I’m posting our weekly music feature a little early this time; I’ll be on the road by this afternoon, heading west to Wendover, Nevada, a.k.a. Salt Lake’s moral exhaust port. I’m going out for a concert, and no, it’s not Rick Springfield for a change. It’s these guys, actually, another favorite band of mine from the Awesome ’80s:

Ah, the ’80s, when images of six guys standing around watching a woman sleep weren’t considered creepy at all. It really was a different time… a better, more innocent time in a lot of ways. Sorry about the dodgy picture; The Man has disabled embedding on all the decent-quality Huey Lewis videos, at least the ones I could find in two minutes of Googling.
“Do You Believe in Love,” from the album Picture This, was the first charting single from Huey Lewis and the News. I remember hearing it quite a lot back in the day and I always liked it, but the band wouldn’t really break through into “household name” status until the next album, Sports. Sports was a monster hit, with four of its nine tracks hitting the top 10 singles charts, and a fifth breaking into the top 20. The album itself was the second bestseller of the year, right behind Michael Jackson’s Thriller.

The Arbiters of Cool never thought much of Huey and the boys, and I suppose I can understand why. Their image was more cuddly than cutting-edge; Huey himself was a bit older than the usual pop star, with rugged yet average features that appealed to the housewives; and a lot of their lyrics admittedly tended toward the cutesy and/or sappy. But then, so did the early rock ‘n’ roll and 1950s doo-wop that so obviously influenced their sound. And anyway, you can’t listen to Lou Reed and The Ramones all the time. Well, I suppose you can, but if you do, I don’t want to hang around with you.

We have time for one more, my personal favorite by Huey Lewis and the News, the one that drove the strait-laced, finger-wagging set into hissy fits because they didn’t understand what the song was really about:

Yeah, good stuff. Any band that can come up with that opening wail is rock-and-roll in my book. Incidentally, that dunking-your-face-in-a-sink-full-of-ice-cubes gag was done by Paul Newman in at least two movies that I know of: Harper, from 1966, and 1973’s The Sting. And one final thought: I always admired that red suit with the black t-shirt that Huey’s wearing. I still like the look, actually; if I ever find myself in the position of having to wear a suit, that might not be a bad way to do it…