"They say the heart of rock and roll is still beating,
And from what I've seen, I believe 'em..."

Huey Lewis & the News – “The Heart of Rock N’ Roll”

Huey Lewis & the News came about during a time when rock and roll was popular with most generations.  It was the 80s, and it was high time that the generation gap be bridged, even if just temporarily.  With their signature pop and rock sound punctuated with whaling saxophone sounds, Huey Lewis & the News created built their careers upon a sound that the young and old alike could agree upon for most of the 80s. 

It was the late 70s when singer and harmonica blower Huey Lewis and keyboardist Sean Hopper of the Bay Area jazz-funk fusion band Clover began looking to form a new band.   With Clover, they recorded several albums, but went over the Atlantic to England to join in on their pub rock scene.  Eventually, the band, without Lewis, became the backing band for Elvis Costello’s first album, and following that they returned home to the US and eventually disbanded.  After picking up bassist Mario Cipollina, guitarist/saxophonist Johnny Colla, and drummer Bill Gibson, Lewis and Hopper started jamming at Uncle Charlie’s, a local bar, under the name Huey Lewis & The American Express.  In 1979, the group recorded a demo, “Exo-Disco,” a disco rendition of the theme from Exodus, that pretty much flopped, and picked up another guitarist, Chris Hayes.  Once they got picked up by Chrysalis Records, the credit card of the same name, American Express, lodged a complaint about their name, thus the sextet became known as Huey Lewis & the News.

Late in the following year, the band released their self-titled debut.  Like their original demo, their album of covers and a few originals went unnoticed.  On the other hand, their live shows started to bring the San Francisco rock scene alive, giving cause for a second album, Picture This.  The first single off the album, “Do You Believe in Love” proved to be their breakthrough, landing a position in the Top 10 and on radio stations across the country.  Their second single, “Workin’ for a Livin’” fared well, turning Huey Lewis & the News into working-class heroes.  MTV played a huge role, putting their videos and Lewis’ photogenic mug on heavy rotation.  With all the national face time Huey Lewis & The News got, Picture This became their first Top 20 album, eventually going gold. 

Riding high on the success of Picture This, in 1983 the band released Sports, the album that would kick their careers in between the goalposts of rock and roll success.  Infectious and catchy songs like “The Heart of Rock and Roll,” “If This is It,” “Walking on a Thin Line” and “Heart and Soul” carried mass appeal moving album sales from the initial #6 on the charts straight up to #1.  Even the sometimes mistakenly controversial “I Want a New Drug” (hey mom, they were talking about love) found tremendous success and, like many of the other singles from Sports, broke into the Top 10.  Sports turned Huey Lewis & the News from a humble, yet lucky, bar band into bonafide pop stars.

1985 got off to a fantastic start with their very first #1 single, “Power of Love,” from the soundtrack of the hit movie, Back to the Future.  Huey Lewis even got a little extra face time thanks to his appearance in the film, and the single eventually sold over a million copies, becoming a summertime love anthem that would be heard on radios from Chicago, Illinois, to the campgrounds of Yosemite. 

Following the whirlwind triumph of “The Power of Love” as well as their other contributions to the film and soundtrack, in 1986 Huey Lewis & the News released another sports-monikered album, Fore!  They continued their #1 streak with “Jacob’s Ladder” and “Stuck With You,” while finding Top 10 hits in singles such as “Hip to be Square,” “I Know What I Like” and “Doing It All (For My Baby).”  With entertaining videos, like their buried-to-the-neck while stuck on a desert island sequence for “Stuck With You” and the surgical camera look of “Hip to be Square,” it was clear that they didn’t let their keen ability to create pop anthems and huge hits get to their head.

A couple of years would pass before their next release, 1988’s Small World.  The album became a platinum seller based on the success of its title track and “Perfect World,” but it seemed to be not enough for rock critics.  Despite this, and perhaps to their credit, Huey Lewis & the News continued doing what they loved, going back to their bar scene roots to jam and work on new material.   In 1991, they released Hard at Play, which found an audience with baby boomers on the strength of singles like “Couple Days Off” and “It Hit Me Like a Hammer,” though it failed to connect with younger audiences.  A wind of change was coming in music; though you couldn’t tell by licking your finger and putting it up in the air, the grunge sounds of the Pacific Northwest were soon to take over America’s airwaves. 

In 1994, Huey Lewis & the News released a cover album, Four Chords & Seven Years Ago.  It was a moderate success, but nothing close to the band’s heyday in the 80s.  Throughout the 1990s Mr. Lewis took on a number of small roles in films, and it would be until 2001 before we got to see any new material from the band when they released Plan B.  Today, the band continues to tour, though their lineup has changed significantly.  Their most recent release was 2005’s Live at 25, a recording of a live performance in California, and commemorating their 25th year together as a band.  They have new material in the pipelines, and they have recorded a theme song for an upcoming film, The Pineapple Express.  They continue to draw crowds ready to groove to old-school (as if the 80s were old school?) rock-and-roll; perhaps the heart of rock and roll is still beating…