THE OLDNESS OF NEW
  • No Lewd
  • Jackson Browne
  • Clarence Carter
  • Club 8
  • Al Martino
  • Thin Lizzy
  • Professor Haul
  • Thwap
  • portesaintmonty
  • Robbing Albertans
  • Holy Grizzly
  • Mercury's Lament
  • Strap Me In
  • Chad Hammond
porte

saint

monty

Phil & Huey

4/22/2019

 
Huey Lewis was playing harmonica and singing second lead vocals in a band named Clover, an American rock band signed to CCR’s Fantasy label. By the mid 1970s Clover had relocated to the UK, where they toured tirelessly as the support act on tours with Lynyrd Skynyrd, Graham Parker and Thin Lizzy, for its 1976 Johnny & The Fox tour. Clover’s lead singer was late for soundcheck one day and so Huey stepped in, sang lead for a few songs until he got there. One or two members of Thin Lizzy were out front and when they heard Huey they thought it was pretty clear who the real lead singer was. They told him he needed to start his own band.
​

Huey listened, left Clover and started his own band, which he called Huey Lewis & The News. Thin Lizzy took them out on the road again even though Huey was a total unknown. "We supported Thin Lizzy on their Live and Dangerous tour, and Phil Lynott took me under his wings and taught me how to run a band," Lewis later recalled. 
Picture
Phil ​Lynott, "Let's do drugs."
Huey Lewis, "Alright, Phil-let's. Only, I want a new drug, one that won't make me sick. One that won't make me crash my car. Or make me feel feet, feet, feet thick. I want a new drug, one that won't hurt my head. One that won't make my mouth too dry. Or make my eyes too red."
Phil Lynott, "Let's do drugs."

In 1982, Huey repaid the favour. Thin Lizzy was done. Lynott’s solo career was stuttering. Still, Picture This, The News' second album, contains a cover of Lynott’s solo single from the album Solo in Soho (1980). It is an endearing gesture, even if Huey’s version draws attention to the obvious bizarreness at the heart of their friendship. Lynott was, perhaps, the greatest of all the drug fiends 1970s hard rock ever produced. Huey Lewis’s two greatest hits are “Hip to be Square” (1986) and “I Want a New Drug” (1984), which became an anti-drug anthem of sorts. Lynott and Lewis are polar extremes on the sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll spectrum. Yet they enjoyed an intense two-person admiration society. They were buds.
Lewis’s cover, “Giving It All Up For Love,” exposes aesthetic incongruities as well. Lewis’s version is, like much of his oeuvre, high-energy, hard-driving, new wavish pub rock, alarmingly un-ironic yet somehow still vaguely fun like watching a corpulent infant stomp a flower bed to death. It’s an approach entirely unsuited to the original, “Tattoo,” which is a light and frothy concoction in which Lynott explains to the listener that:
  • “She's got a tattoo on her tummy
    And her Mummy plays gin rummy”

And also:
  • “She keeps a silver armadillo
    ​Well hidden beneath her pillow”
​
It’s good information to have.

Comments are closed.
Site powered by Weebly. Managed by Rebel.ca
  • No Lewd
  • Jackson Browne
  • Clarence Carter
  • Club 8
  • Al Martino
  • Thin Lizzy
  • Professor Haul
  • Thwap
  • portesaintmonty
  • Robbing Albertans
  • Holy Grizzly
  • Mercury's Lament
  • Strap Me In
  • Chad Hammond