For myself, part history major and classic rock lover, Huey Lewis’ lecture in the University of Montana’s music recital hall on Monday couldn’t have been more exciting.
Not because the aging rocker packs arenas or sits atop pop charts, picks up chicks with a laser pointer or drives a Lamborghini. He doesn’t.
It was exciting because he was a Montanan telling the stories of some of rock ’n’ roll’s beginnings. And because afterward I was able to sit down and bullshit with him.
After he finished posing for pictures and signing autographs for students, I shook his hand and asked if he wouldn’t mind talking to a lowly student reporter.
“Sure, I’ll give you 10 minutes,” he replied. After more than an hour, we would finally leave the tiny room adjacent to the stage where I was able to interview him.
At first, I figured I would have to keep my questions concise, and I began to think up some as we sat down, he on a chair and myself three feet away on a sofa.
As he began to sit, “Rockists,” was all I heard.
“What?” I asked.
“Rockists,” he told me is a term for “critics who have an agenda.”
Reborn by recent criticisms and a New York Times article by Kelefah Sanneh, the term was meant to describe those of the late-1970s who demonized disco — and really, any kind of pop music made for money — while glorifying legendary rock heroes. According to Sanneh’s article, the movement became so powerful that in 1979 audiences burned thousands of disco records in Chicago’s Comiskey Park.
When he mentioned the effect of commerce on rock ’n’ roll the term came to mind, Lewis said. He figured there might have been some rockists in the crowd.
During his lecture, he had explained that rock was partially established by Chuck Berry to make money.
He had seen how white teenagers responded to other black musicians and tailored his music toward what was popular.
I could see how a rockist might be upset. With the definition out of the way, I looked up from my notes and noticed a small entourage of six or seven students huddled in the room we had chosen for the interview.
They had followed us in.
“You’ve never lectured in a classroom before?” I asked.
“I’ve never spoken to any university crowd before … If it paid a thousand times better I’d do it (professionally),” he said with a laugh. With the 10-minute pressure, I asked the all-important question: “What has had the greatest effect on rock ’n’ roll?”
“Television … is a huge thing,” Lewis said.
And, it had the most profound effect on music in the last 50 years.
It began when Elvis first stepped in front of the camera on the Steve Allen show (in July 1956), he said.
After that, the man’s performance was considered too risqué for network television, and when he was later recorded on the Ed Sullivan show, he was only half-featured.
“They couldn’t show him from the waist down,” Lewis said.
The Beatles utilized not only their appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show — it was, after all, how they broke through in America — but they later made the movie “A Hard Day’s Night” early in their career, Lewis said.
And he made it perfectly clear that the Beatles wouldn’t have gotten nearly as far without a man in business.
“(Beatles manager) Brian Epstein is phenomenal,” Lewis said. “He created the modern American music business.”
While Epstein isn’t well-known for being good with money, his image-savvy ideas, which included cleaning up the Beatles’ appearance by making them wear suits and even bowing in unison at the end of a show, made them more acceptable to the public.
It was a concept Lewis reiterated. The need to make money and get out into the public propelled rock ’n’ roll.
Epstein had the sense to hook the Beatles up with producer George Martin, Lewis said.
Martin expanded on multi-track recordings, Lewis said, by recording different sounds and instruments over the songs three or four or more times.
“All John Lennon had was a string guitar when he began to sing … ” and Lewis began strumming the air while singing with a decent Lennon impression (at least for a man with a deeper voice) … “I heard the news today, oh boy …” It was Martin who added a symphony to the song, Lewis said.
With the Beatles’ reputation of playing hard gigs and crawling out the pubs of Liverpool, I had to inquire if there was a unique sound in Montana.
He said he has lived in Montana since 1987 but hasn’t really heard anybody groundbreaking. During the 1960s, Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead could be considered the only real “San Francisco” sound, he said. Within 10 years, the sound that originated where he grew up had disappeared.
Meanwhile, Prince came surprisingly from Minnesota, he said.
“The greatest things are always exceptions,” he said. “The biggest bigots were in the South and that’s where Mark Twain came from.
”
Unfortunately for rockers like Lewis, there are few exceptions to the young standards for today’s musicians.
He told of how Joni Mitchell quit the music industry because she couldn’t sell a new album and Randy Newman called his own Oscar-winner “If I Didn’t Have You” a “piece of shit,” written in five minutes.
The musicians that top the charts have changed since the 1930s and ‘40s, which Lewis considers the “heyday” of music.
Then, it was about talent and sophistication.
After MTV struck in the 1980s, business practices changed.
“Before MTV … when you released an album, you toured,” he said.
“In each town you invited the radio stations and the journalists.”
If the radio stations liked the performance, they played it on the radio. “That’s how you broke the record,” he said.
Lewis considers Frankie Goes to Hollywood to be the first to break the standard. When the openly gay group came to America with a No. 1 hit in Britain, they decided to tour only a few major cities.
San Francisco was their first stop, Lewis said, and “they got creamed in the press.”
“All they had to do was not play live,” he said. With regular television play, they still had a hit.
While seemingly rockist in nature, Lewis followed his comment with defense of a practice that most rockists might find sacrilege and one he did himself: sampling drums.
“There’s arguably an audio reason for sampling drums,” he said. “Everybody does it in big coliseums.
”
Including a rockist’s favorite, Bruce Springsteen. Lewis remembered being backstage and hearing Max Weinberg of the E Street Band hit his snare for the first time, setting off a recording that he would play along with. Lewis said Weinberg discussed it with him after the show and said, “Doesn’t it sound good?
” Lewis doesn’t need the electronic help anymore. He said that if there are 10,000 people in his crowd, he’s good.
Other aged artists may still sell out stadiums, like Jimmy Buffett or the Grateful Dead.
But, he said, it is because they have an activity that brings the middle-aged coming back.
“You turn somebody onto LSD, and they’re never gonna forget you,” he said. And, “people want to get hammered.
”
While Buffett may make more money, Lewis still plays because “if you don’t work too much, you really have a lot of fun.”
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