I Want My '80's! (Springfield Brothers, Imaggination, Inc., 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After the 1961 Hammer movie Cash on Demand was over on Turner Classic Movies Saturday, December 13 I switched over to KPBS for a pledge-break special called I Want My ’80’s! which I figured my husband Charles would be interested in because he’s a much bigger fan of 1980’s pop music than I am. (That’s the nine-year generation gap between us again; I was born in 1953, he in 1962, and therefore I have living memories of the 1960’s and its music that Charles doesn’t. Once we were talking about Janis Joplin, of whom I have living memories even though I never got to see her live. Charles said, “To me, Janis Joplin has always been dead.”) I Want My ’80’s! turned out to be a concert presentation in which Rick Springfield was the headliner and Wang Chung and John Waite were basically his opening acts. Springfield got six songs during the show, which ran for an hour and a half though only about 45 to 50 minutes were actual performance, and Wang Chung and John Waite got three songs each. I’d never heard of John Waite before, actually – if I’d heard the name back then I’d probably have assumed it meant either John Hiatt or Tom Waits – but he presented himself as a solid singer-songwriter whose three songs, “Change,” “When I See You Smile,” and “Missing You,” were powerful if unexceptional pieces of pop-rock. I had heard of Wang Chung before and I had at least one of their CD’s, the soundtrack album for William Friedkin’s 1985 Los Angeles-set thriller To Live and Die in L.A. I got that after I’d read about it in Fanfare magazine because in the 1980’s Royal S. Brown was doing a regular column about film music and that was one of the albums he was obliged to review. He joked in his article that he had originally thought “Wang Chung” was a single Chinese or Asian-descended musician instead of the nom de groupe of two young Britishers, Jack Hues (true name: Jeremy Ryder) and Nick Feldman. Actually there was a third group member, Darren Costin, who left after their second album. According to their Wikipedia page their name means “Yellow Bell” in Chinese and is also the first note on the Chinese musical scale. Royal S. Brown also joked that his younger son had threatened him with bodily harm if he didn’t like the Wang Chung To Live and Die in L.A. album. Fortunately for him, he did. The CD was originally an LP release which contained four vocal tracks on side one and four instrumentals used as soundtrack cues in the movie on side two.

The three songs Wang Chung did on I Want My ’80’s! were “Dance Hall Days,” “Let’s Go,” and “Everybody Have Fun Tonight,” which famously incorporated the group’s name into the lyric: the chorus went, “Everybody have fun tonight. Everybody Wang Chung tonight.” (The band’s name was originally Huang Chung, but when they signed with Geffen Records, David Geffen suggested they change the spelling to “Wang Chung” to make it easier for Westerners to pronounce.) I’m not sure which Wang Chunger was which, but one of them had considerably shorter hair and was playing a normal guitar while the other had longer, bushier hair and was playing one of those oddball guitars with a quadrilateral body and no visible tuning pegs. (I wonder how he keeps it in tune.) Also the longer-haired Wang Chungster was wearing a black T-shirt which had writing on it; it was too bunched up on his body to make the writing totally legible but it appeared to say “Wang Chung Are Fucking Metal!!!,” with the “a” in “metal” replaced with the anarchist symbol. Charles told me that one of them was classically trained, and I’m guessing it was the short-haired one because his voice had weathered the years considerably better than his partner’s. After three songs by Wang Chung and three by John Waite, Rick Springfield came on and turned out to be surprisingly well preserved, both physically and vocally. No, he’s not the same cutie he was in the early 1980’s when he was at the peak of his fame, but he looks quite good and without the careworn lines that had started to afflict Mick Jagger’s face at a comparable age. He’s also a quite good guitar player and a capable singer whose voice was almost as good as it was in the 1980’s. Charles said he wondered what Rick Springfield’s voice would have sounded like “in the day” without the benefit of studio production, and as luck would have it I had a chance to do a comparison.

On July 5, 1981 I had recorded a TV broadcast (through a direct connection, though I can’t remember whether I was recording off a TV itself or off a radio station that was doing a simulcast) of an outdoor concert in Long Beach with The Beach Boys as the headliners and Rick Springfield, Three Dog Night, and Pablo Cruise as their opening acts. I had dubbed my original cassette to CD and dug it out to play for Charles, and he agreed with me that the 1981 Rick Springfield and the 2025 Rick Springfield were surprisingly close in timbre and overall pitch control. Springfield’s songs were “Affair of the Heart,” “World Starts Turning,” “State of the Heart,” “Don’t Talk to Strangers,” “Love Somebody,” and his star-making hit, “Jessie’s Girl.” (The big line of that song was, “I wish that I had Jessie’s girl,” and of course being me I did a Gay rewrite: “I wish that I was Jessie’s girl.” Later Charles told me that he, like I, had been perplexed at the spelling of the name “Jessie,” which is usually the woman’s version. Charles joked last night that it was about a man trying to break up a Lesbian couple!) For “Affair of the Heart” Springfield wore a spectacular jacket with a sunburst pattern printed on the front. For the next four songs he took off the jacket and performed in a plain black T-shirt, and for “Jessie’s Girl” – which he played in a 10-minute version that had at least as many false endings as Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood” – he took his shirt off completely and played topless. Given that he’s 75 years old (he was born August 23, 1949 in Sydney, Australia and the show was taped as part of a multi-city tour that also featured Paul Young and John Cafferty), he’s quite impressively preserved (certainly far better than I am!), and his voice is also solidly preserved and in good shape for the driving power-pop that is his stock in trade musically. Charles said he remembered watching, and considerably disliking, the 1984 movie Hard to Hold, in which Springfield played a rock star who falls in love with a woman psychiatrist whose only musical interests are in classical. He said he’d endured the movie and later he found that his sister Taun, who’d seen it separately, actually walked out on it. And this was supposed to be the big stroke for his acting career that would get him out of the General Hospital soap-opera ghetto, which it didn’t. But it was still nice to hear Rick Springfield again and notice how good he still is, even though he’s probably suffered under the long-term comparisons between him and the far more creative and talented Bruce Springsteen based only on the similarity between their names!