The way I remember it, there was one summer when I didn’t think much about music at all, when I was just a wee lad content to listen to whatever Mom put on our gargantuan old hi-fi console, and then the very next year after that, I was a budding audiophile who obsessively followed the weekly Top Ten Countdown and toted around a transistor radio everywhere I went. The biggest song in the land that summer was “Jessie’s Girl” by Rick Springfield, and I was absolutely crazy about it.

I can’t tell you what it was about that song that appealed so strongly to my 11-year-old self — it’s not like I could relate at that age to the angsty lyrics about unrequited lust for another man’s lover — but there was something about it that sank its claws into my not-quite-pubescent brain. It was the first 45 RPM single I ever owned. The album from whence it came, Working Class Dog, was my first LP (my first grown-up LP, anyway, the first that didn’t come with a read-along storybook). And my first concert experience was — can you guess? — seeing Rick himself, live at Salt Lake’s Symphony Hall on Halloween night, 1981.

My mom took me and one of my friends, a kid named Brett Miller if I remember correctly. My memory of that kid’s name may be a little hazy, but I clearly recall Rick joking that his drummer, who was wearing a white jumpsuit that night, was dressed as an astronaut for Halloween. And I also remember how cool I felt the next day when I went to school wearing my very first concert-tour souvenir t-shirt, a black-and-gray baseball jersey with the album art on the back. I wore that shirt more or less constantly for several years; it probably won’t surprise any of my loyal readers to know that I still have it. (To be honest, I still have most of my old concert shirts, but the only one I think I’d feel really badly about losing is that first one.)

All of these firsts naturally added up to Rick becoming my first musical hero. It wasn’t easy to be a Rick Springfield fan, though, certainly not at that age. I endured a fair amount of crap from my (male) classmates who thought there was something… suspicious… about a guy who liked Rick Springfield. He was on a soap opera, for crying out loud, and all their sisters had posters of him over their beds. He was somebody that girls liked.

I didn’t care about all that stuff, though — I thought he was cool. I loved his records and his style and the way he put his dog on his album covers. Hell, I even watched General Hospital from time to time, and I liked it. But eventually, as with so many of the things I loved around that same age, Rick started to lose his luster for me.

The follow-up to Working Class Dog, Success Hasn’t Spoiled Me Yet, was okay, but it featured several tunes that felt a little too cutesy, a little too targeted to the Tiger Beat demographic for my burgeoning and fragile sense of masculinity. I liked the harder, grittier sound of the next one, Living in Oz, much more. “Love Somebody,” the big single from Rick’s feature-film debut Hard to Hold, was kick-ass. However, the other charting songs from that movie — “Bop Til You Drop” and “State of the Heart” — annoyed me, and the two records that closed out Rick’s career in the ’80s, Tao and Rock of Life, were just plain weird, filled with experimental and synth-heavy music that didn’t do a thing for me. By the time I reached college, my musical tastes had shifted to ’60s rock, classic Motown, and blues, and Rick Springfield had become little more to me than a fond childhood memory.

Then a few years ago, something unexpected happened: I started hearing “Jessie’s Girl” again, first on the radio, then popping up in the occasional movie. After a decade or so in the wilderness, the music of the ’80s was sneaking back onto the pop-cultural radar screens. Overwhelmed one afternoon by a fit of nostalgia, I picked up CD versions of my old Rick albums. I expected nothing more than a fun little walk down memory lane. To my surprise, however, I found myself falling in love all over again. Working Class Dog and Living in Oz speak more to me now than they did back when I was wearing that old concert shirt every other day, and I’ve come to appreciate Success as a fun slice of bubblegum with a few good rockers thrown in for extra flavor. I even like “State of the Heart” now that I’m old enough to understand what it’s about. (I’m still not crazy about the Tao or Rock of Life albums, but hey, every musician puts out a couple of duds, right?)

I didn’t see it when I was a kid, but I now recognize that Rick’s lyrics — he writes most of his own music — are generally smart, evocative, and at times even poetic. Interestingly, for a guy whose reputation was as a teen heartthrob who had girls and women throwing themselves at him, his songs are more often about love gone wrong than romantic success. The protagonist of much of Rick’s music is insecure, battered and beaten by romance and life in general, singing about unrequited love, cuckoldings, loss, guilt, regret.

He’s still recording, too, or perhaps I should say he’s recording again. He spent about a decade away from the music industry before coming back in 1997 with Sahara Snow, a disc I completely missed when it was released and still haven’t heard. The ’99 album Karma has some good work on it, especially “It’s Always Something,” a catchy tune that draws heavily on Rick’s real-life ups and downs to paint a portrait of resilience. His latest album, The Day After Yesterday, is an interesting if not overly dynamic collection of covers — I like Rick’s version of the old Dream Academy song “Life in a Northern Town” — but Day‘s predecessor, shock/denial/anger/acceptance, is frakkin’ brilliant. As the title suggests, it’s dripping with darker emotions — rage, frustration, depression, jealousy, and assorted neurosis — but I think it’s Rick’s most passionate, exciting work since the early ’80s. It’s a damn shame that radio doesn’t have a place for guys like Rick anymore, as there are at least four tracks on that album that deserved to be hits: “I’ll Make You Happy,” “Wasted,” “Will I,” and “Invisible Girl” are all great songs that invite you to sing along, even as you ponder the stories behind them. (Just for kicks, the latter song cleverly recycles a bit of “Jessie” during the bridge.) I think I read that “Beautiful You” got some airplay, although I don’t recall ever hearing it on the radio myself. If you ever had any interest in Rick Springfield back in the day, you really owe it to yourself and to him to pick up a copy of s/d/a/a — it’s a great piece of work from a mature artist who’s been to hell and come back to tell some traveling tales.

I guess the point I’m trying to make here — assuming I’ve even got one this time around — is that I’ve come full circle: I’m a Rick Springfield fan again, just as I was in the beginning, only this time I’m not shy about admitting it or bothered that other folks might not think he’s cool. Because I can tell you for a fact that he is.

Oh, as for “Jessie’s Girl,” the song that led me to Rick in the first place and then led me back to him all these years later, it is, in my opinion, simply perfect. Seriously, you try writing a three-minute pop-rock song with an instantly infectious hook, reasonably meaningful lyrics, and which folks still want to listen to after 25 years. No, go ahead. I’ll wait… what, you still here? Go on…

[Coming soon: Seeing Rick in concert again. Wow.]