A jaunty beat, a bunch of white guys on a peach-colored rooftop, and a closeup on a pair of zebra-print shoes: why, it’s Huey Lewis and the News! Huey Lewis was still having hits in 1988? Apparently so–and this wasn’t even his last top-forty single. Unlike countdown last-gaspers Pat Benatar and Kenny Loggins, he had four more hits, extending all the way through 1993.
After the footwear closeup, we get some establishing shots of the band before turning our attention to Lewis. He’s got a jacket, a white shirt with oversized clasps, and a chin that looks like the child-size portion of Jay Leno’s. At age 38, his hairline’s starting to recede, but he’s marching in place like he owns that rooftop. With a triumphant fist pump, Lewis struts up to the microphone stand and sings, “Everybody’s looking for that perfect world.”
This song’s relentless mediocrity sent me back to the News’ greatest hits, to see if they were any better. (I listen so you don’t have to.) I liked Sports when I was a kid, and it’s better than “Perfect World,” but none of it holds up very well. The songwriting was the group’s strongest suit: at their best, they delivered catchy, well-crafted pop-rock songs. Lewis was a generic vocalist prone to husky shouting. The News were an okay bar band, and some of them get rock ‘n’ roll merit badges for playing on Elvis Costello’s My Aim Is True. As far as I can tell, Huey Lewis and the News got over on regular-guy bonhomie.
“What you going to do when one and one makes three?” Lewis sings. He sells the hell out of this not-very-good lyric, flashing up one finger and then three, and looking alarmed by what he finds on his right hand. It’s genuinely amusing; Lewis wasn’t a very talented lead singer, but he did a good job as frontman, and his shrugging and mugging played well on MTV.
Lots of shots of the News–there’s five of them plus Lewis, all looking like middle management, or maybe grocery-store-owners. In the background, we can see rolling green hills, probably in the vicinity of the Bay Area. Lewis waggles his finger at the camera and then changes into a black polka-dot shirt, now appearing in the foreground so he can do some more finger-waggling. We cut to a sideways shot of Lewis and the two guitarists, stepping back and forth from their microphones–the angle that was pure accidental poetry for the final minute of “Found a Job” in Stop Making Sense. Here it’s more forced, an effort to do a white-man soul revue.
At this point, a full minute and twenty seconds into the video, the MTV “Top 100 of 1988″ logo appears in the upper left-hand corner, along with the #59 placement. This is supposed to appear at the same time as the credits block in the lower left-hand corner; i.e., about five to ten seconds after the clip starts. Somebody in MTV production (a) was asleep at the switch (b) couldn’t be bothered to roll the tape again to fix it.
A stray piece of newspaper flies across the set and onto the bassist. He heroically plays on. The keyboardist is rocking some crazy fringe on a black leather shirt. Lewis waggles his finger again! This time he’s looking into the camera as he sings “They’ll talk about you.” I would rank Lewis as #2 on the list of lead singers most reliant on hand gestures, behind only Cy Curnin of the Fixx, who always looked like he’d rather be doing a puppet show.
More newspaper flies onto the set, this time landing on Lewis. Now he goes up to the lip of the “roof,” and we get an over-the-shoulder camera angle, revealing that he is actually singing to a vast garbage dump. Let’s give the band the benefit of the doubt and assume this wasn’t meant to be an expression of contempt for their fans. It’s a carefully groomed dump–lots of trash, but nothing too specific or unappetizing. Ah, a simpler time, when environmental concerns were more focused on waste disposal than global warming.
More trash flies at the band, and I wish we could see the production assistant who’s dropping the flotsam in front of a giant fan. Lewis ducks and gamely pretends to be surprised. We rotate through more shots of the band; this time around, there’s always a sea of trash in the frame. Lewis throws his microphone from one hand to the other and spins on his heel.
A bulldozer plows through the trash. A band member (a New?) has switched to trumpet: actually, he’s playing two trumpets at the same time, and has four saxophones slung around his body. The lead guitarist grimaces as he plays the solo. The camera pulls back, revealing that the garbage is now dwarfing the “roof” that rests on top of it. The band sings merrily on top of a pile of trash, and then rides the bulldozer into the sunset, waving at the camera.
“Perfect World” went all the way to #3 on the Billboard charts. You can watch the video here.
posted 4 February 2010 in 1988. 4 comments
