Huey Lewis has a reputation as The Rock Star Next Door, Mr. Nice Guy, the clean-cut all-American boy. Yeah, sure, but what is he really like? Well, much as I like to uncloak a fraud, as far as I can tell Huey Lewis lives up to the rep.
Lewis was riding high through most of the ‘80s with a string of top-ten singles and multiplatinum albums. His band, Huey Lewis & the News, opened the Grammies in 1985. Their songs, mostly written by Lewis in collaboration with one or two band members, were all good-time rock ‘n roll party tunes, rife with stick-in-your-head musical hooks and punchy lyrics. But the end of the decade was the end of Lewis’s glory days. Ten years passed without any original material. The only news from Lewis was the addition of a horn section for an album of rhythm and blues cover tunes in 1994. Still pleasing the crowds but no longer selling out coliseums, the band started supplementing their tour schedule with private corporate parties.
But wait — now they’re back! The new CD, “Plan B,” gives us 11 fresh, original songs. Lewis wrote them to suit the new configuration of the band, so the sound is more R&B than pop, but it’s unmistakably Huey: rockin’, shake-your-booty fun.
Lewis grew up in Marin county and has always kept at least one foot here. The son of a Mill Valley radiologist, he spent his teens at a New Jersey prep school, wandered around Europe for a year, then attended Cornell engineering school half-heartedly until dropping out to pursue the rock ‘n roll dream. He came back to Marin and joined Clover, a popular local bar band, as the harmonica player. They played the kind of clubs where a waitress could pour a pitcher of beer over the head of a rowdy customer and not get fired.
Clover cut a couple of albums, then spent two years in England. “It was like rock ‘n roll boot camp,” recalls Sean Hopper, the keyboard player who’s been with Lewis for the last 31 years. “We learned a lot, but the punk movement was starting at the same time, so the crowds were perfecting their skills at like spitting on people.” Clover’s pop/country sound did not go over, says Hopper. “It was like playing in front of a rabid dog.”
The band broke up shortly after returning to the U.S., with lead guitarist John McFee later joining the Doobie Brothers. Lewis put together a new band – later to be named the News — with Hopper, Johnny Colla, Chris Hayes, Bill Gibson and Mario Cipollina. That was 1978, and they’re all still with him, except for Cipollina, who was replaced in 1995. The band had a regular Monday night gig at Uncle Charlie’s in Corte Madera for about a year, when they landed a record contract and a new manager. After ten years of scrambling, Lewis finally caught the rocket that shot him straight to the top. Along the way, he married his manager’s secretary and had a daughter and a son, now 17 and 16.
I met with Lewis at his manager’s office in Mill Valley, where the walls are lined with gold records, a framed photo of the band and other memorabilia. Wearing black-rimmed glasses and a thick sweater, Lewis, now 51, looks more like a college professor than a rock star. He’s pumped about his new record and, it seems, about life in general. Bristling with energy, he rattles on from one story to another with little prompting, leaning forward in his chair, sometimes jumping up and striding across the room.
The first cut on your new album sounds like it could be your band’s motto: “We’re not here for a long time, we’re here for a good time.”
Yeah, kind of. We’ve always played “up” stuff. And the thing with this album that’s so nice is we wrote it for the band. We literally recorded this one ourselves in Johnny’s studio. Johnny engineered everything. With all our other records, we always knew they were going to get played on the radio. And that affects the recording process. You have to worry about flaws. But we did this record without a record label. So we did it on our own dime. And not only did we not know if it was going to be played on the radio, we didn’t know if it would be released. A lot of our earlier songs were cut with drum machines, but now we’re playing all together, live, because we’re much better. If you’re good enough, the breathing with the music actually makes it better. And we’re finally good enough. It’s taken 20 or 30 years, but we’re finally good enough.
Oh, the band sounds great.
