Rick Springfield

The segment opens with sponsor messages for Uber Eats, Squarespace and the show's own intro. They are not part of the conversation. The Uber Eats read offers $10 off a first grocery order with the code it gives, and requires a $30 order minimum. The Squarespace read offers a free trial and 10% off a first website or domain purchase.

The interview picks up mid-discussion about whether intelligent life could reach Earth. One speaker's "stumbling block" is time: a species would need to survive long enough to develop interstellar travel and then make the trip, and humans are "nowhere near that." The other speaker suggests such beings may not have evolved in a world as violent as ours. He then questions his own point, because for humans, survival and competition drive innovation ("Wars create great innovation"). He calls the idea that they are monitoring humanity through an "adolescent phase of evolution" the more interesting theory, and links it to reports of craft hovering over nuclear bases. The exchange ends with the admission that it is "very debatable."

The host is struck by a video of Springfield singing "Jesse's Girl" at 77. He contrasts it with contemporaries, and even younger performers, who are "falling apart." Springfield credits the audience's energy for how he can still deliver a song he has played "a million times."

I'm still very passionate about playing music.

I mean, I wrote the song to see an audience react like that to it.

Springfield traces his drive back to age 11, when he first saw and held a guitar. Guitar is still what he enjoys most, even though he says it is not what he is "necessarily known for." He describes songwriting as a turning point that gave him "a great forward focus" beyond just playing.

He started performing at about 15 with a school band and was later kicked out of 11th grade for not showing up. He ties that directly to depression: he was failing at school, the one arena open to him, and it was "dragging me down." Instead of attending, he played guitar and read horror writers he loved, naming Robert Block and August Dirliffe (as transcribed). He calls this "my education really."

I had a serious depression when I was a kid. I still deal with it.

His shifting accent comes from his moves. He lived in Australia until 10, then England until about 13, which he calls a "game changer." In England he discovered "Girls and guitars" and Cliff Richard and the Shadows, a band he notes came before the Beatles. He jokes that he cannot say "Australia" in an American accent.

After returning to Australia, Springfield went to Vietnam in 1968 to 1969. He explains the business model: promoters in Saigon and Danang wanted acts from Australia, the closest "Occidental" country, because GIs wanted to see girls who reminded them of home. His account of the length varies. He first says "a couple of months," then "about four months" twice.

So as long as we had a couple of girls in the band, they would hire you, and you could tour Vietnam during the war zone.

He had expected to make money. Instead, the band earned little and spent it at the PX. Based in Saigon and Danang, they toured from "Cameron Bay" (as transcribed) up to the DMZ. He says they were about two miles from the DMZ on the Tet after the Tet offensive. He recalls parachute flares on New Year's Eve and "a line of guys" heading toward them, who were held at bay.

He describes repeated exposure to fire: getting shot at, rocket attacks, and mortars landing mid-show. On a return visit to Navy men they had befriended at Marble Mountain outside Danang, the base was attacked while he was in the radio shack. He says he ended up "throwing mortars down the frigging tube." He also says the band went up on a mission in a helicopter he identifies as an Apache, and he stresses that "you couldn't do any of this now."

He emphasizes the soldiers' wish to connect with home. The GIs would bring the band into their tents to play Hendrix and get stoned, and there was a connection "even though we're Australian." He was 18. The band often slept in the GIs' hootches, and the host shows a photo of one. Asked if he regretted going, he answers simply "It was fear."

It was pretty much a fear factor the whole time.

Springfield says that even though he was not going out shooting with the GIs, he fell into a mindset that "everything's legal." As one example of the "pretty nutty things" they did, he describes standing in a hut with 40 other men waiting for one Vietnamese sex worker. He also first smoked marijuana there. He qualifies this by saying he has never really "been a doper," but there it was "just a thing to do," and everyone was stoned "All the time."

The host says being high in a war zone is the last thing he would want. Springfield's examples show both sides. Nha Trang ("the Trang" in the transcript) was a beach R&R spot where soldiers could surf, but it was still dangerous. One night, stoned in a rat-infested former French villa, they heard machine-gun fire outside and an order to "hit the lights, hit the floor" without knowing what was happening.

But it was freaky, but being stoned helped you deal with it, you know, not have the constant fear, although when the fear hit, if you stoned was like you'd go over the top, you know.

