“Wow, they really liked you didn’t they, Ricky? That was pretty damn cool. You’ve waited a long time for this. What a shame you didn’t give them your best though, huh? You and I know it was kind of a half-assed performance you put on back there, and no amount of money or adulation can really change that, can it, big boy?” The Darkness has finally hitched a ride.
I change, dry off, and go up front with the rest of the partying band to grab some wine and chase him off. Most of the time Mr. Darkness doesn’t drink. Sometimes I stay in the back until someone comes looking for me, and then I moan about what a shitty show it was, perhaps fishing for some faint praise so I can feel momentarily better, and whoever I’m moaning to says something like, “Are you kidding? It was fucking great. The audience went crazy.” And as I move up front to grab a glass, Mr. D. always has an enlightening parting shot: “How long before the audience finds out that you’re faking it, d’ya think?” I have a drink, crawl into my bunk, and pull the curtain closed. The tour bus rumbles on through the night.
Other than these visits from the companion who refuses to die, everything is soaring. We’re selling out everywhere we play, movie and TV producers are sending scripts, RCA is ecstatic to have a current artist selling millions of records for them at last, and T-shirt sales are so through the roof that the things start showing up in photos of Midwestern teenagers on the pages of National Geographic. I play live on the Grammy show and then win one of the awards I’m nominated for: Best Rock Vocal for “Jessie’s Girl,” although I’d have preferred for Ronnie to win the album cover category. I give the Grammy to my old mum, as I do most of the platinum albums and awards that are starting to come in from other countries. I never display this stuff in my own home and never will. I feel it’s past tense and just looks like cheesy ego crap. But it’s okay for my mum to display it and tell her friends how great and awesome I am—I’m totally cool with that.
I now own several companies: touring, publishing, and even a land-holding company, all named after my very groovy dog Ronnie. There’s Ron’s Band Corp. and Super Ron Music, the Lethal Ron Corp., and Ron’s Land Corp. He has become synonymous with my newfound success. We continue to play and screw our way across America, Europe, and Japan. One day in a hotel in Osaka, I find the Japanese version of Gideon’s Bible in a bedside drawer. It’s a collection of teachings from the Buddha. I steal it. It’s a very un-Buddhist way of acquiring the book, I’ll grant you, but God works in mysterious ways. I begin to read it in hopes of replacing the faith I was raised in with something else.
I grew up with the concept of God as a punishing father who whipped me with failure and guilt when I was “bad” but who required that I get down on my knees, grovel, and thank him from the bottom of my unworthy soul every time something “good” happened. I didn’t get it. But at least there was a degree of comfort in believing that an all-powerful entity was up there somewhere and I could pray to him when I felt like shit or needed something. But now he’s taken my dad way too early and broken my mother’s heart. It’s impossible, given the teachings I learned as a young boy, not to hold this vengeful God responsible. What remaining faith I have left is slowly leaching away as I travel the world with my band and look for fame to heal me.
So it’s only natural, as my faith in my Christian God slips away, that I seek a path of spirituality that will sustain me. I begin buying (hey, I’m no longer stealing them) and reading every book I can find about alternate divine paths. I don’t want to resolve my lack of faith into total atheism. Whether God exists or not, I would rather choose to believe in something, and have that belief at my back, than to think that it’s just me out here amongst the black sky and white stars. Books like Think and Grow Rich have given me an unshakable conviction that there is something, some power around me that is more than just me. So I go shopping for a kinder, gentler God.
Barbara sometimes flies out to join me mid-tour. She is beautiful and alive and innocent of all that goes on while her back is turned. But the pressure we’re both under and that which we put on ourselves is not an easy thing to plan our approaching wedding around, and the big day is pushed farther and farther away until it hits the back burner. One other gift the Darkness has cursed me with is a reckless and wicked temper that flares when I’m feeling stressed, and Barbara gets the brunt of this because she’s the only one really in the center of the storm with me. Neither of us knows what we’re doing or how to reconcile our deepening relationship with all that’s going on around us. It’s insane for us to even try. We often turn on a dime from loving partners (the crew calls us “Ken and Barbie”) to a couple of kids having a full-blown tantrum, with the added touch of smashed hotel furniture and screaming profanities, all fueled by large amounts of alcohol.