Creatively, we’re at our peak. But this record is certainly not going to outsell any of our other records. We get played on AC radio stations, adult contemporary. And typically, you don’t sell as many records as you do on a kids’ station – contemporary hit radio, CHR. Selling CDs is really about kids when you look at the average age of the record buyer. Which is kind of frustrating, because we’re at our creative peak. But so was Sinatra in 1965. My favorite Sinatra record was “Live at the Sands,” with Count Basie and Quincy Jones. And Sinatra was 50 years old. But in 1965 he was very out of favor. The Beatles had just taken the world by storm in 1962.
I wouldn’t have figured you for a Sinatra fan.
Oh, I like all kinds of stuff. Ray Charles is my main man. But my dad played jazz. He was an amateur drummer. My mom is an artist. Both of them really are bohemians, in the true sense of the word.
Whose idea was it to send you to prep school?
It was my father’s decision. My parents split up when I was 11 or 12 and I went away to prep school at 13. My mother tried to fight it in court. It was kind of an ugly scene. The judge finally asked me if I really wanted to go and I said, yeah. My dad had given me the catalog that had a picture of this gorgeous quad with ivy-covered buildings and big trees and a guy crossing the quad with a gal – Buffy and Biff – and she was tremendous-looking. And I said, yeah, that looks great! So I show up at prep school and there’s no Buffy. Just a whole lotta Biffs and no Buffy, for four years.
I read in your bio that your father advised you to take a year off before starting college. That’s surprising advice from a father.
Yeah, it was. But it worked out for me. I was accepted to engineering school at Cornell and instead I took a year off. My mother gave me a harmonica and a Bob Dylan record and said, “check it out.”
Your mom turned you on to Dylan?!
Yeah. And I traveled for a year and played harmonica everywhere. I had long hair and in Franco’s Spain of 1968, you could hitchhike for 12 hours and not get a ride. The only people who would pick me up were German tourists. So I’d play harmonica by the side of the road until my lips bled. The first concert I ever played, I was coming back from Morocco and I lost my passport. I finally get to the embassy at 5:00 on Friday, and it’s closed until Monday. I’ve got 15 bucks to my name, and I know it costs $15 for a duplicate passport. So I’ve got to make some money. I wander down to Seville and bump into some art students and I play some harmonica for them and they come up with this idea to do a concert. So they make up these beautiful posters and put them all over town and they held auditions for a guitar player for me. And on Monday, we gave this concert. There might have been 2000 people there and they loved us. We weren’t very good, but I guess we were authentic or something. That was the first show I ever played.
And it gave you a taste for it.
The whole European experience gave me a taste for what I finally wanted to do. And I suppose that’s what my dad had in mind – go out and see what comes up. If I hadn’t taken the year off, I might have gone all the way through Cornell engineering school. After that year, I did go to Cornell engineering school for maybe five minutes over a two-year period – until the work really caught up with me, because I was playing in bands all the time. And then I dropped out. But I might have gone all the way through and ended up who-knows-what and always longed to be a harmonica player.
Tell me about the time when Clover went on the road with Thin Lizzy. Sean Hopper called it “rock ‘n roll boot camp.”
That’s right. Philip Lynott, the leader of that band – he’s a black Irishman, played bass and sang and wrote all the songs and a fabulous human being – and he took us under his wing. He’d take me in his limo down to King’s Row and we’d shop for high-heeled boots and clothes. And of course I didn’t care anything about clothes, so it was a lesson: hey, you gotta wear something hip here. I learned everything I know about the presentation of rock and roll – everything but the musical aspects – while I was in London.
It sounds like he was trying to groom you to go punk or heavy metal.
It’s all the same. When you’re on stage, move!, he’d tell you. [jumps out of his chair, puts on thick Irish accent]: Me mother says she saw you and you weren’t moving! Mooooove, Huey! That was his thing – you’ve got to move, you’ve got to throw shapes. We didn’t have a clue. We were playing at the Lion’s Share [a club in San Anselmo], standing in one place. So it was a great education. The Sex Pistols come along and say, “rock and roll is dead, we’re the new rock and roll.” And you realized that it was just a new fashion.
