20 Questions: Huey Lewis

Former yogurt salesman Huey Lewis and the band he fronts, the News, are doing their best to make sure that the heart of rock 'n' roll is still beating. "Sports," the News' third album, sold 6,000,000 copies, and "The Power of Love," their song from the Steven Spielberg presentation "Back to the Future," hit number one soon after it was released. David and Victoria Sheff met with Lewis in his smallish London hotel room. They told us, "He's the only rock star who plays golf and occasionally punctuates a sentence with 'For fuck's sake.'"

1.

[Q] Playboy: Since Sports was released two and a half years ago, it's been on the charts for well over 100 weeks. We keep hearing from people in the record business that it couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.

[A] Lewis: That really is the secret. It had nothing to do with the record or the fact that we're a good band or the videos. It's just that I'm a nice guy.

2.

[Q] Playboy: Don't nice guys finish last?

[A] Lewis: I'm not that nice a guy. It really has been amazing. Heart and Soul, The Heart of Rock and Roll, I Want a New Drug and If This Is It all went to number six and stopped. Six happens to be my lucky number. The album was number one for six, seven days, until Bruce [Springsteen] knocked us off, and, boy, were we glad when he did--all that pressure. Much rather be number two or three, back where we belong. The record has refused to die, which is fine, though it's made it hard to make another record. Most groups put out a record a year. It's been three and a half years since we made Sports. It's a bit frustrating, but that's not the kind of thing you bitch about.

3.

[Q] Playboy: Sports is a good album, but more than 100 weeks on the charts? To what do you attribute its massive success?

[A] Lewis: I think it's my golden voice. And the fact that I'm a nice guy. Next question?

Seriously, we are very fortunate, OK? There's a certain belief that if you are a serious musician, you have a chip on your shoulder. You don't have to. We don't take ourselves very seriously, but we do take the music seriously, and the two things are not mutually exclusive. And we also hit a nerve somehow. It wasn't a calculated thing, but because we were a real band from a real neighborhood--no gimmicks, just us--people could relate to us. We insisted on producing the records ourselves and having control: We conceived the videos ourselves, for the most part; we did the album cover ourselves, because we wanted literally as well as figuratively to stay out of Hollywood. I'm generalizing now--rather largely, but what the hell? Hollywood is out of touch with Cleveland, Tulsa, Memphis and everywhere else but Hollywood. People there don't have a clue. If somebody had told them, "We've got this little black man with his hair in a pompadour; he's going to wear purple lingerie and he's going to be huge," they would have said, "What, are you crazy?" If they'd said, "We've got these six guys, see; they really don't look like much--just boy-next-door types--and they are going to be the next big thing," nobody would have bought that, either. We look like the boys next door. I'm talking about imagewise. We're not.

4.

[Q] Playboy: Want to tell us about I Want a New Drug?

[A] Lewis: A lot of people could relate to that song--for some strange reason. [Laughs] There is a tradition of songs with similar themes--You're Getting to Be a Habit with Me or I've Got You Under My Skin or "I get no kick from cocaine ... I get a kick out of you." But it was new to this audience. I Want a New Drug is not about drugs. It's a Sixties song. And that's what we're proudest of, being children of the Sixties. It was a lot of fun to write. You could write a hundred million verses for it, but three is all that the law would allow.

5.

[Q] Playboy: What was your reaction the first time you heard Ray Parker, Jr.'s, remarkably similar song from Ghostbusters?

[A] Lewis: I was fairly well shocked. The suit is over, thankfully, and one of the conditions of the settlement is that I can't talk about it. And, no, I didn't see the movie. I had to boycott it on principle. I understand it was great, though.

6.

[Q] Playboy: You're an A-level star now. What have been the pluses of this success?

[A] Lewis: It certainly has improved the hotel rooms. [Laughs, looking around his messy, standard single room] The best part is that I've gotten to meet Ray Charles and Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and Tina Turner and that sort of stuff. To have Quincy Jones say "I love your stuff" is too much. Meeting sports stars, too, which is really something for me. Dwight Clark and I have played golf twice. It's like a mutual-admiration society. We spend time gushing over each other. He wants to talk about the videos, and I want to talk about the Super Bowl. Also, Dylan sent me a tune. You know what I'm saying? "Here's a song I thought you might like. Take care. Good luck. Bob." I'm speechless. And it's a good song.

7.

[Q] Playboy: Who is the coolest person you have ever met--someone who had you shaking in your boots before meeting?

