Richard Marx didn’t know what hit him. It was 2019, and he was sick—sickest he’d ever been in his life—with something that came on fast and intense. Fever. Chills. Aches. “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. They were stumped, too. But one thing Marx knew was that this mysterious illness would not stop his 2019 solo acoustic tour. “At showtime, it was like Weekend at Bernie’s,” he says. “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. “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.’” 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. 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. 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. The Song of the Summer can… Click below to read the full story from Esquire
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