Chrysalis 41212
Producers: Huey Lewis and the News
Track listing: The Heart of Rock & Roll / Heart and Soul / Bad Is Bad / I Want a New Drug / Walking on a Thin Line / Finally Found a Home / If This Is It / You Crack Me Up / Honky Tonk Blues
June 30, 1984
1 week
The 1980 self-titled debut album by Huey Lewis and the News was a big disappointment, selling poorly and failing to chart. Rather than packing it in, Lewis and the News fought for more control and the right to produce their second album, 1982’s Picture This. That album spawned the band’s first hit single “Do You Believe in Love,” written by producer Mutt Lange. “We were allowed to produce the second album and we had a hit,” says Lewis. “And that allowed us the chance to make a third record. If we hadn’t had a hit on that second record, that would have been it. We would have had to look for a deal somewhere.”
Instead, Lewis and the News cut Sports. “We were feeling really confident,” Lewis says, “because I knew we were in the game.” Having produced Picture This, the band had also learned its way around a recording studio. “We kept improving so much as a band and in the studio. We were just getting so much better. My view at the time was, ‘Man, if you like this stuff, boy are you going to like the next one.'”
Even with that kind of confidence going into the project, Lewis admits that the sessions for Sports, at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley and the Plant Studios in Sausalito, California, were “fairly tedious.” Says Lewis, “We were an R&B-based band, but since we were new, the idea was to use machines and embrace new technology and make blues and rhythm & blues cut to a drum machine.”
Indeed several tracks, including “I Want a New Drug” and “Bad Is Bad,” were recorded with a drum machine instead of live drums. The band also turned to other new technology. “‘I Want a New Drug’ has a synthesized, sequenced bass,” Lewis says. The latter track, however, wasn’t complete until lead guitarist Chris Hayes added a human touch. “We knew we wanted it to be a sort of groove thing, but we couldn’t come up with the right lick, until Chris said, ‘I got it,’ with a kind of sparkle in his eye. And sure enough, he did.”
The album’s final cut, a cover of Hank Williams’s “Honky Tonk Blues,” featured a reunion of sorts with John McFee, who played slide guitar on the track. Lewis, News keyboardist Sean Hopper, and McFee were members of the ’70s San Francisco bar band Clover. That group, minus Lewis, backed Elvis Costello on his 1977 debut album, My Aim Is True, but disbanded shortly thereafter when McFee left the band to join the Doobie Brothers. “That was fun,” Lewis says.
Overall, Lewis was pleased with Sports but was surprised by its slow rise to the top. “I felt like the whole album was a good album, almost from beginning to end. It kind of went to pieces a little bit on the second side, but I felt like the first seven tracks were as good as they could be.”
Included on the album’s first side were three top 10 hits. “Heart and Soul,” a track originally recorded by Exile, reached number eight in November 1983. In March, the News struck again with “I Want a New Drug,” which peaked at number six. “The Heart of Rock & Roll” hit number six in June. The three hits were enough to push Sports to the top of the album chart in its 39th week, making it the slowest-climbing chart-topper since Fleetwood Mac’s self-titled LP . The News went on to score their fourth top 10 hit from Sports when “If This Is It” reached number six in September. Says Lewis, “We just felt like it was our time and we could do no wrong.”
THE TOP FIVE
Week of June 30, 1984
1. Sports, Huey Lewis and the News
2. Footloose, Soundtrack
3. Born in the U.S.A., Bruce Springsteen
4. Can’t Slow Down, Lionel Richie
5. Heartbeat City, The Cars