Huey Lewis & The News
It makes sense that San Francisco sextet Huey Lewis & The
News were one of the most popular American bands of the 80's.
Huey
(real name Hugh Anthony Cregg III) was good looking in a dumb
guy-next-door way, a rock & roll Dobie Gillis, and his band
could appear to play hard even if they neglected to generate any
intensity,
In the early-70's, Cregg met up with Clover, a
soft-rock/country collection of longhairs who left Fantasy Records
after recording two albums. He had known some of them since
school, and was officially drafted into the band around 1972.
The group slogged it out on the same circuit of clubs for
several years until their luck changed in 1976 when members of Dr
Feelgood - who were in Los Angeles to play at a CBS convention
- cruised into the Palomino Club one night with their manager,
Jake Riviera, and their guitar roadie, Nick
Lowe, in tow. Riviera was impressed and coaxed Clover into
coming to the UK.
Nick Lowe got Clover (minus Hugh) to back Elvis
Costello in the studio on his first LP, My Aim Is True,
and the band wound up recording two more albums in England. But
the UK was in the throes of the punk maelstrom and not interested
at all in Clover's chicken-funk offerings. The albums bombed and Clover
broke up on their return to the USA.
But Hugh bounced back, organising a weekly jam session at a
Marin County club called Uncle Charlie's, which attracted some
first-class players (John Colla had played with Sly
Stone and Van Morrison) who
gradually became Huey Lewis & The News.
Partially via their connection to Jake Riviera and Nick Lowe,
Chrysalis UK signed the band to a record deal and released their
self-titled debut album in 1981. While the album sold poorly, the
follow-ups Picture This (1982) and Sports (1983),
established Huey Lewis & The News as a chart-topping concern.
The band was responsible for several empty-headed Top Ten hits
- among them I Want A New Drug (1984), The Heart Of
Rock & Roll (1984), The Power Of Love (1985)
and Stuck With You (1986) - but those annoyances
were merely bland compared to Hip To Be Square (1986),
which was genuinely malevolent, popping up everywhere from college
marching band halftime shows to Las Vegas showrooms. It was also
big at weddings.
Musically, Hip To Be Square was marginally more
interesting than what Lewis and company usually conjured up: the
fast beat was agreeable enough and the band sounded less reined-in
than usual by the group's inevitable drum-machine taskmaster.
Lyrically, however, this was a perfect anthem of rationalisation
for uneasy sell-outs.
The narrator of the song has cut his hair, scored a
"good" job, and realised that, yes, its hip to be
square, because in this context "square" means
financially successful.
We'll leave you by saying that Hip To Be Square was
a pox on rock & roll in the late 80's, and to draw your own
conclusions about the fact that Huey Lewis and The News were
eulogised by psycho-killer Patrick Bateman in the book American
Psycho.
|
