Huey Lewis was born in
New York City
.
[1]
His father, Hugh Anthony Cregg Jr., was an Irish-American from
Boston
, and his mother, Maria Magdalena Barcinska, was Polish, from
Warsaw
.
[2]
[3]
His grandfather,
Hugh Cregg
, was district attorney of
Essex County, Massachusetts
from 1931 to 1959.
[4]
Lewis was raised in
Marin County, California
, living in
Tamalpais Valley
and
Strawberry
,
[5]
and attending Strawberry Point Elementary School (where he skipped second grade)
[6]
and Edna Maguire Junior High School in
Mill Valley
. When he was 13, his parents divorced. He attended and graduated from the
Lawrenceville School
, a then all-male
prep school
in New Jersey,
[6]
in 1967, and he achieved a perfect score of 800 on the math portion of the
SAT
.
[7]
He was also an
all-state
baseball player.
[8]
Lewis attended
Cornell University
in Ithaca, New York.
His mother had an extramarital affair with
Beat Generation
poet
Lew Welch
, who became his stepfather. Lewis credits Welch with inspiring him in his early teenage years.
[9]
His mother was close friends with the Grateful Dead's manager and extended family.
[10]
In an interview with
David Letterman
,
[11]
Lewis talked about
hitchhiking
across the country back to New York City and how he learned to play the harmonica while waiting for rides. He talked about hanging out at the airport for three days until he
stowed away
on a plane to Europe. In later interviews, Lewis would reveal other encounters he had traveling around Europe. While visiting
Aberdeen
, Scotland, with no money and nowhere to sleep, he claimed that the locals were very hospitable by offering him somewhere to stay. In
Madrid
, Spain, he became an accomplished
blues
player as he hitchhiked and supported himself by
busking
with his harmonica. He gave his first concerts in Madrid, earning enough money to buy a plane ticket back to the US.
Upon his return, Lewis entered the engineering program at Cornell University. While there he made friends with Lance and Larry Hoppen who later played with
Orleans
and Eddie Tuleja of
King Harvest
. Initially an active student, Lewis soon lost interest in college. He signed up with a band called Slippery Elm, and in December 1969 during his junior year, he dropped out of Cornell and moved back to the
San Francisco Bay Area
.
[12]
He stated California was where "it was all happening." His aim was to continue playing music, though along the way he also tried other fields of work including landscaping, carpentry, wedding and event planning, as well as delivering and selling natural foods.
[6]
[13]
In 1971 Lewis joined the Bay Area band
Clover
. Around this time he took the stage name "Hughie Louis", the spelling of which he would tinker with for some years after. Other members of the band (at various points) included
John McFee
and Alex Call. Lewis played harmonica and sang lead vocals on a few tunes.
In 1976, after playing in the Bay Area with limited success, Clover went to Los Angeles. They had their big break in a club there when their act was caught by
Nick Lowe
, who convinced Clover to travel to Great Britain with him. However, Clover arrived in Britain just as their folk-rock sound, known as
pub rock
in Britain, was being replaced by
punk rock
.
The two Clover albums produced by
Robert John "Mutt" Lange
for
Phonogram
were not successful. By this point the spelling of Cregg's stage name had changed to "Huey Louis"; it is under this spelling that he is billed on both of Clover's albums for Phonogram, although for songwriting credits he is billed as "H. Cregg". The band accompanied
Elvis Costello
on his debut album,
My Aim is True
, minus Lewis and Alex Call, the singers.
[14]
As Lewis told
Rolling Stone
years later, "there isn’t any harmonica. I tell people, 'All the harmonica that isn’t on the Elvis Costello record was played by me.'"
[15]
In 1978 the band returned to California, McFee joined the
Doobie Brothers
, and Clover disbanded. McFee and Lewis, credited as Huey Harp, both appear as guest musicians on the George Hatcher Band's 1977 sophomore album,
Talkin' Turkey
, produced by
Tom Allom
.
Under the name "Bluesy Huey Lewis", Lewis played harmonica on
Thin Lizzy
's 1978 landmark album
Live and Dangerous
.
[16]
That same year, he was playing at Uncle Charlie's, a club in
Corte Madera, California
, doing the "Monday Night Live" spot along with future members of the News. At this point, he had adopted the "Huey Lewis" spelling, and the band was billed as Huey Lewis and the American Express. After recording the song "Exodisco" (a disco version of the theme from the film
Exodus
) simply as American Express, Lewis landed a singles contract from Phonogram, and Bob Brown became his manager.
[17]
The band played a few gigs (including an opening for
Van Morrison
), before adding new guitarist
Chris Hayes
to the line-up. On Brown's advice, they changed their name again to Huey Lewis and The News. After a failed
self-titled debut
in 1980, the band finally broke through to
Top 40
success with the gold album
Picture This
(1982). It rose to No. 13 on the albums chart thanks to the Mutt Lange-penned "
Do You Believe in Love
" (No. 7), the band's first hit.
