I had a nice chat this morning with a lady from the next town over. She told me about an ice cream place she takes her children near me. I told her of an ice cream place nearer to her. On Saturday a man came by to upgrade our modem. He was a local fellow, too. He told me all about the little towns around us where he grew up. How they’ve changed, what they offer, the people that call them home.
I mention this because, even though they have little in common and there’s no through-line between the two experiences, it can be delightful meeting people who are proud of where they’re from.
It’s another day to marvel at how well the plants flourish. On the southern side of the house, sheltered from the morning sun, but thrive in the western sun. I caught this in the early afternoon. Sometimes the flowers outside can distract you from the task of making lunch inside.
This evening we were out in the yard, admiring our recent landscaping and lawn maintenance, and I noticed the moon was on it’s way up in the east. For some reason, my lovely bride didn’t think I could take a photo of it. I said I could, if she did a handstand.
And so the neighborhood watch may now revise down their estimation of our age. A plus! Also, I got the moon in my photo. Count your wins, all of ’em, big and small.
Let us return to the Re-Listening project, because I am several records behind. That has been the status quo of this project for almost a full year now, so there’s no need to jump up and down. We’ll catch up eventually. (My CD collection is, after all, finite.) The Re-Listening project, if you’ve not noticed it’s occasional appearance here, is the one where I listen to all of my old CDs in the car, in the order in which I acquired them. (More or less.) There’s a small period where those details are hazy, and it doesn’t really matter. This whole exercise is simply an excuse to listen to some music and, when I get around to writing about it here, share some music, fill some space, and maybe bring to the fore some old memory that is tied to a song, an album, a performer or an experience.
Let’s see which one we get to in this installment!
In 1987 Australia’s INXS followed up on their American breakthrough, taking the world by storm on their sixth studio album. “Kick” was certified six-times platinum, peaking at number three on the Billboard 200. The band wanted every song to potentially be a single, and if you listen to the whole thing through your late 1980s prism, they got pretty close. There were four top 10 singles, including a number one, and they’ve all become new wave, pop rock classics.
I picked this up in 2004 or thereabouts, and the circumstances behind that are forgotten and it was probably altogether unremarkable. But I never had it, I needed it, and that’s enough.
“New Sensation” was the third single, released in March 1988, and I was still trying to do the coolest things with this song at my campus station in the 1990s and in commercial radio just after the turn of the century.
It’s a good song with which to really test the limits of legal IDs is all.
Perhaps it was that first single, September 1987, that introduced me to INXS. (It was just a question of timing, but I came to 1985’s “What You Need” later.) MTV was, by then, a fixture, and this was in heavy rotation. Wikipedia tells me that Andrew Farriss was inspired by the guitar lick while waiting for a cab. He went inside to record it, and 45 minutes later, returned to find a furious cab driver. I wonder if anyone every followed up with that guy. Michael Hutchence heard the cab demo and pulled most of the lyrics together in just a few minutes.
There are a lot of successful songs that have this supposed sort of origin story. I wonder if, when that happens, the people pulling it together know they are really onto something.
Also, there are a number of them that could be considered quintessential 1980s music videos, that one is on this list. Everything about it is weird and odd and right.
And then they tacked on “Mediate,” because when they played that demo in the studio, the engineer stumbled into a happy accident that the two worked so perfectly he thought something was wrong.
Art is sometimes serendipitous.
Art sometimes copies others. If the “Mediate” video seems familiar, Bob Dylan would like you to know he did it first, 23 years earlier.
And, I just learned that in 2003, almost 40 years after Dylan defined it and some 15 years after INXS perfected it, Weird Al Yankovich spoofed it.
Back to “Kick,” they wound up releasing something like seven singles off of the 12-track effort. It got so out of hand that “Mystify” had a comparatively quiet peak at number 17 on the Billboard Album Rock Tracks chart.
On any other record “Calling All Nations” would have been a new wave hit. “Tiny Daggers,” from several decades away feels like a teen movie soundtrack stalwart, or an obvious 1980s hit.
The band continued on after Hutchence’s death in 1997. They continued on until 2012. But they’re still putting out material of a sort. Just last month they released a behind the scenes feature on “Never Tear Us Apart.”
The whole thing is Prague, just before the Velvet Revolution.
Modern listeners, in the “first time” genre, agree.
And this one is hysterical. I’ve queued it to the moment where she is feeling some feelings.
It’s a remarkable record, really. They sold almost 10 million units internationally in those first two years when “Kick” was everywhere. By the time they re-released it in 2012 to celebrate 25 years, they’d move something like 20 million units. Because you can’t cash in enough, Universal Music re-re-mastered it and re-released it in time for the 30th anniversary, in 2017, in a package with 3CD+Blu-rays and 2LP vinyls, and digital media. (What, no cassettes?)
Next time we do the Re-Listening project, we’ll move from Australia to Canada. I wonder who that could be, eh?
