BREAKING RULES WITH HUEY LEWIS

BREAKING RULES WITH HUEY LEWIS

by

Laura Fissinger

Right below "decadent millionaire" and "world savior" on the list of popular life ambitions is "normal guy making good as bigdeal rock star." CREEM has come across with a list of some of the rules that could help normal guys the world over stay normal once rock stardom hits. (How to be a bigdeal rock star is next month.)

Below each rule on this list are quotes from the normal-est guy in rock today, Huey Lewis. He's 33 (not old but not young); cute but not gorgeous; smart but not snooty; ambitious but not nuts. Lewis did the normal rock star schooling, kicking. around in various bands and flirting with success until the right time, songs, musicians and dumb luck came together. The first LP didn't do much; but the second, Picture This, did the trick for Huey and the other normies in the News with "Do You Believe In Love?" Now there's Sports and its hits, "Heart And Soul" and "I Want A New Drug." For being such a good example of a normal guy, we give Huey our normally perverse CREEM thanks —an abnormal article. Lucky guy!

RULE 1: Don't ever start enjoying work. Just enjoy fun. "It's so wonderful to hear people say that they think we're having fun. That's why we produce our own records, why our record covers are so 'busy' and non-Hollywood—we're San Francisco, we're a real band. Our motto is, 'hey, let's have a good time. Just be yourself.' "

RULE 2: Remember where you have the most fun, and find a way to get free drinks there. "What do I do to blow off steam? I go to our local bar, the one that's in the photo on the cover of Sports. It's called the 2 A.M. Club and it's in Mill Valley. I go there all the time. Now that I put it on the album cover I get all my drinks for free (laughs). Seriously. The owner of the bar is a guy named Goose that I've known since grade school. I was bom and raised in that town, so I know everyone there."

RULE 3: Be able to tell what "hip" people think is fun apart from what isn't really fun at all. "The trouble with videos is that any good song is better than its video, like any good book is better than the movie. Videos are best done with songs that mean nothing because they can give a little meaning to something that means nothing. A good song by itself is more visual than a video, actually. Before its video, a song can mean a lot of things. Afterwards, it just means one thing."

RULE 4: Think about how much it hurts when your head hits a brick wall, and avoid doing it. "Sports is much closer than any of our other records to how I initially conceived it in my head. But I get this thing where I write the song and then I sing it, and I think, 'dammit, it's got to be sung better than that. ' I go back and sing it again a little bit better, and I listen, and you know what? It's still not good enough. But you know what? It's the best I can do. So I let it go. It's a strange feeling to hear the song and know that Stevie Wonder could just tear it up. Well, it's as good as I can do."

RULE 5: Think about how fun it is to be a normal young gawk, and wish you were doing it. "At this one gig, I saw these two kids walking down a hallway. Right in the middle of it, the guy gets his nerve up and turns to the girl (acts out a Hollywood embrace). They just stayed embraced—they were afraid to let go because they?d have to look at each other. They stayed for a minute or so just kissing, with real tight lips. It was wonderful. God, it was wonderful. It must be so great to get that excited about a kiss!"

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RULE 6: Don't always tuck in your shirt. "To give people the true personality of you and your band, you can't always worry about the music being perfect. Same thing with video—do I look good enough? It doesn't matter, ultimately. That's not what it's about. If you're gonna get across the personality, you've got to give it to 'em straight."

RULE 7: Play the boss man's game if the payoff is good enough. "Anybody who's cried to a song, who's really felt that thing about music, cannot deny that music is an art, albeit with a small 'a.' It can change your life. It can actually teach you something about life. If you love it like that—and we could get into a really long discussion about this—it's OK to infiltrate in any way, shape or form possible. But when you get in there —like after you have some hit records— you gotta give something back. If you don't give something back—and Lord knows, a lot of people don't—it's just not right."

RULE 8: Don't ever forget who gave you your start. "We're gonna lose the rock 'n' roll culture if we don't work at keeping those songs and those sounds around. It's important that people know who Chuck Berry was—you may not like him anymore, but he's really important. Do people know how rock started? It's 25 years old, for chrissake. Kids today hear Bow Wow Wow do 'I Want Candy'—and they don't know that Bo Diddley did it first. That's bad news. I'm concerned about the business—it lives in its own little microcosm world in Hollywood. So right now it's Australian bands, and later it's something else. I saw there's only two kinds of music, good and bad. If you squander the gift for feeling the music—Karma-wise, that's gonna come back on you. Elvis Costello's manager Jake Riviera had a great saying— "infiltrate, then double-cross." How can you love music and not give something back to it? Our next challenge is to make our mark, our print."

RULE 9: Skip the big words when they get in the way of speaking English. "Some lyrics like 'It's Alright' by the Impressions or 'Kansas City' aren't very deep lyrically, but there's something dead honest about them. When that guy says he's goin' to Kansas City, you know he's goin' to Kansas City. He believes 'em—they're real. Or like in 'Barefootin' by Little Bobby Parker—there's a party goin' on there."

RULE 10: When the fun gets to be work, go have some fun. "We have a local club where we started, and we go there all the time to play. It's not a real big deal or anything, but it's fun."

RULE 11: Pay attention in marine biology class. "Every audience is like a real live thing. An audience at a place like JFK Stadium is like a huge whale—you can hammer it over the head forever and it won't budge (laughs). But if you tickle it in the right place, wham, it'll jump up and do a big flip. You have to make them come to you. It's just like a love affair—you have to be coy, then you have to scold, then you have to reward. It's a thing where you have to be in command. But you know, I'm just getting to the point where I can sing in a living room or something in front of a small group of people. I'm not in control there yet."

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RULE 12: Know what questions to ask. "I set some goals three years ago—well, not goals, but I'd think in my mind, 'if I could on/y get a record deal,' you know, 'if I could get a record deal and do OK.' But then you get the deal and you think, 'weli, if I could just have a hit.' No sooner do you have that than you set more goals for yourself. But the key to the hit is enjoying it while it happens. Because it's a fleeting thing, and so is a pop career. Don't take it for granted, either. Often you don't know you're having a good time until you stop and ask yourself, 'am I having a good time?' This band has a good time."

RULE 13: Don't get used to strangers asking you lots of questions. "I get more nervous doing interviews than I've ever felt on a stage or anywhere. An interview is not normal. "