Heart Of Rock & Roll I Want A New Drug Workin' For A Livin' Huey Lewis & The News

The Heart of Rock & Roll Album: Sports (1983)
I Want A New Drug Album: Sports (1983)
Workin' For A Livin' Album: Picture This (1982)
by Huey Lewis & The News

The Heart of Rock & Roll is written by Huey Lewis along with the band's guitarist/horn player Johnny Colla, this is another fun, well-crafted hit song for the Huey Lewis & the News, one of their 12 US Top 10 hits in the '80s. It's about how rock music is alive and well all over the United States, similar in style to the Motown classic "Dancing in the Street," which also features powerful horns and shout-outs to lots of cities.

Cleveland was the city that inspired this song. In 2013, Lewis told Billboard: "'The Heart of Rock & Roll' was written driving out of Cleveland. We'd heard that Cleveland was this great rock and roll town, and we're from San Francisco - how can Cleveland be anything? We went to play the Agora Ballroom and had this amazing gig. On the bus out of town I was looking at the skyline of Cleveland and I said, 'You know what boys? The heart of rock and roll really is in Cleveland. Hey, that's a pretty good song title.'

Later I thought it through and went, 'The heart of rock and roll is still beating.'

The idea is that, although the music business is in New York and LA, good rock and roll is where you find it."

Cleveland had a rich rock history with a claim to the first rock concert. It's also where the DJ Alan Freed popularized the phrase "rock and roll," but the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame didn't open there until 1995, 12 years after this song was released.

Different versions of The Heart of Rock & Roll were sent to radio stations with nearby cities inserted into the lyrics. For instance, if you lived in New Mexico, you might hear Huey mention that the Heart of Rock n' Roll is beating in Santa Fe. This geotargeting was very effective in an age when pop radio airplay was largely responsible for sales. The local cities were mentioned near the end, so you would listen through the whole song to hear it.

When Huey Lewis went in the studio to customize The Heart of Rock & Roll for different cities, he happily sang the names of many American metros, but he drew the line at Canada.

In a 2023 interview with Lewis, he told the story:

"They said, 'Now we're going to do Canada.' I said, 'Canada?!' And they go, 'Halifax.' I just couldn't do Halifax. I said, 'Look guys, I can't do that. Because the heart of rock n' roll can't be in frickin' Halifax, OK?' That's when I cut it off."

Later, Lewis learned that Halifax really did rock.

"The irony is, on the very next tour, we rehearsed The Heart of Rock & Roll up there in Halifax in a hockey arena - we rehearsed our whole show. We were there for like a week, and I got to see the town. There was this little music bar there, and there was this great blues band playing... in Halifax, Canada! So, I said to myself, 'Wow. Halifax really is the heart of rock and roll.'"

After the heartbeat drums that open The Heart of Rock & Roll, there's a clap that sounds like it came from a drum machine but is actually a hand clap drenched in echo. The band loves hand claps - check out the bridge on "Heart And Soul."

The Heart of Rock & Roll was the third of five singles from Sports, the third Huey Lewis & the News album. All of the singles were hits, and the album went on to sell over 7 million copies in America, putting the band of firm financial footing for the first time, which was very important to them - these guys were all in their 30s and had been working in music since the early '70s.

The music video for The Heart of Rock & Roll was directed by Edd Griles and shows the band larking about in New York City and Los Angeles. In New York, they see a punk show; in LA they check out some glam rockers. In between, we see the band performing in a more traditional style.

Huey Lewis & the News opened the Grammy Awards in 1985 with a performance of The Heart of Rock & Roll, which was nominated for Record Of The Year. It lost to Tina Turner's "What's Love Got To Do With It."

In 1985, the band released a concert film called Huey Lewis & the News - The Heart of Rock 'n' Roll, which was sold on Laser Disc and VHS. Directed by Bruce Gowers, it was recorded on March 19, 1985 at the Kabuki Theater in San Francisco. In 1986, the video won the Grammy Award for Best Music Video, Long Form - the only Grammy win in the band's history.