It was a very different sound, too.
Musically, it never got me, ever. The thing I loved about the punks is that they were playing their own music, their own way and they were singing their own songs. See, I never sang. I have a baritone voice and I was led to believe you had to be a high tenor. There was Styx and Journey – they were big in the States. And I didn’t have a voice like that. So coming out of the punk thing changed me. They weren’t trying to sound like Journey. The Clash were spitting at people. I thought that was great. They thumbed their noses at the record companies. I thought, what a relief! Then I saw Graham Parker & The Rumour and Nick Lowe’s band, Rockpile. And these bands were sort of punky, but they were playing Chuck Berry music and stuff that I really dug, and maybe I could do that as well. So I thought, if Clover ever breaks up, I’m going back to the nearest club, pick my favorite musicians from my home town and I’m going to sing every song and we’re going to play music that we all love and just make a scene right in our little neighborhood. And the hell with Warner Brothers in Los Angeles. Clover had been there five times with demos. I was just sick of trying to “make it.” So I vowed that, if Clover ever broke up, we’d just do it for the hell of it, like the punks had. And that’s what we did.
And that’s when the band really took off.
We were doing “Monday Night Live” at Uncle Charlie’s. Monday nights have always been good nights. Clover played Monday nights at Lion’s Share.
I know, I was the waitress.
Of course you were — now I recognize you! I’ve known you for 100 years! So Monday nights are good nights. I call the two guys I liked from Soundhole [another Marin band] and said, let’s do it. The first show was at Knight’s Bridge and it sold out and Jeannie from Uncle Charlie’s came and couldn’t get in, so she asked us to play Uncle Charlie’s and I said okay, it holds a little more. And the second one, Patty Gleason came, from Different Fur Music and she couldn’t get in. And she offered me some free studio time. Actually, she thought we were still Clover and she said, “does Clover want some free studio time?”
How did Clover break up?
John McFee and Kevin Wells wrote a couple of songs together. Kevin was the new drummer we got over in England. So they decided they wanted to start their own group. And I said, “what?! Alex [Call] writes all the songs! You guys write one tune and now you want to break the band up?!” I was crestfallen. So anyway I tell Patty, Clover no longer exists, but we’d love some free studio time. And she gave us three days and we cut “Exodisco.”
I never heard that.
Well, this was 1977. So it went, [sings the melody and bass part from the theme from the movie “Exodus” to a disco beat, snapping fingers]. We thought it was hilarious! They thought we were nuts. But shortly thereafter, Nick Lowe asked me to come to England because he wanted to record a song I’d written, “Bad is Bad,” and he wanted me to play harmonica on a couple of his songs. So he flies me to England, we cut the tracks and the record company came down to hear them and the record company was happy and we were all sitting around and I said, “do you want to hear something funny?” and I played “Exodisco” for them. Well, the record company went nuts! They said, that’s great! Let us release it! And bingo! I made a singles deal with Phonogram Records. But they said they wanted more vocals on it. So I come back home and tell the guys and I call Patty Gleason and she gives us five more days in the studio. Well, we got another version of “Exodisco” in four hours and spent the other four days demo-ing up three other songs – thinking, we sold this one, maybe we can sell some original stuff. I sent them off their single and Patty sent the demo to Bob Brown [who became Lewis’s manager]. And this is the note she included in it [walking over to the wall, where the framed note hangs]. Bob liked it a lot, calls me up, I met with him here in this office 23 years ago and my wife, Sidney was the secretary at the time. Now she’s the mother of my 16- and 17-year-old kids.
I remember running into you on the street in Mill Valley when you had just gotten back from England and you told me you were selling vitamins, or something like that.
I had a health food business with a partner, called Natural Foods Express. That was my day job. Nancy’s Yogurt was our main product, but we also sold vitamins and ginseng. We had a route and a warehouse and trucks and we were delivering the stuff by day and then I played with Clover at night.
