More Huey Lewis and The News

• The band’s 1986 follow-up to Sports finally arrives on the site with Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound or very close to it on both sides
• The open, spacious soundstage and full-bodied tonality here are obvious for all to hear – huge, punchy, lively and rockin’ throughout
• This copy will show you just how big, lively and POWERFUL this music can be on the right pressing
• “This is by far one of the absolute best releases by Huey Lewis & the News. Powerful, hard-hitting, and quite emotional. . . for those of you who like hard-hitting, powerful rock music from the ’80s era.”

This vintage Chrysalis pressing has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records can barely BEGIN to reproduce. Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn’t showing signs of coming back. If you love hearing INTO a recording, actually being able to “see” the performers, and feeling as if you are sitting in the studio with the band, this is the record for you. It’s what vintage all analog recordings are known for — this sound.

If you exclusively play modern repressings of vintage recordings, I can say without fear of contradiction that you have never heard this kind of sound on vinyl. Old records have it — not often, and certainly not always — but maybe one out of a hundred new records do, and those are some pretty long odds.

What the Best Sides of Fore! Have to Offer Is Not Hard to Hear

• The biggest, most immediate staging in the largest acoustic space
• The most Tubey Magic, without which you have almost nothing. CDs give you clean and clear. Only the best vintage vinyl pressings offer the kind of Tubey Magic that was on the tapes even as late as 1986
• Tight, note-like, rich, full-bodied bass, with the correct amount of weight down low
• Natural tonality in the midrange — with all the instruments having the correct timbre
• Transparency and resolution, critical to hearing into the three-dimensional studio space

No doubt there’s more but we hope that should do for now. Playing the record is the only way to hear all of the qualities we discuss above, and playing the best pressings against a pile of other copies under rigorously controlled conditions is the only way to find a pressing that sounds as good as this one does.

What We’re Listening For on Fore!

• Energy for starters. What could be more important than the life of the music?
• Then: presence and immediacy. The vocals aren’t “back there” somewhere, lost in the mix. They’re front and center where any recording engineer worth his salt would put them.
• The Big Sound comes next — wall to wall, lots of depth, huge space, three-dimensionality, all that sort of thing.
• Then transient information — fast, clear, sharp attacks, not the smear and thickness so common to these LPs.
• Tight punchy bass — which ties in with good transient information, also the issue of frequency extension further down.
• Next: transparency — the quality that allows you to hear deep into the soundfield, showing you the space and air around all the instruments.
• Extend the top and bottom and voila, you have The Real Thing — an honest to goodness Hot Stamper.

TRACK LISTING

Side One

Jacob’s Ladder
Stuck With You
Whole Lotta Lovin’
Doing It All For My Baby
Hip To Be Square

Side Two

I Know What I Like
I Never Walk Alone
Forest For The Trees
Naturally
Simple As That

Rolling Stones Review

By the fall of 1985, after three years on the road, it was time for the band to get a grip – and time to write and record another album. “While we were following Sports around the world, I don’t think we were aware of what was happening,” says Cipollina. “Sports came out and just did a slow, steady climb during ’84 and ’85. The whole time we were on the road, I don’t think we knew how famous we were getting. When we finally stopped touring, this huge wave of reality came crashing in behind us.”

“Everybody and his brother was waiting for this album,” Lewis says. “I’d get in a room with a pencil and paper or a guitar, and it was ‘Well, I’ve got to write a song now. How about if I write one about this? Well, jeez, I already wrote about that. That was “The Heart of Rock and Roll.” Let’s see, how about this? Well I’ve already done that.’ And so on. You can’t really conjure these things up.”

Though they were now seasoned performers, Huey and the band were not adept at writing hits on demand. With his band – Cipollina, Hopper, guitarist-saxophonist Johnny Colla, guitarist Chris Hayes and drummer Bill Gibson – Lewis sweated out some new material. “We wrote about six songs that way,” says Lewis. “We’d write them and go record them, and they’d come out terrible. And I’d sit back and go, ‘The trouble with this is it’s a lousy song.”‘

After an agonizing six months of “work, work, work,” the breakthrough finally came. Hayes, 28, received a phone call from the band’s manager, Bob Brown, who was getting jittery. “I think we’re gonna need some more songs, man,” Brown said. “We need a tune.” Hayes’s reaction, he recalls, was “God, Bob, I don’t know. I’ve got a lot of things going. My wife’s pregnant right now. But let me see what I can do.” Hayes went out, bought himself a six-pack and went into the studio. “Three hours later,” he says, “I had ‘Stuck with You.’”

With that song, the members of the magic circle regained their charmed existence. “Chris gave me the tape, and the melody and words came straight out,” Lewis recalls. “And I thought, ‘That’s the way to do it. Don’t try to write so hard. Receive. . . . Let the ideas come.’ When you’re working so hard, there’s no room for ideas to flow into you. It sounds a little cosmic, but I really think that’s it. I wrote [the lyrics to “Stuck with You”] in fifteen minutes, driving out to rehearsal and back in one fell swoop.”

That song, which took Hayes and Lewis three hours and change to write, zoomed to the Number One spot on Billboard‘s Top 100; four weeks after that, Fore! was the Number One album. It heralded the return of Huey Lewis and the News. They would not be victims of what Cipollina calls “that huge record that kills you.”

— Michael Goldberg

5 Star Amazon Review

This is by far one of the absolute best releases by Huey Lewis & the News. Powerful, hard-hitting, and quite emotional. . . for those of you who like hard-hitting, powerful rock music from the ’80s era — but without all the nonsense and profanity — then I definitely would suggest that this album is for you. Don’t get me wrong, for there are other bands out there who are just as popular as Huey Lewis & the News, if not even more popular, such as Journey and Rush — whom I also love to this day, but Huey Lewis’s band is one of the groups I began listening to early on in my teenage years. Besides, they are still pretty much “The Heart of Rock & Roll”.

— “Aging & Lonely Romantic”