The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Huey Lewis looks back (to future)
Veteran rocker to bring The News to Mohegan Sun
UNCASVILLE — Still “workin’ for a livin’,” Huey Lewis and the News will make their way back to Connecticut for a 7:30 p.m. concert Nov. 1 at Mohegan Sun Arena. In a phone chat recently, Lewis talked about the band hitting heights in the 1980s with a mix of rock, soul and R&B — independently for the most part because his label was based in England and had other fish to fry.
“I was 30 when we (formed as The News) ... in the summer of 1980. I’d been around a little bit and we lived in England, with another band (Clover), made two records . ... The lesson for me, I kind of learned it from the punks really, was that they were just kind of thumbing their nose at the music establishment. And before, we tried to make ourselves attractive to these music people. ... I thought, ‘Wow, how liberating!’
“And we came back here to Marin (County in California), and there was a club here that we started on Monday nights and just grew it. But ... the idea was we do it all, we write the songs ourselves, we produce themselves and we stayed out of L.A.”
The group’s bow to commercial demands, however, proved to be its launchpad. For the album “Sports,” Lewis said he expected one or two hits and it produced
six huge hits (soon buoyed by two songs in the film “Back to the Future”).
“It was a record of its time in the ’80s; radio was king,” he said. “There wasn’t any internet . ... By 1978, radio was contemporary hits radio, top 40 ... the term invented for a programmer in Fresno who opined, with the advent of push-button radios, that ... as long as people didn’t hear something they didn’t like, they’d stay on your station. (Stations became) like top 28, in fact, and if you were No. 28, you only got a spin or two.
“And MTV, for their first two years, their play list exactly mirrored radio and record (hit) lists . ... We had to figure it out for ourselves and it was the hardest thing that we did. We had to get a top-5 hit record in order to exist, in order to be relevant.”
Lewis, 67, has done some acting, but he lives on a ranch in Montana and has no use for more fame or reality shows. We asked him if he would do “The Voice.” He said he’s never seen it but:
“If they asked me to be on ‘The Voice,’ that’s a lot of money, isn’t it? (pause) I don’t look good enough for television, to be honest with you. TV is about looking good, I mean let’s face it. How many ugly people do you see on TV? ... If it was creative to me, I’d be into it. So there you go. I wanted to give you an answer to that.”