Sports Talk with Huey Lewis
The singer discusses what made his third album with The News such a success
On September 15, 1983, Huey Lewis & the News released their third album, Sports, which immediately brought the San Francisco-based band massive international success.
Five songs off the album became hits: “Heart & Soul,” “I Want a New Drug,” “The Heart of Rock & Roll,” “If This Is It,” and “Walking on a Thin Line.” That, in turn, helped Sports spend an astonishing 160 consecutive weeks on the U.S. Billboard Top 200 chart. Forty years later to the day, the band have reissued Sports on vinyl, giving fans the chance to revisit songs that, for many, have been an indelible soundtrack to their lives.
VIDEO: Huey Lewis & The News “I Want A New Drug”
During a recent Zoom video call from his ranch in Montana, frontman Huey Lewis says he and his bandmates are proud that these songs have endured – especially because so much care was put into creating them in the first place.
“It sounds like it’s a bar band, but that Sports record was actually put together very, very carefully, piece by piece,” he says. “I wanted the songwriting to be old school and the production style to be new, so that it sounded like the old and the new at once.”
He also specifically wanted this album to be a collection of potential hit singles.
“In 1982, ‘83, radio ruled the roost,” he says. “There was no Internet, there was no jam bands, there was only one avenue to success and that was a hit record. Even MTV, their playlist exactly mirrored radio. So if you wanted to play your own music and make a living at it, you’d better have a hit record. And so we aimed all those songs right at radio.”
The band self-produced Sports themselves so they could make sure that this quest for success didn’t go too far, though.
“We wanted to make those commercial choices ourselves because we knew we’d have to live with them. We didn’t want a ‘one eyed, one horned flying Purple People Eater,’” Lewis says with a laugh, referencing the lyrics to Sheb Wooley’s hit 1958 novelty song, “The Purple People Eater.”
It was, Lewis says, an unusual move at that time for a band to take control in this way.
“No bands produced their own records – that just didn’t happen,” he explains. “You always had to go with a producer. But our manager fought for that, and our label, Chrysalis Records, were seven thousand miles away and couldn’t really control us, fortunately.”
So they recorded the album and were about to hand it in when Chrysalis Records was sold to CBS Records. Suddenly finding themselves on a new label made Lewis his bandmates worry that they’d get lost in the shuffle during the transition, so they decided to keep Sports to themselves until everything was sorted out.
As they waited, Lewis says, “We had to hit the road because we had to pay the bills. We called it the ‘Working for a Living Tour.’ We had all of us on one bus.” One month into this tour, Lewis suggested that they give Sports a listen. It was not, he recalls, a happy experience.
“I can’t remember if it was ‘I Want a New Drug’ or which song it was, but it just wasn’t good,” he says, sounding despondent at the memory. “I said, ‘We’ve got to cut this with a [drum] machine, man.’ I was intent on using the latest technology, which in those days was a LinnDrum machine.”
That particular drum machine was also favored by other contemporary artists such as Michael Jackson and Jefferson Starship – and it was that latter group who inspired Lewis to use it, too, after he heard them working on their song “We Built This City” when his band and theirs were both recording at the Record Plant in Sausalito, California.
He says they ended up using the drum machine on reworked recordings for “I Want a New Drug,” “Bad Is Bad,” “Heart of Rock & Roll,” and “Walking on a Thin Line” – but he wants to make it clear this decision wasn’t made because the band’s drummer, Bill Gibson, wasn’t up to snuff. “It’s not that he can’t play it well enough,” Lewis says. “It’s the actual sound of the LinnDrum – the techno edge that you hear there is different than any captured ambient snare drum because it’s its own pure signal, and it sounds like a techno drum, if you will.”
Being replaced by a drum machine seems like something that would make a drummer quit, but Gibson apparently went along with this plan. “Bill Gibson is, first of all, part of the band,” Lewis says. “We’re a real band, and he is an equal member of the band, and he wants the band to do good, just as well as the rest of us, and he understands the concept. It’s a one for all, all for one kind of thing.”
Even though they’d deliberately worked hard to write and record songs that could potentially be hits, Lewis and his bandmates were shocked at just how successful Sports became when it was released. “Our first single was ‘Heart and Soul,’ and [it] did well,” Lewis says. “The second single was ‘I Want a New Drug,’ and when that became a hit, I went, ‘We’re going to have a few of these.’ That’s when I knew.”
Lewis was right: Sports achieved platinum sales status – seven times over. It charted in nine countries, including reaching the number one spot on the U.S. Billboard 200 chart. The only album that outsold it that year was Michael Jackson’s indomitable Thriller.
All of these achievements made it quite a daunting task for Lewis and the band to try to sustain this level of success, however. Lewis recalls feeling rushed to write and record again: “The record company was clamoring for another record, so we had to hurry for our record Fore!,” he says.
He and his bandmates were also disappointed to discover that the legendary producer Bob Clearmountain, who had done such a stellar job mixing Sports, was only available to mix one song for Fore! – “Stuck with You,” which ended up becoming yet another #1 single for the band. But Lewis and a recording engineer ended up mixing the rest of the album themselves, “and we frankly didn’t do a great job,” Lewis says.
When it was released in 1986, Fore! ended up earning triple platinum sales status in America – but it also taught Lewis what he didn’t want the band to do from then on. He remembers having a discussion with his band about it: “I said, ‘Look, we’re not doing anything for commercial reasons anymore. We’re good here. We have a career, we’re going to be able to play, people are going to show up. We’re not going to try and get any bigger anymore. That’s not going to be an issue. We’re going to try and get better, not bigger. And we’re going to do what we want to do.’
VIDEO: Huey Lewis & The News “Hip To Be Square”
“So then we pursued all kinds of different stuff,” Lewis continues. “Like, we made two records where we used not only no machines, no click tracks, no nothing – just captured the performance, if you will, as opposed to creating it piece by piece. It’s a lot more fun to capture a record. Honestly, since Fore!, we have not done anything for commercial reasons. Everything has been artistic for us. I’m proud of that.”
Unfortunately, Lewis says the band’s recording career is now finished because he has been diagnosed with Meniere’s Disease, a rare disorder of the inner ear. With hearing aids, he is able to hear people when they speak to him, but anything to do with music is out of the question. “I can’t sing. I can’t hear music at all. You could literally play one of my songs and I can’t identify it. I haven’t heard music in seven years,” he says.
So while it may be a bittersweet thing to realize that Lewis himself can no longer hear his own music, he is firmly optimistic as he looks back on the legacy that he and his bandmates created: “We’re very proud of that – and we did that all ourselves.”
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Huey Lewis is the legend of legends. I hope I can meet him soon.