Song Of The Weekend: Insiders 'Ghost On The Beach'!

"Remember us? We'll give you some time to 'mullet' over."

For a Chicago-based rock band with hopes of being a major label commodity, 1987 was a weird time.

While the A&R scouts for the major labels didn't seem willing to explore within Chicago city limits, if you were a suburban synth band with a line-up that included at least one former member of Off Broadway and/or Pezband, labels were soon knocking down the door of your Schaumburg rehearsal space with offers in-hand.

While insanely talented Chicago bands built rabid followings one joyously sweaty, beer-soaked club gig at a time, making them oddly invisible to major labels, the pages of the Illinois Entertainer were chock-full of gushy page-turners about the latest suburban synth-pop outfit to nab a major label deal.

From the moment this writer first laid eyes upon Insiders at a Lincoln Park street fair in the middle of a lazy summer afternoon, despite no former members of Off Broadway or Pezband, it was obvious this band of city boys had the goods.

Hell, their guitarist Jay O'Rourke had co-produced the first Ministry single, for cryin' out loud.

The next year saw them opening for just about every band we saw at FitzGerald's, Orphans, the Vic, the Riviera, and so on, making us quite familiar with their repertoire by the time singer Gary Yerkins announced from the stage one night that the band had officially signed to Epic Records and that, with any luck, their next gig in November would be the last of their outdoor gigs for the year.

I chuckled, but Gary was dead serious: their next gig really was outdoors at one of the city's autumnal street festivals and, as I recall, it was freezing, but the band put on a brave face and tore the roof off the beer tent.

Weeks later, WXRT began spinning one of the songs from the band's upcoming album, "Ghost On The Beach" and there was a buzz at the band's shows now that made it feel like something was about to happen.

While WXRT spun the tune religiously, album-oriented rock and college rock format radio stations all across the country were adding the song to their playlists. At one point, the tune reached #8 on Billboard's Hot Mainstream Rock Tracks chart.

To its eternal credit, WXRT has not stopped playing the song since despite the fact that, unlike many of the other songs the station plays with alarming regularity, "Ghost On The Beach" and the album of the same name are completely unavailable for purchase in the digital realm should any listeners hearing the song on the radio wish to purchase it for their collection.

Granted, you can pick up copies on eBay and the like, but the band sees no cash from such sales.

Imagine having given years of your life to a project and recorded a song that still gets major-market radio airplay thirty years after-the-fact and the band sees no money from sales because Sony has refused to issue it themselves or allow the band to do so themselves.

For shame, Sony, for shame!