The Real Story Behind Rick Springfield's 'Jessie's Girl'

Per Yahoo, Springfield went on to point out that the details of his meeting with the couple that inspired "Jessie's Girl" were so specific that it shouldn't have been hard to them to track him down if they'd wanted to do so. "If someone was in a stained-glass class in 1979 in Pasadena and his name was Gary, and he had a hot girlfriend, you got to put the things together, right? No one's ever contacted me, but Oprah did try to find them." Yes, the mystery of "Jessie's Girl" is so enticing that even Oprah Winfrey herself had her people look into it; per Springfield, they got as far as tracking down the details regarding the Pasadena stained glass class. "But the teacher had died two years before she had found them, and they'd thrown out all his paperwork a year later. Oprah missed it by a year, but they went looking."

Perhaps its the mystery of just who this girl is that's made the song such a lasting classic. It was covered on the TV show "Glee" and featured on the soundtracks of the movies "13 Going On 30" and "Boogie Nights," about which Springfield told Louder Sound "I thought its darkness was a pretty good fit..." To top it all off, Dave Grohl of Nirvana and the Foo Fighters used the song as part of his "Sound City" documentary, inviting Rick Springfield to join him onstage to perform the song at several live shows.  

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