The first thing I want to do with this blog is to tell my story about what happened with the Australian rock band INXS (pronounced in excess). These experiences are the basis for many subjects I want to write about. 

I didn’t talk about it for many years for reasons that I now think are wrong. Women are silent because they are shamed, disbelieved, attacked, and because they are taught to protect men. I want this to change.

I may never have talked about it if it weren’t for my friend, Jackie Fuhrmann, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Jackie died unexpectedly in September 2023. She was two years younger than me. She was an INXS fan. Her favorite band member was Jon Farriss, the drummer.

Jackie lived in Chicago. She was born and raised there. I was from New Jersey. I met her through my local New Jersey friends, Terri and Jessica. Jackie came out to New Jersey to visit and sometimes my friends went to the Midwest to visit her. I never did. I still have never visited Chicago. Jackie loved soccer and music. She first saw INXS in concert in 1983 in Chicago. She visited us in New Jersey in the summer of 1984 and saw several INXS concerts. Jackie was one of my three friends who Michael Hutchence, the lead singer of INXS, invited up to his hotel room on July 2/3, 1984. Terri and Jessica were the other two. More about that in a future post.

Facebook allowed us to reconnect after we had lost touch with each other. Jackie followed some INXS fan pages. She became Facebook friends with many of the other fans in those Facebook groups. She enjoyed remembering the fun times.

In 2018, Jackie started tagging me in posts that were about INXS and in September 2019, I joined one of the INXS fan groups on Facebook that she was in. 

I had stopped paying attention to the latest news about INXS and I rarely talked about them. Sometimes I would mention that I went to 22 INXS concerts if I needed to say something about myself during an ice breaker at a social event- a common practice at military spouse events where people often don’t know each other because we move so often. Sometimes I would mention that I had met the band, but I never told the whole story. I was embarrassed about the things we did, and I didn’t like to talk about it. I didn’t want to be thought of as a groupie because that was not true. Groupie has a sexual aspect to it as opposed to being a fan. And it is sexist because it is a word that describes women and is meant to denigrate them. 

I started to read the posts from this INXS Facebook group that showed up in my feed. I still remembered a lot from my life in the 1980s and many of the posts jogged my memory. For example, I had forgotten that Bruce Patron existed until I watched a video from 1986. He was in it, and I recognized him immediately. Bruce Patron was the tour manager for INXS during their Listen Like Thieves tour. I started to comment on the posts with details I remembered.

Then the COVID-19 pandemic happened. I was living in Honolulu, Hawaii and almost all social activity came to a halt in March 2020. That left me with a lot of free time. I started to read my diary with the intention of sharing my stories about INXS with the INXS Facebook group I was in. I started out by posting stories about what happened in 1983 in April 2020. At first it was fun but then it became disturbing because I noticed things I had not noticed before and it brought back memories from a difficult time in my life. 

https://www.facebook.com/mystifymh

Richard Lowenstein made a documentary about Michael Hutchence called Mystify: Michael Hutchence. It was released in the U.S. in January 2020, but I didn’t watch it until after I finished reading my diary, so not until May 2020. As I told my friend, Jessica, it brought up a lot of shit for me. Questions that I have been trying to answer ever since. 

I have been trying to establish what is fact and what is fiction. Obviously, I don’t doubt my own experiences. I was there. It happened to me. But because other people do doubt me, I am turning to every source I can find to establish what happened and when. As they say, the devil is in the details, and I plan to turn the vague recollections of people who were there into a clear picture.

Right now, I am reading a biography by Vincent Lovegrove called Michael Hutchence: A Tragic Rock ‘N’ Roll Story- A Definitive Biography. I think it is out of print. It came out in 1999 and it made Patricia and Tina angry. They say so in their book. I plan to read as many books as I can find so I can gather information and find different versions of events and then determine what is most likely to be true. I will tell you about all the books and videos I come across.