The tour was nothing like the Bob Hope-style shows they had imagined, with helicopter fleets and bleachers. It was "just a guy out of Saigon that hired us," and they often played on the back of a truck or at firebases. In a brief aside, Springfield mentions he has ADHD and loses his train of thought easily. He recalls a soldier, "stoned out of his head," who told him after a show that he was going "to go out and see what I can kill now, man" and walked into the jungle with his company. Looking back, Springfield asks "what the fuck was I thinking?"

Springfield relays an Arthur C. Clarke story about a man on a plane who talked for two hours about the war and had one line about his current job selling insurance. Springfield uses it to explain why war stories can go on forever: so much is lived in so short a span. He calls constant fear "pretty taxing." He repeatedly separates his experience from the soldiers'. The band fired weapons "from 45s to tanks," were shot at, and were hustled into bunkers, but "we weren't actually going out like those guys were and walking point."

The two agree it was among the worst wars. The host calls it one of the strangest, because it made no sense why the U.S. was there and returning soldiers were treated so differently from World War II veterans. Springfield adds that they were "Spat on." His firsthand evidence is that the soldiers he met said, while still fighting, that they did not know why they were there.

All the ones I met were, dude, I don't know why we're here.

The host compares this to the grocery-store scene in The Hurt Locker, where the contrast between war and home is "too crazy." Springfield says he does not remember his own homecoming. His mother told him he jumped when a car backfired at the airport, and he "took me a while to kind of get through it."

she said you know my eyes look kind of haunted

Asked whether he saw people die, Springfield does not answer directly. He describes GIs' "trophy albums" of photographed body parts, including a man hit in the head by a "50 millimeter shell." He then recounts the death of band leader Pete Watson. Springfield was the guitar player, not the lead singer. Watson developed a rare lung condition after the tour and died at 25 after lasting about a year. Springfield is explicitly unsure of the cause: "I don't know if it was Agent Orange" or something else picked up in Vietnam, possibly somewhere Watson went on days off. The rest of the band got chest x-rays, which came back okay.

He also says the band was asked to play for troops in North Vietnam, with choppers kept ready in case of trouble. The band leader refused. A DraftKings sponsor read with gambling-help lines and offer terms interrupts here before the conversation resumes. Springfield says "We'd had enough" of the experience.

Asked about decompression, Springfield again says he does not really remember. He names one thing that has stayed with him: a mortar he threw had hit someone, and the next day he was told so.

And they came in the next day and said, Hey, you got one, you got one. And that still has a hard place to land in me, you know?

Limitations of this account: speakers are not labelled in the transcript, so who said what is inferred from context. Dates and durations are inconsistent ("a couple of months" vs. "about four months"; garbled year references, with his age given as 18). Several place and author names appear as transcribed and may be errors. Springfield himself says parts of his memory are hazy, and he is uncertain what caused Pete Watson's illness.

This part of the conversation opens with Springfield describing a wartime episode he says he "couldn't really find a place for that to land." Even now it feels to him like "years ago, another guy, another place." When the host asks how it happened, Springfield places it at Marble Mountain, outside Da Nang (transcribed as "the Nang"), a Navy encampment on the beach. He was in the radio shack and the band members were in the perimeter boxes. He says it was "like the movies": a radio call reported movement, someone asked to check for friendlies, and the answer came back that there were none.

Then he was asked whether he wanted to drop some mortars down the tube. Springfield frames his yes as the naivety of youth: "as a young kid, I didn't really understand what I was doing." He says he dropped "about five or six mortars," and adds that he "could have easily lost a hand." The next morning someone came in and told him one of the rounds had hit a VC. He reports this as something he was told. He does not describe confirming it himself.

And it was John Wayne time.

The host asks how long the experience stayed with him. Springfield answers, "I think it's still there." He finds it hard to accept that he was responsible for ending a life. He also lists the things that cut against that: it was distant, it was war, and he "didn't really have anything to do and didn't really know what I was doing." He sets the John Wayne playfulness against how "pretty heavy" it is when he thinks about the reality.

I think it's still there.

Springfield says he has not written a song about the episode. He did write about it in his autobiography, but it "hasn't been song material" yet. The host suggests there is probably something there, and Springfield agrees. He then mentions, while saying he doesn't want "to commercialize it," that his new record deals with getting older and "probably could be elements from that."

He compares the new record with his first album, Working Class Dog. He made that record at 29 or 30, and he says it was "all about, getting laid" because "that's all the guy thinks of." With age, he says, other subjects move in, including "the thinking of death." He writes about what he thinks about. He says sex is "still in there, but not as much" as it was at 29 or 30.