For a few years in the 1980s, Huey Lewis & the News were the kings of the music hill.
The group's poppy, crisp rock and Lewis' distinctive voice helped the band score a
string of beloved hits. Here's a look at the real-life story of Huey Lewis.
Huey Lewis was born in 1950 in New York City as Hugh Anthony Gregg III. When he was 4 years old,
however, his jazz-drumming radiologist father and commercial artist mother moved to San Francisco's
Marin County. The area was a center for the bohemian arts movement, and it was closer to
nature than the Big Apple. Lewis was a very smart kid with an early interest in music,
so the club-filled area fueled his interests. Unfortunately, the blissful family life didn't
last for long, because the musician's parents divorced when he was still young.
In a 2001 interview with journalist Jill Kramer,
Lewis said that the divorce happened when he was 11 or 12, and hinted that the split wasn't
entirely amiable. However, in a 2019 post on the Huey Lewis & The News' official Facebook page,
the singer notes that the cloud of divorce had an unexpected silver lining.
His mother started renting out a room in their home, and the tenant
just happened to be a folk musician called Billy Roberts, whose instruments of choice
were the guitar and the harmonica. As Lewis noted in the Facebook post:
"[Billy Roberts] had a zillion harmonicas,
and he gave me a bunch of his old ones. That's how I first got into them."
Huey Lewis was a clever kid, so it's no surprise that he was bound for a pretty decent school.
However, in an interview with journalist Jill Kramer, the artist revealed that things took
a dark turn when his dad wanted to send him to prep school, and his mother emphatically didn't.
They weren't together anymore at that point, and things were already pretty contentious.
Lewis' mother even took his father to court over the issue of their son's education.
In the end, the case was resolved when the judge asked Lewis what he personally thought about it.
He ended up choosing to go away to prep school, but he found the experience markedly different
from the brochures. In reminiscing about his prep school experience, Lewis had this to say:
"My dad had given me the catalog that had a
picture of this gorgeous quad with ivy-covered buildings and big trees
and a guy crossing the quad with a gal – Buffy and Biff – and she was tremendous-looking."
Unfortunately, the pretty lady in the catalog turned out to be a marketing trick,
and the young man ended up spending four years in a school full of other "Biffs."
In 1968, Huey Lewis took a year off before college and spent it traveling the world.
While this was no doubt a cool experience as a whole,
it also led to some serious trouble for the soon-to-be music star.
Lewis was a long-haired young man, which was significantly worse in
dictator Francisco Franco's Spain than it might have been at, say,
Woodstock. As a result, his hitchhiking endeavors were less than successful,
and it wasn't uncommon for him to wait as long as 12 hours between rides. This gave him a chance to
improve his musical skills, though. In remembering his time in Spain, Lewis told an interviewer,
"The only people who would pick me up were German tourists.
So I'd play harmonica by the side of the road until my lips bled."
Another Spain-themed pickle happened when Lewis was coming back from Morocco and lost
his passport. It was Friday, and he had no money at all, save for what it would take him
to get a new passport when the American Embassy opened on Monday. Fortunately,
those punishing harmonica exercises during the lonely hours by the road ended up saving him.
He bumped into a bunch of art students in Seville,
and they were so impressed by his harmonica skills that they hooked him up with a guitar player.
They ended up playing a pretty big concert — Lewis' first ever.
No one can deny that Huey Lewis & The News were massive in the 1980s. However, Lewis
and his merry men could have been even bigger — financially, at least. In the early 1980s,
Coca-Cola approached them to appear in their commercials,
which would have been a huge deal. After all, Michael Jackson had just shown the world what
celebrity endorsements could be, courtesy of his record-breaking $5 million deal with Pepsi.
Lewis decided to pass on the opportunity, and while he had his reasons,
he was still calling the decision idiotic in 2016, telling CNBC,
"We had just started selling out concerts, making more money than we'd ever made. And I thought
why would I do this for money? I'm an artist. I'm an artist, and an idiot."
In 1987, Huey Lewis suddenly lost all hearing in his right ear. This was a major problem,
because he was at the absolute height of his career at the time,
and hearing is generally considered a pretty important skill for a musician.
In describing the moment he knew he was losing his hearing, Lewis told an interviewer,
"I felt like I had been in a swimming pool and my ear was full.
I couldn't shake it out or pop my ears."
Lewis was eventually diagnosed with Meniere's disease,
which the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders
defines as an inner ear disorder that can cause all sorts of problems, including vertigo and
tinnitus. No medical professional could fix the issue, and one simply told Lewis to,
quote, "get used to it." Eventually, it became clear that this was his only option.
Lewis soon discovered that amazing musicians like Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys also operated with
a similar type of ear condition. As such, Lewis adjusted and was able to carry on his business
as usual. Sadly, though, this wouldn't be his last struggle with hearing issues.
The film version of Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho came out in 2000, and like the book,
it wasn't shy of showing Patrick Bateman's love for Huey Lewis & The News. However,
as M Live tells us, Lewis actually ended up boycotting the movie. This didn't have anything
to do with the scene where an unhinged Bateman, played by Christian Bale, delivers a speech about
Lewis' music before dispatching a professional rival, played by Jared Leto, with an ax.