How long did you keep the day job?
We got somebody to fill in for me while I was in England, and then when I got back I was helping out at the business again, and that lasted another couple of years, I think. When I got the record deal with “Exodisco” and got started with Bob, I told the guys I couldn’t work anymore. That’s when I became a full-time musician.
In the early days, did you ever dream that you’d have a platinum-seller?
No. Nor was it ever my object, I don’t think. The object was to make a living playing in a band. It was so much fun playing in a band. When you get to be where you’re really in the pocket, it begins to play and sing itself. It really is like a wave that you ride. It sounds like a phony metaphor, but it really picks you up and carries you along with it. It’s such a great, exhilarating feeling. And to make a living doing that, that’s really the objective. But what happened was, once we got a record contract, now business stopped. We made a first record and it didn’t sell. And now we’ve got to make a second record and it had better sell because we had a contract for two albums and then they had options. So we needed a hit on our second record.
This was as Huey Lewis and the News.
Yeah. And the guy who produced our two records as Clover, who we’d stayed friends with, gave me a song called “We Both Believe in Love.” That was our first legitimate top-40 hit. And we sold enough records that they allowed us to make another record, which was “Sports.” By now, we’d made a couple of records and produced them ourselves. We were with Chrysalis Records, who were 6,000 miles away and couldn’t really look over our shoulders and Bob had convinced them we were capable of producing these records ourselves. And we learned how to work in the studio much better, we got better by leaps and bounds, until the “Sports” album, which sold lots of records and now we were fine.
You were definitely on a roll then.
For the follow-up, we had to go with the material we had. You can’t make yourself write great songs. You can make yourself write songs, but great songs just kind of come to you. You can sit there all day and wait for them, but you never know when they’re going to come to you. And after “Sports” was so big, everybody said, you’re a fool if you don’t release a record as soon after that as you can. Because in those days, if you had a few hits in a row, your next one would automatically sell so many copies and get played on so many radio stations. Today, that’s much less so. They get so much of you now, with TV, they burn out on one record. You used to be able to get a four-year run. And you had to keep up with it. It was tough, the record company clamoring for the stuff. And, suddenly, everything you do, they love! And that can’t be right, either! They didn’t like you for so long, and now everything is fantastic. They’re all cheerleaders for awhile. But at the end of that, you’re overexposed and it makes it tougher. What I consider one of our best records was “Small World.” There was a gorgeous solo by [jazz saxophonist] Stan Getz. It was the best thing we’d ever done and it was the first single that broke a string of I don’t know how many that wasn’t top 20. So now, you’re with a major label, and they keep wanting something that you can’t give them. After a couple more records we got off Warner Brothers and had no label. And this is the first record that’s just for us.
Putting Stan Getz on your record must have been for you. That was a left turn away from what you’d been doing.
True. They’ve all been for us. But I haven’t been blind to the fact that they’re going to get commercial play. So it’s something you have to deal with. If you’re a record producer, you’ve got to know where the market is, and you’ve got to produce for that market. Our market at that point was huge. And you have to worry about that. We’ve never made a record we don’t like. We really haven’t. But, with this record, I didn’t have to consider at all any sort of commercial potential. Because it’s not going to get played on the radio, except for AC. Our music is so anachronistic at this point.
Did becoming a father affect your decisions?
Well, you don’t want to be away from home. We play maybe 60-80 shows a year, but we used to play 200 or more. But it actually helps the music. Because if you don’t play too much, it’s like falling in love all over again. Once I was asking Stan Getz about his practice regimen and he said, “man, I quit practicing. I never practice, I just play. Because when I pick up the horn, it’s like falling in love all over again.” And it’s true.
So you still have fun on stage?
Love it. Don’t like traveling much. Love to stay at home, being with the family. Family life has never been more demanding or more rewarding. So I don’t like to be gone, but you have to, to play. So it’s finding that balance.
Your kids were babies when you were at the peak of your career, so you must have been gone a lot then.
