Friday Night Video

Been a quiet week for posting around here, but I'll be stepping it up over the weekend with a few blogs that are almost (but not quite) ready to go---including fresh reviews of The Hurt Locker and (500) Days of Summer...movies still out in theaters! A veritable first for Boy Hates Girl! But until then, it's time for the best part of the week. Don't try to pretend otherwise...

Last Friday, in order to mark the 10-week countdown to my seeing Rick Springfield live in concert in Atlantic City, I started a Friday Night Video countdown to correspond with ten of Rick's greatest hits/videos. Last week we saw him perform "Everybody's Girl," a song which even John Williams had to admit showed that "he kind of can play guitar." John found this shocking, so this week I try to completely blow his mind by showing Rick playing...the piano, too!

"My Father's Chair" is not the kind of song you would ever think to associate with Springfield. Forgetting for the moment that he plays piano in it, the song itself is a serious meditation on the premature death of his father, someone who Springfield routinely credits in his lyrics as the person most responsible for encouraging him to play music. Sadly, his father died just before Rick became a star, another common lament which permeates some of his best songs. It's a moving song, as honest and sincere as it is surprising. One of my favorite moments happened during the 1985 Grammys, I believe it was. Springfield was introduced, but instead of rocking out and gyrating around as everyone was expecting him to do, he instead sat down at a piano wearing a tuxedo and played the following song:

This version, not from the Grammys, is from a concert video called The Beat of the Live Drum, directed by...Fight Club's David Fincher. Fincher, actually, was responsible for many of Rick's early videos. The audio quality isn't great, but this is the best I can do.