Songoftheday 12/26/13 - Doctor, doctor you gotta help me yeah you gotta make it right for me, it seems this other man's name has been following me around...

Rick Springfield - "Bruce"
from the album Beautiful Feelings (1984)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #27 (one week)
Weeks in the Top-40: 6

Today's Song of the Day is by Australian singer/songwriter/actor Rick Springfield, whose 1984 was busy promoting his movie Hard To Hold, and continuing his successful stint on the ABC television soap opera General Hospital. From the film's soundtrack he scored three top-40 pop hits with "Love Somebody", "Don't Walk Away", and "Bop Til You Drop". In the meantime, Mercury Records (not his label at the time, he was on RCA) acquired the masters for tracks he recorded at the Sound City recording studio in the late 70s, and remixed the vocals with a band the label put together without any input from Rick. Under the title of Beautiful Feelings, the "new" Springfield record was put out at the end of 1984, and as a single the company released a song Rick originally had on the Australian version of Working Class Dog, "Bruce". Playing off his name's similarity to the New Jersey rocker (who also is way bigger now in 1984), "Bruce" capitalized on the break between Rick's albums to put out this as "new" Springfield material, way against Rick's wishes...

"Bruce" made it to the Top-40 in January of 1985, and the album made it to #78 as well. Rick of course disavows the recording, and it's never been on any of his greatest hits album. However, more recently, the originally mixed Sound City recordings have been re-released with the recordings he did in the late 70s with the original band, which is notable in Rick's inclusion in the recent Sound City documentary.

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Here's the track as originally recorded. It's obviously that Mercury not only redid the instrumentals but sped up Rick's voice on the 1984 version...

Up tomorrow: More jammin' for the Woman In Red by the Motown genius...