Rick Springfield tells all

The Dallas Morning News

Rick Springfield, the 61-year-old singer-songwriter behind 1981’s No. 1 hit “Jessie’s Girl” (and 16 other Top 40 songs), is touring for his just-released memoir “Late, Late at Night” (Touchstone, $26). The book’s press release calls it “searingly candid.” Between bookstore stops, he chatted by phone.

Q. How’re the book signings going?

A. Being in a bookstore makes people behave better than they would in a concert hall. They can’t go too nuts. Someone told me yesterday that her inner 13-year-old was freaking out. I’ve also had a lot of people tell me they’re so glad I brought up the depression thing and that the rope came untied.

Q. That scene they’re talking about relates to your suicide attempt, by hanging, at age 17. Why’d you decide to open with that?

A. I didn’t want to start with that clich of standing backstage with 150,000 people screaming my name. ... I wanted a human opening, not a rock ’n’ roll opening. ... Depression has been one of the threads of my life, and that was an ultimate, life-changing moment. If the rope hadn’t come untied, I’d have been gone, because I was committed to it.”

Q. Who was “Jessie’s Girl,” anyway?

A. It was actually Gary’s girl, and it was about this couple I met in a stained-glass-making class. I didn’t like the way Gary sounded, but I had a Ron Jessie football jersey, and that made me think to change it. That’s why it’s the wrong spelling of Jessie (the usual male spelling is Jesse). I can’t remember the girl’s name.SClB