We’re in an expensive New York hotel one night when one of these raging fights comes down. After some table lamps are smashed against walls, and chairs and bedside tables splintered, I angrily pack a suitcase and charge out into the hall to go get myself a separate room. Four house detectives are lined up with their backs to the corridor wall, with looks of “What the fuck do we do now?” on their faces. I smile and say “Oh. Hey,” and slowly back my way into our suite and close the door. These battles get progressively worse as new lines are drawn in the sand and words that should have been left unsaid are spat out in self-righteous anger. I know there are many reasons for these fights, but the one I’m the most keenly aware of is my infidelity, of which Barbara has a dawning understanding.
I approach one of my business people and ask him to arrange a meeting for me with a therapist, so I can try to work out a solution to my disloyal behavior. I go to the meeting with the gnawing pangs of guilt I should have been feeling from the very beginning but never have. I understand that being in love with Barbara and wanting her to stay in my life doesn’t jibe with me trying to fuck every girl I meet. I am earnestly looking for guidance. I spill my guts to this guy, hoping to find some healing ground, but all he says to me is “Look, screw around if you want to. Just don’t tell her.” It’s years before I discover that it was all a setup. It was prearranged by my camp that he say that to me so I’d get on with my career and keep making everyone lots of money without any disturbances caused by my trying to address this issue and have a real life. I know that what he’s advised is wrong, but for now I take his counsel anyway, and the Darkness smiles a Stygian smile.
The three singles released from the Success album are all written about Barbara: “Don’t Talk to Strangers,” “What Kind of Fool Am I?” and “I Get Excited.” All three become hits, and my second RCA album outsells my first. MTV has exploded into the living rooms of the world, and the $1,500 original cost of my first two videos doesn’t even cover the catering bill for the next one. Everybody wants to direct a music video, and I meet with William Friedkin (who directed Linda Blair in The Exorcist) to discuss the possibility of him shooting a video for the Success album.
I’m not a big fan of music videos. They seem like just a bunch of cheesy mirror posing and cheap special effects with no real cohesion to any of it other than the music track that they’re supposedly illuminating. Until Michael Jackson gets hold of the medium and utilizes it properly, it’s all just a big, money-sucking, stroking wank. Luckily a video only takes a day to shoot, so there’s no harm, no foul, and people can’t seem to get enough of the damn things. I still focus on the music, although every now and then, when I’m writing a song, I do get the odd vision of a staggeringly beautiful and meaningful scene from the video I could film—and push it firmly out of my mind. The rocket burns on.
We are booked into seven sold-out nights at the Universal Amphitheater and will shoot my first live concert video there. The night before my week begins, Barbara and I go to see Frank Sinatra open the place. He says something about “this kid Ricky Springfield will be in for seven nights starting tomorrow,” and I secretly wish my dad could have heard him say that; he loved Frank. I comfort myself with the assurance that he did hear it, somewhere
—out there. The final track on the Success album is a five-line, one-minute and thirty-second song about my dad’s death called “April 24th, 1981,” the day he left us. It’s an adaptation of the song I wrote for Cleo when she died, and it’s all I can manage to get out, so fresh is the wound, but it marks a change in my writing.
From this moment on, my songs start to become much more personal. I feel I have no real choice other than to write this way. My friend Doug Davidson will later tell me, “Your dad deserved a whole song,” prompting me, three years on, to write just that and have the most cathartic songwriting session of my life, finally doing some serious grieving for my father.
The unexpected thing about emotional pain is that it deepens our colors; I can feel something shift inside me. My songwriting starts to reflect more complete slices of my life rather than wishful fantasies. I also see that, though my writing is becoming more personal, moving inward, it’s also moving outward at the same time, connecting to others by virtue of the fact that we are all human beings and have the same basic life issues.
The ride continues. I’m nominated for a couple more Grammys for my second album, though not for Best Album Cover, bugger it! I see Elton at my second Grammy show and he says, “You’ve come a long way from the ‘most popular guitarist’ award.” We laugh. Is he following me?
We’re one of the few bands that actually come off the road in better shape than when we start the tour. There are drugs on the road, of course (though it’s no longer something I’m into), but for the most part, we become workout junkies. Clearly my father’s death has inspired me. I’ve seen how people often develop a specific anxiety about whatever disease kills their parents. I’m sure my dad’s health was wrecked decades earlier by the stress, atrocious food, disease, and near-death experiences in the jungles and mountains of New Guinea, where he fought the Second World War. And war takes the lives of more than just those who don’t come home from the front. Since I’m not fighting any world wars right now, I focus on what I eat and how I maintain the general health of my body.
