Huey Lewis hit a grand slam with 1983's Sports. The third album from Huey Lewis and the News featured the ubiquitous hits "Heart and Soul," "I Want a New Drug," "The Heart of Rock and Roll," "If This is It" and "Walking on a Thin Line." The LP hit No. 1 on the Billboard 200 in June 1984, charted for 160 weeks and has sold more than seven million copies to date. "The Power of Love" single was featured in Back to the Future and was nominated for an Academy Award.
Lewis had been touring for a decade by the time Sports hit, beginning in the early '70s with his San Francisco Bay Area band Clover. Throughout, he gathered cool fans, friends and collaborators, including Dave Edmunds, Elvis Costello, and Nick Lowe, (Lewis produced Lowe's 1985 version of "I Knew the Bride (When She Used to Rock and Roll):).
By the close of the ‘70s, Clover was over, and Lewis’ new band was the American Express. However, when their debut album launched on Chrysalis in 1980, the lineup would be named "The News," to dodge potential legal issues with the credit card company. The ensuing decade of hits and MTV dominance assured Lewis’ place in cultural history. Of the six Huey Lewis and the News albums released in the ‘80s, two hit Gold sales status and three platinum. And the frontman would still be playing those hits live on tour if it wasn’t for Meniere’s Disease, which robbed the performer of his hearing seven years ago. (He’s wearing Bluetooth hearing aids "connected to his devices" for our Zoom interview.)
Lewis and the News’ most recent (and potentially final) album, Weather, released in 2020, and was recorded before Lewis’ hearing loss. But don’t count Lewis out; he’s got some tricks up his sleeve that will come to fruition in 2024. For now, looking back on the occasion of Sports’ 40th anniversary, the singer evinces both gratitude and a sometimes slightly wry humor as he recalls the hits, misses and memories of his career to date.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
From what I read about your self-titled debut in 1980, you were always attuned to what was commercial and on the radio. What does Sports sound like to you now, 40 years later?
It sounds like a collection of singles to me, which means it's a record of its time. In the early '80s, there was no Internet, no jam bands, and album rock didn't mean anything, either. All that mattered was contemporary hit radio, which was playing 23 songs, basically a playlist. And it was an editing process that we all competed for.
If you wanted to write your own music and sing your own music, and make a living, you had to have a hit single. And if you wanted to hear one of our Huey Lewis and the News hit singles, you also would hear a Garth Brooks song, a Commodores song, or Whitney Houstonsong, or Michael Jackson. Very diverse. We all competed for that one format.
So Sports we produced ourselves because we knew we needed a hit record. We wanted to make those commercial choices ourselves because if we had a hit, we'd have to play it for the rest of our lives. And we didn't want "One Eyed-One-Horned-Flying Purple People Eater" [the 1958 novelty hit by Sheb Wooley] if you know what I mean.
We fought to produce our record ourselves. And fortunately, our small little label Chrysalis was 7,000 miles away and couldn't really control us. We aimed every song — or most of those songs — right at radio. We knew we needed a hit. We didn't know we were gonna have five of them.
Even though I know Sports well, I didn't realize "Heart and Soul" was by [songwriters] Chapman and Chinn. I was a huge fan of the Sweet and all the bands they worked with. How did that song come to you?
First of all, Chinnichap, Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman, they're brilliant. Mike Chapman, we actually met with him and flirted with having him produce us, but we really wanted to do our own thing. A publisher sent me the song. It was originally written, I think, for Suzi Quatro. Because, thinking about the [original] lyric, "two o'clock this morning, if he should come a calling / I couldn't dream of turning him away."
But they redid it with Exile, the country band. I didn't know any of this; all I know is my publisher sent me the song. I heard it and went, Wow, that sounds like a hit to me. My philosophy always was, we'll write the eight best songs we can write, and then cover the two best original songs we can find. We basically just copied what we thought was the demo — we now know it was Exile’s record.
It’s not much of a song, there are only three chords, and most of the song is two chords, but it's a brilliant production. We swiped all that, we just copied it. So we're mixing it in LA. I go to the bathroom out of the control room, and go by the other studio. And I hear "Heart and Soul" coming out of the next studio, the same song. And it’s [L.A. band] Bus Boys. The publisher had pitched it to all these people. Needless to say, I wasn't very happy with the publisher.
"Heart and Soul" was nominated for Best Rock Vocal, Group at the 1984 GRAMMYs. What did that mean to you?
No question; it meant everything to me. Those are our peers. We got nominated for a zillion GRAMMYs, and I think we only won one or two. I mean, Bruce Springsteen beat me out in about nine categories, including "Power of Love," which should have won something, I think.
The "Heart of Rock and Roll" video is so much fun. It was shot in New York City and at Gazzari’s on the Sunset Strip. Where would you guys be without MTV?
We certainly wouldn't be as popular. But we might be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. [Laughs.] It kind of hurt our credibility. We were seen as a pop band in America. In Europe. we're a rock and roll band, or a soul band. But I remember it was a necessity for us.
We actually filmed two videos prior to being signed by Chrysalis Records as a way to market ourselves. There was a gal called Kim Dempster and Videowest in San Francisco — this was the advent of videotape and cable and cable TV — she said, "I'll do a video of you guys if you'll let us show it on our Videowest channel at midnight." I said "done!"
I schemed this idea for "Some of my Lies are True" where we’d go to the beach and set up on a sewage pier. Like,what's the strangest place you would have a band set up to play? I liked it on "Shindig" and "Hullabaloo" when James Brown would set up by the swimming pool. Chrysalis saw [the video] and loved it and they signed us.
