Late, Late at Night - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Rick Springfield has been writing and performing music for more than four decades. An accomplished actor, he has performed on Broadway, headlined in Las Vegas, and starred in numerous movies and television series; most recently, he played a twisted version of “himself” in Showtime’s hit Californication. He maintains an active touring schedule, playing more than 100 dates per year around the world. He lives in Malibu, California with his wife Barbara.

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A Note From the Author

When I turned fifty, I wrote a song about my life so far, to see if I could

fit it into a three-minute pop tune.

I could.

My Depression

Born in the Southern Land where a man is a man

Don’t remember too much, warm mama, cold touch

Postwar baby boom, fifty kids in one room

All white future bright but living in a womb

Got a TV receiver Jerry Mathers as the Beaver

No blacks, no queers, no sex. Mouseketeers

Daddy kept moving round, I can’t settle down

Always the lost new kid in town

Mannlicher lock and loaded, JFK’s head exploded

Dark figure at the fence, end of my innocence

Hormones hit me, chew up, spit me

Get stoned, get plastered, always was a moody bastard

Guitar fool, kicked out of high school

Joined a band, Vietnam, Mama-san, killed a man

Daddy gets real sick it’s too intense I can’t stick it

Buy myself a ticket to the U.S.A.

Oh my God, it’s my life. What am I doing kicking at the foundation?

That’s right, my life. Better start thinking ’bout my destination

Hollywood sex-rat, been there, done that

Jaded afraid I’d never get a turn at bat

Last in a long line, finally hit the big time

Gold mine, feeding time, money/fame, I get mine

Use it, abuse it, Daddy dies, I lose it

Get a wife get a son, beget another one.

Head said “God’s dead,” motorcycle body shred

Midlife crisis rears its ugly head

Prozac, lithium, could never get enough of ’em

Last wills, shrink’s bills, sleeping pills, sex kills

Edge of sanity, my infidelity

Looking in the mirror and thinking how it used to be

Don’t like the skin I’m in, caught in a tailspin

Honest-to-God vision, spiritual transmission

Climb aboard the life raft, looking back I have to laugh

Take a breath, don’t know if I’m ready for the second half

Oh my God, it’s my life. What am I doing kicking at the

foundation?

That’s right, my life. Better start looking at my destination

My life, my depression, my sin, my confession,

my curse, my obsession, my school, my lesson.

For anyone with a short attention span, that should cover the major

details of my life, so you can put this book back on the bookstore shelf.

For those of you who want to hear the deeper cut, many thanks and

read on . . .

—RS

Prologue

A Swingin' Teenager

So here I am, seventeen years of age, feeling as ugly as the ass end of

a female baboon at mating season, unloved, very much in need of a

good caressing by some attentive young woman and, right now, swinging

by my neck at the end of a very thick twine rope like some pathetic

B-Western movie bad guy. I’m thinking to myself as I lose consciousness,

“Wow, somehow I thought it would all end so differently.”

Thank God I haven’t succeeded at a lot of the things I’ve tried, like

this suicide attempt for instance. But thank God I have succeeded occasionally.

Because in a furious flash-forward, of the type that can only

happen in the movies or in this book, I am thirty-one years old and

standing onstage with a very expensive guitar strapped around my very

expensive suit, playing a rock-and-roll song that I wrote. The audience

of this sold-out show is clamoring for more. A bevy of young girls is

waiting backstage for me, and there’s a middle-aged bald guy standing

on the side of the stage, smiling at his healthy profit, ready to hand me a

big, fat check when I’m done.

Wait . . . Wait, wait, wait, wait! Just a second here . . . So if I’d succeeded

in offing myself back in my teenage years of staggering angst, I

would have missed all this? Evidence, I think, that when we are at our

lowest and ready to give in and go belly-up forever and for always, we

should take a step back and say, “Is this the absolute best move I can

make right now?” And then give ourselves an extra year or two or three.

I am walking, breathing, living proof that, considering how depressed

and full of self-loathing and self-pity I am right now, swinging

by my skinny, teenage neck three feet off the ground, thinking that I am

worthy of not much more than the gig of pre-chewing hay for a horse

with bad teeth, good things can still happen. It’s just the law of averages,

and the law is on our side, losers. Yay us! So to those who are at

the bottom of the emotional heap—and it’s crowded down here—there

is still reason for hope! Not that the teenage idiot I was (who is, by the

way, still swinging freely from a crossbeam and turning a lovely shade of

blue) would have believed that dopey, feel-good phrase anyway.

Although by nature I tend to gravitate toward the bleaker side of

things, I have been open to and have received signs throughout my life

that have given me hope when I’d thought there was none. A part of me

believes that these signs are directives from the gods. I’ve stayed surprisingly

receptive to them, even though part of me thinks I’m full of shit to

take them as any kind of actual, meaningful omens.

Another furious flash-forward—damn it, I wish there were cool

sound effects in this book . . . whooooosh!—it’s 1979. I’m living in

Glendale, California, with a girl named Diana. Playing guitar in a house

band at a local restaurant bar. This is not where I’d hoped to be in my

music career by the age of twenty-nine, but then again I also thought I’d

be dead by now, “strung up,” as it were, by the neck, so it’s just as well

that not all my expectations are met. One night there’s a party at someone’s

house in Glendale after my bar gig, and I go there by myself while

my girlfriend waits at home.

A tarot card reader is in attendance. I love these people. They let us

pretend to possible bright futures, even when we have none, and right

now, I have none. At least not any future I’d want to celebrate. So I pull

up a chair and shuffle her cards. Bad disco music is playing in the background

and I think to myself, “Is there good disco music?” She deals my

hand. The Emperor. The Two of Swords. The Hanged Man. The Star.

She looks up from the array of archaic cards and locks eyes with me

from across the table. She wants me. Wait . . . no, that’s not it.

“That’s the most incredible card spread I’ve ever seen,” she whispers

breathlessly.

“Yeah?” That’s pretty much it from me.

“Something big is going to happen in your life . . . and soon,” she

answers as if definitively.

“Could you be more specific?” I ask. I want dates. Names. Exact

amounts of cash. Truly, you can never nail these people down.

“Something . . . really . . . amazing,” she replies.

It will have to do. And it does.

As a seeker of encouragement and affirmation all my young life, I’ve

become accustomed to positive if self-servingly vague prophesies from a

range of “experts”: numerologists, astrologers, phrenologists (I do have

a shitload of bumps on my head, so phrenologists have a party when I

show up for a reading), tasseographists (look it...