That bassist, Mario Cipollina, was also the vampire in the “Heart and Soul” video.

I would say the two best HL&TN songs are “Heart and Soul” and “The Power of Love,” and at the time, you couldn’t get that last one on any album except the soundtrack to Back to the Future. (Now it’s on various News hits packages, of course.)

If I’m not mistaken, Sean Hopper was the only one of the News who played on the Elvis Costello album (he was one of a half-dozen keyboardists) but my favorite New was the goth bassist who brought snakes to the beach.

was “The Power of Love” ever on an actual Huey album? wasn’t that their best by a mile?

From a copy of this video that was on Youtube a couple years ago that was taped when this video was new, I know that this video was an MTV exclusive. That, along with the placement on this countdown above other videos that did well when they were on MTV, and that it didn’t place quite as highly on the Billboard year end Hot 100, suggests a likely top 3 peak on the MTV top 20. What’s somewhat jarring, or perhaps telling, is that from their next album on, none of their videos would receive noticeable rotation on MTV, and this was starting in spring ’91 with “Couple Days Off”. They’d been relegated to VH1, pretty much.

Still, they had a pretty good run in the ’80s. (I have a soft spot for “Heart And Soul”.) And this is at least one of two acts on this countdown played on the TV show “Chuck”. (Hint: Another one was played a few weeks ago on the season premiere.) In one of the early season 2 eps. (can’t look up the title right now, unfortunately), “Hip to Be Square”, “Power of Love” and “Do You Believe In Love?” were all played at key moments. It’s been said that Huey Lewis pointing to Josh Schwartz at a concert the latter attended in the ’80s was formative on the influence of music in his writing, so there you go.

I’d half-agree with you that Sports doesn’t hold up tremendously. But the album you don’t mention here — the transition between that breakthrough and this ’88 mediocrity — was 1986′s Fore!, the one where they really became a punchline. If Sports contains a couple of their least embarrassing hits – I still have a soft spot for synth-rock bootyshaker “Heart and Soul” and Ray Parker Jr. roadmap-to-a-hit “I Want a New Drug” – Fore! is so bland and lousy, it practically begged Bret Easton Ellis to invent Patrick Bateman for the sole purpose of making fun of it.

Fore! was HL&tN’s X&Y, the moment where a hardworking if limited-talent act capitalizes massively on gradually increasing fame. If the Billboard album chart had made No. 1 debuts as easy back then as they are now, it likely would’ve debuted there; as it was, I think it shot to the top in just two or three weeks, a virtual No. 1 debut. And the lazy, truly awful single “Stuck with You” rode to No. 1 on the Hot 100 so fast, it was clear radio program directors weren’t thinking much before cashing their summer ’86 payola checks/coke shipments. The album spawned five Top 10 hits, almost none of which you could sing a line of now — except maybe “Hip to Be Square,” again thanks to the immortality of über-Lewis fan Bateman. Everything that was wrong with ’80s music was encapsulated on Fore!

I bring all this up because “Perfect World,” by the time it limped onto the charts, was basically a card-puncher for Lewis et al., a victory lap after a lazy album that did absurdly well relative to its musical merits. Arguably, the lite/white-reggae beat of this thing is Lewis trying — it’s about as much effort as he/they needed to put into a hit at that point. So I guess we should…thank him? for breaking a sweat, however modest.

For some reason, this was my Dad’s favorite Huey Lewis song. I think he asked me to put it on a mixtape for him once, and I recall complying. But then, HL&tN were Dad-rock pretty much from the start, right?