Despite their phenomenal success (or maybe because of it), the band took some heat for making songs that some critics labeled "uninspiring." Lewis addressed this criticism in a 1987 interview with San Francisco Chronicle, saying, "Nowhere is it written that rock and roll has to be political or change the world. One thing rock and roll has to be is true. And if it rings true, it's right."

The "drug" that Lewis sings about in I Want A New Drug; is women. They don't have the side effects most drugs do: dry mouth, red eyes, make your face break out, etc.

Huey Lewis offered this explanation in a Rolling Stone interview: "The whole meaning of 'I Want a New Drug' is that drugs aren't a part of life. They're just superficial. They're nothing about life. Life is love. Love is the answer, man."
Lewis wrote this song with his guitarist, Chris Hayes. They were the primary songwriters in the band along with multi-instrumentalist Johnny Colla.

This was one of five hit songs from the Sports album, an '80s landmark that sold 7 million copies in America. It was one of just five #1 albums in 1984, claiming a week in a year dominated by Thriller, Born in the U.S.A., Purple Rain and the Footloose soundtrack.

None of the five hits were huge, but they were each released about three months apart, starting with "The Heart of Rock & Roll" in late 1983 and ending with "Walking on a Thin Line" late in 1984, keeping Huey Lewis & the News on the charts and on the air for well over a year with a single album. "I Want a New Drug" was the second single, peaking at #6 in March 1984.

When the Sports singles ran out, the band released the biggest hit of their career: "The Power of Love," a #1 smash in 1985 from the movie Back To The Future. Ergo the video, and if the connection has not been made... Doc. Brown and Marty McFly are Rick Sanchez and Morty Smith.

Lewis sued Ray Parker Jr. for stealing the melody to I Want A New Drug from his hit "Ghostbusters." They settled out of court, but Parker sued Lewis in 2001 after Lewis revealed in a VH1 Behind The Music special that Parker paid him as part of the agreement.

In the I Want A New Drug video, Lewis wakes up bleary-eyed from a hangover, gets dressed, and drives his sports car to an awaiting yacht. He then takes a helicopter to a concert where he's performing. The joke is that Lewis was never into the hedonism available to a rock star such as himself. Where he finds happiness is on stage, performing his music.

MTV was three years old at the time and had become a crucial marketing vehicle. Huey Lewis & the News understood its influence and made videos for all their singles, becoming one of the most popular acts on the network. The iconic shot from "I Want A New Drug" is the one where Lewis sticks his head in a sink full of ice water and we see him from below with his eyes open, singing the song while submerged. Who needs special effects!

Huey Lewis explained in the book Playing Back The '80s: A Decade Of Unstoppable Hits that "I Want A New Drug" came to him, understandably, in the midst of a hangover. "I had a long night, shall we say. I woke up and I had an early appointment with Bob Gordon, my then-publishing attorney, at like nine in the morning. I got up and I remember I had a headache. I drove to his place and I had the idea on the way. I walked in and I said, 'Bob, do you have a pen and pencil?' I wrote down most of the song."

Lewis also explained in that book about the struggles that the band had finding the right feel for the song. "I shared it with some of the guys. We made a couple false starts with the song, to be honest with you. People thought it was gonna be OK, but I didn't. I remember really believing in the lyric, and thinking this song wasn't good enough. So I finally got up the nerve to tell the guys that I didn't think that we were going in the right direction. Finally, I remember I was at home and Chris Hayes (the News' lead guitarist at the time) called me up on the phone and he said, 'I got it. 'I Want A New Drug,' I got it. I got a great riff.' I said, 'Come on over.' So he came over and we had a little cassette player, he played it and I sang it and that was it."

Weird Al Yankovic did a parody of this song titled "I Want A New Duck." When Al appeared in a parody of American Psycho, he is killed by Huey Lewis, who exclaims, "Try parodying one of my songs now, you stupid bastard."

Yankovic doesn't approach his parodies lightly, however. In Lily Hirsch's book Weird Al: Seriously, Yankovic's mentor Dr. Demento uses "I Want A New Duck" as an example of Al's exhaustive attention to detail in his work. "He spent hours at the library researching ducks, writing down duck facts in a big blue notebook he carried everywhere he went," he recalled.

The movie Back To The Future went into production with "I Want A New Drug" as a temporary track until a more suitable song was written, which turned out to be "The Power of Love."

