Ten Albums: Number 1 - Huey Lewis and the News - Sports

In time of pandemics, we all seem to have a bit more free time. For me, the cancelling of, well, everything has really killed my writing routine, where most of my writing was done at coffee shops while my kids were at sports practice. I haven't been able to adjust and man is it frustrating.

But a friend tagged me in one of those annoying, yet fun Facebook challenges to post 10 albums that have influenced my musical taste. One record a day for ten days. No explanation, no review, just the over.

Yeah, I can't do that without an explanation. Plus, it gives me something to write about. So, here, over the next ten days will be my ten albums followed by a bunch of words.

Huey Lewis and the News - Sports

My first record. Well, besides Sing along with Sesame Street.

I vividly remember riding my bike up to The Flip Side (okay, no one called it "The" Flip Side, it was just Flip Side) with my brother to buy this album and the Weird Al Yankovic "Eat It" single. I can assure you that my brother was not buying a pop rock album as he was more of a progressive rock fan (more on that later) but he was there to help introduce me to record stores. Even when he wasn't directly influencing my musical tastes, he was helping me dip my toe into the wonderful world of music.

By the time I bought this album, "The Heart of Rock & Roll" had been played millions of times on radio, and the video was a staple on MTV, and saxophone solos were cool, a trend that continued throughout the eighties until alternative music killed it. We had a record playing in our living room and I listened to this record hundreds of times there. Then I got a boom box and I wanted to listen to this in my room. So I put a cassette tape in the boom box, stuck it up to one of the speakers of the stereo attached to the record player and dropped the needle on Sports. I paused the tape to flip sides of the record, restarted the recording and in forty minutes, I had all nine songs of Sports on side a of a Maxwell CR-90. Then my brother came home. I proudly showed him what I did. He shook his head and told me to play the tape. I rewound to the beginning and started the tape. It took seemingly forever before the heartbeat into to The Heart of Rock & Roll to start. Plus, it didn't sound right, like half the parts of the song were missing. That's how I learned about stereo. Turns out, different parts of the music come out of each speaker. My brother taught me how to record correctly, and for countless nights, I listened to that Maxwell CR-90 through my crappy Kmart bought boom box, propped between the headboard of my bed and my pillow. I usually feel asleep before "I Finally Found a Home" and always woke up to the click of the play button stopping as the tape reached it's end.


"Walking On a Thin Line" is my favorite song on the album. I also loved the closing song, a cover of Hank Williams's "Honky Tonk Blues." But there are no tracks to skip on this album.

The picture is the original record I bought at Flip Side way back in1984. I still have it and I'm listening to it while writing this. Back when album art matter because, well, records were huge, this was a classic. Huey in the foreground, jacket slung over his shoulder, top button undone, skinny 80s tie slightly loose, the rest of band seated at stools around the bar eyes focused at the camera,  bassist Mario Cipollina working the bar, wearing the sunglasses he always wore, a San Francisco 49ers game on the TV. Then, flip to the back, everyone but Cippolina is gone from the bar, and the band is shown on TV, the previously clean rack of pool balls in motion across the pool table.  Cool. The adult in me now sees the bottle of Maker's Mark and wants a bourbon with a splash of coke.

I still know every word of every song on this record. I still love it. I still listen to it. I've never seen Huey Lewis and the News live and probably never will, now that Huey is dealing with Meniere's disease, which damaged his hearing making him unable to perform. But I'll always have Sports. The Heart of Rock & Roll is still beating.