Hip to Be Square

You are tuned to The Zoo, where the deep cuts and the big hits still share the same dial, and right now the needle is sitting on a record that made square sound like a compliment. “Hip to Be Square,” track five on Fore!, the 1986 album that put Huey Lewis and the News back at number one and proved the Sports explosion was no fluke. Written by Huey Lewis, drummer Bill Gibson, and keyboard man Sean Hopper, cut by the band themselves for Chrysalis, and released as a single in October 1986 with a remix of “Some of My Lies Are True” on the flip, it climbed to number three on the Billboard Hot 100 and number forty-one in Britain. Four minutes and one second of horn-punched, handclap-driven rock and roll that still sounds like a convertible with the top down and the radio loud.

The joke inside the groove is sharper than the video made it look. Lewis has said the song started in the third person, a little essay about the old rebels who cut their hair, got serious about the gym, and kept their record collections. He flipped it to first person because he thought it would land funnier. It landed so well that a lot of listeners took it straight, an anthem for the button-down life, and he has called that misread one of the regrets of his career. The lyric is really about the bourgeois bohemians before the phrase existed: people who dropped back in without giving up the music. On The Zoo we play it for the pocket, the stacked vocals, and the fact that a Marin County bar band could write a cultural argument you can dance to.

Listen close on the tag and you are hearing San Francisco 49ers. Joe Montana, Ronnie Lott, and Dwight Clark, friends of the band from civic functions and charity stages, step in on the “hip, hip, so hip to be square” chant. Clark’s famous catch is already hiding on the Sports cover if you know where to look. That is Bay Area rock and roll in 1986: the same town that gave you the Grateful Dead also gave you a hit single with Hall of Fame defensive backs on the background vocals. Sesame Street later borrowed the changes for a cartoon called “Hip to Be a Square,” and Lewis said the publisher cleared it and he thought the parody was sweet. In concert the band often sings it as “(Too) Hip to Be Square,” the title they used on the live album Live at 25.

Fore! arrived on August 20, 1986, recorded at Studio D and the Plant in Sausalito and at Fantasy in Berkeley, and it spent time at number one on the album chart while spinning off five Top 10 singles. “Stuck with You” and “Jacob’s Ladder” both hit the top. “Hip to Be Square” was the second single, sitting between them, and it may be the one that best explains the band. They were not posing as outlaws. They were a working group in their mid-thirties, writing about showing up, staying in shape, and still believing a great chorus could carry a room. The video leans into the square suits and the geometric sets, but the track itself is pure News: Gibson’s drums locked to the handclaps, Hopper’s keys, Johnny Colla’s sax and guitar, Mario Cipollina’s bass, Chris Hayes on guitar, and Huey out front with that harmonica-player’s sense of when to push and when to lay back.

The song picked up a second life in American Psycho. Patrick Bateman calls it the band’s undisputed masterpiece and lectures about conformity before the scene turns ugly. Lewis licensed the track for the film. The soundtrack album was another matter. Early pressings went out with the song on them before the proper rights were cleared. Lewis refused permission after the fact, and something on the order of a hundred thousand copies were recalled. Manager Bob Brown later said Lewis had not even seen the movie. The objection was the unauthorized album, not the picture. That is the square part of the story, and it is also the part that still gets argued in liner-note columns.

The man at the microphone was born Hugh Anthony Cregg III on July 5, 1950, in New York City. His parents split when he was thirteen. He finished Lawrenceville prep at sixteen, posted a perfect 800 on the math SAT, started at Cornell, and left to spend a year in Europe playing harmonica. Back home he joined the country-rock band Clover, which recorded in Britain and backed Elvis Costello on My Aim Is True without getting their name on the sleeve. The Marin County bar circuit came next. The group first billed itself as Huey Lewis and the American Express until the credit-card company objected, and the News was born. Chrysalis signed them. Picture This in 1982 made a little noise. Sports in 1983 made a lot: multi-platinum, a string of hits, and the sound of a band that had done the miles finally getting the room.

Fore! was the victory lap that refused to coast. The same lineup that had built Sports stayed in the room and produced the record themselves. Colla, the sax and guitar voice of the band, Hopper on keys, Gibson on drums and percussion, Cipollina on bass, Hayes on guitar, and Lewis on vocals and harp. They had already slipped into film with “The Power of Love” and “Back in Time,” plus Huey’s cameo as the battle-of-the-bands judge who tells Marty McFly his group is just too darn loud. By the time Fore! hit the stores they were headliners who still wrote like a bar band, which is why the songs hold up on a freeform rock station decades later. Later records, Small World and Hard at Play among them, kept the craft. In 2018 Ménière’s disease took most of Huey’s hearing and stopped the touring, a hard break for a singer whose whole instrument was his ears. The records did not go anywhere.

That is the Zoo take on “Hip to Be Square.” Not a novelty, not a costume. A band record with a wink in the lyric, Pro Bowl vocals on the tag, and a groove that still belongs on the FM dial next to the records that raised it. Huey Lewis and the News remain one of the great American working bands of the album-rock era, Marin County to the top of the chart and back to the songs. You can read the long version of the band’s story at their official home, hueylewisandthenews.com, follow the verified pages on Facebook, Instagram, and X, and dig the song facts at Songfacts. And when you want the deep cuts, the liners, and the station that still plays album rock like it matters, you are already in the right place at The Zoo.