Rick Springfield, Part One: Examining The Rick Springfield Video Anthology
(In celebration of the upcoming New York premiere of “An Affair of the Heart”, the documentary about Rick Springfield and his relationship with his fans, we are re-posting this Rick Springfield feature from last year.)
With the release of Rick Springfield’s autobiography “Late, Late at Night”, we heard about his “General Hospital” years and hit making music career, his fights with depression and sex addiction, and that the Jessie in “Jessie’s Girl” is spelled with an “i” because Rick had a jersey with NFL wide receiver Ron Jessie’s name on it.
In the book, Rick touches on some of his more memorable experiences making music videos in the Golden Age, including working with a young music video director named David Fincher:
RCA gives me $1500 to shoot two videos. For what purpose, I don’t know. I write up a script and storyboard the “Jessie’s Girl” video but leave the “I’ve Done Everything For You” video to the cameraman/director Mark Stinson. We shoot everything in 3 days. It’s guerilla video-filming at its finest.
I meet an arty young guy from San Francisco named David Fincher who wants to direct my next music video. He will later become a very successful Hollywood director of hits like Fight Club, Se7en, and Panic Room [and the current hit The Social Network] but right now he’s a skinny, pasty-faced kid who looks like he’s seventeen. David says he has an idea for a sci-fi themed video for my new single “Bop Til You Drop”. He adds that he is in possession of a fine, $3 plastic bowl which, when inverted an painted gray, will look like a multimillion dollar space dome. He has some other pretty outrageous ideas, and I’m encouraged.
[Also, I spoke with Joe Dea, director of Greg Kihn’s “Jeopardy” music video, who was onset for the “Bop Til You Drop” shoot in San Francisco, wanting to check ou this guy David Fincher who had somehow gotten a gigantic budget for his first music video. “I was there, on the set. Just heard it was happening, I had a friend on the production, and I wanted to see what this guy would been doing. I’d heard about him, that he’d been working with Industrial Light and Magic, and he was virtually unknown, plus he was the competition, and it was a big budget thing. It was huge!”]
Rick Springfield Bop Til You Drop by Celtiemama
…when I see what he shoots and edits for the videos of my singles from Tao – “Celebrate Youth,” “State of the Heart,” and “Dance This World Away” [reportedly Rick’s favorite of all his videos] as well as “Bop Til You Drop” – I am absolutely floored. They’re still the only videos of mine I can sit through, aside from the original one from “Jessie’s Girl,” which will always have a cheesy/cool appeal for me. David then shoots my next concert video, The Beat of a Live Drum [see Entertainment Tonight story below on “The Tao of Rick Springfield”], and again does stuff no one else is doing with music videos.
Rick Springfield – Dance This World Away by VEVO
Credit note: Springfield’s other notable videos were directed by the late Doug Dowdle (“Souls,” “Affair of the Heart,” “Human Touch,” and his Hard to Hold soundtrack hit “Love Somebody”), and “What Kind of Fool Am I?” and “Don’t Talk To Strangers” were directed by the amazing Paul Justman, brother to J. Geils Band member Seth Justman and director of the documentary “Standing in the Shadows of Motown.”