Five years ago today I was in Las Vegas getting ready to see Rick Springfield and Loverboy perform at The Joint in Hard Rock Hotel. It was an extra special RS week, as I had seen him earlier that week in Phoenix at the Arizona State Fair. (I had purchased the Vegas concert tickets and plane tickets before the Arizona show, a few minutes from my house, was announced.)
My two older sons, who were 7 and 9 at the time, got to sing “Don’t Talk to Strangers” with him at the fair, which was a huge thrill!
Can you imagine? Two Rick Springfield concerts in one week?! (And I’d seen him twice earlier that year – a full-band show and a Stripped Down show – and got to briefly meet him afterward both times.)
As painful as it is to fans that there are no RS concerts on the horizon to look forward to, it must be even more difficult for RS to not have any planned. He looked so happy to be up on stage for the recent Sammy Hagar birthday bash on Catalina Island. After touring pretty much nonstop for 20 years, I imagine that this eight-month hiatus from performing has been difficult. Hopefully he’s taking solace in the knowledge that all the fans who attended those concerts are missing him and his shows. (This past week I had a medical procedure where I was knocked out for a little awhile and my last thought before falling asleep was wondering how he was doing. Is that normal?)
Hopefully this is a temporary phase that we are all going through and at some point it will be safe to start having concerts again. This can’t last forever, right?
Meanwhile, our concert memories will have to suffice and maybe RS will be up to sharing some more new music soon because thank goodness we have the technology that allows for him to share when he wants to. (Thinking back to the 1980s when the anticipation was the teen magazines and what new posters and information would be in the next issue and maybe there would be a new video on MTV. We’ve been really lucky these last few years when there’s been so much content to help feed the cravings.)
I thought I’d revisit that happy time of October 2015.
- That anticipation before a show: “Two weeks from tonight!”
- The gratitude that the favorite rock star of my youth still performs decades later.: ‘Back to the future is now the present.”
- The ability to enjoy concerts from afar, in this case shows at Walt Disney World: “Happiest Place on Earth‘
- An appreciation of sharing RS songs with my kids in advance of their first concert: ‘Greatest Hits’
- The night before the concert
- “My sons got to sing with Rick Springfield!”
- More about the concert: “Concert afterglow”
- A report on the Vegas show: ‘What happened in Vegas’
And that’s that, a really good RS month. Hope this post brought more joy than sadness, we need to hold on to all the joy we can!
My Rick Springfield crush 