I read a book called The Save Your Life Diet and stop eating red meat for years because of it. I’ve already sworn off chicken because of the chicken-head-detachment-and-subsequent-boiling-of-the-feathery-body-to-loosen-the-plumage summer back in my golden youth. And to supplement my healthy (I think) diet, I begin working out with weights. I’ve already been running daily for several years now. The band and I work out at the gyms in health clubs and in the hotels we sometimes stay at.
We book into these hotels on the days off so we can recuperate a little. It’s a much-needed break from life on the tour bus. One day in a hotel Jacuzzi I meet a woman who is nonplussed at the attention I’m getting from people walking through the pool area. “Are you someone I should know?” she asks innocently enough. I tell her who I think I am, and she seems intrigued. “Hmm. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of you before,” she says, and follows with, “Do you think I could come to the show tonight?”
She seems nice enough, very mature, and possibly even of some breeding. I tell her I’ll get her a couple of tickets. “No, just one will be fine,” is her answer, and she goes on to say how she’s just lost her fiancé in a terrible car crash. I feel bad for her and say if she needs anything to just let me know. Anyway, long story short, she informs me at another show (yes, she starts coming to them regularly) that she is an heiress to the Marriott hotel chain; would we like it if she gets us free Marriott hotel rooms everywhere we travel? “That would be cool,” I answer, and I’ll be damned. She does it. Even to the degree that when we arrive at a Marriott in New York and they can’t find my reservation, she gets on the phone and says, “Let me speak to the manager.” I have my room in five minutes. Even my name at this point couldn’t move them that fast. She asks if she can ride short distances with us on the bus, and I say “Sure.” In only a matter of weeks, she insinuates her way into my inner circle. One day she surprises me with the gift of her dead fiancé’s ring. I would just like to say here for the record: I did not have sex with her.
The tour ends, and a few months later, to my absolute surprise, the FBI comes looking for her. They tell us they’re after her for writing bad checks to cover all the “free” hotel rooms she’d gotten for us. And to add insult to injury, she isn’t related to the Marriott family in even the most remote way. She’d been a fan right from the beginning and had planned the whole thing, including the “chance” meeting in the hotel’s Jacuzzi. She’d conned us all. I want to find her and hire her. Anyone who could pull off the “swindle of the decade” that she pulled was someone I wanted working for me. Never did find her—and I hope the FBI didn’t either.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
SEX, MORE SEX, AND ROCK AND ROLL
(NO REAL DRUGS TO SPEAK OF)
AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 WEEKS
1984–1985
General Hospital is a mixed blessing. It’s certainly been the liquid hydrogen to my music career’s liquid oxygen, and together they’ve ignited to launch the space shuttle of my livelihood to this point. But the soap opera joyride is starting to drag a little as far as I’m concerned. Music has always been my priority, and I’ve gotten a bit sidetracked with what now feels like the burden of this acting gig. It started out well enough with our young hero arriving early, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, nervously struggling to remember his lines and dutifully playing the new stud on the show, doing what he was asked, and showing up at functions to play the network game. And certainly people’s attitudes on the show start to change as Noah Drake gets more popular—the GH stars treat him with a little more respect; the young ingénues try to catch his eye—and although the attention is fun and a bit head-swelling, it still feels like a side gig: something to facilitate my music. To a degree it’s a barometer of success as well. Scenes are added each week for Dr. Noah, thanks to the positive feedback from fans about the role I’m playing, but that’s the difference to me. It’s a role. Whereas the music I am writing, recording, and playing taps very solidly into the real me.
The backstage dramas that play out behind the scenes on the General Hospital set seem like episodes from the show itself, but I feel removed from the action, with my one-foot-in/one-foot-out attitude toward this gig: There’s the child actor who gets fired and asks me, with tears in his eyes, “What am I supposed to do with my life now?” And the older leading man (he played a doctor opposite me in my first-ever acting role on a Six Million Dollar Man episode) who’s been a regular on GH and approaches me to intercede on his behalf with Gloria because she’s thinking of dropping him from the show. The Daytime Emmys that every- one but me attends. The ego struggles between some of the stars, and the bruised self-esteem that ensues when one character gets more airtime than another. And, of course, the almost daily photo sessions for the daytime magazines that I mostly manage to duck.
