EGN NEWS DESK
After Huey Lewis discovered {that a} syndrome of the internal ear referred to as Ménière’s illness had brought on him important listening to loss and left him unable to play or hear music, he confronted the troublesome job of getting to inform his associates and friends.
Lewis, whose wry lyrics and rumbling vocals powered Reagan-era pop hits like “I Want a New Drug” and “If This Is It,” turned to folks like Tico Torres, the longtime Bon Jovi drummer, whom he’d gotten to know on {golfing} journeys. But their dialog proved to be an surprising supply of the pragmatic philosophy that Lewis constructed his profession on.
Over a breakfast interview final month, Lewis delivered a vigorous, solo re-enactment of that fateful speak with Torres.
“He goes, ‘Hey, Huey, how ya doing?’” Lewis recalled. “I say, ‘Tico, it’s not good.’ And I start to clarify. I mentioned, ‘I’ve misplaced my listening to and I can’t hear pitch. I can’t sing.’”
“I’m telling him the entire story and he’s going like this” — right here, Lewis lowered his head, furrowed his bushy brows over his eyeglasses and shook his head in dismay. Slipping into an imitation of Torres’s New Jersey accent, Lewis mentioned, “When I end, he goes, ‘Whaddaya gonna do?’”
“So that’s my mantra,” Lewis continued. “What are you going to do? Really, it’s a reasonably good query. I don’t know. Still engaged on it.”
Lewis had already halted his performing profession earlier than he went public along with his analysis in 2020. But whereas his relationship to his artwork has essentially modified, he has continued to work on a brand new Broadway musical, “The Heart of Rock and Roll,” which is constructed round lots of the songs he made well-known with Huey Lewis and the News.
The musical, which opens on April 22 on the James Earl Jones Theater, spins Lewis’s tunes like “Hip to Be Square,” “Workin’ for a Livin’” and the title observe right into a fictional story set within the Eighties a couple of couple (performed by Corey Cott and McKenzie Kurtz) torn between pop-star ambitions and company alternatives.
It is a challenge greater than a decade within the making, one which started earlier than Lewis discovered in regards to the illness that has upended his life and given the musical an surprising sense of urgency.
As Lewis, 73, defined, “Zen Buddhists say you want three issues: Something to like, one thing to hope for and one thing to do.”
“I obtained a lot to like,” he continued. “So that is my hope-for and my to-do. It retains me from reflecting on my [expletive] listening to.”
A gregarious, exuberant storyteller, Lewis will readily regale a listener with tales from his picaresque profession, like his formative days in Clover, a Bay Area band that arrived in London simply in time to see their country-rock sound develop into swept away by the punk motion; or the hours he spent driving to set with Robert Altman when Lewis performed a task within the filmmaker’s 1993 ensemble comedy-drama “Short Cuts.”
Recalling a few of Altman’s recommendation, Lewis mentioned, “He advised me, ‘Learn the script. Read it every single day. Find your character to the purpose the place you recognize what he had for breakfast. And then don’t take heed to anyone.’”
Lewis’s fellow musicians describe him as devoted and dependable, which comes throughout in Bao Nguyen’s documentary “The Greatest Night in Pop,” in regards to the making of the 1985 all-star charity music “We Are the World.”
In response to electronic mail questions, Lionel Richie recalled Lewis coming onto the challenge on the final minute, taking on an element that had been written for Prince.
Even so, Richie mentioned, “I keep in mind him eagerly leaping in with confidence and endurance.”
“The Huey we noticed within the documentary all these years in the past is identical Huey we see immediately,” Richie added. “Fast ahead to the night time of the documentary premiere — he was nonetheless a nervous wreck over that night time whereas watching the screening! His humor, his compassion and his welcoming spirit are just some of the issues that haven’t modified because the day I met him.”
In particular person, Lewis can hear properly sufficient to conduct face-to-face conversations. He typically makes use of a discreet, disc-shaped listening system, which broadcasts wirelessly to a listening to help in his ear.
But when he’s in group settings, Lewis mentioned, it could possibly really feel as if he’s “in a cocoon.”
“I sit there like this,” he mentioned, pretending to nod and smile at nothing specifically. “Can’t hear a factor.”
Lewis can be candid in speaking in regards to the despair he felt after studying that he may by no means have the ability to carry out music once more. Though he had skilled listening to loss in his proper ear because the Eighties, he mentioned the listening to in his left ear grew to become all of the sudden and considerably distorted earlier than a present in Dallas in January 2018.
“I’m primarily a half-full man,” Lewis mentioned, however what adopted had been “essentially the most depressing six months of my life.”
“I contemplated my demise,” he mentioned. “I laid in mattress. I attempted acupuncture, cranial therapeutic massage, chiropractors, all-organic weight loss plan.” No matter which docs he spoke to or which cures he tried, Lewis mentioned all of them yielded the identical outcomes: “Nothing.”
In that interval, Lewis mentioned that speaking to his grown youngsters — his son, Austin, and his daughter, Kelly — is what finally gave him the boldness to maneuver ahead. “They mentioned, ‘Come on, Dad. Get away from bed, Dad,’” he defined.
When Lewis felt capable of resume work, “The Heart of Rock and Roll” — a number of years into its improvement — was prepared for him to return to it.
