Huey Lewis Finally Gets To See His Songs on Broadway — Even If He Can’t Always Hear Them
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Inside Broadway’s James Earl Jones Theatre on a recent afternoon, Huey Lewis has some actual good news. Checking his texts, he learns that Martin Short will be attending the opening of The Heart of Rock and Roll, the rom-com musical based around songs from his catalog. Also on the list for the first-night celebration are Michael J. Fox and the members of Lewis’ band, the News.
But anyone expecting Lewis to jump onstage and join the cast in song will be disappointed. “Can’t do it,” he says resolutely. “I’ve tried. I just can’t hear pitch good enough. When you sing a song and you’re in the pocket, the song begins to sing itself. It’s a wave you ride and, oh, my God, it’s the most fun thing in the world. That ain’t gonna happen to me anymore.”
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These are interesting times for Lewis. Set in the Eighties, The Heart of Rock and Roll, which opens April 22, tells the story of a failed rocker who winds up having to choose between a resurrected music career and an executive job at a cardboard company. (Hey, it’s Broadway.) With a book by Jonathan A. Abrams and a story by Abrams and Tyler Mitchell, the show — which first ran in San Diego in 2018 — finds the characters bursting into the title song, along with “Hip To Be Square,” “Stuck With You,” “I Want a New Drug,” “Do You Believe in Love,” and various Lewis deep cuts throughout the show. Prepare, too, to hear jokes about Downtown Julie Brown, Sony Walkmans, and Matlock.
Two of his songs, “The Power of Love” and “Back in Time,” are also part of the current hit Broadway show based on Back to the Future (the original 1985 film version, starring Fox, featured both songs). The Lewis renaissance doesn’t end there, either. For pop-culture nostalgists, one of the must-see docs of the year is The Greatest Night in Pop, about the recording of the 1985 charity single “We Are the World.” Among its many fascinating moments is the sight of the affable Lewis learning to sing his one line after he was recruited to fill in for Prince, who was a no-show.
But in a cruel twist of fate, Lewis, 73, can’t always fully appreciate any of that music or footage. In 2018, he was diagnosed with Ménière’s disease, an inner-ear affliction that leads to hearing loss and vertigo. Settling into a seat in the empty midafternoon theater, wearing a down jacket and with his newly omnipresent beard, Lewis pulls out a round device the size of a coaster. With it, he can adjust the volume on his two specially molded hearing aids. “I can hear you now,” he says, with a resigned smile.
Speaking of your hearing, where do things stand at the moment?
I lost my hearing six years, two months ago, but who’s counting? It fluctuates up and down, but basically, I’m spiraling down. It continues to deteriorate. I’m going to have a consultation in 10 days, and we’re going to explore a cochlear implant. It’s very difficult to determine how much benefit I would get from that. It’s a tough decision, because when they cut your hearing off, it never comes back. I need to determine how much better I will be, and that’s something nobody can really tell you.
Is singing still off the table?
I can sing. But I can’t sing to anything. I can’t hear pitch. A bass part sounds like [he imitates what sounds like a hurricane of turntable scratching]. It’s all distorted. I can hear there’s music going on. But I can’t hear what it is. When you play a song on a boombox, I can’t tell you what’s on it. I can hear the beat. But I literally can’t recognize my own songs.
Will there ever be another album?
I doubt it. I’d like to think I could sing again. And I can still write a little bit. In fact, I got an idea already, just the other day, because I hear it in my head. But even if I could somehow struggle and find a way, I don’t think it would be fun. [Grim chuckle.]
How have you learned to deal with it after all this time?
As best you can. You remind yourself there are lots of people out there much worse off than I am. I have two great children who won’t let me feel sorry for myself. And the musical has been huge therapy for me.
Your cover of “Let’s Dance” with Umphrey’s McGee from 2019 was just released.
It probably was my last session. I love those guys. They’re good kids. We did it for a Howard Stern record. They said, “Look, we’ll cut the track — all you got to do is sing it.” I said, great. I learned it that day and sang it. My only regret is it’s a little too David Bowie. If I had another shot at it, I’d change it a little bit. But I was just trying to learn the tune.
When you were first approached about using your songs in a musical, how did you react?
The story had lots of parallels to my life, actually. The character is the same age as I was when I started my band. I had a little day job, and I had started the News. I’d been playing in bands for 12 years. The News was pretty much my last shot. So I have a sense of the anxiety, the ambition, and the worry and all that, as Bobby does.
I worried about the integrity of the songs. Some of them, like “Stuck With You” and “Hip To Be Square,” we play for silly, and I’m fine with that. You’ve got to stretch the boundaries of what the song is and be open-minded that way. And partially because of my condition, I can’t go out on the road. So I’m more open to this stuff.
How many changes did you suggest along the way?
A lot of them, actually. Little things. Some of the choreography a little bit, like when Bobby is a rock star and how he holds the microphone. All the songs have little lyric changes. That was a difficult balancing act, because it’s important that the song push the story forward, but you don’t want to lose the integrity of the song.
