Rick Springfield was still a teenager when he flew to Da Nang, Vietnam, to play for troops in 1968. What happened next still haunts his memories today.
He spent many of his formative years at an army camp in Broadmeadows, Victoria, Australia. So, using his burgeoning six-string talents to boost soldiers’ morale during a famously harrowing conflict, he likely felt it was the natural thing to do. He’d taken up the electric guitar at 13; he was 19 when he said yes to the Vietnam gig.
“We met these [soldiers], and we really got along well,” he says in a recent appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast. “We stayed overnight with them,” he recalls. “I stayed in the radio shack, and we got attacked, and I’m throwing mortars down the freaking tube of the radio shack.
“It was John Wayne time. I was a young kid,” he continues. “I didn’t really understand what I was doing. I said, ‘Oh, yeah! Let’s fire a gun!’ So I threw the mortars down, around five or six. I could have easily lost a hand.”
If it seemed like a movie while he was doing, the next day brought some serious news.
“I’d thrown a mortar down, and it had hit somebody,” he says. “They came in the next day and said, ‘Hey, you got one! You got one!’ And that still has a hard place to land in me, you know? That’s really the one thing I brought back with me that I couldn’t find a place for that to land. It still seems like years ago, another guy, another place.”
Time is meant to be the great healer. Decades later, however, what happened that day still weighs heavily on him.
“It’s hard for me to face that I was responsible for the end of a life, even though it’s distant and it’s war and I didn’t really have anything to do with it, and didn’t really know what I was doing,” he says. “I was a kid playing John Wayne. But it’s pretty heavy when I think about the reality of it.”
Some 13 years later, Springfield’s life changed again. Yet he says he didn’t know “Jessie’s Girl” would be a hit.
The song made him a superstar, and the public’s warmth for it has never cooled in the intervening years. In fact, he even collaborated with American prog rock group Coheed & Cambria to bring a sequel, “Jessie’s Girl 2”, to life in 2020. Coheed bandleader Claudio Sanchez had spearheaded the track, with Springfield more than open to his twist on the tale.
“This is pretty much a first,” Springfield told Forbes in 2020. “As far as an artist writing a continuation of a song from another artist, it’s pretty unique. Claudio’s idea was pretty hilarious; she turned out to be a freak!”
Elsewhere, John Fogerty has revealed how escaping the Vietnam War gave birth to one of his most enduring hits.
