By JAY ROBERTS

The Cassette Chronicles is a continuing series of mini reviews and reflections on albums from the 1980’s and 1990’s. The aim of this series is to highlight both known and underappreciated albums from rock, pop and metal genres from this time period through the cassette editions of their releases. Some of the albums I have known about and loved for years, while others are new to me and were music I’ve always wanted to hear. There will be some review analysis and my own personal stories about my connection with various albums. These opinions are strictly my own and do not reflect the views of anyone else at Limelight Magazine.

RICK SPRINGFIELD – SUCCESS HASN’T SPOILED ME YET (1982)

Rick Springfield’s sixth studio album, Success Hasn’t Spoiled Me Yet, came a year after his breakthrough album Working Class Dog. I wrote about the latter album just a couple articles back and it was due to the fact I was seeing Rick Springfield in concert for the first time on the day that article was posted.

As it happens, I enjoyed his set a lot (even though we missed the first two songs played) and that kicked off an urge to hear more of Springfield’s albums. My friend Jeff Hogland down in Georgia suggested I check out the album Living in Oz but I wanted to go right to this follow up album.

Playing up the success angle on the album’s cover art, Springfield’s dog is pictured once again looking as if he’s enjoying the fruits of his “labors”.

It’s an amusing notion to begin the album off with, but then you get to the actual music portion of the release and it really gets interesting.

The album was successful in that it was certified platinum. But that was less than the sales figures for the Working Class Dog so clearly there was a drop off.

Initially, I thought I’d never heard any of the songs on the album because I’d never listened to it before. But among the three Top 40 hits is one of Springfield’s biggest hits “Don’t Talk To Strangers”.

Apparently conceived due to Springfield’s paranoia that his girlfriend was cheating on him when he was out on tour (where he has stated he was doing the same thing), that “fear” ended up giving rock fans an all-time classic track. The song hit #2 on the singles chart and is still a huge part of Springfield’s concert set list.

It’s the first song on Side Two of the album and it’s a pretty darn good song. When going to that concert a few weeks back, I thought we were going to miss the song because all the set lists I’d seen leading up to the show I went to had it being played as the first or second song in the set. But it got moved to later in the set for the show I went to with my friend George Dionne and so we got to see it in full. 

While the song is still uptempo, it isn’t quite as fast as some of Rick Springfield’s other hits but that slight sense of restrain gives the track enough of a difference to separate it from his other classics.

But as for the rest of the material, I was definitely right in the assertion that I’d never heard of it before.

There’s twelve songs on the album split evenly with six songs between each side.

The first side of the album opens up with the song “Calling All Girls”. It pretty much kicks off in high gear with no real intro to it. I liked the uptempo rocking nature of it, though it didn’t seem to have quite the same kind of hook to it that I was expecting. 

I don’t know if it was planned or if it just happened by cirumstance, but the opening of the song “I Get Excited” has the same opening guitar line that was used on “Jessie’s Girl”. You could dismiss it as happenstance but given that it was released as the third single (hitting just #32 on the singles chart) from the album, it seems like they were kind of being a bit dishonest or at least desparate to do a reprise of that particular guitar line. I know it distracted me from really hearing the actual song the first time. It kind of left a bad taste in my mouth to see that Springfield essentially plagiarized himself.

So here we are about to listen to the third track of the album, and I haven’t really been all that sold on the album’s first two tracks.

Thankfully, I thought “What Kind of Fool Am I” was actually pretty damn good. It was the second single from the album, peaking at #21 on the singles chart, but I thought it had a bit more gravitas and a way better musical hook than the first two song.

While keyboards dominate the intro and most of the musical soundtrack of “Kristina”. There’s plenty of guitar in the mix as well. This one is high energy and rocking throughout which I did like though at times it flirted with going over the top.

For “Tonight”, the tempo starts out a bit slower through the first verse. The lyrics start out describing two people in a workplace before morphing into what happens between the two people AFTER work. The tempo rises into a more rocking burst in the song’s choruses but I liked the steady vibe in the main lyrical passages as Springfield tells the song’s story with the lyrics seeming to convey a much more potent story than what came before it on this album.

