Q 13

PLAYBOY: You had an interesting childhood. Your mother was, ah, eccentric, wasn't she?

Huey Lewis: Excuse me? Keep my mother out of this! Actually, that's why we made it--because my parents were eccentric, and I'm a nice guy, but primarily because my parents were eccentric. I forgot that. Right. My father was a jazz drummer and a doctor, and now he's retired for the most part and still a huge jazz fan. My mother is an artist. She is the farthest out of the family. She hung out in the very early days of the beatniks. My parents split up and she hung out with the Beats, who then became the hippies. She was the first of the adults to go to Fillmore Auditorium and listen to the Grateful Dead and that sort of stuff. So I grew up on that. I was encouraged as a kid to do anything--really anything. Experience was the best teacher, and here I am.

Q 14

PLAYBOY: When did you begin playing the harmonica? Are you good?

Huey Lewis: Yeah. I'm an incredible harmonica player, a great singer and an extremely nice guy. I picked up the harmonica on the way to Europe when I was 16. It fit the image. I hitchhiked through Europe, had long hair and couldn't get a ride, so I played a lot of harmonica. It was the knapsack that made it. That and being 16--and Bob Dylan, although my style was more like Sonny Terry's and Brownie McGhee's than Dylan's. That's when I got the bug to be a musician. I was always a listener. I was always the guy through grade school who, when there was a dance, would be standing next to the bandstand or near the speakers. I was always a fan. My first band was called Slippery Elm, and later I joined Clover, which was a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. We went to London, thought we were going to make it. The Sex Pistols were breaking. The Clash had just had their first gig. We were this nice, friendly country-rock band. Wrong.

Q 15

PLAYBOY: And then the News--how did that happen?

Huey Lewis: Later, when I was in England, I saw a resurgence of American roots music, which I had been into for a long time. I saw bands like Rockpile, Elvis Costello and Graham Parker playing Chuck Berry. So, much later, I was asked to run a local jam session at Uncle Charlie's in Marin County every Monday night. I said sure. I called up all these guys and things really took off. We had comedians, and sometimes big names would come in, like The Doobie Brothers. Van Morrison came by one day. The thing started to sell out and there was a big line around the block and some local studio offered us some studio time, and I said sure. We went in and, for a laugh, cut a disco version of Exodus that we called Exodisco, which we thought was very clever. At that time, Nick Lowe flew me over to play on his record with Dave Edmunds. While I was over there, I played this tune to Phonogram records, and they loved it and signed me to a singles deal. They gave me 6000 bucks. I took the money back. With $3000, I paid the studio off, and I took the other $3000 and gave it to the studio so we could cut a demo tape of three other songs that we had hastily written. Those songs got us our manager, Bob Brown. Three weeks later, Chrysalis came to see us, and three months later, we were signed. The rest is Mill Valley history. Since I had called everybody up for the gigs, I got to be the singer.

Q 16

PLAYBOY: Now that you've made it, do people ever say, "What an asshole"?

Huey Lewis: I'm sure they do, but never to my face. I find it tough to decide who is an asshole and who isn't anymore. It used to be easy. I suffer fools a little too gladly--that's what my wife tells me, anyway.

Q 17

PLAYBOY: What do you miss about old-style rock 'n' roll?

Huey Lewis: San Francisco used to be so creative. The Grateful Dead, the Jefferson Airplane gave us the "I don't know where we're going; we're just going to let it rip" jam sessions, God bless them. Also the R&B, consciousness-raising lyrics, psychedelic lyrics with R&B music--Sons of Chaplain, Sly Stone, which became Prince, Rick James, George Benson, Chicago--all that was born in the Sixties in San Francisco. Those were amazingly creative times. That was exciting. Rock 'n' roll was the cutting edge at that time. I miss that, I suppose.

Q 18

PLAYBOY: What's the cutting edge now?

Huey Lewis: Television, and, unfortunately, it isn't doing a lot of cutting. It's being very poorly handled at the moment. The idea of 24-hour-a-day music television is fantastic. The idea of a 24-hour-a-day sports thing is fantastic. So it does have the potential for becoming the cutting edge. The new art is going to materialize on television somehow. We're certainly ready for something. The point is that I don't think you can get people's attention anymore through a song. It's not powerful enough anymore. The music business has become bigger than the artists themselves. They tried not to play Elvis Presley records, but they couldn't hold him down. They couldn't hold The Beatles down. But The Beatles and Brian Epstein changed things: They sort of created the modern American monster-music business. When the Sex Pistols came along, the business said, "Wait a minute. These guys aren't going to play ball with us and we're not going to play ball with them." And the Sex Pistols lost. I think that was a signal there. People's jobs are on the line. That's a sad thing. It's a reflection of the country as a whole: It's very hip to be capitalistic, materialistic now.

Q 19

PLAYBOY: Where does that leave you?

Huey Lewis: It challenges you to get your message across, but discreetly, between the lines. You have to water down your message to get played, but at the same time, it must be there. Nobody says you have to be political to be valid, but I think you do have to be honest, and you do have to say more than "Hey, here's another hit." I don't feel a lot of pressure to make a song that's another hit record, but I do feel pressure to make a song that's a hit record that means something.

Q 20

PLAYBOY: You're not great at golf. What else are you not great at?

Huey Lewis: Reading Russian. Badminton. I'm pretty good at going goo-goo and ga-ga with my daughter. That's about it. Boring, I know, but I'm a terrifically nice guy.