Picture This: Huey Lewis and the News, "MTV Saturday Night Concert", and a Time Capsule of Culture Forty Years Ago
Decent Music Early in the Last Decent Decade
The culture of forty years ago was and was not the same. It was almost Dickensian in an important context.
All of the fundamental irrational, misanthropic philosophic and aesthetic ideas that saturate today’s culture, including twenty-first century popular culture, saturated academia, “serious” culture, et cetera. And, without better, rational ideas correcting those of academia and “serious” culture, it’s a matter of time before almost everything is execrable, as the last four decades have demonstrated. Time had not yet taken its toll completely; there were still afterglows of earlier, better cultures in some of the movies, television shows, and popular music.
The decade-or-so roughly known as “the Eighties” (around 1981 through 1991) is illustrative of this kind of schizophrenic, transitional time period. One musical group and one long-defunct television program are both fascinating time capsules that crystallize a time when, fleetingly, vestiges of a dynamic culture were still saturating airwaves and regular, popular consciousnesses. The synthesis of the two, not particularly exceptional at the time, is now a stark totem.
Huey Lewis and the News was a six-man band from the San Francisco Bay area of California that did not conform to the musical stereotypes of that area. Like many successes (musical and otherwise), they were a synthesis of diverse influences. Their two most salient aspects were perhaps an early rock and roll style fused with the new wave trend popular at the time, or roots music amplified by then-modern technology (synthesizers, the latest effects pedals, etc.). They were sort of a more contemporary, more successful, west coast version of Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes (who will be featured in this publication soon enough). Lewis, a harmonica player and emotive blue-eyed soul singer, previously fronted the band Clover. He played on albums by Thin Lizzy and their frontman Phil Lynott. The News included lead guitarist Chris Hayes, saxophonist/rhythm guitarist Johnny Colla, keyboardist Sean Hopper, bass guitarist Mario Cippolina, and drummer Bill Gibson. All sang harmonies. They were organic, skillful, melodic, and tight without the need of the computer enhancements shortly to become common (all of this went without saying at the time).
They released their first album, produced by Bill Schnee and consisting of almost entirely self-penned material, on Chrysalis Records in 1980.
Two years later (an eternity at the time), Chrysalis released their second album, Picture This. Picture This had a new formula for the band which would continue for many years, leading to sustained commercial and (in a manner of speaking) artistic success. They produced the album themselves, but—ironically—they wrote only about half of the material. While it was a qualified success compared to the next few albums, the record was their first with any substantial hits and their first to be certified Gold by the Recording Industry Association of America. Both hits were written by others. Robert John “Mutt” Lange’s “Do You Believe in Love” peaked at number 7 on the Billboard “Hot 100”; “”Hope You Love Me Like You Say You Do”, written by their friend Mike Duke, peaked at number 36 on the same chart. “Workin’ for a Livin’”, written by Hayes and Lewis, peaked at number 41 and was sort of a hit, but close only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades, and government work. Self-written highlights include “The Only One”, a quintessential tragic story song inspired by a couple Lewis knew in high school. Highlights written by others include “Buzz Buzz Buzz”, a cover of a 1957 hit by The Hollywood Flames; another is a song from Lynott’s solo career. Lynott’s original, on which Lewis contributed harmonica, is titled “Tattoo (Giving It All Up For Love)”. The Picture This track is officially “Giving It All Up For Love” (no “Tattoo” or parenthesis). (A comparison of the two recordings is a demonstration of how much artists can transform a piece they didn’t write, and Huey Lewis and the News were outstanding in this regard, infusing themselves into the song and making it their own.) The first Huey Lewis and the News production is most notable qua production in the background vocal arrangements, punchy drumming, and biting rhythm guitar reminiscent of Rick Springfield. Picture This was and is an enjoyable, tuneful, skillful listening experience. It is only in the context of the ensuing four decades of destruction that it is particularly notable as a studio album.
