Rick Springfield on Recording With Foo Fighters, Performing in Vietnam

Rick Springfield has had a long enough career to accumulate a few stories. Ahead of the Feb. 14 release of Big Hits: Rick Springfield’s Greatest Hits, Volume 2, a collection of tracks from his 1999 album Karma to Automatic from 2023, Springfield told Billboard’s Behind the Setlist podcast about partnering with Sammy Hagar on Sammy’s Beach Bar Rum drinks (and writing the song “Party at the Beach Bar,” which appears on the new greatest hits album), his early musical influences (such as The Easybeats and guitarist Hank Marvin) and writing “The Man That Never Was,” a song from the Dave Grohl-led Sound City: Reel to Reel soundtrack, released in 2013, that also appears on the new collection.

The hard-rocking “The Man That Never Was” started as a track recorded by Springfield and the members of Foo Fighters, he recalls. “Dave wanted everyone to kind of get together that was in the documentary and all write songs. So I got together with the Foo Fighters in the studio, and we put together this track that was a really good track. It was a riff that Dave originally came up with, and we kind of fleshed it out.” Grohl then handed Springfield a CD with the track they just recorded and said, “OK, now go write a song.”

Springfield then continued working on the then-unnamed track with veteran bass player Matt Bissonette, most recently a member of Elton John’s band. Bissonette had the idea to write lyrics based on an actual story from World War II about an elaborate plan by British intelligence officers to trick the Germans about the Allied armies’ invasion of Sicily. (The operation was captured in 2010 book Operation Mincemeat, and made into a movie of the same name in 2021.) “We’re both great history buffs,” Springfield says.

Working with Grohl and company was tame compared to Springfield’s experience performing for U.S. troops during the Vietnam War in the late ‘60s. More than a decade before Springfield topped the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart with “Jessie’s Girl” — one of 21 appearances on the tally — he was performing with his first professional band when an American promoter hired the group to perform in Vietnam. He had no idea what was in store.

“It was a war zone,” he recalls. “I’d never been to one. And we played for the troops in the on the back of trucks just before they went up. You know, we’d get [flown on helicopters] into fire bases, which is where the grunts would operate from, and go out into the jungle and just start fighting. We’d play in those places, and we get rocketed and mortared, and they’d have to shut the show.”

At one point, the base came under fire when the band’s bass player was lying unconscious in a dentist’s chair, ready to get some teeth pulled. “They started saying, ‘That’s incoming, gentlemen, better get to the bunkers.’ So we didn’t know what to do,” Springfield says. “He was all hooked up, so we left him and went into the bunkers. And when we came back, he was still there. So it was all good, but he didn’t know he’d he’d been left to the the wiles of the Viet Cong.”

During a visit to a Navy encampment at Marble Mountain outside De Nang, U.S. forces came under attack. “You see tracers going off through the sky,” says Springfield. “I was throwing mortars. You couldn’t do this stuff now. First of all, it’s insane to do it. And secondly, you wouldn’t be allowed. But back then, it was the Wild West.”

Listen to the entire interview with Rick Springfield using the embedded Spotify player below, or go to Spotify, Apple Podcasts, iHeart, Amazon Music, Podbean or Everand.