Fortunately, I don’t compound the issue by nailing any of the actresses on the GH set, though there is a lot of sexual innuendo that goes on amongst the young cast. Apart from a brief, erotic moment in front of a dressing room mirror with Demi Moore (sorry, she was just too hot), I have a hands-off policy while I’m on the show. I’m not quite sure why this is the case with me regarding acting gigs, but I have never (okay, almost never) had sex with an actress I’m working with. I feel no similar compunction when it comes to music. I think because I started acting later in life, it’s the adult in me that shows up for work, whereas music started when my hormones were just beginning to rage and the arrested adolescent set the tone early. Anyway, I think it’s time to leave the show.
I’ve been on General Hospital for almost eighteen months straight when some serious movie offers start coming in. Talk about the one that got away: the producers of a film called The Right Stuff are interested in seeing me for the part of one of the astronauts, but I’ve just been offered a shitload of money to do a film starring me! (Hang on a sec; maybe it is about the money.) At this point my inflated ego is relatively unchecked, so I decide
I’m ready to carry my own movie. I’m so damned desperate to believe all the great things people are saying about me and to me that I actually begin to believe some of it. The movie that’s offered is called Hard to Hold. After I read the script, I toss it in a corner of the room in disgust and call my acting agent.
“The script is rubbish,” I tell him.
He says that what I read is just a first draft. They’ll fix it.
“I don’t think I should play a musician in my first film. People will think I’m not acting,” I counter.
He says that they’re offering me $1.5 million to do it.
I sing “Do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do.” And Universal Pictures has themselves an actor/musician.
Gloria Monty, the GH producer, is as tough as Kevlar and wears iron undies. Most of the cast and all of the crew are terrified of her. But for some reason she’s sweet and gracious to me and even takes me into her confidence when she’s diagnosed with cancer. I like her. I tell her I’m leaving the show.
“Yes, I know,” she says.
We hug and I thank her and tell her I’ll stay in touch. She comes to see me now and then at different gigs, but we never work together again. I go to her service when she passes away many years later and cry on the drive home. It’s as much for myself as for her, because I understand how close I came to never reaching what I was reaching for. She helped to lift me out of the obscurity that, but for one more roll of the dice, I might have been consigned to. And she saw something in me at a time when maybe I no longer saw it in myself.
On the road again, I write the songs for what will become my next album: Living in Oz. Since I’m doing most of my writing on the tour bus between gigs, the songs have a lot more energy. I’m focused on writing strong stage songs. I’m also writing more about what’s really going on in my head. Now that I’ve reached a certain degree of success, I feel like I can stretch out a little. Writing about sex for sex’s sake is taking a backseat, and instead I’m looking at my past (“Allyson,” “Me and Johnny,” “Like Father, Like Son”), how I’m dealing with fame (“Motel Eyes,” “Living in Oz,” “Human Touch”), and how it’s all affecting my relationship with Barbara (“I Can’t Stop Hurting You,” “Affair of the Heart”). I produce the sessions myself with Bill Drescher because I want the guitars to be louder, the drums bigger and more ambient, and the vocals edgy and blasting, an approach Keith Olsen avoided on the previous record. In other words, I want everything to be louder than everything else. (Sorry, that’s an old, dumb studio joke.) We finish the record, I leave General Hospital, and the filming of Hard to Hold is about to begin. We’re also starting up a new tour, now that the new record is done. Ronnie is not featured on the cover this time (though he is on the inside sleeve) because I feel this album is very different from the last two and I want the cover to suggest that. My reviews are not always stellar, although even in a glowing review I’ll find the one negative and obsess on that (or should I say, the Darkness will do it for me—glad to see Mr. D is still with us. I’d be lonely if it weren’t for him hanging around, trying to kill me) and the bad reviews demoralize me and my fragile ego. I’ve since come to understand that reviews say much more about the person writing them than they do about the artist being reviewed, but that future knowledge doesn’t help me right now. Living in Oz is reviewed in the Los Angeles Times as an album about “nothing.” Even our most earnest and heartfelt works can be summed up, by others, as meaningless crap. It’s good to know. Thank God no one listens to this guy, because the album and singles are hits and even more of my money is thrown at the production of lavish videos.
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