Reader’s Choice/Tom’s Top Tunes….Song #56/250: The Power of Love by Huey Lewis and the News

For much of the 1980s and 90s, Huey Lewis was at the centre of the Pop/Rock scene in North America and around the world.  With his band called The News, Huey Lewis amassed worldwide sales of over 30 million albums. Their list of Top Ten hits reads like a soundtrack of the era with such songs as “Hip to Be Square”, “I Want a New Drug”, “So This Is It”, “Do You Believe In Love?”, “Heart and Soul”, “The Heart of Rock n’ Roll”, “Doin’ It All for My Baby” and “The Power of Love” from the Back To The Future soundtrack. Huey Lewis was also front and centre when the USA for Africa supergroup was formed, being honoured as he was with a solo line to sing when it came time to record “We Are the World”. Huey Lewis is a first-rate harmonica player, he possesses a strong, distinctive singing voice and he has the kind of guy-next-door handsomeness that has endeared him to generations of fans. It is not an understatement to say that Huey Lewis was, and still is, one of the most popular and well-liked performers of his generation. And yet, most fans do not even know his name. Hint: it isn’t Huey Lewis. Not only that, most fans of his music regularly misinterpret the nature of his songs. For a guy who appears at first blush to be the type of man you could see yourself talking to about the weather or baseball as you mow your lawns, the fact remains that Huey Lewis has actually led quite the life and is a tad more mysterious a figure than he lets on. With that being said, let’s get this post started and learn all about a man whose real name is Hugh Cregg.

Hugh Anthony Cregg was born in 1950. By the time he joined his first band as a teenager, it was still in the 1960s! I find that fact very surprising. To my way of thinking, Huey Lewis and the News always seemed right for the times when they burst onto the music scene via a string of highly successful music videos on MTV and Much Music here in Canada. He was young looking, handsome, full of vim and vigor, and yet, by the time the first MTV videos began rolling out, Lewis had already been a veteran of almost two decades of music! That time spent before becoming a video and music star contains a lot of very interesting information. For instance, Hugh Cregg, as he was called as a child, grew up in California. However, his parents divorced when he was a teenager and he ended up finishing high school at an all-boys prep school in New Jersey. While at this school, he achieved a perfect score on the math section of his SAT exams. He was also an All-State athlete in baseball. After his parents divorced, Cregg’s mother became involved with one of the Beat Generation poets named Lew Welch, and as a result Cregg experienced his teenage years in the company of people such as Jack Kerouac, among others. After finishing high school, Cregg decided to travel to see if that experience would provide him with a hint as to what direction his life should take. With very little money in his pocket, Cregg began hitchhiking across the US Northeast. Along the way, he picked up a harmonica and learned to play it as he wandered like some lost minstrel soul. Cregg became a competent busker and was usually able to earn enough money from his harmonica to pay for food and lodging each day. On those days when his take came up short, Cregg learned to use his looks and his charm to convince people to help him out. As his worldly personality traits became honed, Cregg decided to visit Europe. But, because he had no money to do so, Cregg ended up busking at the airport and even living there for the better part of a week before stowing away on an airplane! While in Europe, he hitchhiked his way through Scotland, England, France and Spain before returning to America. By this time, young Hugh Cregg had become quite comfortable performing in front of others for money. It dawned on him that this was the direction that his life should take. Upon his return to the US, Cregg enrolled at Cornell University to get an education “just in case” he should need to get a real job. But his heart was set for a life in the world of music. In the late 1960s/early 1970s, one of the hotbeds of musical life was San Francisco, so that is where he went.

With a few friends that he had met at Cornell, Cregg formed a band called Clover. During the first half of the 1970s, Clover was very much a local band that played the club circuit in the Bay area. While touring with Clover, Hugh Cregg decided that he needed a cooler-sounding music name, so he started calling himself Huey Louis. In 1976, while playing at a Clover gig at a bar in nearby Los Angeles, Huey Louis and his band were seen by UK rocker Nick Lowe. (You can read more about Nick Lowe in a previously-written post here). Lowe thought that the band had potential and invited them to come back to England with him to record their music there. The guys agreed to go with Nick Lowe, arriving in the UK just as the Punk Rock scene was exploding. Clover recorded two albums with famous producer “Mutt” Lange but never achieved any measurable degree of success on their own as a band. However, they did gain some fame as session players, appearing as the backing band on several songs for Elvis Costello’s terrific album My Aim Is True, as well as Thin Lizzy’s live album Live and Dangerous (where he is listed as “Bluesy Hughie Lewis”).  By the end of the 1970s, Clover returned to the US and subsequently disbanded.  Huey Lewis, as he was now known, gathered together several musical friends and formed a new band called Huey Lewis and the American Express. Because of their reputation as good session players, the band was hired to open for Van Morrison several times. It was while doing this that they were advised to shorten their band name. Thus, Huey Lewis and the News was born. Not long after that, Huey Lewis and producer Mutt Lange reconnected. Lange had penned a song that he felt might be a good vehicle for Lewis and his bandmates. It was a pure Pop song called “Do You Believe in Love?”. The song became an instant Top Ten hit. In a stroke of fortuitous timing, “Do You Believe in Love?” hit the airwaves just as MTV was launching. In those early days, MTV was desperate for content. Having years of experience cashing in on his rugged, dimple-chinned brand of handsomeness, Huey Lewis was the perfect face for this moment in time. The videos for Huey Lewis and the News went into heavy rotation all throughout the 1980s, making Lewis, in particular, one of the most recognizable music stars in the world. 

