Jacob’s Ladder

Step by step, rung by rung, Huey Lewis and the News climbed all the way to the top of the American charts with a song they did not even write. “Jacob’s Ladder” opens Fore!, the 1986 album that turned a Marin County bar band into the most unavoidable rock-and-soul act on the radio, and it is the record’s quiet conscience. While the rest of the album is grinning about being stuck with you, hip to be square, and doing it all for my baby, this one is about a woman on the south side of Birmingham who wants nothing from the next day except to get it better than the one she already has. That is a different kind of hit, and it still sounds like the News.

The writers were Bruce Hornsby and his brother John Hornsby, out of Williamsburg, Virginia, which John later called ground zero for television preachers. The biblical image is straight out of Genesis: Jacob dreams of a ladder reaching toward heaven, angels moving up and down it, a promise waiting at the top. The Hornsbys turned that picture sideways. In the song a fan dancer is running from a fat man selling salvation in his hand. Then a voice on the television says the chosen few need to send money or the signal goes dark. She is not buying it. She is just another fallen angel, climbing one rung at a time. John Hornsby put it plainly: the song is about one person’s personal goal, and it also takes a swing at media evangelists who preach sing along, send money, join the chosen few. A fan later tied the Birmingham line to a real run-in while Bruce was in town for a University of Virginia bowl game. Whether that story is gospel or bar talk, the lyric feels observed, not invented.

Huey almost produced it for somebody else. Hornsby asked him to produce the debut that became The Way It Is. Lewis was buried in his own schedule, but he was a fan, so he agreed to put his name on three songs. He heard “Jacob’s Ladder” with a different arrangement in his head. Hornsby did not want that arrangement. Lewis remembered the exchange years afterward: Hornsby said no, you do it. So the News did it. The gift landed as track one on Fore!, released August 20, 1986, on Chrysalis, recorded at Studio D and the Plant in Sausalito and at Fantasy in Berkeley, produced by the band itself with Jim Gaines engineering. Bruce kept the song in his pocket and cut his own version for Scenes from the Southside in 1988, looser and more piano-bar than the News single. A later bluegrass-leaning take with John showed up on Hornsby’s Intersections set. Same ladder, different climb.

The single arrived in January 1987, with a live “Heart of Rock & Roll” on the flip. It spent one week at number one on the Billboard Hot 100, the band’s third and final chart-topper, after “The Power of Love” and “Stuck with You.” It also reached number 10 on Mainstream Rock and number 17 on Adult Contemporary, and it finished the year at number 41 on the Hot 100. In Canada it hit number 16 on the singles chart and number 2 on adult contemporary. Australia saw it at 48, New Zealand at 50, West Germany at 65. None of that mattered as much as the way the record felt on a car radio: Sean Hopper’s keys, Johnny Colla’s sax and guitar color, Chris Hayes on lead guitar, Mario Cipollina’s bass, Bill Gibson’s drums, and Huey out front with that conversational baritone, half harmonica player, half working stiff. Three minutes and thirty-three seconds, no sermon, no wink too big for the lyric.

Fore! itself was a victory lap that refused to sound tired. It hit number one on the Billboard 200, went triple platinum, and spun off five top-ten Hot 100 singles, a first for any group from a single album: “Stuck with You,” “Hip to Be Square,” “Jacob’s Ladder,” “I Know What I Like,” and “Doing It All for My Baby.” The title is a golf shout, which fit a singer who has always looked more comfortable with a club in his hands than with a leather-pants routine. The band cut the record as a band. Tower of Power horns and a pile of San Francisco 49ers, including Joe Montana and Ronnie Lott, turned up on “Hip to Be Square.” “Jacob’s Ladder” needed none of that. It opens the album like a handshake.

The man singing it was born Hugh Anthony Cregg III on July 5, 1950, in New York City, and grew up in Marin County. Before the News he played with Clover, the Bay Area band that backed Elvis Costello on My Aim Is True and logged serious miles in Britain. Back home the group became Huey Lewis and the American Express, then Huey Lewis and the News, once the credit-card lawyers cleared their throats. The classic lineup locked in around Lewis, Colla, Hopper, Gibson, Cipollina, and Hayes. Picture This in 1980 and the self-titled follow-up built a club following. Sports, in 1983, blew the doors off: “Heart and Soul,” “I Want a New Drug,” “The Heart of Rock & Roll,” “If This Is It,” multi-platinum, and a sound that borrowed from Stax, doo-wop, and bar-band rock without apologizing to either camp. “The Power of Love,” written for Back to the Future, gave them their first number one in 1985 and a Marty McFly soundtrack that still introduces the band to kids who were not alive when the DeLorean hit 88.

By the time Fore! arrived, the News were famous enough to give a song away and still have a spare number one in the drawer. They kept working: Small World, Hard at Play, the Soulsville Stax tribute, Plan B, and Weather in 2020, much of it tracked before Ménière’s disease took Lewis’s hearing and, later, left him unable to hear music or sing. A Broadway show built on the catalog, The Heart of Rock and Roll, opened in 2024. The records did not go anywhere. “Jacob’s Ladder” remains the one that does not ask you to party. It asks you to keep climbing, and to ignore anybody charging admission for the view.

That is the Zoo way of hearing it, too. Freeform album rock, deep cuts, and the stories behind the singles live at THE ZOO, the listener-supported revival of Dallas-Fort Worth’s KZEW. For the band’s own trail, start at the official Huey Lewis and the News website, then the Facebook page and Instagram. Fans still gather under the old handle at Huey Lewis Fans on X. Put the needle on side one, song one. The ladder is right there. Nobody has to sell it to you.