[17]
The band's third LP,
Sports
(1983), is one of the best-selling pop releases of all time.
[18]
It became a No. 1 hit in 1984 and had multi-platinum success in 1985. Four singles from the album reached the top-10 of the
Billboard Hot 100
: "
Heart and Soul
" reached No. 8,
[19]
while "
I Want a New Drug
",
[20]
"
The Heart of Rock & Roll
",
[21]
and "
If This Is It
"
[22]
all reached No. 6.
Lewis knew
Nick Lowe
and
Dave Edmunds
from having played harmonica on their 1979 albums ("Labour of Lust" and "Repeat When Necessary") and produced Lowe's 1985 version of "
I Knew the Bride (When She Used to Rock and Roll)
". He later produced several songs (including one where he sang backup and played harmonica) on
Bruce Hornsby & The Range
's debut album,
The Way It Is
.
Hornsby thanked him by writing the song "
Jacob's Ladder
", a No. 1 single from the News' next album
Fore!
His song "
The Power of Love
" was a No. 1 U.S. hit and was featured in the 1985 film
Back to the Future
, for which they also recorded the song, "
Back in Time
". Lewis has a cameo appearance in the film as a faculty member who rejects Marty McFly's band's audition for the school's "Battle of the Bands" contest. As an inside joke, the piece the band plays is an instrumental heavy metal version of "The Power of Love". (Lewis plays the audition committee leader, who, after glancing at the other, equally unimpressed fellow faculty members, picks up the megaphone and says, "Hold it, fellas ... I'm afraid you're just too darn loud. Next, please".) A poster for the album
Sports
is hanging on Marty's wall when he awakes at the end of the movie. "The Power of Love" was nominated for an Academy Award.
[23]
Following the success of "The Power of Love" and
Back to the Future
, Huey Lewis and the News released their fourth studio album,
Fore!
in 1986.
Fore!
followed the success of
Sports
and reached No. 1 on the
Billboard
200. The album spawned the No. 1 singles, "
Stuck with You
" and "Jacob's Ladder" as well as the
mainstream rock
hit "
Hip to Be Square
". In all, the album had five top-10 singles on the
Billboard
Hot 100 and was certified triple platinum.
Lewis and his bandmates performed on
USA for Africa
's 1985 fund-raising single "
We Are the World
". The remainder of the 1980s and early 1990s were mostly spent touring and recording fourteen top-20 Billboard Hot 100 hits and releasing two more hit albums:
Small World
(1988), which reached number 11 on the charts, and
Hard at Play
(1991) which peaked at number 27. Lewis had a planned solo album titled
Back in Blue
that was canceled in the mid-1990s due to living arrangement issues on the part of Lewis.
[24]
[
failed verification
]
One of the songs from that cancelled project, "100 Years From Now", was later used for the compilation album
Time Flies... The Best Of
.
[24]
[
failed verification
]
Lewis has sung with Chicago-based progressive jam band
Umphrey's McGee
at several shows beginning with the 2005
Jammy Awards
and is featured on two tracks of their album
Safety in Numbers
.
On February 13, 2007, Lewis was interviewed on the podcast series
Stuck
in the 1980s. During the interview, he revealed that the band had written several new songs that they planned to record in 2008. He also stated that, given how much the industry has changed since their last album, he was unsure how they would sell the new material.
[25]
During a show at the
California State Fair
on August 21, 2007, Lewis was named
Sacramento
's Musician of the Year by the fair's general manager and presented with a gold statue of the California state bear.
Lewis recorded a duet version of "
Workin' for a Livin'
" with
Garth Brooks
, which was included on Brooks's three-disc set
The Ultimate Hits
, in late 2007.
On July 4, 2008, the eve of his 58th birthday, Huey Lewis and the News were the opening act for the annual
A Capitol Fourth
celebration on the west lawn of the
U.S. Capitol
in Washington, D.C. More than a half million people attended and was broadcast live on
PBS
. The band performed "The Heart of Rock & Roll",
"The Power of Love"
and "
Workin' for a Livin'
".
On May 29, 2011, Lewis played the annual
Summer Camp Music Festival
in
Chillicothe, Illinois
, along with Umphrey's McGee. They were billed as Huey Lewis and The Rumors. Together they played covers as well as songs from both their respective catalogs.
[26]
On April 2, 2013, Lewis appeared on the ABC television series
Dancing with the Stars
, where he performed "The Heart of Rock & Roll" in celebration of the 30th anniversary release of
Sports
and a concert tour with the News.
On April 13, 2018, Lewis announced that he had been diagnosed with
Meniere's disease
, and that he "couldn't hear well enough to sing". As a result, the remaining shows scheduled for the 2018 tour were cancelled.
[27]
[28]
[29]
[30]
In November 2023, it was announced that the musical
The Heart of Rock and Roll
featuring the band's music would debut on Broadway in March 2024. Lewis has been involved in the development of the show since 2018.
[31]