The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.
—Samuel Johnson
Kicking the habit is what Rick, by now once again doing drugs almost full-time, should again have tried to do. But he didn’t. Instead, in 1989 he recorded an album titled Kickin’ for Warner Bros. Kickin’ is slang for Great! but the word also could refer to kicking the dope habit, kicking out angrily against repeated failure, or, for that matter, kicking the bucket. The company did its own kickin’ by refusing to release the album in the United States, due in part to what it said were “concerns over production quality.”
Like his Great White Cane album, Kickin’ was distributed during Rick’s lifetime mostly in the form of promotional copies. In the case of Kickin’, however, those promotional copies were released only in the United Kingdom.
Rick’s estate released a remastered CD of Kickin’ in 2014 that displayed on its cover a sullen, overweight Rick in a loose black outfit and large black beret, smoking a cigarette. The songs were all pretty good examples of Rick’s punk-funk style, and the album sounds as good as his other albums in terms of production quality. It should have been released years earlier. One of the songs on the album, “Get Wit It,” featured the line “Stuck-up little Jew girl” about a woman who wouldn’t yield to Rick’s charms. Except for this offensive line, this song was one of Rick’s better ones from the record.
Rick tried once again in 1989 to buttress his recording career at Warner Brothers by performing on that company’s album Rock, Rhythm & Blues, producer Richard Perry’s attempt to remake great rock ’n’ roll and R&B tunes of the past. (Perry had jump-started the stalled careers of Ringo Starr, the Pointer Sisters, and others during the 1970s.) Rick sang a medley on the album consisting of “This Magic Moment,” first recorded in 1960 by Ben E. King and the Drifters, and the pop classic “Dance with Me.”
Rick, wearing a 1950s Elvis nightclub outfit and hairstyle, did a great job of recalling that era’s music. The Record newspaper of Bergen County, New Jersey, was absolutely correct in noting that Rick had “never sounded so smooth or so soulful.” On the video, which seemed to have been blurred on purpose to signify a bygone musical era, Rick tossed his mic from hand to hand and was backed by a musical combo, a male singing group, and a female singing group resembling the Supremes. Girlish screams issued from the audience.
Most reviewers denounced the album and Rick’s part in it. The Austin American-Statesman called Rick’s treatment of the two songs “lush, lovely and utterly passionless” and said his performance pushed the entire album toward “sugar-coated banality.”
Record buyers appeared to agree. The album sold so badly that, in the words of one reviewer, it put a nail in the coffin of Rick’s career. But the best was yet to come.