Rick Springfield has made his peace with “Jessie’s Girl,” the enduringly, monstrously successful pop hit that turned him from a struggling musician/actor to an instant pop-cultural icon in the early 1980s. Springfield, who performs Friday at Star Plaza, is currently re-recording the song for an upcoming AT&T commercial, lent it to director Paul Thomas Anderson for prominent placement in “Boogie Nights” and played it roughly 150 times last year on the road.
But the dogged popularity of “Jessie’s Girl” is only partly responsible for the 50-year-old Springfield’s career resurgence. Recent appearances on TV shows like “Suddenly Susan” and on Broadway in “Smokey Joe’s Cafe,” as well as a highly rated, dramatic feature turn on VH-1’s documentary/soap opera “Behind the Music,” have raised Springfield’s profile dramatically. His new record, “Karma,” is a 12-years-in-the offing exploration of love, spirituality and death set to pop chords and drum loops.
Q. “Behind the Music” made your life seem incredibly dramatic: stardom, deaths, motorcycle wrecks. Did your life in the ’80s seem like such a soap opera at the time?
A. I’ve done a lot of things in my life that they couldn’t fit into an hour, so they left a lot of stuff out, you know. But that show definitely (raised my profile). . . . It’s reminded people that I’m not dead, or that I’m not lying in some hospital somewhere in insulin shock or something.
Q. Your latest record is more diverse and technologically advanced than anything you’ve done. It’s got dobros and drum programs and loops, things people might not expect from a Rick Springfield album. Was it hard for you to make that leap, to do something so different from what people expect of you?
A. It took me 12 years to do it. It was pretty daunting, but I just figured it was time I stopped procrastinating. It was a long process from the demos to the finish, and I felt like everything I was doing was under a microscope. But it was an exciting process, and that’s what pushes you forward. And I still feel like I’m a work in progress, you know? I’m still very hungry, which is why I still have the energy and the drive to keep doing this.
Q. “Karma” is also more spiritual in nature than your fans might be used to. Are you worried that some of the people who liked you when you were a pinup singer might not follow you now?
A. I think it’s certainly a worthy goal for an artist to grow and to have the audience grow with you. But on the other hand, I did an album called “Tao” which (addressed a lot of the same issues), and I think that was too much growth too fast, and I lost the audience — but now a lot of people tell me it’s their favorite one. Spirituality has always been in my work, anyway. On most of my records, at least one song was spiritual.
Q. Do your kids have any concept of what you do for a living?
A. They have a healthy sense of humor about it. They don’t like it when people come up to me in stores. My oldest son gets uncomfortable when people come up to me. I played this private party on New Year’s Eve, and the first thing he asked when I told him was, “Are there going to be fans there?” They want to be musicians when they grow up, though.
Q. So what else is left for you to do? You’ve been on television, in the movies, on Broadway, sold millions of records. Doesn’t that pretty much cover it?
A. I’m working on developing a television program, actually, a comedy-drama, so I’ll probably be doing that, (even though) I don’t watch TV. I never watched it growing up. I don’t let my kids watch more than an hour a night, because I see the blank looks on their faces when it’s on. I watch PBS when I’m on the road, though. Or the Discovery Channel.
Q. Aren’t there nights on the road when you say to yourself, “Please God, don’t make me play `Jessie’s Girl’ again”?
A. No, I’m fine with it. It’s one of my favorite songs, and it feels like one of my children, something that I can’t be objective about. It’s a part of you. And it is what it is, you know?
