Search - Rick Springfield :: Beginnings...

You would think that the debut solo album sporting two hits, no less! from one of the '80s' biggest heartthrobs would have been reissued long ago, but this 1972 Capitol release was indeed the "beginnings" of a series of misadventures in the music business that were to plague Rick Springfield until he broke through in the early '80s with "Jessie s Girl" and General Hospital. Springfield had scored a major hit in Australia with "Speak to the Sky" (the song appears here in its re-recorded U.S. hit version) when he moved to the States and made Beginnings, but there was a serious disconnect between the music and the marketing. The label seemed bent on selling him as a Tiger Beat teen heartthrob one look at the gatefold photo (faithfully reproduced in this package) will attest to that but Springfield's songwriting betrayed an artist with loftier ambitions, switching from Big Star-esque power pop ("Mother Can You Carry Me") to T-Rex-ish glam ("Hooky Jo") to McCartney-esque balladry ("What Would the Children Think"). And the explicit suicide theme of "The Unhappy Ending" pretty much stuck a fork in any designs Capitol may have had for the teenybopper market. Even worse, radio DJs boycotted the record after a rumor spread that Capitol was artificially inflating sales figures by buying the record. Unsurprisingly, Springfield left the label soon thereafter; this album deserved a wider audience then and still does now. We've added notes and photos--another Real Gone discovery!