“Jessie’s Girl” (Rick Springfield)

Your classic early MTV song of the day, and an unshakable earworm, is “Jessie’s Girl” by Rick Springfield. The single was released at the end of March in 1981 but took an agonizing 19 weeks to hit #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 at the beginning of August. Billboard ended up ranking it as the #5 song for the entire year.

“Jessie’s Girl” topped the charts the same week that MTV launched. That confluence of events and a video that showed off Mr. Springfield’s acting chops got the song a ton of airplay on the fledgling channel. It’s not that MTV helped the song reach #1 (it did that before the channel’s launch), it’s that MTV firmly cemented “Jessie’s Girl” in the firmament of the MTV generation.

It helps that “Jessie’s Girl” is a perfect piece of New Wavish power pop, with or without an accompanying video. Mr. Springfield wrote it himself about a girl he happened to meet while he was taking a stained glass class in Pasadena. A friend of his named Gary was also taking the class, as was Gary’s girlfriend. Springfield says he never really met Gary’s girl but admired her from afar. In his own words:

“There was a girl in stained glass class who I was hot for but she had a boyfriend and didn’t want anything to do with me. So I took my sexual angst home and wrote ‘Jessie’s Girl’ about her.”

Springfield claims not not to remember the name of the girl, but admits “Jessie’s girl” sings a lot better than “Gary’s girl,” so there you have it.

As to the writing of the song, here’s what Mr. Springfield remembers:

“The [guitar] riff came first. And although it’s a pretty simple-sounding song it wasn’t easy to write. It took about two months, working on the guitar and piano. [Guitarist] Neil [Giraldo] added a vibe to the song, but it was the producer, Keith Olsen, who convinced me to shorten a long guitar solo I’d played on the demo which was right out of the seventies. It’s a bubbly and vivacious song, but it’s dark. It’s also covetous, which a lot of my music is.”

That guitar riff is pretty cool and ultimately memorable. It’s what makes the song, in my humble opinion—that and the hooky chorus, of course.

Rick Springfield was born in Australia and played in a number of local bands before emigrating to the U.S. in 1972. He signed a one-record deal with Capital Records, released that album to little fanfare, then signed with Columbia Records in 1973. Columbia promoted him as a teen pop idol in the David Cassidy vein at the same time he was making a name for himself as an actor, guest-starring in numerous primetime TV dramas. He released his fifth album, Working Class Dog, in 1981 and, propelled by “Jessie’s Girl,” it was a success and led to his winning the Grammy for Best Male Vocal Performance that year.

Springfield kept acting (including in the movie Hard to Hold and the General Hospital daytime soap opera), recording, and performing. He’s still alive today, aged 74, living in Malibu, California. You can hear him each week hosting his own Working Class DJ show on SiriusXM Satellite Radio.