By: Brad Gallagher
We all know the song by Huey Lewis and the News off their third album, “Sport”, titled “The Heart Of Rock And Roll”. We all just love it’s heart beat intro and fade out. What brilliance. It has a great back beat, and a really cool saxophone solo by Johnny Colla, not to mention tremendous vocals, and it even mentions my home town of Philadelphia, “The Liberty Town”. But did you know that “The Heart of Rock and Roll is Still Beating” were not the original words of the song.
As The Story Goes:
Back in the early 1980’s there was a lot of banter within the rock industry about what city had the best rock scene. Of course, whichever city any particular rock artist was from was the best rock city in their own mind.
Artists from New York claimed that their town had the best music scene. They had that cool “modern music” that they played “with a lot of style”. And of course, as Lewis said, “where else can you do a half a million things all at a quarter to three”?
And artists from Southern California who played “that hard rock music” believed that their music scene was the best in the country. After all, they had the sunset strip and the neon lights, and they played their music with a “lot of flash”.
Bands form all over the country, “DC, San Antone and the Liberty Town, Boston and Baton Rouge, Tulsa, Austin, Oklahoma City, Seattle, San Francisco, too” all claimed that their city was the best rock city in the country.
And, Huey Lewis was no different. Being from San Francisco, he maintained that San Francisco was the country’s best rock city. After all, San Francisco was the home of artists such as of The Grateful Dead, Cream, and Jimmy Hendrix. At that time, however, the gurus of the music industry all said that Cleveland actually had the best rock scene in the country. But Lewis could not bring himself to believe that Cleveland was the best rock and roll city in the country. After all it was just a small city in Ohio that really wasn’t known for much of anything. Until one night in 1981 while performing there. And even though Lewis had always refused to believe it, he changed his mind during that first evening’s performance.
That first night playing in Cleveland, they received such a great response from the crowd that they actually agreed that the fans in Cleveland were the best fans in the country. Coupling that with the beauty of the city and it’s gorgeous skyline, the next morning as the band was talking about the previous night’s show and the energy and passion of the crowd, Lewis said, “The heart of rock and roll is in Cleveland”. And then he went on to say, “That would be a great title for a song.”(2) Fortunately, as time went on, the other members of the band convinced him that “The Heart of Rock And Roll is in Cleveland” was not really a good title, so they changed the words to what we know today, “The Heart of Rock And Roll is Still Beating”.
The song topped out at #6 on the Billboard charts in 1983, and the album, “Sports”, reached #1 on the Billboard top 200 in June of 1984.
So keep your rock and roll heart beating and come back and see me real soon right here on As The Story Goes.
(2) Reader, Adam (December 26, 2020). Huey Lewis on the Story of 80s hit “The Heart of Rock and Roll” from Sports. Professor of Rock. YouTube. Archived from the original on 2021-12-20.
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