[A] Lewis: I met a lot of them at the We Are the World session. Dylan is really cool, and Lionel Richie was fantastic at the USA for Africa session. Quincy Jones above all. And Ray Charles, whom I never actually met. I mean, there he was, but I was so embarrassed, so in awe of him that I couldn't go up and say, "Hi, Ray. Nice to meet you." I just couldn't bring myself to do it. The best thing about it was that nobody was allowed in the room except the artists themselves. So we had breaks every two hours or so, and there I was talking to Dylan and Willie Nelson, both of whom I've idolized for years. We had that Sixties feel. There was Waylon Jennings talking to Smokey Robinson. There were Kenny Rogers and me and James Ingram having a rap. The best line came from a pop star who shall remain nameless: "If they dropped a bomb on this session, John Denver would be back on top."

8.

[Q] Playboy: Has success changed what you have in your pockets? Come clean.

[A] Lewis: What? I mean, I've been asked some weird things. [Reaching into his pockets] Oh, yes. [Removing his wallet, opening it, grabbing some snapshots, handing them to us] Want to see my daughter? She's almost three. Here she is with her old man. The worst part of being on the road now is the family. I really miss my daughter. I can talk to my wife on the phone, but my daughter doesn't do that yet. It certainly has increased the telephone bill. It's rough. Here are some more pictures. Her birthday is March ninth. Cracks me up, I really miss her, and the pictures make it worse. You pick up the pictures and you linger. I do this nightly. [His mind wanders.] (continued on page 272)Huey Lewis(continued from page 173)

9.

[Q] Playboy: Hello? We all loved your Grammys take-off--the Spammies. Are you going to hold them again?

[A] Lewis: I'm not sure. Organizationally, it's tough. I don't think we can get all of us into Uncle Charlie's night club anymore, let alone let any people in. [Handing over another photo of his daughter] Here she is with her mom. Don Nagle is really the brains behind them, if you can call it that. It was really just an excuse for some poor jokes. There were awards for all kinds of things: Uncle Charlie's got the award for Best Night Club in a Shopping Center Overlooking a Major Federal Penitentiary. Winners got cans of Spam. We never won, but a local band called The Edge won the award for the Best Band Named After a Shaving Cream.

10.

[Q] Playboy: How do you and the News keep from going crazy on the road, with more than 300 dates in the past three years?

[A] Lewis: We've taken up golf, which has really been a savior. There's nothing to do on the road in mid-America, unless you're into golf. And there are some of the best golf courses in the world in Ohio, North Carolina, Virginia and places like that. So we go out in the day and whack away. We're pretty serious about it--seriously bad. My handicap mirrors my ability in general. I shoot mid-90s, low 90s. I can't consistently get in the 80s, which is my goal. It's a way to kill time and not to watch television. In bad weather, it's trouble. You read. A good book is essential. I've been reading Ken Follett for a while now. I've also been reading scripts, believe it or not, which has nothing to do with reading good books. It's a good laugh.

11.

[Q] Playboy: So are you going to--

[A] Lewis: Be a movie star? Yeah, that's it; I'm going to be a movie star. No, I'm not going to be a movie star. I'm going to be a singer, still. I've been offered some stuff, which is flattering. I don't know how to act. I was a tree in seventh grade, and that's the extent of it. I could probably screw up a perfectly good music career with a bad movie. I'm reading the scripts because I may try acting one day, and I want to figure out what a good and a bad script is. Some scripts I think are awful; then I go to see the movie six months later, and the one I thought was awful is a better movie than the script I thought was pretty good. Actors must be kicking themselves. After studying for years, they can't get a part because the producers want to give it to me. It's silly, but that's showbiz.

12.

[Q] Playboy: Why was the album called Sports?

[A] Lewis: Because we couldn't spell weather. I can't believe I said that. I don't know; it just seemed like a good idea at the time. For 17 reasons, none of which is really valid enough on its own, it makes sense. We are a team. Music is a team sport. We hang out in a lot of coliseums and take a lot of showers.

13.

[Q] Playboy: You had an interesting childhood. Your mother was, ah, eccentric, wasn't she?

[A] Lewis: Excuse me? Keep my mother out of this! Actually, that's why we made it--because my parents were eccentric, and I'm a nice guy, but primarily because my parents were eccentric. I forgot that. Right. My father was a jazz drummer and a doctor, and now he's retired for the most part and still a huge jazz fan. My mother is an artist. She is the farthest out of the family. She hung out in the very early days of the beatniks. My parents split up and she hung out with the Beats, who then became the hippies. She was the first of the adults to go to Fillmore Auditorium and listen to the Grateful Dead and that sort of stuff. So I grew up on that. I was encouraged as a kid to do anything--really anything. Experience was the best teacher, and here I am.

14.

[Q] Playboy: When did you begin playing the harmonica? Are you good?

