I had seen him in the flesh once before, back when Huey Lewis and the News was touring in support of the album Hard at Play in 1991. I was 13 years old and Lewis was my first favorite rock star. He played at the not-intimate Marcus Amphitheater in Milwaukee, which seats approximately 12 times more people than Wisconsin Dells's Crystal Grand Music Theatre, and was built in the aftermath of a dangerously overcrowded concert that Lewis performed on the grounds in the summer of 1984 — about the time his most popular record, Sports, rose to the top of the Billboard album charts. That concert drew 30,000 people to a space suited for 15,000. (The Marcus Amphitheater could accurately be described as "The House That Huey Built," though I've never heard it actually described that way.)
Wisconsin Dells doesn't have close to 30,000 people in the entire town, which is situated in the south-central part of the state, about a two-hour drive west of Milwaukee. As Wisconsin's tourism hub, its population swells in the summer months depending on the weather — an area dense with woodlands, lakes, water parks, and wax museums, Wisconsin Dells is a relatively cheap place to take the kids on vacation, though omnipresent storm clouds chased away visitors in early June like a great white shark stalking a beach community. Still, all but 100 or so tickets were sold for the night's Huey Lewis and the News concert several hours before showtime. Towns like this are Huey's bread and butter these days.
Many of those ticket buyers were coming to hear the songs from Sports played from front to back. While Sports isn't usually mentioned among the most popular musical blockbusters of the '80s, it belongs in that company. Of the album's nine tracks, five charted in the Top 20: "I Want a New Drug," "The Heart of Rock & Roll," "Heart and Soul," "If This Is It," and "Walking on a Thin Line." (One of those songs might be playing on the "cool FM" oldies radio station in your town at this very second.) Sports was one of only five no. 1 albums during all of 1984, the fewest number in history. The others were Michael Jackson's Thriller, the Footloose soundtrack, Prince's Purple Rain, and Bruce Springsteen's Born in the U.S.A. Huey Lewis held the summit for only one week, but Sports sold 6 million records in '84 alone (on the way to topping 10 million), good for second on the year-end sales list behind Thriller.
"We were opening for .38 Special when Sports was out, and the crowds were finally coming to see us." Lewis says. He sits on a small love seat opposite a wall lined with mirrors and partially concealed by a rack of stage clothes, and relaxes his right hand after hurriedly autographing 50 CD booklets from the recent Sports reissue. "We went out on an arena and coliseum tour, and we were killing them every night because our record was growing by the day. We would show up at the hall at seven and eat the crew meal, put on our clothes at 7:45, go out from eight to nine o'clock and just tear it up, and get as many encores as we want. To their credit, if .38 Special were super-mad about it, they would suck it up and play their show real hard."
Lewis recalls telling his bandmates at the time, "'This is as good as it gets, man. Just have fun with this right here.' And I've been in the business for long enough to know that that's true."
Lewis does not sound bitter when he says this. He's a little older than you remember — the lines on his forehead are deeper, his voice more sandpapery, and he untucks his almond brown button-up shirt to hide his 62-year-old paunch. (He also apparently keeps his collection of Skittles-colored, proto-Arsenio suit jackets in mothballs. They are nowhere in sight in his dressing room.) But for the most part, in appearance and demeanor, Lewis is unchanged from the handsome, confidently smirking cool-dad figure on the cover of Sports. For much of his life, Lewis has been cursed with a face that looks eternally 41, but he's now reached the point where this is a good thing. In person, he's friendly, though not particularly gregarious — he prefers not to do interviews on show days, which is difficult because nearly every day is a show day. After tonight's concert, the band will shower, the crew will load out, and Lewis's 25-person caravan (which he refers to as his "small business") will hop back on their buses and drive 403 miles to Anderson, Indiana, for tomorrow night's gig at a horse track and casino. In the next seven days, Lewis will play five shows in places like Paducah, Kentucky, and Quapaw, Oklahoma, along with bigger cities like Dallas and Cincinnati. Even with the gaudy 1980s sales statistics, Huey Lewis and the News has the work ethic of a 2010s indie band.
by Steven Hyden, Grantland | Read more:
Photo: Getty Images
