On Huey Lewis and Amy Winehouse

By now you’re well aware that Winehouse passed away this weekend. Like everyone else I’d been watching her slow decline through the years. Caught up in the tangled erratic mess which so characterizes drug addiction, Winehouse was somewhat of a darling of the gossip media. As those gossip blogs reveled in the rubber-necking, it saddened most of us to see the images of her thinly wobbling about even as the music – that muscular force of a voice she had – pumped out of the speakers. The music, if not the drugs as well, seemed to be her version of an out-of-body experience, pulling from a guttural level. There was pain in her singing, to be sure, but there was a transcendence about it too. Maybe it was the stark honesty with which she sang about not wanting to go to rehab. When she sang “I ain’t got 70 days,” you kind of believed her. 

SIDENOTE: A couple of years ago, the song appeared on an episode of Glee, where the New Directions’ arch rivals Vocal Adrenaline delivered an impressive – if inappropriate, given these are supposed to be high school kids – performance of the song. There was athletic choreography, suggestive moves between male and female “students”, and decent singing. Though Glee tends to give tired songs a treatment which revives them (“Hey Soul Sister,” anyone?), I found the performance of “Rehab” to just be depressing. Not to harp too hard on my “it’s never just music” rant I’ve been on lately, but here again was a faction of the mainstream completely missing the point. “Rehab” is a dark song.  

I’m still not sure what they were going for here. I can almost see the interesting choreographic challenge of creating something not-completely-spasmadic to accompany this sped-up version. But… really? I hope Amy got some bank out of it, at least. 

Anyway. 

Under no other circumstances would I have been thinking about Amy Winehouse during a Huey Lewis concert. But, I’d seen the comments on Facebook (how I receive most of my breaking news these days) and was ruminating over whether or not I felt it was surprising or more sad than her continuing life – living long in the dark teetering-tottering cyclone of her addiction and, I imagine, depression. 

And there onstage was Huey Lewis. Lewis always looked old to me. In the ’80s, when he hit with The News, in videos for “Doin’ It All for My Baby” and “Workin’ for the Weekend,” I always thought he must have been 40 or something (old to a kid, and for a new pop star). In his Miami Vice getup. I was always rooting for Huey against the oversexed drama of his 20-something hair-band peers. The News – aside from being one of my favorite names for a band – had a full-on horn section. There was some soul in there, if played down in favor of synthesizers (excepting the occasional requisite ’80s sax solo). Indeed, decades later, Lewis has come through the various water slide-like turns of a life in the music industry, and has released an album which exemplifies his soul roots. 

There’s that saying about how living long is the greatest revenge. Not sure who Lewis would be getting revenge on, but there’s something to be said for getting to be old enough where you can look back on your youth and laugh. I reckon it’s that thing which makes us sad when we see young artists fall to the heavy hand of their addiction before they manage to reach an age where they can see the path away from it. Maybe it’s not the music we’ll never hear that we mourn, but that the artist herself won’t ever achieve that particular perspective. Long as they live, though, some people can just never get there.

So, I’ve been thinking about longevity. We can only speculate what it may have been like to watch – via the gossip media, I’m sure – Winehouse struggle even longer. We can only hope she would have disappeared for a while, returned in her 40s or 50s for a string of world-wide dates, and blown all our minds with some even-more-fueled-by-life soul music with that formidable gut-punching voice of hers. Returned with a jazz album, or something further out of left field. An answer to “rehab” which dissects her successful journey out of the dark, like what Eminem did with Recovery.

We as a species like to see each other fail, if only for how good it feels when that same person comes back around to show they’ve still got it. We’re fans of redemption. We cheer for the team. 

It’s hard not to cheer for Huey Lewis – never the kind of guy you would have freaked out over if you saw him at Target shopping for socks. But up there on that stage, he’s made it to 61 years old. He conquered the music industry when there was one to conquer, through whatever drugs and booze he tried – or didn’t – and earned the right to sing the kind of songs he wants to sing. To play a whole set for people who came to see him do “Power of Love,” but keep the hit(s) until the very last minute. And then to only play three or four of them. This isn’t a casino tour. Rihanna was on that stage this summer and, speaking of longevity, Bob Dylan tomorrow.