[A] Lewis: Yeah. I'm an incredible harmonica player, a great singer and an extremely nice guy. I picked up the harmonica on the way to Europe when I was 16. It fit the image. I hitchhiked through Europe, had long hair and couldn't get a ride, so I played a lot of harmonica. It was the knapsack that made it. That and being 16--and Bob Dylan, although my style was more like Sonny Terry's and Brownie McGhee's than Dylan's. That's when I got the bug to be a musician. I was always a listener. I was always the guy through grade school who, when there was a dance, would be standing next to the bandstand or near the speakers. I was always a fan. My first band was called Slippery Elm, and later I joined Clover, which was a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. We went to London, thought we were going to make it. The Sex Pistols were breaking. The Clash had just had their first gig. We were this nice, friendly country-rock band. Wrong.

15.

[Q] Playboy: And then the News--how did that happen?

[A] Lewis: Later, when I was in England, I saw a resurgence of American roots music-- which I had been into for a long time. I saw bands like Rockpile, Elvis Costello and Graham Parker playing Chuck Berry. So, much later, I was asked to run a local jam session at Uncle Charlie's in Marin County every Monday night. I said sure. I called up all these guys and things really took off. We had comedians, and sometimes big names would come in, like The Doobie Brothers. Van Morrison came by one day. The thing started to sell out and there was a big line around the block and some local studio offered us some studio time, and I said sure. We went in and, for a laugh, cut a disco version of Exodus that we called Exodisco, which we thought was very clever. At that time, Nick Lowe flew me over to play on his record with Dave Edmunds. While I was over there, I played this tune to Phonogram records, and they loved it and signed me to a singles deal. They gave me 6000 bucks. I took the money back. With $3000, I paid the studio off, and I took the other $3000 and gave it to the studio so we could cut a demo tape of three other songs that we had hastily written. Those songs got us our manager, Bob Brown. Three weeks later, Chrysalis came to see us, and three months later, we were signed. The rest is Mill Valley history. Since I had called everybody up for the gigs, I got to be the singer.

16.

[Q] Playboy: Now that you've made it, do people ever say, "What an asshole"?

[A] Lewis: I'm sure they do, but never to my face. I find it tough to decide who is an asshole and who isn't anymore. It used to be easy. I suffer fools a little too gladly-- that's what my wife tells me, anyway.

17.

[Q] Playboy: What do you miss about old-style rock 'n' roll?

[A] Lewis: San Francisco used to be so creative. The Grateful Dead, the Jefferson Airplane gave us the "I don't know where we're going; we're just going to let it rip" jam sessions, God bless them. Also the R&B, consciousness-raising lyrics, psychedelic lyrics with R&B music--Sons of Chaplain, Sly Stone, which became Prince, Rick James, George Benson, Chicago--all that was born in the Sixties in San Francisco. Those were amazingly creative times. That was exciting. Rock 'n' roll was the cutting edge at that time. I miss that, I suppose.

18.

[Q] Playboy: What's the cutting edge now?

[A] Lewis: Television, and, unfortunately, it isn't doing a lot of cutting. It's being very poorly handled at the moment. The idea of 24-hour-a-day music television is fantastic. The idea of a 24-hour-a-day sports thing is fantastic. So it does have the potential for becoming the cutting edge. The new art is going to materialize on television somehow. We're certainly ready for something. The point is that I don't think you can get people's attention anymore through a song. It's not powerful enough anymore. The music business has become bigger than the artists themselves. They tried not to play Elvis Presley records, but they couldn't hold him down. They couldn't hold The Beatles down. But The Beatles and Brian Epstein changed things: They sort of created the modern American monster-music business. When the Sex Pistols came along, the business said, "Wait a minute. These guys aren't going to play ball with us and we're not going to play ball with them." And the Sex Pistols lost. I think that was a signal there. People's jobs are on the line. That's a sad thing. It's a reflection of the country as a whole: It's very hip to be capitalistic, materialistic now.

19.

[Q] Playboy: Where does that leave you?

[A] Lewis: It challenges you to get your message across, but discreetly, between the lines. You have to water down your message to get played, but at the same time, it must be there. Nobody says you have to be political to be valid, but I think you do have to be honest, and you do have to say more than "Hey, here's another hit." I don't feel a lot of pressure to make a song that's another hit record, but I do feel pressure to make a song that's a hit record that means something.

20.

[Q] Playboy: You're not great at golf. What else are you not great at?

[A] Lewis: Reading Russian. Badminton. I'm pretty good at going goo-goo and ga-ga with my daughter. That's about it. Boring, I know, but I'm a terrifically nice guy.

"We are a team. Music is a team sport. We hang out in a lot of coliseums and take a lot of showers."