The last song on Side One of the album, “Black on Black” started out with the bass having the dominant level in the song’s mix. Of course, then it started sharing the spotlight with all the other instrumentation. It’s an interesting song because it is a cover song that I’ve not heard the original version as yet. It’s got a lively uptempo feel to it. It’s probably not a song I will find myself going crazy over but it’s a solid run through at the least. Oddly, I thought the production on Springfield’s vocals reminded me of how the vocals sound on albums by some other band but I couldn’t think of who exactly that was.

After talking about “Don’t Talk To Strangers” earlier in the article, it’s time to talk about the rest of Side Two of Success Hasn’t Spoiled Me Yet. I mentioned that “Don’t Talk To Strangers” is a bit slower in tempo but If you want more of a speedy number, the song “How Do You Talk to Girls” fits the bill. It’s rocking with a mix between the guitar rock and poppish keyboards. And it is delivered with a focused and relentless intensity. 

One of the reasons the Living in Oz album was suggested to me as a Springfield album to check out was the assertion that the lyrics showed a new level of maturity to them. If I end up writing about that one, I’ll have to remember to listen for that. But on this album’s song “Still Crazy For You”, I found it interesting to hear the line, “But I fell victim to a parallax view…” Say what you want, it’s not many artists that will work in the word “parallax” into a pop type of song. But man, I gotta tell you that I really dug this song. I know that the song’s title might not be all that high concept, but the actual song is amazing. 

Between the slower lyrical passage with a spare guitar line accompanying Springfield’s vocals before the song blows up into a more grandiose track in the song’s repeated choruses, this song really had me hooked all the way through. If I was making my own playlist of favorite Rick Springfield songs, “Still Crazy For You” would be on it.

“The American Girl” has the same kind of slow then fast song structure to it as “Still Crazy For You” but the song’s lyrical content or perhaps subject matter is drastically different. As you might expect by the song’s title, this one is an ode to American girls as a whole. It’s fine for what it is and there is definitely a cool vibe and hook to the song.

“Just One Kiss” is solidly entertaining rocker. When the guitar playing is given the spotlight during the song is when the track shines best. Between Springfield’s delivery in the main lyrics and the enhanced backing vocals for the song’s chorus, it really grabs your ear and provides plenty for you to listen to.

The album closes out with the song “April 24, 1981”. I’m not sure it has anything to do thematically with the rest of the album though. I say this because the song was written due to Rick Springfield sharing a close bond with his father. And this track, which uses the date Springfields’s father died as its title is a tribute from son to father. It’s a brief song at just over ninety seconds, but it is a pretty powerful piece. He would write another tribute to his father, “My Father’s Chair”, on his 1985 album Tao.

Here’s something I noticed about this album. It seemed to really move fast. I started playing it and soon it was over. But when I looked it up online, Success Hasn’t Spoiled Me Yet was about four minutes longer than Working Class Dog. I can’t put my finger on why it felt this album moved faster even though it has two more songs that its predecessor. 

After listening to the album, I can see why it wasn’t as successful as the one that came before it. But while I had some issues with the songs that got the lion’s share of the acclaim from Success Hasn’t Spoiled Me Yet (not counting “Don’t Talk To Strangers” which is a great song), what makes this a solid album for me is the strength of the songs that are considered “album tracks”. Those songs range from good to great and there’s even what I think could be an all-time classic too.

So while I can’t say that I come away from this album quite as enamored as I was with Working Class Dog, I definitely can appreciate all that is good with Success Hasn’t Spoiled Me Yet.

NOTES OF INTEREST: The Success Hasn’t Spoiled Me Yet album peaked at #2 on the album chart. Mr. Mister vocalist Richard Page is featured on backing vocals throughout the album.

The song “Black is Black” was originally recorded in 1966 by the group Los Bravos. Meanwhile, according to Wikipedia, the song “Kristina” is a remake of the Bachman-Turner Overdrive song “Jamaica” with completely different lyrics. The original track was written by Jim Vallance who gets a co-writing credit here as well. Vallance is best known for his long collaboration with singer Bryan Adams.