Heart and Soul

You are locked into the signal at THE ZOO, and the record on the turntable is the one that shoved a Marin County bar band onto every rock station in America. Huey Lewis and the News, “Heart and Soul,” the opening shot from Sports. Chrysalis put the single out at the end of August 1983, with “You Crack Me Up” on the flip, and by November it was sitting at number eight on the Billboard Hot 100 and number one on the rock chart. Album cut runs about four minutes and thirteen seconds. The single trims it to three fifty-five. Either way it hits like a bar-band engine that finally got a real chassis.

The song was not theirs. Mike Chapman and Nicky Chinn wrote it, the same Chinnichap desk that built “Ballroom Blitz” and “Fox on the Run” for Sweet, “Mickey” for Toni Basil, and “Kiss You All Over” for Exile. Chapman has said the lyric was first aimed at Suzi Quatro. Exile cut it in 1981 as the title track of their own Heart and Soul album, Chapman producing. That version stalled at number 102, bubbling under and going nowhere. The BusBoys also cut it in 1982. A publisher sent Huey what he thought was a hot demo. He told Songfacts later that he heard it and said, wow, this is a great demo. It was Exile’s finished record. The band copied the arrangement almost note for note, three chords, most of the tune riding on two, and made it sound like it had been written in a Mill Valley club.

The punch line belongs in every aircheck. They were mixing their version in Los Angeles when Huey stepped out of the control room and heard the same song coming out of the studio next door. The BusBoys were cutting it at the same time. The publisher had shopped the tune to both camps and forgotten to mention the other session. A lot of bands would have walked. These guys finished the mix. Chris Hayes later said he did not know why the guitar sounded so good. Usually they had to redo every part. This time a Les Paul through a Marshall in a tiny room worked on the first pass. The band produced Sports themselves. Chrysalis had wanted an outside hand after Picture This. The group pushed back, booked the Bay Area rooms they already knew, and aimed the whole album at radio without sanding off the bar-band grease.

The clip, directed by David Rathod, puts Huey in the suit and tie against a room full of new-wave extras. He looks like the only working musician who wandered into someone else’s party and decided to stay. That image stuck. Sports, released in September 1983, eventually went to number one and threw off five hit singles: this one, “I Want a New Drug,” “The Heart of Rock and Roll,” “If This Is It,” and “Walking on a Thin Line.” “Heart and Soul” picked up a Grammy nomination for Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal. The band’s own rule, Huey has said it more than once, was simple. Write the eight best songs you can write, then cover the two best outside songs you can find. This was the cover that opened the door.

The group behind it had been grinding a long time before the suits noticed. Huey Lewis was born Hugh Anthony Cregg III in New York City and raised in Marin County. He came up on harmonica, jazz, and the British beat groups, then spent the middle 1970s in Clover, a Bay Area band that relocated to England and fell in with the Stiff and pub-rock crowd. Clover played on Elvis Costello’s My Aim Is True. Huey blew harp on Thin Lizzy’s Live and Dangerous. When Clover folded he came home, pulled a working unit out of the local circuit, and for a short stretch they were billed as Huey Lewis and the American Express until the credit-card lawyers objected. The News stuck.

The Sports-era lineup is the one the rock stations still picture: Huey on vocals and harp, Johnny Colla on guitar and sax, Chris Hayes on lead guitar, Sean Hopper on keys, Mario Cipollina on bass, Bill Gibson on drums. Colla and Hopper went back to the early bands. Cipollina is the younger brother of Quicksilver Messenger Service’s John Cipollina, so the San Francisco thread runs through the rhythm section. They were a live act first. The 1980 debut on Chrysalis barely registered. Picture This in 1982 finally dented the chart when Mutt Lange produced “Do You Believe in Love,” a top-ten single that proved the band could live on the radio without turning into a studio project. Sports was the argument that they could do it themselves.

What you hear in “Heart and Soul” is that argument in one track. The backbeat is Gibson playing like a man who has closed a thousand rooms and knows exactly where the chorus has to land. Colla’s sax stabs are bar-band punctuation, not session sweetening. Hayes’s guitar is bright and a little rude. Huey’s vocal sells the story without winking at it, the guy who cannot walk away from the wrong invitation. Chapman and Chinn wrote a machine. The News played it like a song they had been doing between last call and the load-out. That is why it still belongs on a freeform rock station and not in a nostalgia bracket. It is album rock that happened to sell.

Sports did the rest of the work. “I Want a New Drug” and “The Heart of Rock and Roll” kept the band on the rock chart through 1984. Fore! arrived in 1986 with “Stuck with You” and “Hip to Be Square,” and the Power of Love single from Back to the Future had already made Huey a movie face as well as a radio face. They stayed a working band: Small World, Hard at Play, the covers set Four Chords & Several Years Ago, Plan B, and much later Weather, recorded before Huey’s hearing gave out. Ménière’s disease took the stage away from him. The records did not go anywhere. Johnny Colla, Bill Gibson, Sean Hopper and the rest of the circle have kept the name alive in the clubs. The songs were built to be played by a band, not by a laptop.

If you want the long version of the story, the band keeps the files themselves. The official site is hueylewisandthenews.com, still posting news, fan photos, and Huey’s answers to listener mail. The verified Facebook page is Huey Lewis & The News. Instagram lives at @hueylewisandthenews. The official X account is @HueyLewisNews. No separate fan site has stayed upright long enough to send you there. The band’s own pages are the archive.

Back on the Zoo, “Heart and Soul” is the handoff from the lean years to the platinum years, played the way it was cut: loud, a little greasy, and built for a rock radio speaker. Sports is the album. This is the track that kicked the door. Stay with the signal at THE ZOO.