Huey Lewis and the News: Stuck With Success

The sign hanging on the recording-studio wall warned, “Album – Don’t Choke.” It was March 1986, and Huey Lewis and the News were trying to record their follow-up to Sports, their smash 1983 album, which sold 9 million copies and yielded five Top Twenty singles. The sign, pinned up by keyboardist Sean Hopper in the hope of inspiring a bit of levity, did little to break the tension that plagued the sessions.

The “magic circle,” as the band members sometimes call themselves, didn’t talk much about the pressure, but everyone felt it. “So much was at stake,” says bassist Mario Cipollina. “We wanted to prove that Sports wasn’t an accident.” In the three years since the last album was released, its huge success had become something of a specter, and no one felt the pressure more than Huey Lewis.

Hey, Huey, how’s the new record coming? It became impossible for Lewis to leave the sanctuary of his nineteenth-century English-style carriage house – one of the spoils of his success – without hearing that nightmarish refrain. At the grocery store, he’d run into an old friend or, more often, some fans. As he’d shake hands or sign autographs, he knew even before they opened their mouths what was coming: Gosh, you guys. ‘Bout time you made another record. God, what are you gonna do? You must feel awful.

Sometimes he did feel awful. He’d lie in bed for hours, worrying about that next record. After fifteen years in the music business, Huey Lewis had come up against a rather peculiar problem – success. For years he had tried in vain to write a hit. In 1982, at a point of desperation, he and the band made what they later called their “deal with the devil.” They recorded producer Mutt Lange’s “Do You Believe in Love,” a decidedly commercial tune that Lewis thought would get the band on the radio. He was right; it became their first Top Ten hit. Then came Sports, and the boys from Marin went from playing small clubs to headlining at – and selling out – arenas all over the world.

By the fall of 1985, after three years on the road, it was time for the band to get a grip – and time to write and record another album. “While we were following Sports around the world, I don’t think we were aware of what was happening,” says Cipollina. “Sports came out and just did a slow, steady climb during ’84 and ’85. The whole time we were on the road, I don’t think we knew how famous we were getting. When we finally stopped touring, this huge wave of reality came crashing in behind us.”

“Everybody and his brother was waiting for this album,” Lewis says. “I’d get in a room with a pencil and paper or a guitar, and it was ‘Well, I’ve got to write a song now. How about if I write one about this? Well, jeez, I already wrote about that. That was “The Heart of Rock and Roll.” Let’s see, how about this? Well I’ve already done that.’ And so on. You can’t really conjure these things up.”

Though they were now seasoned performers, Huey and the band were not adept at writing hits on demand. With his band – Cipollina, Hopper, guitarist-saxophonist Johnny Colla, guitarist Chris Hayes and drummer Bill Gibson – Lewis sweated out some new material. “We wrote about six songs that way,” says Lewis. “We’d write them and go record them, and they’d come out terrible. And I’d sit back and go, ‘The trouble with this is it’s a lousy song.”‘

After an agonizing six months of “work, work, work,” the breakthrough finally came. Hayes, 28, received a phone call from the band’s manager, Bob Brown, who was getting jittery. “I think we’re gonna need some more songs, man,” Brown said. “We need a tune.” Hayes’s reaction, he recalls, was “God, Bob, I don’t know. I’ve got a lot of things going. My wife’s pregnant right now. But let me see what I can do.” Hayes went out, bought himself a six-pack and went into the studio. “Three hours later,” he says, “I had ‘Stuck with You.'”

With that song, the members of the magic circle regained their charmed existence. “Chris gave me the tape, and the melody and words came straight out,” Lewis recalls. “And I thought, ‘That’s the way to do it. Don’t try to write so hard. Receive. . . . Let the ideas come.’ When you’re working so hard, there’s no room for ideas to flow into you. It sounds a little cosmic, but I really think that’s it. I wrote [the lyrics to “Stuck with You”] in fifteen minutes, driving out to rehearsal and back in one fell swoop.”

That song, which took Hayes and Lewis three hours and change to write, zoomed to the Number One spot on Billboard‘s Top 100; four weeks after that, Fore! was the Number One album. It heralded the return of Huey Lewis and the News. They would not be victims of what Cipollina calls “that huge record that kills you.”