In early April, 1982, as they were becoming better known to the general public, Huey Lewis and the News performed at Chuck Landis’s Country Club in Reseda, Los Angeles. The venue opened in 1980. Originally intended as a country music club, rock bands of all varieties shortly started performing there. If setlist.fm is reasonably accurate in this case, the band performed at the venue on April 3 and 6.
MTV (the now-inaccurately named “Music Television”) started programming in 1981. Saturday Night Concert was a program that aired from 1981 to 1987, years when the network still regularly aired music videos and live music, some of which was as close to classical and jazz music as it was to Huey Lewis and the News. Frank Zappa released some performances that originally aired on MTV on You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore: Vol. 1 in 1988. The title was already accurate, and Zappa wrote in the liner notes: “I doubt they’ll let us get away with that again.”
MTV aired an episode of Saturday Night Concert sometime in 1982 featuring Huey Lewis and the News performing at Chuck Landis’s Country Club in April. If setlist.fm is reasonably accurate in this case, most or all of the performances are from the April 6 concert.
The programming is a superlative snapshot of popular culture at its best four decades ago. It should be released as both a live album and video release. It is not unlikely that neither Huey Lewis and the News nor MTV surpassed it. (It is certainly superior to Picture This and includes all but two of its songs.) Viewing it now and contrasting it with today’s culture can be a bittersweet experience, but the show is an inestimable value, especially now.
The program starts with the series’s standard animated introduction. Suddenly, a unique introduction transpires with a live-action shot of a stack of newspapers thrown to the ground. Hands rip off a paper cover and reveal a headline: HUEY LEWIS AND THE NEWS. A newsie is heard offscreen hawking the papers before the shot wipes to a shot of the newsie hawking the newspapers to the audience inside Chuck Landis’s Country Club. The newsie walks onstage and introduces the headliner. Spotlights illuminate Gibson kicking into “Change of Heart”, the Hayes/Lewis composition that kicks off Picture This. Almost instantly, the rest of the News is illuminated onstage, playing the song. Then, the frontman strides onstage.
The band plays with more intensity than their two studio albums up to that point. Hayes attacks the strings of his gold top Les Paul; Gibson’s drumming drives the band to another level of excitement and vigor. Cippolina’s bass lines, more reminiscent of early rock and roll than those of many of his peers, integrate with Gibson’s playing, forming a foundation for the soloists, all of whom play well by pop standards. Hopper takes full advantage of 1982 technology with skills on display that would be rarer today but were more than adequate then. The audience is rapt, and all six players look like they’re enjoying themselves. Lewis’s not-so-subtle lyric change to “Change of Heart” is about the only point of criticism, but it’s a cavil—and anyway, it does add to the live nature of the show. (Another possible point of criticism: It’s possible the audio is not entirely live. It may not be Lewis’s voice, but there is a shot in which Lewis’s mouth is stationary and it sounds like his voice is on the soundtrack. This kind of “touch up”, whether or not it took place here, is extremely common. One example is The Beatles’ 1965 Shea Stadium concert film. Another is Led Zeppelin’s The Song Remains the Same concert film, which has pickup shots filmed in Shepperton Studios in England. If it happened here, it does not detract from the general quality and live nature of the program.)
The Lynott cover is next: Lewis looks like he’s having the time of his life as Colla and he engage in slightly choreographed, appropriate and visually effective dual harmonica and saxophone parts. There is a joie de vivre that would be conspicuously and acutely reduced in pop culture about a decade or so later, when ennui became modish.
The third song is a thunderous and thundering “Trouble in Paradise”, the highlight of the band’s self-titled debut. Lewis introduces it as a song about their hometown, San Francisco, and name drops the Country Club (a better lyric change). The band is already, to use a trite phrase, on fire.
The band’s sartorial habits are also notable. They are not consumers of the rock star cliché clothier like the parvenu Sunset Strip hair bands (some of which were and are inestimable). They just dress like dignified adults. Gibson and Hopper even wear neckties.
After “Trouble in Paradise”, they play two more songs from Huey Lewis and the News, both more pugilistic and puissant than the studio counterparts. But it’s the song after those two that catapults the set into something transcendent and beyond stupendous.
