Huey Lewis and the News- Sports
In order to get the album Sports illustrated (sorry), the estimated 10,000,000(!) seller from Huey Lewis and the News released at the end of Summer 1983, it’s important to run the numbers in relative terms. The period 1983-84 was a banner period for rock blockbusters from ZZ Top, Def Leppard, The Police, Van Halen, and Bruce Springsteen among many others, but Huey Lewis and the News Sports outsold everybody in 1983…except Michael Jackson’s Thriller. And Sports was still selling sixteen months after release, making Huey Lewis and the News the #14 seller for the FOLLOWING year 1984, as well! That is Cooperstown-worthy slugging percentage.
The good news? In spite of his all-American boyish good looks and refreshingly matter-of-fact charm, upon closer inspection you will find in Huey Lewis’ life ( born Hugh Cregg III ) a series of contradictions. Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, Huey claims in our classic rock interview to have “grown up as a lower middle class kid”, yet his father was a doctor who sent Huey to private prep school in New Jersey. His mother was a free-spirited artist at the nexus of the hippie movement, yet Huey was a clean cut “A” student athlete good enough to earn a baseball scholarship.
You may read that Huey’s first pro band, Clover, was Elvis Costello’s studio backing band on the introductory My Aim is True album, but most omit the fact that Huey did not play on it. After returning to America and forming Huey Lewis and the News, their third album Sports in September would eventually sell over seven million copies certified stateside, but not before Huey Lewis paid the rent as a street corner singer in Europe, a truck driver, a carpenter, a short order cook, a partner in a landscaping business (“We pretty much just pulled weeds”, Huey laughs), and the first recycling business in California, all before Huey Lewis spread the News. By the early Eighties, the music business had long established a formula where, by the third album, a recording artist was expected to go big or go home. With Sports, Huey Lewis and the News went big. Really, really big. #1 sales big, 71 weeks on the Billboard chart, four Top Ten hit singles big, including “Heart and Soul”, “If This is It”,”The Heart of Rock ‘n’Roll”, and “I Want a New Drug”.
The band had to cancel all of their remaining 2018 concerts when head coach Huey Lewis was stricken with an inner ear malady, Meniere’s disease.
“I can’t hear music well enough to sing,” Huey told Rolling Stone magazine in 2018. “Just before a show in Dallas, I lost most of my hearing…making it impossible to find pitch.”
Like migraine or diabetes, Meniere’s disease sufferers outwardly appear normal, but it is a chronic condition, which means that you don’t treat it for a week or two and then it goes away. It is constant and can last months, years, or possibly the rest of your life.
– Redbeard
