The first stop on Huey Lewis’ promotional tour for the 30th-anniversary edition of “Sports” was ABC’s “Dancing With the Stars.” It provided a bit of heavenly demographic match-making: “DWTS” appeals to a significant audience–nearly 11 million viewers–outside the 18-49 target. It’s a crowd that would remember the appeal of Lewis and the News when they were in their 20s, the string of hits that included “The Heart of Rock ‘n’ Roll” and “If This Is It” and numerous videos in heavy rotation on MTV.
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It’s also an album most people bought on cassette or vinyl.
It’s an intriguing time for any album celebrating its 30th anniversary that didn’t have a quarter-century commemoration. In the years between 1983 and 1986, the CD was in its infancy, accounting for less than 6% of sales, and when buyers were looking to refresh their collections at the end of the ’80s, “Sports”wasn’t likely to be the type of album they were buying in the new format.
Regardless of the format this time around, the sales results of Universal Music Enterprises’ 30th-anniversary “Sports” could be a solid gauge of how well a formerly massive hit (the RIAA certified it seven-times platinum in 1987) can sell in a different period of transition. It’s also a test of using TV to target an audience outside the demographic that advertisers desire; this is about selling music to people who owned it long ago and may well have forgotten the album’s appeal.
Not all hits are created equally, of course, and there are several unique elements to “Sports.” It scored four top 20 singles on the Billboard Hot 100 within a year of its release in September 1983 and ranked No. 2 on 1984’s year-end Billboard 200, behind “Thriller.”
“We aimed all the songs to be hit singles,” Lewis says of the band’s strategy for “Sports,” the group’s third album. “FM radio was already programmed, so you [had to land] one of those 20 spots. We aimed all those songs at radio. They were all different so as to not repeat ourselves.”
The band members had another big advantage: control. As producers, they combined the modern-drum machines, synthesizers–and, according to Lewis, the “R&B kind of instruments.” The technological infatuation that has dated so many ’80s recordings is held in check here. “‘Bad Is Bad’ was an epiphany, production-wise,” he says of the group’s modern twist on a doo-wop blues. “The cake was built with technology, but the icing was always older styles and instruments.” On top of that, the members produced their own videos as well.
The album’s sales popularity, however, seemed to have ended in the ’80s, as it has sold only 473,000 units since 1991, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Again, a good reason to get on TV and tour in support of a catalog item.
The group will next visit “Live With Kelly & Michael” just prior to the May 14 release of the expanded edition and then perform on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” the day after it comes out. The band will perform the album in full–plus other songs, as it’s less than 40 minutes long–during a spring/summer tour that’s expected to approach 50 dates.