After “Stop Trying”, Lewis tells the audience, “we’re going to throw you a curveball.”
It might be the most substantial understatement of his life.
He continues, “This is something we do to warm our voices up when we’re traveling … in small cars and things. We want to feature Sean, our keyboard player, is going to sing bass on this. So if you want to know who’s doing it, it’s Sean. This is an old song, so if you know the words, sing along, and if you don’t, clap your hands or snap your fingers … it really won’t hurt at all.”
Instruments are jettisoned. Cippolina joins Hayes at his microphone. Gibson stands up. With finger snaps as the only non-vocal “instrument”, Huey Lewis and the News perform an a cappella rendition of Sam Cooke’s “Chain Gang”.
It’s something like six-part harmony. It’s a cataract of voices blending in melody and harmony.
It really needs to be seen and heard. I’ll just elucidate that the ebullience of the performance is striking and ironic given the somewhat dolorous lyrics, and is part of an infectious enthusiasm that can enliven a viewer today.
In my peak viewing years, which were significantly better than the last twenty-six, I never saw anything like this on MTV.
It’s not even the only a cappella “oldie” performed by Huey Lewis and the News on MTV Saturday Night Concert in 1982, but it is the most effective, stunning “curveball”.
Cicero wrote that to be ignorant of what happened before one was born is to be forever a child. He probably did not consider a couple of decades as relevant. Sam Cooke was not all that long ago (even now), but the principle is not inapplicable here, anymore. There were almost certainly members of the audience that night (and certainly the television audience) who were not born when “Chain Gang” was released in 1960. Lewis does not mention Cooke by name, and one disadvantage of 1982 compared to now was a lack of Internet search engines. But maybe this performance led to appreciations of that period of music, and Cooke in particular, that otherwise would not have happened.
The set proceeds with more songs from the first two Huey Lewis and the News albums (and another cover). All of it is required viewing and listening for anyone with the most passing interest in the subject(s). Just a few highlights …
Lewis dedicates “The Only One” to John Belushi, who died a month and a day earlier.
The band closes the set with a pile driver of a performance of “Workin’ for a Livin’”, which is more or less a throwaway (but an enjoyable one nonetheless) on record. The Tower of Power Horns join them. This show is a time capsule and indicator of subsequent decline in more ways than one (or two). Lewis sings “hundred dollar car note, two hundred rent” … Recall that Huey Lewis and the News were from the San Francisco Bay Area, where two hundred will not get you a square foot on the sidewalk for half an hour now. Perhaps that is why the lyrics were changed for Garth Brooks’s 2007 cover version (in which Lewis appears).
As “Workin’ for a Livin’” climaxes, Lewis acknowledges each member of the band by name, then signs off with a catchy and effective slogan that would not continue to work or make sense for long. Watch until the end.
Huey Lewis and the News returned for an encore which was also filmed or videotaped and is also available in a separate video to watch on YouTube (as of publication—see links below). Whether or not the encore aired is not evident. Information is sketchy, and evidence is almost contradictory. One possible reason it may not have aired is that the final song contains one of the Carlin “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television”, multiple times. The words are audible in the YouTube video, and a credits sequence appears at the end. If setlist.fm is accurate in this case, these two videos together constitute the entire April 6, 1982 concert.
