Saturday, December 13, 2008

128. Huey Lewis and the News - Sports

What can I say? It's Huey Lewis. How can you not love this guy, with his charming smile and skinny tie and earnest pop songs?

I was working in the record store when this came out and I was at the time heavy into buying import singles of post punk bands and working on maintaining my edgy, yet sophisticated personality that was trying to say "Hey, I'm totally 80s without being, you know, totally 80s." Because there were two kinds of 80s. There was the New Order 80s and there was the Huey Lewis 80s.

Worlds collide, Jerry!

I had a dilemma. I liked this album. A lot. So my punk self met my pop self and we had a meeting and decided that we didn't really care what anyone thought of us. If loving Sports was wrong, we didn't want to be right. So we bought the album AND we bought the cassette and we played it in the car and we played it at home and we discovered that there were a lot of other "totally 80s but not totally 80s" people out there who had also embraced their inner pop selves and fell in love with Sports and Huey Lewis.

Favorite song: If This is It
Huey Lewis and American Psycho

8 comments:

califmom said...

I wasn't a huge Huey lover back in the day, but I didn't like Mr. Rogers back in the day. I came to appreciate both with age. Nostalgia is like that, I think.

Rod Knowlton said...

I loved this album as well, and still have the vinyl.

One thing that always bothered me was that the instrumental break in Heart and Soul (with the clapping, about two minutes in) always, ALWAYS sounded like I'd heard it before. Does anyone know what it might have been reminding me of, or was it just a memory encoding malfunction (veya du?).

Lisa Paul said...

For years, Huey Lewis and the News were Northern California's favorite bar band. The secret to his success is that he never lost that sensibility. And now that his star has fallen -- he's happily back playing the bars in Northern California.

NOthing wrong with being a good bar band.

michele said...

Funny, Todd was just telling me that Huey's from Northern California. Seems Todd was friends with a guy whose sister was dating Huey Lewis and one Christmas they all got signed copies of his album from her.

HRH Courtney, Queen of Everything said...

Michele, I've seen Huey Lewis in concert. TWICE. I understand.

Unknown said...

I'll tell you why I like Huey -- he's a lot like Ringo. Huey & The News were the world's luckiest bar band, and they knew it. Never let success go to their heads, they just played some good bar music, loud, had a lot of fun and shared it with their audience.

And, yeah, also I was like 13 or 14 when it came out, and highly impressionable. But I'm less so these days -- and still like me some Huey Lewis now and then.

Anonymous said...

If this isn't my favorite album of all time, it's 1A. I grew up on this album (vinyl that my Mom pitched a few years ago... damn her.) and played it relentlessly. I unabashedly love this album.

I must disagree with best tune. Finally Found a Home or Walking On a Thin Line would be my two choices with WOaTL the best one. Almost blew out a set of speakers with the opening of it due to the bass line on vinyl...

Solonor Rasreth said...

My brain said "no" but my heart said "yes" on this. As much as I'd rather have just played Blue Oyster Cult and Pink Floyd, it seemed like we needed to play about half the Huey Lewis catalog in bars in order to keep working for a living (heh), but they really were fun.