What happened in this episode?
Joe Rogan speaks with musician and actor Rick Springfield about Springfield’s early life in Australia and England, his depression as a teenager, and the long arc of his career. The most consequential passages centre on Springfield’s account of touring Vietnam during the late 1960s as part of a band hired to entertain US troops. He describes being shot at, sleeping in military “hooches”, and a night-time attack at Marble Mountain near Da Nang where he says he fired mortars from a radio shack and later learned one round killed a Viet Cong fighter. Springfield also says the band’s leader, Pete Watson, died aged 25 after returning with a rare lung disease, which Springfield speculates could have been linked to exposure or infection.
The conversation also turns to fame and the music business. Springfield revisits how radio DJs helped drive ‘Jesse’s Girl’ to number one, and recalls taking a role on General Hospital partly for income before his record broke, later describing how quickly daytime television made him recognisable. He shares anecdotes about meeting Elvis Presley on a flight and claims an Elvis autograph was stolen during customs inspection. Springfield also recounts a lawsuit he calls “buttgate”, in which a woman allegedly claimed he injured her when he moved into the audience during a show.
Later, Rogan and Springfield discuss ageing and health routines, including MRI body scans, supplements and hyperbaric oxygen therapy; Rogan makes anti-ageing claims about telomeres, while Springfield describes participation in a skincare trial involving serum derived from his own cultured cells.