I was gone a lot then. And I worried about it. It was mainly hard on my wife, because she had to take care of everything. My three-year-old daughter and my one-year-old son didn’t miss me much. The fathering didn’t come into play until the late ‘80s, early ‘90s, when we started to slow down. That was absolutely a factor in our slowing down. We all have families. Johnny has two kids, Sean has two kids, Billy’s got two kids, Chris has three kids.
I once read an interview with you, when you were just hitting the top, and you were asked if success had changed you. And you said, no, but it’s improved the looks of the women I go out with.
No, that was a Pete Townshend line. My line was, it’s improved the hotels I stay in. But you know, when we hit that nerve, I knew it, because I had been around for awhile. I was thirty years old, living in Larkspur Canyon with 300 bucks to my name. I remember because I had bought my white BMW, which I just sold, my white ’71 2002. And I think I paid $3,000 for it. And God, that was a lot of money. I took out a loan and paid so much a month for two years. I was worried I wasn’t going to make the payments. But “Do You Believe in Love” came out that year. And bingo! You could feel it. The “Sports” album was just on fire, and I knew it because I had watched the Doobies. We opened for the Doobie Brothers on our first national tour in 1980 and we barely got through the set every night. We only got booed, really, in a couple places – which they told us was way better than the Fabulous Thunderbirds, who got booed off and had to cut short their set. So if we got through all ten songs, we were doing great. And we did, almost every night. And then we would watch the Doobies slay the people. This was when Michael McDonald had just joined the group.
Oh, yeah, they were very hot then.
They were playing some of the songs from “Takin’ It To the Streets” – [sings]: You don’t know me, but I’m your brother… And then they’d play “Jesus Is Just Alright.” They’d play R&B and country and rock [makes the sound of a wailing guitar]. It was like a cross-section of American music, like an American music festival! But the next morning – more times than not — the newspaper would declare that we had been fabulous and the Doobie Brothers were “tired and old.”
Really!
Yeah. And so we lived by that review. We had a record deal that was doing nothing. So I’d talk to the guys and say, “Is that what you heard last night? Was Michael McDonald ‘old and tired?’ I don’t think so!” And I said, we’ll remember this – because, God willing, this’ll happen to us. So, when we really hit and it all started to happen, we had watched it from so many sides. I’d watched Linott at the end of his career get vicious reviews, they’d just tear him apart. It’s like ‘N Sync right now – they’re just getting chewed up, those guys. And people who review their record poorly, they put it on the cover! If you’re going to review somebody poorly, why put their record on the cover of your magazine? So I knew about all that when our rocketship ride started to take off. And I told the guys, “enjoy this, guys, this is the honeymoon.” There was a minute there when everybody liked us. But we took all that with a grain of salt and loved it and treasured it.
How long do you plan to continue making records and touring?
I don’t know about making records, to be honest. Because it’s hard. The hardest part is writing. It’s harder after you’ve written 100 songs. You want to be original, and you want to say something. I want the music to be uplifting, entertaining, but I don’t want it to be dumb, I don’t want it to talk down to people. I want it to be smart, and I like it to be a little funny. I think the real big things – love, life, death – they’re all those things. So all it has to be is true, but it’s hard to write a lot of those.
Are your kids musical?
Yeah, both of them. My son’s a good guitar player and he’s got a great ear. He plays in a jazz band at school and he plays blues. He’s a Stevie Ray Vaughn freak. And my daughter loves everything. Took piano lessons and was very good but quit anyway, much to my chagrin. She sings, she’s got a great ear, very musical, but doesn’t practice or play anything anymore.
If your son wants a music career, would you encourage or discourage him?
Whatever they want to do. My message to my kids is, find out what you really love to do – which is not so easy sometimes. But if you love to do it, you’ll do it a lot and if you do it a lot, you’ll be very good at it, and if you’re good at it, it will look after you. I love my job. I’m a lucky guy. And I have to work, because I have kids and I have expenses, but I love my job.