For today’s post I could have chosen many different songs as representative of the band’s musical catalogue, but I ended up choosing “The Power of Love”. I did this because, despite his long list of Top Ten hits, “The Power of Love” was the first of his songs to actually reach No.1 on the charts. It was a song that was written specifically for the movie Back to the Future starring Michael J. Fox. In fact, Lewis was even pegged for a small role in the film. In it, he plays a man who is judging bands that are auditioning to play at the high school dance. When Fox gets his turn, it is Lewis who turns him down with the ironic criticism of being “too loud”. In any case, Back to the Future was Lewis’ entry point into the world of acting. It was also how he achieved his first No.1 hit, so all in all, I would have to say that Huey Lewis must have been pleased to have been asked to participate in this project. 

However, “The Power of Love” was not my first choice of songs for this post. Initially, I wanted to profile the song “Hip to Be Square”. My desire to write about this song is because my wife and I both consider ourselves to be on the nerdy side of the personality spectrum, and this song has played as our anthem on many occasions. But when I did my due diligence and researched this song, I was dismayed to find Huey Lewis lamenting about how people often misinterpret the song as being an anthem of the egghead lifestyle. In reality, being a child of the 1960s, Lewis wrote “Hip to Be Square” as a commentary on how so many of the hippies and bohemians of the time had cut their hair and settled into middle-class lifestyles by their 30s and 40s. The song is about compromising your ideals and conforming to society’s expectations. Well, boo! Fine then! If I couldn’t use “Hip to Be Square”, then I would go with Plan B, which was “I Want a New Drug”. I always liked that song and the music video’s “ice dunking scene” too. But when I went to look that song up, I found Lewis lamenting about how many people think that the song is about drugs, pro or con, when it has nothing to do with that at all. Apparently in that song, Lewis intended for the word “drug” and “love” to be used interchangeably. OK. Moving on. My third choice was “The Heart of Rock n’ Roll”. As it turns out, the idea for that song came from a concert tour that had brought Lewis and the band to Cleveland, Ohio. As you may be aware, the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame is located in Cleveland because that city was where many people claim that radio DJ Alan Freed first uttered the phrase rock n’ roll with regard to a concert being organized there in the 1950s. Well, Huey Lewis, being true to his San Francisco roots, always thought that the Bay area was where the heart of rock n’ roll was at. So he wrote a song to good-naturedly challenge the Cleveland fans’ assertion that their city gave birth to rock n’ roll. But as  he was about to perform, he thought better of the idea and instead, acknowledged Cleveland’s local history, while pumping San Francisco’s tires, too. Giving a shout-out to the local fan base is a tried and true performer’s trick that almost always results in cheers from the crowd. Lewis’ intro speech went over so well with the Cleveland fans that he decided to use the same format wherever they play. Thus, crowds in Toronto and Detroit and Memphis and London, England all get to have their musical egos stroked by Lewis before he and the band launch into “The Heart of Rock n’ Roll”. I could go on….and I almost did when doing my research for this post! But when I read that “The Power of Love” was his first No.1 hit song, that turned out to be the deciding factor in choosing a song to profile in this post. So there you have it!

Huey Lewis is 74 years old as you read these words. In human years that means it is time for him to be retired and enjoying his golden years. However, in rock n’ roll years, there are many performers still actively touring and even releasing new material such as The Rolling Stones, for one such example. It would surprise no one to read that Huey Lewis and the News were on a nostalgia tour, too. But unfortunately for his fans, touring again is something that will never be happening. A few years ago, Huey Lewis contracted an inner ear disease called Meniere’s Disease. The long and the short of this disease is that it renders its victims deaf or almost deaf in one or both ears. Sometimes the disease causes direct hearing loss. In other victims, it causes excessive ringing in the ears, or else the feeling of water on the ear, to the point where the ability to hear normally is greatly reduced. For Huey Lewis, this means that he can no longer hear well enough to maintain even pitch control when singing or even to know if he is in tune or not. So, Huey Lewis has been forced into that retirement that so many of us were more than happy to accept. But Lewis is not going quietly into his old age. In the tradition that is becoming more common, Huey Lewis has decided to use the band’s song catalogue to create a Broadway-style musical. Thus, just like Frankie Valli did with Jersey Boys and Abba did with Mamma Mia, Huey Lewis is now doing with a musical entitled The Heart of Rock n’ Roll. The musical is set to have premiered this very week. I wish Mr. Lewis and his bandmates good luck with this latest endeavour.

For a guy who strikes me as someone so normal that I could see myself talking to across our shared backyard fence, Huey Lewis/Hugh Cregg has turned out to be a very interesting man who has lived a far more active and unusual life than many would have suspected. It is too bad that Meniere’s Disease has impacted the quality of his life, but I am happy to see that he is carrying on and still finding ways to have music be a relevant aspect of his world. If you have a favourite Huey Lewis and the News song or memory, feel free to leave it in the comments below. I have to be honest, my second favourite memory is how his music was dissected/analyzed during one of the most impactful scenes of the film American Psycho starring Christian Bale. In that scene, “Hip to Be Square” was forever changed for me. My favourite Huey Lewis and the News memory is also “Hip to Be Square” and the lifetime of having that song as a symbol, mistakenly as it turned out, of the life that my wife and I share together. Even if how we live our life is not what the song is about, I think we will stick with our own interpretation in this case. We are nerds in love and proud of it! Having said that, thanks for reading my words. Have a great rest of your day. Until next time, take care. Bye for now.

The link to the official website for Huey Lewis and the News can be found here.

The link to the video for the song “The Power of Love” by Huey Lewis and the News can be found here. ***The lyrics version is here.

The link to the official website for the musical “The Heart of Rock n’ Roll” can be found here.

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