Huey Lewis

I got pulled over for speeding today, and as I rooted in my glove compartment for my registration, I saw a cassette tape.

Tonight, driving to the grocery store, I pulled it out and put it in my car’s tape player. (My car was built when they still put cassette players in cars.) I thought it was a mixtape, but incorrectly cataloged within was Huey Lewis and The News, Fore (1986).

The audio quality of a 22-year-old tape in my car’s decade-old deck was predictably lacking. But I think I prefer it that way. Altered, muted, discernable, but distorted.

I’m trying to plumb what it is about Huey Lewis that appealed to me. I started listening because a girl I had a crush on liked the band. But my fandom has outlived my infatuation by a good 19 years to date.

Huey Lewis’s songs bear little resemblance to my history or inclination. In high school, I genuinely did not know that “Whole Lotta Lovin’” was about sex. I was slightly afraid of drugs and drinking alcohol. It is possible for me to be less rock ‘n’ roll, but to do so would require me to actively identify as something else—country or folk or classical or something. I’m as far from rock ‘n’ roll as ignorance and benign indifference can take me.

Even though Huey and I are pretty far apart, I don’t think I would have continued to like say, Duran Duran or Madonna if I had decided to listen to them because of a crush. I can't yet identify why that is. The music didn’t speak to any experience I had. I can’t even say the music is qualitatively “good,” although a few songs are hella catchy. It’s just that it’s mine.

Huey and the News still tour. They’re still a working band. According to Wikipedia, they have/had a plan to record a new album this year, and seemingly out of nowhere he did the theme song for Pineapple Express. Huey is well into his 50s—closer to 60, really—and the guy is still working.

Twenty years is an unprecedented amount of time for me to have artifacts. The idea that I have memories and feelings associated with an item 20 years old seems... singular. I have few intermittent moments with Huey between high school and now. It’s like it traveled through time.

Play through, Huey.