Sports (1983)

Some years ago I was reading along in the 2006 installment of the Da Capo Best Music Writing series, with selections in that volume by guest editor Mary Gaitskill, when I first encountered Katy St. Clair's remarkable story for SF Weekly, "A Very Special Concert." As the deck on the original piece suggests, it's about "the enduring bond between Huey Lewis [& the News] and the developmentally disabled," a sensitive consideration of an unusual, somewhat surprising, and cheering phenomenon. St. Clair writes, "Whatever the reason—the catchy tunes, the goofball charisma, or maybe those slapstick videos—developmentally disabled people see something significant and tender in Huey Lewis. He makes them happy." The piece goes on to detail how they have made him their own rock star, with the same kind of uncanny abilities to charm and weave spells that Tom Jones, Morrissey, Bruce Springsteen and many other superstars have for others.

It reminded me of a dilemma I faced early in my so-called career as a rock critic, perhaps for the first time, which is the matter of trusting your gut. We know now how overrated it is as a quality for the US Commander in Chief, but it comes in pretty handy for critics. In fact, it's one of their most important qualities, if they have it—an ability to step back and judge, not exactly impartially but with clarity or honesty and a willingness to stand by their responses. I never got the hang of it and, in fairness to me, it's not an uncommon problem. Revisiting most newspaper and other reviews from years gone by, distinguished by being written in the heat of the moment, often uncovers views of conventional wisdom that no longer make sense, viz., Led Zeppelin is terrible commercial hokum, Yoko Ono wrecked the Beatles, David Bowie is poncy, disco sucks, punk-rock is anti-life. Those are just from the '70s and incomplete. There's much more. Most people are convinced that critics are terrible idiots and in many ways they are right.

I can admit now to being thrilled by most of Sports from the first time I put it on. But when it came time to write the review, it was much harder to stand by or up for it. I sensed from peers the ironical tone would be mandatory at least, as also applied at the time to, say, Agnetha Faltskog's Wrap Your Arms Around Me (which is good!). The serious tone was reserved for the new Tom Petty. There were things you couldn't exactly like, but more had to "like." In fact, I wanted to look up the review I ended up writing on Sports to see how I threaded that needle. What I discovered, after spending too much time digging into the deepest wells of my clips files, is that I never wrote about it. Even though it raved up my apartment daily for weeks I was never able to bring myself to defend something I could somehow sense was perhaps as far from cool as it was possible to be. It was as if I could feel "Hip to Be Square" coming and couldn't get away from it fast enough (I still feel that one is a train wreck, a sterling example of lyrics spoiling everything). 

It's probably condescending to say something like the developmentally disabled more naturally have more direct access to their feelings. But certainly they did better than me on Huey Lewis & the News. On the other hand, this band and this album were not outliers or cult even then. You may or may not remember (I didn't), but Sports was an '80s mega album that can stand with Michael Jackson's Thriller, Bruce Springsteen's Born in the USA, Van Halen's 1984, and Cyndi Lauper's She's So Unusual. Thriller is literally the multiplatinum standard and most mega albums traditionally come from established stars—She's So Unusual and Sports are the exceptions. Sports yielded up five top 20 hits, four of them top 10, though none higher than #6: "I Want a New Drug" (#6), "The Heart of Rock and Roll" (#6), "If This Is It" (#6)—oh brrr, 6 - 6 - 6!—"Heart and Soul" (#8), and "Walking on a Thin Line" (#18). And I was surprised and even heartened to see that rock critic Robert Christgau was onto them too, awarding the album a B+ with a warm review that missed my own favorites on it for ones I don't like as much. Taste. What are you gonna do?

In retrospect, sure, there's something a little sickeningly healthy about the band and this album—the boyish Lewis himself who looks like a baseball pitcher flirting with a 20-win season, the jovial man cave sports bar milieu, putting "Heart" into the titles of the first two songs, glossing it all up with a kind of yacht-rock production sheen (credited to the band). When they talk about drugs, on the worst hit, it's by way of rejecting all known recreational drugs, except perhaps from the MDMA family, which was mostly still ahead and might have been what they were looking for. Except you just know these boy scouts would still have some reason for rejecting them too. It's just say no before there was just say no.

But the best of the album is often quite amazingly good, not to overcompensate at this late point. It still sounds better than it has any right to. The "Heart" songs churn and click and set the tone and pace for the album. It's not only fair but right to call it a reasonably pure distillation of rock 'n' roll (and no "and" and no ampersand rock 'n' roll means we're talking about the purest strains). "If This Is It" jumped out at me as the way to do an aching ballad, keeping it up-tempo for the love of everything good. I even had the eeriest feelings of déjà vu over the album closer "Honky Tonk Blues," a rave-up on a Hank Williams standard that somehow kept reminding me of the album Shake Some Action by fellow San Franciscans the Flamin' Groovies. That is highest praise from me, and yes, it's making me move the old bones around the room even in this pandemic.