This is the last of the Vacation Posts for this vacation. Wait, no, I’ll have one more where I share pictures from the vacation itself. I couldn’t post during because the wifi situation was … not ideal … and frankly, I didn’t want to take the time to sit at the laptop and put it together while actually on vacation. This one’s not baseball at all, but I do that here sometimes. I’ll get back to standard UTK on Friday with a bit of a catch-up and look-forward to the ‘second half’ of the season, especially trade season which really heats up.
About a decade ago, a good friend of mine — a subscriber to this very newsletter, the kind of friend who elicits a smile at the very thought of them — gave me the chance to go see Rick Springfield. Italics earned. Just a guy and his guitars. A mic, a spotlight, a setlist with just enough ink bleed to feel human.
It was Storytellers before Storytellers. Except after. That VH1 format where the hitmakers let the music breathe between sentences. I was close enough where it was almost uncomfortable. Other, cougary types did not feel that was the case. I told my friend I’d sing every word and then I did. He talked. He joked. He played a little, then stopped. Told us why. Told us how. If you were there, it felt like your high school playlist grew legs and came to sit beside you for a night. If you weren’t, well, the taping happened the next night. Close enough for myth. It was very up close, very personal.
(Yep, the very next night from when I saw him.)
Rick Springfield might be a punchline now. Your niece might think he’s just the guy from Californication or that old run of General Hospital your mom swore was “actually good TV.” If you were a teenager in the early 80s - if you ever turned the dial to MTV with intent, if your locker had even one ripped page from Tiger Beat - Rick Springfield was the man. Not the only one, sure, but in that weird liminal space between hair metal and Top 40, there was a lane and Rick drove it in a black Camaro with no muffler and a quadrophonic Blaupunkt.
He wasn’t as dangerous as Billy Idol or as bubblegum as Debbie Gibson. (#swoon) He played guitar. He had a mullet that didn’t apologize. He wrote Jessie’s Girl, a perfect, lean, jealous little pop song that lived in your bloodstream by the second chorus.
For forty years now, that song has begged one question for me: who was she?
We know some of it. We know “Jessie” was never Jessie. He was Gary. Gary was a guy Springfield met in a stained glass class in Pasadena, because apparently that was a thing you did in the late seventies if you were trying to quit groupies and stay off cocaine. Springfield’s explained it in interviews: he had a crush on Gary’s girlfriend. Never made a move. Just stewed in it, like so many young men do, confusing envy for passion, proximity for entitlement.
The class was real. Gary was real. But the girl? Nameless. Voiceless. Faceless, even now. That’s wild when you think about it.
Because this is the era of Sharona. We found her. She was real — Sharona Alperin, a salesgirl at a clothing store who inspired Doug Fieger of The Knack to write a riff so infectious it probably still plays on loop inside his tomb. She parlayed it into minor fame and a successful real estate career. She is the girl. Same with “Jenny.” 867-5309 became more than a punchline. It became a rite of prank call passage. We know that number. We know what happened when you called it in Boise. In Topeka. In Yonkers. Don’t even get me started about Josie.
But Jessie’s real girl? Nothing. No one ever tracked her down. No magazine interview. No late-aughts BuzzFeed retrospective. No where-are-they-now side column in People magazine. It’s like she walked out of that stained glass class and disappeared into vapor.
That’s what makes it interesting.
Maybe she doesn’t want to be found. Maybe she never knew. Maybe Gary didn’t tell her that the guy from General Hospital was nursing a quiet obsession over in the corner. Maybe Gary did and that’s why they broke up. Maybe, as it so often happens, none of it meant that much to anyone but the guy holding the guitar.
There’s a strange thing that happens when a song like this outlasts its own moment. It stops being about the facts and becomes about the furniture in your head. You remember how it felt to hear the song through blown-out car speakers on the way to a party you didn’t want to go to. You remember rewinding the cassette, trying to copy the chords. You remember that you had a Jessie’s girl in your own life - a friend, a teammate, a guy who beat you to the girl because he didn’t overthink it. (Hi, Tammy!)
The song becomes folklore. You build meaning into the cracks and then someone says “it was a stained glass class,” and suddenly, it’s not just folklore: it’s folklore with evidence.
Which brings me back to Gary.
Here’s the thing: no one’s ever tracked him down either.
That’s even more confusing, because this is the internet. We found the “Where’s the Beef?” lady’s grandkids. We found the kid from E.T. and the guy who played Jimmy from Road House. No one’s gone looking for Gary, the original Jessie?
He exists. Springfield’s said as much (see below). There’s a version of this where Gary’s just some dentist now or owns a flooring company in Santa Clarita. He tells the story every now and then at a backyard barbecue, but no one believes him. “Sure, you’re Jessie.” But maybe he is. Maybe she married someone else, became a mom, forgot the class entirely. Nope. He’s gone. Oprah of all people - OPRAH - tried to find him. If Oprah can’t find you, maybe you can’t be found.
There’s something poetic about that. The song made them immortal, but only in silhouette.
Maybe that’s the lesson. That Jessie’s Girl isn’t really about the girl. It’s about the ache. The wanting. The part of being young and stupid and certain that if you just had her, the world would fix itself. That you’d be cooler, stronger, better. That the version of you who got the girl was the real one … and the one who didn’t, just a bad draft.
Springfield said he couldn’t bring himself to ask her out. So he wrote a song instead. That’s what lingers. Not the glass. Not the class. Not even the girl.
The song.
That’s what stays.
And this Professor guy is related to Kevin Goldstein. Not sure how, but I’m sure.
Great stuff!