Rick Springfield Targets Comeback : With Acting Career Showing New Signs of Life, Pop Star Embarks on Musical Mini-Tour

Pop star Rick Springfield decided to take some time off from touring in 1986, not long after his first son was born. That son, now 7, has a younger brother who’s 3, and they both have a question for Dad.

“They wonder what I do for a living,” Springfield said, chuckling over the phone from his home in Calabasas.

His break turned into a six-year hiatus, as he not only helped take care of the kids but convalesced from what he now admits was burnout, an inability to write music anymore.

But now, he says, “my battery is recharged.” Tonight, he’ll play the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano, one of three cities on a mini-tour that he hopes will help rekindle his career.

For a time in the early ‘80s, Springfield was one of the hottest names in show business, known not only for such top-of-the-pops hits as “Jessie’s Girl,” which won a Grammy award, but for playing Dr. Noah Drake on TV’s “General Hospital” for three seasons.

Some of the luster had worn off, though, by the time he released his album “Tao” in 1985; it stalled at 21 on the Billboard chart and its highest-charting single never madeit past 22. An album in 1988, “Rock of Life,” failed to hit the top 40.

This year, at 42, he found himself starting pretty much from scratch. His acting career showed the first signs of new life during the summer when he starred in a TV action series, “The Human Target” on ABC. He played a Vietnam veteran (based on a D.C. comics character) who assumed the identity of people in distress. He said he currently is negotiating for another TV role.

Musically, meanwhile, Monday nights at a small club near his home, he started sitting in with a blues band that included two members of his old touring group. The band will be with him at the Coach House.

Playing in front of an audience again has not been difficult, he said.

“With acting, you’re either working or you’re not,” he noted. “You can’t just act around the house. You just have to pick up a guitar to be playing.”

Though he and his band are concentrating on his old tunes right now, the good news for Springfield is that he finds himself able to write new songs again. For one thing, “there’s more to write about now. That’s the great thing about getting older and having kids.”

Born in Australia, Springfield got his first guitar at age 13 and four years later was touring with a band in Vietnam--during the war. (He since has called that a “very, very stupid thing to do”).

After scoring a hit in Australia with his band (called Zoot), he came to the United States in 1972 and re-recorded the song, “Speak to the Sky,” on his own. It reached No. 14 and led to a brief period as a teen pop idol. When that cooled off, he turned to acting and hit big with “General Hospital.”

But acting has never been more than “a way to pay the light bill between gigs,” he said. “My priority has always been music.”

* Rick Springfield sings tonight at 8 at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. $19.50. (714) 496-8930.