleshed it out. The song “Don’t Talk to Strangers” chronicles my sexual insecurities about Barbara that no amount of fucking on my part can erase. Keith doesn’t like “Strangers” when he hears the demo and rejects it, so I go home and re-demo it, convinced it should be included. To our eventual mutual pleasure, I win. Keith, the little shit, is still not a fan of my guitar playing at this point, so this time he hires Chas Sanford—who will eventually co-write a bunch of hits himself, “Missing You” being the biggest—to play most of the guitar. Years later, Keith will walk into a session I’m producing, see me playing slide guitar, and comment, “I never knew you played slide guitar,” to which I will answer, “You never asked.”
Keith does have an ear for talent, though. Tom Kelly and Richard Page and I do all the background vocals: Tom will later co-write “Like a Virgin” and “True Colors,” and Richard will soon have his own success in the band Mr. Mister. Keith also brings in a new kid who has just arrived from Albuquerque to play the solos on the record. Tim Pierce will eventually be in my touring band and on my records all through the ’80s and will later become one of the go-to guys in the recording studio world, playing on pretty much everything you hear on radio and TV.
It’s actually fortunate that Keith takes the reins for now—even though I’m anxious about giving someone so much control—because I’m still on the TV show/touring/interview treadmill that I’ve been on since this all started and my recording time is severely limited. I’m there for most of it but not the final mixing. And when I hear Keith’s finished mix of “Don’t Talk to Strangers,” I’m ecstatic. It sounds like a freakin’ hit. The background vocals session for that song was quite memorable, too: me and two other very happy guys singing the “Don’t Talk to Strangers” chorus over and over because there are two naked girls in front of us on the studio floor going down on each other. Now this is how I always imagined it would be. There will be other times when sex during the recording process will be de rigueur, but this is my first experience of it and I feel like I’m in some kind of rock-and-roll heaven.
We complete the album, and I call it Success Hasn’t Spoiled Me Yet. I come up with another loony cover shot featuring my mutt, Ronnie—this time he’s in a limo with two female poodles, enjoying the fruits of his labor—and the new single, “Don’t Talk to Strangers,” is released to radio saturation play. In lieu of a raise in pay from General Hospital, I ask for extra time off so I can tour more extensively.
With the help of Jack White, who’s still on drums, I put together my new band: Tim on guitar, Mike Siefret on bass, and Brett Tuggle on keyboards. Brett and I discover a special camaraderie out there on the road, where we will laughingly dub ourselves “the Boner Brothers,” and eventually seek an answer to the BIG question: Why can’t we stop having illicit sex? It will take a few world tours to get to that point, however. We hire a tour bus, print up a book full of tour dates, and hit the road. The Springfield School Bus for Undisciplined, Very Naughty Girls is about to touch down via the interstate at a town near you. But as we start doing bigger and bigger shows, something unexpected begins to happen to me.
I swear I’d rather swim laps in a vat of rat piss than step onto another bus tour, after spending five years on one.
But during this period of the 1980s, with the things we do on these buses, it is A-freaking-okay with me. The shows are shriek-fests, with daily newspaper reports, after we’ve left town, of people needing medical attention for heatstroke, cuts, and bruises—and the occasional girl with her jaw stuck in the open “scream” position. The band and I are “living the life” as
has been ordained by the thousand and one bands that have gone before us, and no one is complaining. But the concerts themselves are occasionally starting to have an unforeseen debilitating effect on me. As insane and otherworldly as life on the road is now, everything I’d ever dreamed it could be—sold-out shows around the world, audiences singing “Don’t Talk to Strangers” in Swedish, German, Japanese, and Chinese; an old and patient companion who has been biding his time, waiting for his moment once I get used to mine, is about to step in and make his presence known.
“The Great Escape” is our code phrase for running offstage and straight onto the bus after the last song and taking flight into the night before anyone realizes we’re gone. I sometimes run directly to the back bedroom of the bus and sit alone in the dark, my ears ringing, still sweating and breathing hard from the show as the bus bumps its way onto the next interstate. And before the audience has even started to file out of the arena we just left, I begin to berate myself for not truly connecting with the fans who came to celebrate and dance to the music. I don’t know how I know this—it’s just something I feel. Maybe it arises from inside me or maybe it comes from them, but I sit there beating myself up and trying to figure out what I can change so it doesn’t happen again. It leaves me feeling so empty. Only then does that old “friend” sidle up next to me on the couch and throw a duplicitous arm around my wet shoulders. He just couldn’t stay away, he says. “Missed you, Boyo.”
Late, Late at Night Page 21