The manufacturing’s origins hint again to 2009 when the producer Tyler Mitchell contacted Lewis about turning his music right into a stage present.
Mitchell, who as soon as bagged the musician’s groceries as an adolescent once they each lived in Ross, Calif., mentioned a number of songs already had a story thread.
“His songs resonate with so many individuals as a result of they deal with plenty of relatable topics: following your desires versus taking part in it protected, love and relationships, friendship, blue-collar working,” Mitchell defined. In his idealized model of the present, he mentioned, Lewis’s songs would supply not simply the rating however “a large half of the particular storytelling.”
But Lewis, who has performed two stints as Billy Flynn within the Broadway revival of “Chicago,” had been approached with comparable affords and was cautious.
When it got here to the style of jukebox musicals — he and his artistic companions favor the time period “catalog musicals” — a present was not assured to be successful simply because it used widespread songs.
As Lewis put it, “If the Beach Boys can’t succeed, and Abba does? I’m simply saying. But what we neglect about ‘Mamma Mia!’ is that the ebook actually is nice.”
Lewis needed a present to inform a compelling story, and he felt he discovered that in a pitch from the screenwriter Jonathan A. Abrams (“Juror No. 2”).
Abrams mentioned he started developing the musical’s ebook by writing down lyrics to the group’s varied songs, hanging them on his wall and learning them in obsessive element.
“I stood again like I used to be taking a look at a portray,” he mentioned. “And phrases would soar out. ‘Hip’ and ‘coronary heart,’ and ‘soul’ and ‘energy’ and ‘love.’ From there, I used to be capable of begin to formulate what this factor is demanding to be.”
Lewis didn’t notably thoughts that the present doesn’t inform an autobiographical story, explaining that lots of his best-known songs had been solely ever loosely based mostly on his life.
“You know, the muse comes when she comes,” he mentioned. “It’s normally from one thing private. And once you start to write down the music, you exaggerate. You embellish.”
Readings and workshops adopted, however just a few weeks earlier than saying that the present would have its premiere on the Old Globe Theater in San Diego, Lewis skilled his abrupt listening to loss in Dallas.
The present’s collaborators discovered about this from Lewis quickly after.
“It was very, very painful to look at that occur to such an excellent one that loves music, and loves performing a lot,” Mitchell mentioned. “To have that a part of his life taken from him was actually troublesome.”
But Mitchell mentioned he didn’t ponder halting or canceling the plans for the musical. “Huey would by no means let that occur,” he mentioned. “Huey doesn’t surrender.”
At the Old Globe, Lewis was available to contribute — and to step again when he felt he wasn’t wanted, mentioned the musical’s director, Gordon Greenberg, who directed the 2016 Broadway manufacturing of “Holiday Inn.”
“He was there every single day in rehearsals, 9 a.m. with us, laughing and providing strategies,” Greenberg mentioned, “and likewise understanding, the place he mentioned, ‘Here’s what I’m seeing — however I’m going to simply allow you to guys go.’”
Lewis, who attended a number of performances of “The Heart of Rock and Roll” on the Old Globe, mentioned with a chuckle, “I stored eager to redirect — to vary issues. ‘Oh, no, he’s doing that every one mistaken.’”
He added, “I can’t get goal about it and that’s what I’ll do with this present ceaselessly. But I find it irresistible, and I like the place we’re going.”
Reviewing the Old Globe manufacturing for The Los Angeles Times, Charles McNulty wrote that one’s enjoyment of the musical will probably rely “on how nostalgic you might be for Huey Lewis & the News,” including that his personal “surreptitious survey of theatergoers suggests this sort of materials should have a nice tranquilizing impact.”
Lewis has contributed a brand new music for the Broadway manufacturing, referred to as “Be Someone,” for which he shares credit score along with his bandmate Johnny Colla and the present’s musical director, Brian Usifer.
“I sang the elements into my iPhone and despatched them to Johnny and Johnny demoed all of it up and tweaked it,” Lewis defined in a telephone interview, including that this was a brand new course of for him.
“I can sing to myself,” he mentioned, “however I can’t sing to something as a result of I can’t hear pitch. We simply modified the lyric two days in the past. You obtained to choose your battles.”
Lewis is contemplating cochlear implant surgical procedure and is scheduled to have a session this spring. He mentioned that in his day-to-day life, he has gained a higher appreciation for pastimes like studying and fishing, however that nothing will ever fairly replicate the pleasure of merely listening to a jazz album whereas he’s cooking at dwelling.
“I don’t miss doing 5 reveals per week,” he mentioned. “I don’t miss journey in any respect. But I do miss a present on occasion. And I miss the circus that was our present. But OK — take away singing. Take away performing. I can’t even get pleasure from music.”
And but, Lewis mentioned “The Heart of Rock and Roll” has given him a brand new appreciation for his personal music as a result of the present presents it in new methods and makes narrative connections throughout his physique of labor.
“There’s a character within the songs that I solely acknowledged once I noticed them carried out within the present,” Lewis mentioned. “I noticed, wow, there’s a thread that runs by all these. It’s not my story however there’s a sensibility that pervades every little thing.”
Seeing his decades-old music mirrored again at him, Lewis got here to comprehend it was not simply working however residing and thriving within the manufacturing.
“To see the songs tackle this different life,” he mentioned, “it’s like seeing your youngsters develop up and get a job.”
