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Album dossier / 1983

Sports

Huey Lewis and the News · Rock/Pop

Recorded December 1982-June 1983 at Fantasy Studios (Berkeley), Record Plant (Sausalito) and The Automatt (San Francisco), Sports was self-produced by the band after manager Bob Brown decided their own demos beat the outside producers under consideration -- a hard-fought choice, since their label Chrysalis was 7,000 miles away and couldn't really object. Engineer Jim Gaines and keyboardist Sean Hopper spent six hours building a simulated heartbeat sound for 'The Heart of Rock & Roll' after an ordinary kick drum take fell flat, while 'I Want a New Drug' and other tracks were re-recorded post-mix with a sequenced LinnDrum/bass line -- inspired by hearing the drum machine on Steely Dan's 'Hey Nineteen' -- after Huey Lewis felt the organic version wasn't grooving even after Bob Clearmountain mixed it repeatedly. 'Heart and Soul' was salvaged from the shelf after Lewis overheard The BusBoys cutting their own version of the same song in an adjacent studio and decided his take 'had merit'; when Chrysalis was sold to CBS mid-release, the band and manager withheld the master tapes rather than hand them to an uncertain distributor. Sports spent 160 weeks on the Billboard 200, hit #1, and spun off five top-10 singles including two Grammy-nominated hits.