A few years ago, you couldn’t turn on a television past midnight without coming across the Time-Life Classic Soft Rock infomercial.

It was hosted by the members of the Australian soft rock duo Air Supply, Russell Hitchcock and Graham Russell.  While sitting in a very wholesome-looking living room, the Russells talked about how much they loved soft rock and how happy they were that Time-Life was now giving a new generation a chance to get mellow with Elton John, Peter Frampton, REO Speedwagon, and Seals & Croft.  Graham Russell played his guitar and a chirpy co-host said, “I can’t believe that I’m meeting Air Supply!”

The path to infomercial super stardom began in 1975 when Graham Russell and Russell Hitchcock were both cast in the Australian production of Jesus Christ Superstar.  They formed Air Supply in 1976 and went on to become superstars in Australia.  They also had eleven hits in the United States, five of which had the word “love” in the title.  Their biggest hit was All Out Of Love.

What do you say, everyone?

Are you ready to soft rock?

The song’s best known lyric, “I’m all out of love, I’m so lost without you,” was originally “I’m all out of love, I want to arrest you.”  By arrest, Graham Russell meant that he wanted to capture someone’s attention.  No one found the lyric to be strange in Australia but, when it came time to release the song in the United States, Arista Records’s Clive Davis feared that listeners would misinterpret the song’s meaning.  It was Davis who came up with the new lyrics.

Years later, when Songfacts asked Graham Russell whether “I want to arrest you,” is a common Australian saying, he had this to say:

“It really isn’t. I think it was just me using a weird word. But, you know, now I think of it, it’s definitely very weird. There are certain words that you just don’t use when you’re writing songs. And ‘arrest’ is one of them. Words like ‘cabbage’ or ‘cauliflower,’ like that. There are certain words that just aren’t poetic. And ‘arrest’ is one of them. And I really don’t know why I used it. But Clive called me on it, and the rest became history.”