Huey Lewis and the News

Huey Lewis and the News - Sports

I'd not listened to this in a long, long time. My memories of this are mostly warm and fuzzy except for "Bad Is Bad," a song that to me was true to its title. My buddy back in the day would go on about how "Ghostbusters" and "I Want a New Drug" were the same song ... I know there's a feel in the bass or the melody or something. I suppose there was enough merit to warrant a settlement, but to me all I heard was a gaggle of chicks shouting "Ghostbusters" over and over. I found it irritating, and now it's nostalgic, go figure - and for all that I still can't hear it.

The album was huge and it seemed to hang around a long time. I suppose that was due more to the fact that it was released in the fall of '83 and didn't really seem to take off until the spring of '84, and the band kept mining singles for almost a year. Just when you thought they'd gotten all they could out of it, they managed to find another single (this explains how "Bad Is Bad" was ever released). The album was like a Russian doll.

It's an album very much of its time but was also outside of the new wave and ubiquitous drum machines that were everywhere, which doesn't mean the band was above using modern technology, they were just a little more subtle. This was a good old fashioned band who mined good old fashioned rock and roll. It wasn't retro, but it was steeped in tradition. Heck, the first side is a veritable feast of ear candy, starting with "The Heart of Rock and Roll" through to "I Want a New Drug." It was a collection of great singles (I'm pretending "Bad Is Bad" doesn't exist).

This was the ever infamous third album and the band wanted to stay employed. After the relative success of the single "Do You Believe in Love" from their 1982 album Picture This, the pressure was on, whether it was external from the label, or just imposed by the guys, they certainly rose to the occasion. That was just side one.

Side two kicked off with one of my favourite songs by the band, "Walking on a Thin Line," that was more of a mid temp groove with a bit of edge. It's not the catchiest song on the album but there's something about it that still gets me in the feels. "Finally Found a Home" is another one of those great songs that flew under the radar. Musically, the beginning always reminded me of "Children of the Night" by Survivor with the 12 string riff to start ... I know they aren't the same, it just conjures that feeling. This coming from a guy who admitted he can't hear "Ghostbusters" bass line - still, it's a great song.

As the second side played through I'd forgotten about a couple of the songs, particularly "You Crack Me Up," which was a bit of a misfire, and then the album's closer, Hank Williams' "Honky Tonk Blues," that was more in the vein of "Bad Is Bad" except it didn't suck. Not my favourite song on the album but it's an interesting wink and a nod to the past.

Sports was one of those divisive commercial records that was considered too slick and deliberately structured to have any artistic merit. Quite a few of my more musically serious friends loved to take shots at the band and the album as postcard examples of what happens when people don't know enough to know what they should like. For me I still liked Flesh for Lulu and Echo & the Bunnymen, and didn't see the problem with liking Huey. There were over a million uninformed buyers here in Canada, and another seven in the States ... they seemed to know what they liked, and I was one of them.

Styx - Paradise Theater

Styx was hands down one of my favourite bands as a kid. They were a strange band, even back then. They were a hard rock band, almost progressive at times, who had a penchant for sucky ballads. I know there's a tendency for people to zero in on "Babe" as the song that killed the band's credibility. The roots go way back to almost the beginning when Styx released "Lady" on their second album. It showed a side to the band that needed to be kept in check, and for the most part the band kept things on a pretty tight leash. The band had been setting a gruelling pace, releasing an album a year (two in 1972) and by the time they released Paradise Theater (if I end up writing theatre later it's because that's how we spell it here) in 1981 they'd dropped ten albums in less than a decade. I snapped this up as soon as I saw it, and it became a fixture on my turntable. Like the band had announced on "Borrowed Time" from 1979's Cornerstone , ...

Billy Rankin - Growin' Up Too Fast

Growin' Up Too Fast was never widely released on CD (if at all), and it was one of the albums I really wanted to get back after a basement flood wiped out my vinyl collection in the '90s (when no one really gave a shit about records, and my insurance gave me a couple hundred bucks for an appraised $10,000 collection). Way back in 1984, my (dearly departed and greatly missed) buddy Dave let me borrow his cassette copy, which included a bonus track of "Get It On (Bang A Gong)." When I eventually bought the album, I didn't know it was a bonus track, or even what a bonus track was. If that sentence was hard to read, just go back and skim it. I'm sure you'll get the gist. I'd find out later Billy was an off-and-on-again member of Nazareth and wrote some absolutely killer songs for them. At the time, though, all I knew was this guy laid it out cold with the opening cut, "Baby Come Back," then proceeded to lay down one killer tune after another bef...

Garfield - Strange Streets

I'd seen this before in the bin, but kept flipping through the stacks. I'd see it a few more times, each time stopping to look at it a little more. There was something kind of cool about the cover where the stylized Celtic knot had the dotted yellow line - it was a strange street for sure. I pulled the record out of the jacket and I was struck by the centre image. There was the familiar Mercury label, the same one I'd seen a thousand times on BTO's Head On album. Well, I'd bought things based on odd associations before - like when I had to buy anything that Solid Rock Records released (this was generally a good thing) - so who knows, maybe this was a hidden gem. There weren't any real scratches or rash, just a lot of dirt and dust. It seemed to clean up okay, but we'll see how it goes. The album opens with the title track, and this wasn't straight-ahead pop or rock. It was leaning toward the progressive, but with a pop bent. Oddly enough, the vocals rem...

Old Enough to Forget

Search This Blog