1982 was well into the period I and others refer to as our Endarkenment. In the late eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant published his “critiques”, philosophical counter-revolutions that essentially killed The Enlightenment, the human-centric, pro-reason, pro-individualism philosophic movement that transfigured the modern world and resulted in unprecedented science, technology, and liberty. One of Kant’s critques, Critique of Judgment, inspired (if that is the apposite term) the rise of modernism and nihilism in aesthetics, leading to atonal and arrhythmic noise in “serious” music long before 1982. But in that decade, popular music was still … musical, to a significantly greater degree than it is now. The subsequent four decades (and especially the last three) have shown that it is only a matter of time before the ideas of academia and “serious” culture fundamentally transform the streets and popular culture. The last twenty-seven years in particular has seen the rise of “nu metal”, “gangsta” rap, and overly simple, overly repetitive, monotonous, banal rock bands that make the popular music of the Eighties sound as complex and multifaceted as Camille Saint-Saëns and Giacomo Puccini (even though most of it isn’t). As I wrote in 2018 (referring to recent comments by Wynton Marsalis about rap):
It certainly damaged metal music, et. al. Few foresaw a culture with hit singles like "Smack My Bitch Up" (and, if memory serves, it wasn't a rap or metal song). In 1980, a metal vocalist was Ronnie James Dio or Rob Halford. In twenty years, it was more likely to be Fraud Durst.
But it's far more than rap. Rap was a symptom. The critical/media establishment's abandonment of jazz fusion and progressive rock in favor of punk, rap, etc. didn't help either, but it was just another symptom of conformists following a broader trend. The lyrical content was a counterpart to the destruction of melody in the "music". And it had its counterparts in every creative endeavor, starting with "serious" art, literature, music, etc. (It has now taken over pop culture, too.) Nihilist and trash culture does not turn people into violent lunatics. What it does is contribute to the dulling of their minds and their spirits, which was started much earlier, in school. What we have now is a culture of snide ignoramuses, many of whom have all kinds of qualities, including professional (due to compartmentalization)--who have the souls of inchoate child narcissists. One of the many manifestations of this is the popular view that not only humor but sarcasm has been elevated to the status of a major virtue--practically the only one in the so-called minds of most people (that and not taking oneself, or life, seriously).
Rock and roll was never perfect--it may have been a cultural mistake--but this was not a problem when, e.g., Jan and Dean (with the help of Brian Wilson) crafted one of the musical passages closest to a melodic climax in rock music--the coda of "Ride the Wild Surf". Bruce Springsteen's "Born to Run" has a passage that is also close to a melodic climax (though I don't know if rock ever got there).
As recently as twenty-five years ago or so, one could still see the likes of Peter Gabriel, Genesis, Springsteen, Petty, etc. on eMpTyV Video Music Awards. I know Wynton Marsalis didn't exactly approve of all this either, but it's certainly not rap. He might have had greater appreciation for Metallica's "Nothing Else Matters" and Queensrÿche's "Silent Lucidity", both of which were performed on the awards show around that time with Michael Kamen's strings. Read the lyrics. Listen to them carefully. And contemplate what replacing that with "Nookie", "Sex and Candy", "Scooby Snacks", "Smack My Bitch Up", etc., ad infinitum--and little else--does to a culture. Now, you can see Miley Cyrus twerking on the eMpTyV Video Music Awards.
A passage from perhaps the greatest living philosopher (a teardrop in the ocean, a diamond in the waste, as Rush would put it):
"For obvious reasons, it is impossible to quantify the extent of either type of shrinkage ... within a society--that is, to identify in numerical terms when a mixed rule [inconsistent philosophical method of thought dominating a culture] will self-destruct, or how far along the process is at any given point. On the basis of our discussions of D [skepticism- and nihilism-influenced] products in part two, I think it is safe to say that no Western society has ever been as anti-conceptual as our own. [Immanuel] Kant's takeover has been so thorough and swift that our current culture would have been unimaginable even fifty years ago. What then can we expect fifty years from now?"
Peikoff, Leonard. The DIM Hypothesis: Why the Lights of the West are Going Out. Part Four: "The Future". 14. "Secular Modes in the United States Today". New York: New American Library, 2012, p. 293.
1982 was closer to 1962 than 2012, temporally and especially philosophically—if not in its “serious” culture than certainly in its popular culture.
Many commentators have stated that no one born after the First World War will know how benevolent, warm, respectful, and joyous human society used to be before the horror and carnage of “the Great War” changed everything. An acquaintance of mine mentioned that once common viewpoint and said that he thinks it’s also true to a degree about the Eighties. He had a point, and Picture This and this episode of MTV Saturday Night Concert are illustrative of his point. Acknowledging the occasional “The Only One” or “Walking on a Thin Line” (both important, appropriate songs), this group was fundamentally celebratory.
