This photo of Jackie and Jon Farriss, the drummer for INXS, is from 1983.
My friend Jackie died suddenly at the end of September in 2023. It is because of her that I started this blog. Jackie was a couple of years younger than me. I met her when she was still in high school and I was in college. She loved soccer and music. She lived in Chicago. I met her when she came to New Jersey to visit my friend Terri who also loved soccer and music. I met Terri when I moved to Hillsdale, New Jersey at the end of seventh grade. We had many adventures together and a lot of them involved soccer and music. The New York Cosmos and INXS in particular.
I lost touch with Jackie for a while but we reconnected through social media. She joined some Facebook groups for INXS fans. I went to four INXS concerts with Jackie in 1984 and we had fun. We also went to a lot of INXS concerts separately. I think she liked remembering those days and people liked to hear her stories about the concerts and the band. I still listened to INXS but I did not think about them much or about the past. I was never going to forget some of the events but a lot of the details had gotten lost somewhere in my brain and I could not recall them without something to jog my memory.
Jackie invited me to join one of the INXS Facebook groups in September of 2019. I didn’t see any harm in it so I joined. I checked Facebook daily already because Facebook was beneficial to me. I moved a lot so it was an easy way to inform people about what I was doing and to find out what my friends and family were doing. I started seeing numerous posts about INXS in my feed. Sometimes I would see a photo and make a comment about which year it was from because I recognized the clothing or the haircuts. Sometimes I would make a comment about something I still remembered that was pertinent to the post. Sometimes I would watch a video and it would jog my memory. I remember watching a video containing home video footage of INXS on tour in 1986 and I saw Bruce Patron who was the road manager for the Listen Like Thieves tour. I had forgotten that Bruce Patron had even existed. I would never have thought of him again if I had not seen him in the video. Then memories started bubbling up while I was in bed and falling asleep. There was a sliver of the time that Bruce Patron talked to me.
Soon, the COVID-19 pandemic happened and I found myself at home with a lot of free time. I was living in Honolulu, Hawaii where the government took extensive measures to keep the islands safe because they did not have the resources to handle a lot of sick people. I was encouraged to stay home. Large gatherings were canceled. I stopped going to the grocery store a few times a week. I wore a mask when I did go.
The other people in the INXS Facebook group seemed very interested in hearing every story and every detail and in seeing new photos so I decided to indulge them. I opened my diaries to see what I could find for them. I ended up going down a rabbit hole. The project brought up all sorts of feelings and questions that I had been ignoring. And not just about what happened with INXS. My diary contained a litany of instances of disrespect and harassment from men even more than what the Me Too movement had caused me to reflect on and remember.
For most of my life I thought I would never know what happened. What I read in the years following Michael Hutchence’s suicide did not provide enough information. Reading my diary in 2020 brought up new questions and I saw connections I had not seen before.
When I shared INXS stories from my diary in the Facebook group, someone asked me in a comment if I thought that Michael Hutchence had read the book that I had wanted my friend to give to him. It was a book that she loved. I said, “I don’t know. Maybe there are themes from the book that are in the songs.” I realized then that I could look at that and see what I could find.
For all I knew, Michael never read the note that my friend gave him in June of 1988 because he was ” very fucked up” on drugs and alcohol at the time. She was not able to give him the actual book that I had sent her but the note she gave him mentioned the book. I left it at that and went on with my life. I had tried. In 2020, I realized that just because I wasn’t there to see what happened, it doesn’t mean that nothing happened. One of several things must have happened: 1. He never read the note., 2. He read the note but did nothing about it., 3. He read the note and read the book but he didn’t care for it., 4. He read the book and it changed his life.
I think what happened was number four. I will be exploring this possibility in my blog. I will also tell my story. I have a complicated history with INXS so even a condensed version is a bit long. But I need to start somewhere and this is it.
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