Huey Lewis used to be a renegade, and now, 30 years on from the release of the breakthrough album “Sports” and backed by the indispensable News, he’s taking a look back at his unruly youth with an anniversary tour that calls at Irving Plaza tomorrow night.
Once a laughingstock in the eyes and ears of music snobs, the band has returned to favor in recent years, thanks in part to a recent Funny or Die skit in which Lewis lampoons Christian Bale in “American Psycho.” And it’s impossible to deny Lewis, 62, wrote some seriously catchy tunes back in the day.
Haters be damned, because as Lewis tells The Post, he’s too hip to be square.
Although Huey Lewis and the News are a San Francisco band, you have roots in and around in New York, correct?
I was born in New York City but I moved to California when I was 3. But I was at prep school in Lawrenceville, NJ, from 13 to 17, and I came to New York City whenever I could. I remember seeing the Grateful Dead at Café au Go Go in 1966. My friends and I had fake ID cards so we could get into McSorley’s.
Why do you think Huey Lewis and the News went through such a long period of derision, especially during the 1990s and 2000s?
After we broke through, we were on MTV all the time. I think it was Ernie Kovacs who said that the first axiom of American showbiz is to find a good horse and beat it to death. That happened to us a little bit.
Do you think your treatment in “American Psycho” was unfair?
When the book came out, I read the three-page dissertation on us. [Brett Easton Ellis] had it about right! When they made the movie, they came to us and said, “Can we use your song? We’ll pay you.” We said yes because we knew Willem Dafoe was in it, and we were told it was more of an arty picture.
A week before the premiere, they called us again and said they wanted the song on a soundtrack album. We politely declined because we weren’t obliged to do that, and the rest of the album didn’t seem like a good package. The day before the premiere, they issued a press release that said, “Huey Lewis had seen the movie and it was so shockingly violent that he pulled the song from the soundtrack,” which was complete fiction! I had to boycott the film for a while, but it’s fine now.
You have a reputation among groupies for having, uh, legendarily large man-junk. Between us guys, is it true, and how big is it?
The truth is, I have an enormous penis. I just don’t have it with me right now. But I do have one, and I do brandish it on occasion. At least the rumor isn’t that I have the smallest penis in the world.