Huey Lewis: Success of 'Sports' was no accident

When Huey Lewis and the News take the Florida Theatre stage Sunday evening, you can expect to experience an old school rock show: Real performers, actually singing and playing their instruments, with nary a backup dancer in sight.

"We have nine old guys," Lewis said in a phone interview last week. "Sometimes when we get excited, we move around a little bit, but that's about as exciting as we get."

Lewis and his band - four original members have been together for 35 years and four others have played with the News for more than two decades - are featuring music from their breakthrough album, "Sports," on this tour. It was recorded in 1982 but held up by the record company and wasn't released until September 1983. It went on to become one of just five albums to hold the No. 1 spot in 1984 - Michael Jackson's "Thriller," the "Footloose" soundtrack, Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A." and Prince's "Purple Rain" soundtrack were the others.

"Sports" featured five Top 20 hits - "Heart and Soul," "I Want a New Drug," "The Heart of Rock & Roll," "If This is It" and "Walking on a Thin Line" - and sold more than 7 million copies.

Lewis said that wasn't entirely by accident.

"This was our third album and, if we didn't do well with this record, that was it," he said. "So we aimed five tracks from that album at radio, knowing we needed a hit. We didn't know we were gonna have five of them, but we wanted one."

It was the only time the band intentionally set out to make a hit record, he said. Subsequent albums sold well, but not like that one.

"'Sports' was assembled piece by piece," he said. "Once it hit, it freed the band to pursue creative challenges rather than economic ones."

To mark the 30th anniversary of the "Sports," the band is playing it in its entirety every night.

"I think it's a marketing idea, more than anything else," Lewis said. "And the good thing is 'Sports' is just 42 minutes from beginning to end, so there's more other music than there is 'Sports' in our show. And, for the hardcore fans, three of those songs we've hardly ever played."

Every note you hear at a Huey Lewis and the News show is live - no prerecorded vocals or Autotuned sounds that Lewis decries as "partial karaoke."

"That's just taste," he said. "Some like hamburger, some like foie gras. I like to hear the interplay between the musicans, the ambience of the whole thing. That's what I like, that's what turns me on."

That live sound includes a three-piece horn section, something a lot of performers do without nowadays to cut expenses.

"You have to pay a trumpet player, travel him to Florida, put him up in a hotel, pay him per diem and a salary and he plays one note at a time. I can put all three of those guys on tape and I've got the same thing. Lots of people do that," he said. "We just do it the old-fashioned way because that's the way it sounds good to our ears. It's a challenge every night to get in the pocket and play good, you know."

Tom Szaroleta: (904) 359-4548