Who better to take Rand Paul down a notch? “Oh yeah, Rand Paul is a horrible, horrible, horrible reprehensible degenerate piece of shit,” he says, “and you can quote me on that.” He’s transformed himself into a sane and sensible flamethrower his politically charged tweets are smart and savage, and he’s secure enough with his place in the rock music canon that his tank of fucks is sitting on empty. Marx continues to record music, but now he’s as ubiquitous on Twitter as he once was on the charts. Richard Marx in 1989, the year "Right Here Waiting For You" came out. It’s no coincidence one of Mayer’s musical collaborators on the record is Greg Phillinganes, who worked with Marx in the ‘80s and has been a close friend ever since. His new album, Sob Rock, borrows many of the riffs, vibes, and graphic design of Marx’s early years. And the late ‘80s, early ‘90s pop-rock of which Marx is an icon is experiencing a renaissance this summer thanks to a more recent pop-rock standard bearer, John Mayer. The Song of the Summer can come from anywhere, but for three years running, with “ Endless Summer Nights,” “ Hold On To The Nights,” and “ Right Here Waiting,” Marx mastered The Song of the End of the Summer-the one that’s playing when you walk away from a summer romance, or tearfully head off to college. His were the pop-rock songs we were listening to in the time when we were all listening to the same pop-rock songs, and often those songs provided the soundtrack to the same experiences.
Marx arrived in the summer of 1987 with his self-titled debut album and was a constant on the pop charts for most of the next decade. That’s Richard Marx all over: headstrong and confident, in possession of a gift so undeniable, not even illness would try to stand in its way. “My wife, my manager, everyone was like: dude, go home and rest, and I said, ‘My voice sounds good and my hair looks great, we’re doing this.’” “They’d be propping me up, but then I hit the stage and something took over.” He laughs, a little at the situation and a little at himself.
“At showtime, it was like Weekend at Bernie’s,” he says. But one thing Marx knew was that this mysterious illness would not stop his 2019 solo acoustic tour. “I’m almost cocky about how I never get sick,” Marx tells me from a hotel room in Miami, “but I really was thinking I was going to die.” A diagnosis eluded his doctor, so he visited some of the nation’s top infectious disease experts. It was 2019, and he was sick-sickest he’d ever been in his life-with something that came on fast and intense.
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