An animated variation of the I Want A New Drug video appears in the 2005 episode of The Simpsons, "Midnight Rx" when Marge and Lisa visit a shady prescription drug manufacturer and watch a video with this voiceover:

"The mighty Amazon river. The natives had a word for it. Then we got rid of the natives and no one remembers that word. But here are some words everyone remembers by Huey Lewis & the News..."

At this point, the "I Want A New Drug" video comes on, offering a pleasant distraction from the realities of the prescription drug market.

According to Lewis, his record company was wary of the track's title. "They were afraid of it, the record company, because it had the word 'drug' in it," he told Jim Beviglia. "I remember we played Roseland Ballroom in New York City and the label came out and everybody went crazy to that song. Because of that, I convinced them to make it the second single. But they insisted on the record, on the little 45, and I still have one, that it's called 'I Want A New Drug (Called Love).'"
Lewis has a special affinity for "I Want A New Drug" because of how it showcases the News. "It was a band song," he said. "It's all about the band. There's no way a bunch of LA songwriters write a song like that for somebody. Whoever sings that song, wrote it. That's what was so good about it for us. It didn't fit a hit single formula."

Huey Lewis & the News crafted the songs on Sports for hit potential because getting their songs on the radio was the best way to get them heard. They produced the album themselves, which gave them the freedom they needed.

"Our manager fought for that, and we were allowed probably because we were signed to Chrysalis Records, a very small British label 6,000 miles away, and they couldn't control us," Lewis told Songfacts. "We knew we needed a hit, so we aimed every song right at radio. But we wanted to make those commercial decisions ourselves because we knew we were going to have to live with them."

"Every song on Sports was pretty much aimed at radio, but they're all different genres," he added. "'Bad Is Bad' is kind of a bluesy a cappella number, 'Honky Tonk Blues' is a country song, 'I Want a New Drug' is a power rocker. We knew we needed a hit record but we didn't know we were going to have five of them."

A model named Signy Coleman plays the girl in the video who shows up at a Huey Lewis & the News concert after he spots her during the day riding a bike and lounging on a boat. She's local to San Francisco and first appeared in the video for "Heart And Soul," where she showed great chemistry with Lewis.

According to Coleman, the concert footage was shot at a real show, which posed some problems. "Girls who are Huey fans are hardcore Huey fans," she told Noblemania. "Right before they were about to start they walked me across the stage and put me dead center and there were girls in the front row of the audience who had all kinds of unladylike things to say to me. I won't repeat them! The crew had to handpick a group of people to surround me so I didn't get my hair ripped out, particularly when Huey leaned in to kiss me."

On "I Want A New Drug," the band used a drum machine called a LinnDrum, which had recently come on the market. They were careful to blend it with a wash of real instruments (including real drums) so it wouldn't sound artificial. This was a key component to the sound for the Sports album.

"That's really what we were going for on every song, the old and the new at once," Lewis states. "The songs are written sort of old style, but we wanted to give them a bit of a modern sheen, and we did that with machines."

Huey Lewis wrote Workin' For A Livin' with his guitar player Chris Hayes, who was with the band from 1980-2001. The song is a straightforward tribute to the working man, but it took on new meaning when the band ran into problems with their record company in late 1982. Huey Lewis & the News had released two albums for Chrysalis Records, but after recording Sports, Chrysalis started crumbling.

The band knew they had a great album, and years in the business taught them that struggling record companies are where great albums go to die. So instead of handing the tapes over to Chrysalis, the band kept them and went on tour, which they called the "Workin' for a Livin'" tour. Since their only real hit was "Do You Believe In Love?," they struggled to fill small venues, worked six nights a week, and stayed at cheap hotels while playing songs that would later become huge hits. Once they were convinced Chrysalis had sorted out their issues, the band turned over the tapes and Sports was released in September 1983.

Garth Brooks recorded a duet of Workin' For A Livin' with Huey Lewis for his 2007 album The Ultimate Hits. This version made #19 on the Country charts.

Workin' For A Livin' plays on the season 3 premiere of Stranger Things, "Suzie, Do You Copy?," while Nancy rushes to her job at the newspaper office.