Episode 384 – Huey Lewis

Do you care?

If none of Lewis’s tracks had broken through you’d be raving about him, the infectiousness of “I Want A New Drug,” but he and his band screwed up, they had hits!

Very consciously.

The first album was a dud. The second was a minor success with a middling hit single. They wanted to keep their deal, so they wrote every tune thinking about the radio on their next album, “Sports,” which they self-produced.

Yes, do it long enough and you know your music best. But you can’t be immune to reality. If you want to win the game, you’ve got to play by the rules. As for writing new hits today? Lewis says he’s just not motivated, because he’s a pop writer and the pop market has fragmented. Sour grapes? You decide. But it does speak to motivation… We all need some.

But we also need something to say. That’s what Huey says. That’s when we’re interested. So you know how to play, you even wrote a song, that’s not enough! We need substance, a point of view. And true, you can say it with an instrumental, but keep that in mind. Then again, that’s hard in an era where people are concerned more about stardom than substance and the hits are all written by committee.

Oh, I know, you’re not like that. You’re a unique talent who just hasn’t been given your chance in the spotlight. Music not only saves your soul, but rocks your world, and you believe this inner belief means the rest of us are interested.

But we’re not.

Let’s talk about that riff in “I Want A New Drug”… It was so good, it was a hit twice, once for Huey Lewis and the News and another time for Ray Parker, Jr., with “Ghostbusters”!

And yes, Huey Lewis and the News were not hip, but if you think back to the middle eighties, nobody was. It was no longer the seventies, certainly not the sixties, where there was a strict dividing line between hip and mainstream, in the MTV era we were all in it together, what we listened to was on the channel.

Oh, that’s right, not you.

Then I guess you’re not interested in the VJs’ stories.

OF COURSE YOU ARE! You fantasized about Martha Quinn or Mark Goodman or maybe even both. They’ve got a new book. Unfortunately it’s one of those oral histories, but there are some gems in there, unfortunately thirty years too late. That’s popular culture, when it’s happening, nobody will talk, but when no one cares, everybody’s a chatterbox. Kind of like the King Biscuit Flower Hour… It was anathema to release the live tapes commercially back in the sixties and seventies, but now you can’t give them away. He who breaks the rules wins.

Oh, there you go Lefsetz, you’re contradicting yourself.

Are you really that thin-skinned, are you really unable to split hairs? The key is to give them what they want but twist it all up. The Beatles wrote hits but they were cheeky, they played the game with both a smile and a sense of humor, that’s why we loved them. Just because everybody says you can’t do something, you can’t act a certain way, that does not mean you’re restricted, unless, of course it’s the law!

But just like there’s no crying in baseball, there are no laws in music!

And Huey’s smart.

That’s the dirty little secret no one likes to admit as they sell you an American Dream that’s more achievable in Europe. Social mobility in the United States stinks, and if you think I’m being partisan, read the statistics in the “Wall Street Journal.”

Huey dropped out of college.

After attending Lawrenceville. After taking a year off before going to Cornell, to hitchhike through Europe.

That’s where Huey became who he was, playing harmonica to get by.

You see direction is about the rush. You can sit at home deciding to be this or that, but when you get up on stage and feel that rush, when you write a line of code that works, when you hit the ball over the net and wow your opponent in volleyball, that’s when you’ve found your calling.

Then again, no one does that anymore, they just chase the money.

So Huey ends up playing with Clover, the rest of the band backs up Elvis Costello on “My Aim Is True,” but then it breaks up.

Does Huey Lewis sit home and cry in his beer?

No, he organizes a jam session at the local club. He uses free studio time to cut “Exodisco,” and when he’s summoned to the U.K. to help Nick Lowe cut one of his songs, he makes a deal for the track. And if you think it happened that simply, you know nothing. You make your own luck. Performers are cunning chameleons who evidence charisma. Isn’t that how Madonna got everybody to work with her?

No different with Huey Lewis. No different with all the stars who last. Not only do you have to want it, you have to play the game. You’re better off sitting home watching “Survivor” than tweeting, because human nature and manipulation are keys to making it.

And that’s what Huey Lewis and the News did. Make it. And once you do, opportunities arise, whether it be to write a song for “Back To The Future” or appear in a Robert Altman pic or get your unit sucked by Sweet Sweet Connie, who declares you have the longest…

Yes, legends endure, they burnish the image of the players.

And I won’t say this podcast is as riveting as some, but that’s got more to do with Marc Maron’s unfamiliarity with the territory than Mr. Lewis’s performance.

He’s charming. Telling stories siphoning gas, sleeping on couches, you just want to hang out and listen all day long.

Check it out.

But skip to 10:10, when Huey starts to talk.

