Day Nine­teen – A Song From My Favorite Album:

There is no doubt in my mind that my favorite album of all times is INXS’ “Kick” … Although, I must admit that there was a period of time that I shunned away from it.

Blame it on youth, but I remem­ber lik­ing INXS for so many years before they had become com­mer­cially huge. So when “Kick” was released and gained so much pop­u­lar­ity with the masses, I felt as if the rest of those peo­ple had no clue as who INXS was before they became Global Rock­stars. And that’s when I stuck to lis­ten­ing to their old albums more than I did “Kick.”

How­ever, there is no deny­ing that “Kick” is an incred­i­ble album. Even when lis­ten­ing to the entire album today, I’m still amazed at how well-​​written each and every song was … and how they all stand the test of time as “clas­sic” songs for every gen­er­a­tion to enjoy.

Take for exam­ple the hordes of new peo­ple that were first intro­duced to INXS back in 2006 when Mark Bur­nett and the remain­ing band mem­bers pro­duced “Rock­star: INXS.” In fact, I had recently met a younger cou­ple in Vegas who had never heard of INXS until watch­ing that show. Now they claim that INXS had become their favorite band of all times, “ … espe­cially their older stuff off of ‘Kick.’”

So yeah … it’s a classic.

I actu­ally gained more respect for the album after hav­ing read the offi­cial INXS biog­ra­phy, “Story To Story.” In the book, it talks about how the entire band took a chance in allow­ing only Michael Hutchence and Andrew Far­riss write all the songs; pre­vi­ously, it had always been a group effort. But when the rest of the band heard the songs, they absolutely loved it and added their own flair to the songs.

I’ve prob­a­bly men­tioned it in another post (per­haps this one?), but “Kick” com­bined every best bit of their pre­vi­ous albums into one sin­gu­lar album. It’s like INXS took the R&B of “Sha­booh Shoobah” … the dance-​​ability of “The Swing” … and the Rock n’ Roll of “Lis­ten Like Thieves” and blended them flaw­lessly together.

Grainy pic­ture from 35mm film back in 1986 … Regard­less, Hutch was *still* HOT!

When the album was com­plete, the band and their man­ager, Chris Mur­phy, tried to look at it objec­tively; but they all came to the same con­clu­sion: They thought it was a mas­ter­piece. But when Chris Mur­phy took it to the top exec­u­tives at Atlantic Records, they absolutely hated it. They had thought that there was no way that they could get this music on rock radio sta­tion. They had told Chris that “Kick” was more suited for black radio and that they didn’t want to pro­mote the band in that manner.

Fur­ther­more, when Chris arranged for the top radio exec­u­tives at the time to lis­ten to “Need You Tonight” (unbe­knownst to Atlantic Records), he also didn’t get the response he had hoped. Rock radio didn’t under­stand the song at all. And the R&B peo­ple didn’t think they could get it any black radio play. But lucky for the band, the only radio exec­u­tive that loved it was the head of col­lege radio promotions.

That was the break that Chris Mur­phy was look­ing for. At that moment, he decided he would gam­ble every­thing on this album. With­out inform­ing the band, he took all their assets and even some of his own (he mort­gaged his own home!) to pro­mote the album by buy­ing col­lege radio ads, as well as to finance a string of col­lege con­certs. Mind you, this was with­out any for­mal com­mit­ment from Atlantic to pro­duce the album.

I was lucky enough to see them at the Uni­ver­sity of Michi­gan for the sec­ond col­lege con­cert they per­formed dur­ing this tour (the absolute first one was at Michi­gan State Uni­ver­sity) and I can remem­ber being blown away by the new stuff. So it’s no sur­prise that Atlantic Records finally caved in and released “Kick” shortly afterwards.

So here’s the first sin­gle that was offi­cially released off of “Kick” … one that still gives me the shiv­ers every time I hear Hutch whis­per, “Come over here” at the begin­ning of the song!

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What is with this 30-​​day song chal­lenge?

What was yes­ter­day’s song?