My Love Affair With Rick Springfield

Saturday, October 20th, 2007 • 1 Comment

What can I say?  I broke his heart.

Rock Me Tonight

Wednesday, October 10th, 2007 • No Comments

As an impressionable young girl of eleven, I worshipped Shaun Cassidy.  He was feathered hair and satin baseball jacket cute, one of the original “bubblegum” pinup boys.  I was completely enamored with his sparkling brown eyes and I plastered my walls with his smiling face.  He was the boy I wanted to marry and I spent many sleepless hours worrying over the tremendous age difference between us (he was nine years older than me).  To this day, I remember his birthday: September 27, 1958.  When I ripped that page off my page-a-day calendar a couple weeks ago, his face popped into my brain, eternally twenty years old even while I have gotten older.

Shaun Cassidy was my dream boy—though I did have a brief love affair with the almost as pretty Leif Garrett—but there was nothing remotely sexual about my obsession over Shaun.  I wanted him to sing his songs to me (remakes of 1950s pop tunes, I was dismayed to discover) and let me brush his pretty hair.  We would ride in his car (a convertible, of course) and spend hours talking about important things like unicorns and rainbows and how many times he’d appeared on the cover of Teen Beat and Tiger Beat.  Shaun Cassidy was dreamy… and safe.

My obsession with Shaun started to fade after a couple of years, as all girlhood obsessions tend to do.  I still loved him—and I even demonstrated my loyalty by purchasing the poorly titled Wasp album with the awful cover of “Rebel, Rebel.”  Sadly, the magic of “Do You Believe in Magic?” had started to fade. 

Then I discovered Billy Squier.  He wasn’t a boy, he was a man.  Hearing Shaun Cassidy sing “That’s Rock and Roll” did not come close to giving me the same tingle as hearing Billy Squier wail “The Stroke” or “Everybody Wants You.”  Billy was cute in a skinny, edgy rocker boy kind of way.  He was a leather vest over naked skin and a sheen of sweat, danger and innuendo in skin-tight jeans.  I would listen to the opening riff of “The Stroke” and feel a tingle in places that Shaun Cassidy could never touch.  I did not put Billy’s picture up on my walls—somehow I knew my mother would not approve—but I thought about him.  A lot.

I heard “The Stroke” today on the radio and it gave me that familiar tingle.  I haven’t heard a Shaun Cassidy song on the radio in twenty-five years, but Billy Squier is still on the airwaves, telling me to stroke him.  Shaun would never say such things, but Billy did… over and over and over again.  Billy didn’t want me to remember his birthday, he just wanted me to stroke him.

And even though I didn’t know what it meant, I wanted to.