We also had a completely different ending. [Spoiler alert: Do not read to the end of this paragraph if you want to avoid plot details of the musical.] We tried to make it so that Bobby could have everything. He could get the girl and the gig. That’s what everybody told us: “He’s got to win, win, win, win.” But real life isn’t like that, you know? He chooses love over career or rock stardom.
That’s an interesting message coming from a rock star.
I know. It’s the opposite of me. My dream came true. But not everybody’s dream does. And in fact, most don’t. That doesn’t mean your life isn’t any good.
What’s it like seeing and hearing your songs redone in Broadway form?
When you look at our songs, there’s a lot of “working,” “heart,” “love,” “power,” and “soul” in the lyrics. For some reason, those five words are in half my songs. So it was pretty easy to figure out where you gotta go with this thing. “I Want a New Drug” is interesting, how it’s handled and how he plays it to the guitar. “I Want a New Drug” is not a Broadway song! It’s more of a rap song than anything else, in a way. I thought they handled it very well. “You Crack Me Up,” the first song of the second act, was kind of a throwaway tune for us. “Don’t Make Me Do It” is from our first album, which nobody ever heard.
When you started out, especially with the band Clover in the early Seventies, doing Broadway must have been the least cool thing imaginable.
[Nods.] And corporate stuff. We were afraid of corporations then. We were originally called Huey Lewis and the American Express. That was our name, which I think is what we sounded like. But on the eve of release of our first album, they said, “You gotta change the name.” Why? They might sue us. We had 24 hours [to change it].
After Michael Jackson did Pepsi, Coca-Cola came to me. We had a meeting in Atlanta with them, and they said, “You have the biggest Q quotient of anybody in America right now. Do you know what a Q quotient is?” I said, “No.” They said, “It’s likability and accessibility.” They offered us a lot of money for two ads, but we didn’t do it. That was one of the only mistakes [we made]. Nobody had ever done any corporate stuff, and here we were already selling out shows and making a living. Why would I jeopardize what I thought was my credibility by doing a Coca-Cola ad? A year later, the floodgates opened, and there were sponsorships and ads. I remember the MTV awards that year, and there was a Pepsi ad with Mick and Tina.
And now Broadway is jammed with musicals using pop, rock, and R&B hits from the Fifties onward.
In the old days, people wrote songs for shows, and then those show songs became popular songs when Sinatra or Dean Martin covered them. Now, if you get a few hit songs, they’re wrapping a whole show around it, because you need the recognizability factor to get people in the theaters. I did the musical Chicago [in the 2000s], and those songs are fantastic.
So you think there are too many jukebox musicals?
[Grins sheepishly.] I know I’m biting the hand that feeds me here. But I get the reluctance if you’re a theater person. It’s a little bit disconcerting to see them wrap a whole show around a body of [pop] songs.
Now you have songs in both this show and the Back to the Future musical.
I’m not Richard Rodgers yet. I thought our show might have got just run over by Back to the Future. But it’s been sort of complementary in a way. The two shows are remarkably different. And how my songs are used in the two are remarkably different. I’ve seen Back to the Future several times, and the car is amazing. I have no idea how they do it.
A lot of people really enjoyed seeing you in The Greatest Night in Pop. Had you seen any of that footage before?
Right afterwards, Steve Perry and I were in the same studio, and he had some outtakes and showed me some of them. So I saw it real briefly on a little tiny thing. But no, I had never really seen it. And now, of course, I see it but I can’t hardly hear it.
What was it like watching that footage of yourself?
I got nervous again. It was only one line and the harmony part, except you’re doing it in front of Stevie Wonder, Bruce Springsteen, Michael Jackson, and Bob Dylan. And let’s face it, you don’t meet all those people in your life, let alone work with them or have a conversation. There were always union breaks. During one of them, Willie Nelson comes over and says, “Hey, are you guys playing golf?” I said, “Yeah. We got to do something on the road.”
Dylan comes over and goes, “Are you guys talking about golf?” And we go, “Yeah,” and he says, “That’s outrageous.” I said, “Bob, Nashville Skyline was outrageous. This is just golf.”
Is all this renewed attention a type of validation for you, especially since it’s been a while since you had a major pop hit?
Not really. I’d love to be in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. If I could be part of the same club as Chuck Berry, I’m in. But I understand how we were seen as an “MTV band” and all this stuff. I just try and stay positive. We’re a little underrated critically, and is that fair? I don’t know. I wish we were regarded better critically, but all I can do is try and be creative.
I live in Montana, and I care about the environment and belong to a bunch of conservation organizations. And the news is really bad, man. The insects and climate change and lack of clean, cool water. The environment is under siege right now. It’s very depressing. So it’s nice to escape for two and a half hours and see a show once in a while. That’s really what we’re trying to do here. We’re trying to entertain. We’re not trying to change your world.
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