Now the song "Do You Believe in Love" is on our second album.For that song, the label got an advertising guy and he designed the set. They're all these pastel colors and they matched our pastel shirts and we all had a lot of makeup on. This is the video where we're all in bed singing to the gal. A week later, we assembled at the record company to see the rough cut. There are 10 people from the record label, 10 people from the video company, 10 of us, and the director and he says, "Now this is not colorized yet, it's gonna look a lot better when it's colorized." He shuts the lights off, and plays the video.
My heart just sank. It was just so horrible. There's no direction. There was no story, there was no meaning. It wasn't funny, wasn't entertaining, it was just horrible. When it ended, everybody got up and gave us a standing ovation. I remember thinking to myself, clearly, there's no art here.
So we're writing our own songs, we're producing our own records, we're gonna do our own videos from now on. From then on, we wrote all those videos. The idea was to avoid a literal translation of the song and if at all possible, zig when the song zags and just goof off and have fun.
That's an amazing story. I just flashed back to the Billy Squier "Rock Me Tonite" video.
There is one other thing about "Heart of Rock and Roll"… When we were making [Sports] we were in the Record Plant. Next door was Peter Wolf, working with the producer Ron Nevison on the Jefferson Starship record [Lewis sings ‘We Built This City"] with the [electronic-sounding] machines going. I went, ‘Wow, what is that?’ I befriended Peter Wolf, and said, ‘can you show me how to do that?’ Because we learned about the Linn Drum machine about 1980; that Roger Linn had a machine that had Jeff Porcaro’s [drum samples] in it.
So he sets the machine up and he sequences the bass and gets it going. So we're going to cut ["I Want a New Drug."] We start playing to it, and it was just lying there. It was not working. So we cut the track normally, just organically. We finished the record. We went to New York to mix it. I couldn't get "I Want A New Drug" to groove. I mixed it three or four times with Bob Clearmountain, who's brilliant. We just couldn't get it to where it sounded good to me. I finally got it as best I could. The record was done.
Then Chrysalis sold out to CBS. So we couldn't hand our record in because we didn't know who was going to distribute it; it was all mystery meat at that point. So we just hung on to the record. We hit the road. We had the band and crew and everybody on one bus and we went out and did clubs, the West, Midwest.The last thing we'd ever do is listen to the record because we've been working on it for months and listen to it over and over again. So after about three weeks, one night, on an overnight trip, I say to the guys "Hey, let's put on the record. Let's see what it sounds like."
We throw the record up, and I go, "Damn, it's not happening." So I cried "problem!" to our manager. We went back into the studio and we recut "Heart of Rock & Roll," "I Want a New Drug," "Walking on a Thin Line," "Bad Is Bad," all to the drum machine. Gives it that little modern, techno thing.
I love that you’re such a producer. I know you worked with Mutt Lange with your band Clover. I feel Mutt has some kind of hitmaking brain. Do you have any takeaways from him either as a songwriter or as a producer?
We actually kind of have completely different philosophies about music. I think music matters like crazy. I think it's important to people, to their lives. Mutt just thinks it’s pop music. See, I have a jazz musician dad. All of his favorite bands — like Jimmie Lunceford and Chick Webb and all those early jazz bands — had one number where they would put funny hats and use the hat for a mute on the trumpet, and it was a kind of a show number, a novelty number.
My old man saw rock and roll as that — all novelty; to him it wasn't real music. So when we cut "Power of Love" I'll never forget. You find out a week ahead of time that a song is gonna be number one next week. I’m talking to my pops, and I say, "Guess what? My record goes number one next week.’ And he goes, "Ah, that’s no good. The best s— is never the most popular."
Oh, ouch.
But that's where I'm coming from. And Mutt Lange is coming from a whole ‘nother place. All he cares about is popularity. But Mutt is a genius. He works so hard. I like dashing things off and just going with it. I don't mind if there's a mistake or two; didn't bother me.
Jumping ahead, I’m curious about Weird Al and his take on "I Want a New Drug"—"I Want a New Duck."
I don't know Al at all, but in fact, we did that little thing, the "Hip To Be Square" American Psycho lampoon.. I like his work. He's funny. And you know, he's kind of a serious guy. You know, comedy is serious. It's funny, because when we did that whole thing, the lampoon of American Psycho, we worked on it with the Funny or Die guys for six to eight hours. And they never laughed. No, nothing was funny. I was laughing my ass off.
Did you know the "Huey Lewis appreciation" scene in American Psycho was going to be in the movie?
Somebody showed me the book. And I read the passage about us. It was amazing. I mean [Bret Easton Ellis] actually clearly had listened to our music a lot. They told us that the movie was gonna come out and they wanted to use "Hip to be Square." I said, "and they're gonna pay us?" I mean, it's an artistic thing, Willem Dafoe’s in it, no problem. So, boom, they paid us.
A week before the release of the film they decide they want to do a soundtrack album. I said, ‘Really? What's that going to look like?’ They said, "Well, 'Hip to be Square,' I think there's a Phil Collins song, and then mostly source music." I said, it isn't good for our fans to have to buy a whole record for one song. So we politely declined.
Now, literally the night before the premiere of the movie, they issued a press release to USA Today, The New York Times, everybody, that said that Huey Lewis had seen the movie and it was so violent that he yanked his tune from the soundtrack.
Oh no!
It was bulls—, but they were ginning up publicity.’ That pissed me off. So I boycotted the movie and never saw it. To this day. I actually lent the tune to the musical of American Psycho on Broadway! Duncan Sheik wrote all the other music and it's really good. It didn't last that long, but I was really impressed.
Sports’ huge success must have been the "I can buy my first house" record?
Sports signaled that we're going to have a career where we're actually going to be able to play our own music and have people show up. Until Sports, our focus was to get a hit record, because to exist in the radio was all there was. Such a narrow scope.