P.S. As for Maron, I think “Grantland” had it right, see the link below.

P.P.S. Although I have to fast-forward through Marc’s podcast intros, he did a great piece in the “New York Times” the other week about buying jeans and he was positively entrancing on Bill Maher.

P.P.P.S. Yes, Lewis is working it, he’s on a publicity campaign to sell concert tickets and the 30th anniversary edition of “Sports.” You can even read about his house in the “Wall Street Journal”! Maron’s on the same tour, in concert with the launch of his IFC show… This is old school publicity, which can still work, but the future is about being in the public eye constantly, because otherwise people forget about you, especially if what you’re hyping doesn’t hit.

P.P.P.P.S. You don’t know his name, but the reason you know Huey’s is because of his manager, Bob Brown, a force of nature who won’t take no for an answer.

“IFC’s Maron Doesn’t Quite Capture What’s Great About Marc Maron”

“My Desperate, Stupid, Emotional Hunt for the Perfect Pants”

“Huey Lewis at Home on the Ranch”

“VJ: The Unplugged Adventures of MTV’s First Wave”

Sweet Sweet Connie

“Exodisco”

For years we heard that advertising would make your numbers online. That you could get rid of your real world product, put it on the Internet, and with all the eyeballs attracted, you could charge a fortune for ads and end up rich. Only this didn’t turn out to be true. Just ask the “New York Times,” which went to a porous paywall. Turns out the numbers don’t add up. (Kind of like your royalty statement from the label, but that’s a different issue!)

Was the Harlem Shake a fake?

“You didn’t make the Harlem Shake go viral-corporations did”

Its rapid disappearance is not the only thing interesting about the “Harlem Shake” phenomenon. I mean for not even a month everybody’s talking about it and then not a single word? We make fun of true one hit wonders, we embrace the “Macarena.” Yet “Harlem Shake” was like a comet, it came close to Earth and then blasted right by us into the universe. It’d be like making a friend at summer camp and having all memory of them wiped from your brain as soon as you entered the minivan for the ride home. Huh?

In other words, this sounds more like a marketing campaign than a true social phenomenon. After all, we still reference Rebecca Black’s “Friday.”

But the “Harlem Shake” story, the underpinnings, was not investigated by the mainstream media, which is still clueless when it comes to the Internet, never mind social media. No, this story had to be broken online, and you had to be part of the e-mail loop, a friend on Facebook or a follower on Twitter to find out about it, because almost no one reads qz.com on a regular basis.

And then today, someone e-mails me a link to this article, on Pandodaily.com, which I’ve actually heard of, but don’t read on a regular basis:

“Social media may finally be dying, but the BS around it hasn’t”

Let’s go to the end first, who is this Brandon Mendelson who authored this article?

Someone selling a book. Yup, old wave St. Martin’s published his book back in September. It seems to have had a bit of traction, but it didn’t break through, unlike a Malcolm Gladwell book.

Everyone wants to be Gladwell. The only difference is Malcolm can write and you can’t. Everyone wants to get on the train, not only Brandon Mendelson by Ryan Holiday:

Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator

I’m actually reading Holiday’s book. I’ll probably never finish it, it is not a riveting read, but it does blow your mind. It’s an explanation of not only page views, but how to promote your product online. That’s what it is about for all websites, page views, because that’s how they charge for the advertising they do get. That’s why despite all the hosannas in the business press, the “Huffington Post” is  a worthless piece of crap. Yup, you see an interesting headline and then click through to find a non-story. They’ve won, they can sell advertising on this new page. Furthermore, you can pitch a fake story to get a website to get page views, no matter how outrageous it might be. That’s what they’re selling, titillation and outrageousness. And there’s almost no fact-checking. But the resultant trail of page views emblazons your identity in the mind of clickers.

This is all to say that Brendan Mendelson has an agenda.

But if you read his article, he doesn’t question the viral validity of the “Harlem Shake, ” but PSY’s “Gangnam Style.”

Was “Gangnam Style” a fake?

You’ll think so after reading this article. If nothing else, you’ll learn how to rig the game. That’s what today’s media manipulators do, make you think you’re living in your own self-created world when the truth is you lived in a walled Disneyland, where your odds of building a ride are bupkes.

In other words, just like advertising wasn’t a business model to replicate your real world product online, maybe you can’t make the social media game pay, and we’re all going to become immune to it.

In other words, social media is where you gain eyeballs, but it may not be a revenue generator unto itself.

Which means the value of Facebook is lower than we think and Twitter is a news service, not a marketing platform.