"You like Huey Lewis and the News?"
In fact, Lewis was familiar with American Psycho before the film and has told
Rolling Stone that he's quite happy to be associated with it.
The boycott came after he decided to pull "Hip To Be Square" from the movie's soundtrack album
for reasons unrelated to the film itself. However, the people behind
the movie claimed that he removed it because he was so disgusted by the film's violence.
Understandably, the singer didn't much care for being set up as someone who was easily offended.
As it happens, Bret Easton Ellis has expressed regret that he linked
Huey Lewis and the News to his work in the first place. In 2014, Ellis told Billboard:
"They weren't a favorite band — I was much more a Bruce Springsteen
person than a Huey Lewis person — but I didn't think they deserved
it. I liked them more than the implied criticism of them that's in the text."
"Who you gonna call" to thank for the iconic Ghostbusters theme?
It's a good question. Buckle up, because it's about to get complicated.
"Ghostbusters! What do you want?!"
As Mental Floss and the Ledger Note tell us, the opportunity to write the Ghostbusters theme song
came to Ray Parker Jr. after Lindsey Buckingham and Huey Lewis had both declined the honor.
Parker certainly succeeded, but before long, Lewis' lawyers came knocking.
Per Billboard, the reason was the alleged similarity between
Parker's smash hit and Huey Lewis & The News' "I Want A New Drug,"
which had come out just a few months before. The case was eventually settled out of court.
In 2001, Lewis decided to weigh in on the ruling on a VH1 Behind the Music episode, saying,
"It was kind of symbolic of an industry that wants something -–
they wanted our wave, and they wanted to buy it."
However, in the same Behind the Music episode, Lewis also made it pretty clear
what he thought about the settlement money, saying,
"In the end, I suppose they were right. Suppose it was for sale, because, basically, they bought it."
This prompted Parker to sue Lewis for breaching an alleged confidentiality
clause from the 1984 lawsuit. Unfortunately, we may never find out how that lawsuit ended,
because everyone involved has stayed silent on the issue since then.
Rock stardom and domestic bliss seem to always be in direct opposition to each other.
According to the Los Angeles Times, it seems that even the relatively wholesome Huey Lewis
is no exception. He separated from his wife after they had two children. In an interview
with the golf magazine Kingdom, Lewis notes that the pair got married in 1983 in Hawaii, but their
union ended up lasting only six years. However, he does maintain that they're, quote, "still pals."
In 2001, Lewis reflected on the specifics of the relationship in an interview with
Jill Kramer. He said he met his wife, Sidney, in the late 1970s, when she was the secretary for
Bob Brown, Lewis' future manager. The musician also admitted that Huey Lewis & The News' peak
success years were quite difficult for his then-wife, telling Kramer,
"I was gone a lot then. And I worried about it. It was mainly hard on my wife,
because she had to take care of everything."
In early 2018, Huey Lewis had to once again deal with hearing loss — and this time,
things were even more difficult. As Rolling Stone tells us, Lewis was in Dallas to play a
concert with his band when his hearing suddenly went haywire. Lewis told the music outlet:
"I heard this huge noise. It sounded like warfare was going on in the other room. I yelled,
'What is that?' They said, 'It's just Pat [Green], the opening act.'"
Green hadn't suddenly switched to experimental heavy metal.
Lewis simply couldn't make any sense of what he heard. Everything was just a horrible racket,
and when it was time to perform, he couldn't hear his own voice, let alone find a pitch.
After some rapid cancellation of upcoming shows, Lewis started once again seeking medical help
for his condition. This proved futile. But as a minor comfort, the musician discovered that
his condition came and went, depending on the day. Some days, he can keep up with a
phone conversation with hearing aids on. Other days, he won't even know if the phone rings.
Tragically, the condition heavily impacts Lewis' ability to listen to music.
On a bad day, he can't find a pitch, and the bass crumbles into a nasty static.
"When music is played it just sounds like noise to me."
While he could theoretically still perform on a good day,
the periodical nature of the hearing loss makes touring borderline impossible.
Huey Lewis was in a dark place when he was struggling with his second hearing loss in 2018.
The condition left him with hearing that was coming and going, and music
sounded like distortion in his ears. This essentially destroyed his ability
to reliably perform — and it happened at a time when he and the News were working on
a new album of original material for the first time since 2001's Plan B.
As such, Lewis found the experience so profoundly harrowing that he even considered ending his life.
Lewis told Rolling Stone,
"There was literally a roaring tinnitus in my head. There was
nothing I could do. I'd just lay in bed and contemplate my demise."
Fortunately, the singer has learned to live with the situation, and he's even devised a scale of
one to ten to help others understand how well he's doing on a particular day. He regularly looks into
treatments that might help restore his hearing to a state that would allow him to play live again.
However, he's also accepted the idea that this might never happen.
If you or anyone you know is having suicidal thoughts,
please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline​ at​ 1-800-273-TALK (8255)​.