Rick Springfield has gotten together with Matt and Gregg Bissonette to create a faux-Beatles band they called The Red Locusts.
Rick’s friendship with Matt and Gregg goes back to the 80s. “That’s a thing I did with my friend Matt Bissonette and his brother Gregg Bissonette,” Rick Springfield tells Noise11.com. “Gregg played drums for Ringo for 20 years. He is probably one of the Top 10 drummers in the world. Matt Bissonette plays bass for Elton. Elton stole him off me. They played with David Lee Roth. They were playing with Maynard Ferguson. They are jazz players and were off in Toronto in the early 80s when they came out of this club were they heard all this screaming. They said, ‘whats that’ and were told “its Rick Springfield playing at the CNE Center. They went over and saw the audience going mad and they looked at each other and said ‘we’ve gotta do this’. We have been friends since then. They are incredible musicians. Matt and I have written three albums of mine together. He is an incredible writer. He is very pop”.
Rick Springfield is a collector of Beatles memorabilia. One of his prized possessions is a copy of the rare Butcher cover, signed by John Lennon. “We went in to do this, we are all Beatle freaks,” Rick says. “We wanted to do an album that was influenced but would send us to Beatle jail basically. So we formed The Red Locusts and wrote similar to Russell (Morris) where we wrote a song a day. The thing takes over. It becomes its own energy”.
On one track Rick created a song titled ‘Miss Daisy Hawkins’ from the DNA of Paul McCartney’s ‘Eleanor Rigby’. “There is one on it I wrote called ‘Miss Daisy Hawkins’. That was the original name that Paul picked for ‘Eleanor Rigby’, like ‘Scrambled Eggs’ he had for yesterday. Then he changed it to ‘Eleanor Rigby’. So I wrote a song called ‘Miss Daisy Hawkins’ in the ‘Eleanor Rigby’ style, like a girl who has been jilted. She could have been famous in Paul McCartney’s song but she got dumped. We cut it tongue in cheek but there are some really cool songs on it”.
In October Rick Springfield and Russell Morris (as The Morris Springfield Project) will release ‘Jack Chrome and the Darkness Waltz’, a concept album based on the Spanish ‘Day of the Dead’ celebrations where once a year the living welcome back their family and friends who have passed.
‘Jack Chrome and the Darkness Waltz’ will be released on Robert Rigby’s Ambition Records. Orders for the album have now started through Songland Records, https://songland.com.au/contact-us/
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