Hmm…

I’m a natural skeptic. Which is tough in a rah-rah society. Where we’ve got an old guard clinging desperately to what once was and a new guard populated by snake oil salesmen who don’t want you to be successful, but just want you to buy their product so you think you will be. It’s self-help for dummies. Or an advertisement in the back of “Parade,” or a comic book.

He who gains the most eyeballs wins. Are they doing so via manipulation?

You tell me.

Downloads are killing the music business.

There’s enough anti-streaming venom in music to kill the industry. Whether it be artists angry at Spotify payouts or labels still holding on to CDs and trumpeting downloads to investors, neither can see that streaming has already won. With Pandora. With YouTube. It’s what the customer wants, but the customer is too stupid to realize it.

Take Netflix. What killed the company’s stock, driving it down from $298 to $52.81? An admission of the future. A declaration that to rent DVDs you had to pay more. That they were moving the company to streaming.

And now everybody’s raving about “House of Cards.” I don’t know a single person who rents DVDs by mail…that’s like carrying gasoline from the station when you can plug your Tesla in by your clothes dryer!

It’s all about scale. Streaming payouts suck now because very few people pay. Yes, when subscribers graduate to the paid-tier, rightsholders get more. What are the rightsholders doing to implore people to upgrade? Telling them to purchase CDs and downloads! Huh?

Downloads are a flawed model, because of the bundle.

Lost in the archaic discussion about the artistic value of an album is the fact that it worked economically. You want to get someone to pay ten dollars for ten tracks instead of a dollar for one. The analogy I like to use is automobiles. You can’t pick your options one by one. If you want a sunroof, you need to get upgraded wheels. You can’t get heated seats without heated windshield wipers and headlight washers, they’re all part of the “Winter Package.” Where are the packages in the music business?

Yes, the CD was a package. But those defending the album are disconnected from those listening to music. People cherry-pick their favorites. Artists seem to believe fans listen to their records from beginning to end, over and over again. They’re delusional. The key is to get people to pay for the listening experience, via a subscription.

Netflix is a subscription! You pay $7.99 every month not knowing what you’ll watch and not possessing anything at the end. But the naysayers say music must be owned. Huh? That’s inefficient. We want access, not ownership. Who’s got a house full of VHS tapes, ready to be played? When was the last time you played a DVD? New computers come sans drive, and everybody’s moving to tablets anyway, where there’s no room for a drive.

We’ve got to charge everybody for access. And split up the cash based on what they play.

Whoa! You mean my music actually has to be successful?

That’s not the model we’re employing today. Today, you buy it, we forget it. We don’t care if you throw it out or delete it. We’re all about promotion, convincing you to pay, we’re not about holding your hand after the fact. We’re automobile dealers with no service department. Once you drive off the lot, we close up shop and move on to the next town.

Yes, music is so afraid of technology, so scared by the Napster episode, that it is now skeptical, now refuses to move forward, as technology mutates and our listeners gravitate to non-music entertainment, like Netflix.

Don’t talk to me about the value of music, look at the price of a Netflix subscription compared to the cost of a feature film. It’s bupkes.

Not that film companies are not challenged.

But he who wallows in the past is ultimately forgotten.

The music business needs a concerted campaign to drive consumers to pay for subscription services. As for YouTube, yes, it pays, but very little, and once again we’ve got the cherry-picking problem.

And first and foremost we need an educational program. Steve Jobs would introduce a new product and explain it for an hour. I bet most label heads still don’t know how streaming services work.

Bottom line… Playlists transfer to the handset, they sync, so there are no data costs on the run. People understand that their contacts and photos will sync from their computer, it’s not a big stretch to convince them that music will too, you just have to tell them! Don’t forget, this is the public that was angry at Netflix that they couldn’t rent DVDs, and now have forgotten about said DVDs. People can be molded, you’ve just got to lead them.

Notes:

A. Netflix has 36 million subscribers. Stickiness is provided by new product. It’s the same in the music business, where we release a torrent of new product every week. We’ve got to get people in the habit of checking it out on streaming services. They may reject it, but at least they’ll hear it. As always, only a few recordings will win.

B. Netflix’s stock price is now $217.69, almost a complete recovery. If you’re not willing to make the hard decisions and take a risk, too fearful of a momentary downturn, you’re ultimately going to be left behind.

C. Read “Businessweek”‘s Netflix story to be blown away by how the company is at the technological bleeding edge:

Netflix, Reed Hastings Survive Missteps to Join Silicon Valley’s Elite

D. Yes, great music is still necessary, that remains the same. But isn’t it interesting that recording’s a cornucopia of technological breakthroughs, you can do in your home what used to cost a fortune in a big studio. Musicians make their music on the cutting edge, but cluelessly want to distribute it via an archaic model.

I know, I know, it’s a greatest hits album.