Circa 1995, Judy McGrath and other cultural assassins killed MTV as the above devolution was occurring in music and other areas of pop culture. Before that, it was part of a mass media that, while far from perfect, produced significant amounts of worthwhile content and programming that delivered value and exposed artists and entertainers to millions of people, providing a platform for nascent cultural figures to have a fighting chance at launching a long career. What happened in Reseda, Los Angeles, on April 6, 1982 (and on the airwaves in subsequent weeks) was a kind of magic that does not happen anymore. It was an era in which mass media functioned more or less successfully and still transmitted decent work to listeners and viewers. It was not customary then for rock bands to release a live album after only two studio albums (live home videos were more common). Today, the YouTube videos of the 1982 Huey Lewis and the News performing their studio repertoire and private rehearsal habits are required viewing for anyone with the slightest curiosity about the culture of 1982 or its subsequent precipitous decline. They crystalize an era in which, as this band put it on their next album, the heart of rock and roll was still beating. The content would be essential listening and viewing if ever released as an archival official release. (See links below to watch.)
In an anti-value culture, cultural values are more crucial than ever.
Huey Lewis and the News
Picture This
Chrysalis Records 1982
Produced by Huey Lewis and the News
Side 1
Change of Heart (Chris Hayes/Huey Lewis)
Tell Me a Little Lie (Johnny Colla/Huey Lewis)
Giving It All Up For Love (Phil Lynott)
Hope You Love Me Like You Say You Do (Mike Duke)
Workin For A Livin (Chris Hayes/Huey Lewis)
Side 2
Do You Believe In Love (Robert John Lange)
Is It Me (Chris Hayes/Sean Hopper/Huey Lewis)
Whatever Happened To True Love (Johnny Colla/Huey Lewis)
The Only One (Johnny Colla/Huey Lewis/Bill Gibson)
Buzz Buzz Buzz (John Gray/Robert Byrd)
Chuck Landis’s Country Club
Reseda, Los Angeles
April 6, 1982 (I could not find an airdate)
Produced by Bibi Green and Chuck Hull
Directed by Scott Sternberg
Change of Heart
Giving It All Up for Love
Trouble in Paradise (Mario Cippolina/Johnny Colla/Bill Gibson/Chris Hayes/Sean Hopper/Huey Lewis)
Don’t Make Me Do It (Mario Cippolina/Johnny Colla/Bill Gibson/Chris Hayes/Sean Hopper/ Huey Lewis)
Stop Trying (Mario Cippolina/Johnny Colla/Bill Gibson/Chris Hayes/Sean Hopper/Huey Lewis)
Chain Gang (Sam Cooke/Charles Cooke)
Tell Me a Little Lie
Don’t Ever Tell Me That You Love Me (Mario Cippolina/Johnny Colla/Bill Gibson/Chris Hayes/ Sean Hopper/Huey Lewis)
So Much In Love (George Williams/Bill Jackson)
Do You Believe in Love
The Only One
Some of My Lies are True (Sooner or Later) (Mario Cippolina/Johnny Colla/Bill Gibson/Chris Hayes/Sean Hopper/Huey Lewis)
drum solo/Workin’ for a Livin'
Huey Lewis & the News - Reseda, CA 1982 Encore:
saxophone solo/Buzz Buzz Buzz
Hope You Love Me Like You Say You Do
Who Cares? (Mario Cippolina/Johnny Colla/Bill Gibson/Chris Hayes/Sean Hopper/Huey Lewis)
Postscript: Chuck Landis’s Country Club closed in 2000 and is now a church. That is either a slight step in the right, value-oriented, direction, or another sign of Endarkenment. It’s certainly consonant with cultural trends (in a reactionary way). Huey Lewis lost his hearing recently. I thank Billy Beck—who worked with Huey Lewis and the News—and Chip Joyce for intellectual and other inspiration for this piece.