![]() “Almost the day we landed in England, Johnny Rotten spit in the face of the first NME reporter, and the game was on.” The music wasn’t for him, but the punk spirit was. ![]() This Huey Lewis shit is here today, gone tomorrow.”) He went back to London for a longer stay in the mid-seventies with his country-rock band Clover, just as punk was about to rip a hole through popular music. “That’s something they can’t take away from you. (His father approved: “You need to woodshed on that harmonica, man,” Huey remembers him advising, well into the late eighties. Then he was off to Cornell University in upstate New York, before dropping out sophomore year in favor of more travel and more busking. “I played harmonica until my lips bled,” he says. He left the West Coast after high school to busk around Europe for a year. That thing was the local soul station, KDIA, its playlists thick with the music of Stax Records. Huey’s mother was one of the first Deadheads she dabbled in hallucinogens and dated Charles Mingus when Huey was a teenager, after she divorced his father, a radiologist and jazz drummer. (If you are of a certain age, this is a thing you know, because Casey Kasem would say it over and over during the year and a half Sports pitched singles up the Top Forty.) Its proximity to San Francisco brought in its share of hippies, a counterculture for Huey and his friends to rebel against. He grew up mostly in Marin County, California. Huey’s always been a man slightly out of his moment. I nod excitedly, a guy in his forties who devoured the album when he was twelve. “A lot of the songs we wrote in our twenties and early thirties are actually more appropriate for a guy in his fifties,” Huey says. They don’t even sound like the sixties R&B that inspired them. Although he gets lumped in with the superstars of the eighties, the songs of Sports-“The Heart of Rock & Roll,” “Heart and Soul,” “I Want a New Drug,” “If This Is It”-don’t sound dated. It was the height of the monoculture, and Huey sat on top of it, with weapons-grade likability and a sound that didn’t quite conform to the trends. " HUEY, A PLAYLIST BY DAVE HOLMES, CURATED BY HUEY LEWIS He’s still craggily handsome as he approaches his seventieth birthday, a hero in a Clint Eastwood western. Huey represented a sensibly sexy mainstream masculinity: dimpled chin, haircut that rejected any recognizable trend, body just Soloflexed enough to pull off a red suit. You could, like me, not play sports and play the hell out of Sports. To know Huey Lewis and the News was to love them, whatever else you naturally enjoyed. He had every subset of the 1980s American teenager on his side, like he was Ferris Bueller’s cool uncle. It’s difficult to imagine from today’s perspective, but after the release of Sports in 1983, Huey was ubiquitous and well-liked. It’s particularly cruel that music sounds like distortion to him, because the albums he made with the News were meticulous pop-rock, with the smoothest harmonies this side of the Beach Boys. This is entertainment for Huey now that he can’t hear television or music. “I just think Huey brings to mind a better time.” -Jimmy KimmelĪs we bob around the duck blinds, over the irrigation ditches, he points out a bald eagle in a tree, a herd of whitetail deer bounding past. ![]() “We’re getting a little weather now,” he tells me. It’s possible that with a lot of living still ahead, his last gig is behind him. The title Weather was originally a nod to age and to the band’s breakthrough, Sports, but there’s a newer meaning than what we’re used to getting from Huey. “When it’s really bad, I’m completely deaf almost,” he says. Two years ago, he lost the ability to hear amplified music, to find pitch, to sing live. We’re months away from the release of Weather, the first album of original Huey Lewis and the News music since 2001, and Huey doesn’t know if he’ll be able to perform again. This is a place where Huey can do what he likes while he waits to find out whether he’ll have another chance to do what he loves. When I pull in-carefully, as instructed-there he is, a solitary figure standing in the snow, an icon in camouflage, surrounded by snowcapped mountains. It’s 5 degrees the next morning when I drive to his ranch, an hour outside Missoula, Montana, on narrow state highways as much ice as road. “There are a couple three days a year when the roads are really bad, man. “I’m going to see you tomorrow, but I need you to drive real slow,” Huey tells me, his indelible rasp turned fatherly. If you lived through the 1980s, you will understand the strange and special thrill of receiving a concerned voice mail from Huey Lewis. Huey Lewis photographed on his ranch in Missoula, Montana.
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