But it’s got two new cuts and a remix.

Very few artists have gone on to careers bigger than their predecessor bands. And on one hand we were rooting against Sting, because before he remade his personality in the last decade or so, he was so damn arrogant. Furthermore, we always love the original band with the original members, and the initial solo album, “The Dream Of The Blue Turtles,” was not as good as any Police album. But “…Nothing Like The Sun” was better. Yes, it contains a great cover of Jimi Hendrix’s “Little Wing” and “Be Still My Beating Heart” and “We’ll Be Together,” but the closer, the piece de resistance, is “They Dance Alone.” In a world where too many artists go on too long, the seven minutes of this cut are never too much, the song wanders and builds, you feel the loss Sting sings about in the lyrics, but first and foremost it’s about the feel. It’s not a hit single, it’s an album track, and it would be just as successful today, because it’s just that infectious, it makes you feel your humanity, the range of emotions from connection to loss. That’s what we love about our favorite music, it keeps us warm at night, with it we’re never truly alone.

And “They Dance Alone” is on this compilation album. As are three other tracks from “…Nothing Like The Sun.”

But there are only two cuts from the relatively disappointing “Soul Cages,” the hit “All This Time” and a remix of “Why Should I Cry For You.”

It’s a totally different record. Hearing the remix you think you’ve never heard the original. The groove is emphasized as opposed to the atmosphere. There’s too much on the original, it’s like Sting is broadcasting from across the river, but the remix is positively up close and personal. And you enjoy hearing the original after becoming enamored of the remix, but really, the remix is all you need to know.

It’s the circular groove. You’re nodding your head from the very beginning. And you realize you’re hooked when the almost minute long instrumental ending finally fades out. You have to hear that guitar again! You don’t want to let go of that groove, it’s like eating an endless box of chocolate cookies. But, “Why Should I Cry For You” does run out and you’re so frustrated you hit the rewind button on your cassette player and try and find the beginning again.

And “Ten Summoner’s Tales” was a complete comeback. It was even bigger than “…Nothing Like The Sun.” It was lighter, and filled with infectious tracks. That’s what you want in a lead off single, something like “If I Ever Lose My Faith In You.” It radiates joy without being base, it’s got an intellectual bent yet it’s so simple. If you don’t love it, you’re an unreconstructed punk.

And then there was “Fields Of Gold,” completely opposite in feel and tone, but just as memorable. Sting was seemingly throwing off these masterpieces without any effort, he was totally in the groove.

And then he released this greatest hits album…WITH TWO NEW SONGS!

You know, the new stuff is supposed to be a throwaway. But the two originals are utterly fantastic! And Sting had such faith in “When We Dance,” he didn’t stick it at the end of the album, but put it right up front!

“When We Dance” sounds like a combination of “…Nothing Like The Sun” and “Ten Summoner’s Tales.” It’s heavy, but it’s not distant.

And the track is slinking along, and then it changes completely, Sting sings with emphasis:

If I could break down these walls
And shout my name at heaven’s gate

He’s imploring. At first he was just telling his story. But now he’s frustrated, he’s trying to convince.

And then there’s that magical moment, when Sting is singing “When we dance, angels will run and hide their wings,” but underneath his voice is singing:

I will love you more than life
If you will only be my wife

Whew! It’s so heartfelt, so genuine!

And the other original is “This Cowboy Song,” which has a circular groove akin to the one in “Why Should I Cry For You,” but with a ton more energy and attitude.

This cowboy song is all I know
To bring me back into your arms
Your distant sun, your shining light
You’ll be my Dog Star shining tonight

That’s all we’ve got, our personalities, our intrinsic traits, to win over our desire.

Sure, possessions will get you in the door, a big house, a fancy car, but we’re all looking for something positively human, we don’t want to be a prisoner in the arms of another, we want to feel comfortable, we want to feel desired and alive.

It’s just amazing how Sting can encapsulate so many emotions in his songs.

He was almost too good.

But then he stumbled. “Mercury Falling” had no hits. He returned with “Brand New Day,” which was as infectious as “If I Ever Lose My Faith,” and then tied in with Jaguar to push “Desert Rose” over the top, but it was the last hurrah, suddenly there was no room left in the landscape for Sting anymore. He didn’t lose his talent, but the doors were closed at radio and now, like so many of the classic rockers, he’s given up making new music, it seems nobody wants it.

And that’s sad.

But that’s what it’s like getting old.

But the records remain.

Even if you hated him back then, give him a chance now, if for no other reason than to hear the remix and the two new songs, they’re as good as anything he ever did.

Rhinofy-Fields Of Gold-The Best of Sting 1984-1994

Previous Rhinofy playlists