"Celebrate Youth" by Rick Springfield

Song#:  2281
Date:  04/06/1985
Debut:  60
Peak:  26
Weeks:  11
Genre:  Rock



Pop Bits:  Although Springfield's leading role movie debut Hard to Hold was a box office bomb, the soundtrack did quite well going platinum and producing the #5 hit "Love Somebody." With the movie behind him, Springfield retreated back to the studio for his next album. The new effort, titled Tao, amped up synth-rock sound he had been toying with on his past couple of LPs. This first single introduced that sound and it was greeted with tepid results. The song stopped just inside the Pop Top 30 while missing the Rock chart completely. The first singles from his previous four albums all went Top 10, so this miss was certainly disappointing.

ReduxReview:  This song is just...loud. It's an overproduced message song that is nothing like the hooky pop/rock Springfield had been dishing out for the past few years. I wasn't shocked that both critics and listeners shrugged at it. However, I liked it and the album. Tao was an interesting experiment with Springfield layering sounds upon sounds and trying to write songs that had more depth. Critics balked at the LP but I actually liked it and thought it was one of his most consistent efforts. It's dark, dense, and loud, yet something about it got my attention. I've probably played it more than any other of his albums. A couple of the LP's songs are standards in my gym playlist. So while this song and the rest of the album didn't exactly light up the charts, I was a fan.

ReduxRating:  7/10

Trivia:  One of the most popular sporting organizations during the mid-80s was the WWF - the World Wrestling Federation (now the WWE). With millions of folks watching events on TV and in arenas, it was inevitable that the sport would expand and cross over into other mediums. David Wolff, who was Cyndi Lauper's manager at the time, came up with the concept of a music album with tracks sung by some of the WWF's most famous stars. The project was called The Wrestling Album and one of the songs written for the album was "Eat Your Hart Out Rick Springfield." The "Hart" in the title is in reference to the song's singer and writer, Jimmy Hart. Hart, aka "The Mouth of the South," was a manager in the WWF, but long before he got in the wrestling world, Hart was a musician. His claim to fame from his early days was that he was a vocalist in The Gentrys, a band from Tennessee that got a #4 hit in 1965 called "Keep on Dancing." Hart's "Springfield" song is about Hart dating a girl who is obsessed with Springfield.

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