Happy To Be Stuck With You

Welcome back to "A POP CULTURE ADDICT'S GUIDE TO LIFE" as it is meant to be presented!

Yeah, I won't lie to you.  These past couple of days have been a bit of a whirlwind, but I am happy to report that things seem to be calming down now.  My mom seems to be responding well to treatment, and I'm cautiously optimistic that things will turn out all right.  After all, she's a determined and tough woman who has a lot of fight left in her.  So very proud of her.

So, as a result of this good news, I'm going to try and get this blog back on track.  After all, it's been a while since I wrote anything pop culture related in here.  I just hope that this was worth the wait.

Anyway, in today's edition of the blog, we're going to go back to the year 1986.  And I have to say that when it comes to the Sunday Jukebox entry, 1986 is probably one of my favourite years for music.  I just think there was something about 1986 that defined the classic pop song.  Artists such as Madonna, Whitney Houston, Pet Shop Boys, Prince, and Bon Jovi all had classic hits coming out that year, as does today's featured band.

In fact, they had the #1 song twenty-eight years ago this week.  And this band is more than just a San Francisco treat.  These guys started their career over thirty years ago, and are STILL touring and playing today.

This was a band that had a lot of heart and soul.  They were a band that believed in love and told the world that it was hip to be square.  This was a band that climbed "Jacob's Ladder" to the top ten several times.  And yes, we're going back in time to take a look at one of their biggest hits ever.

Are you ready?

ARTIST:  Huey Lewis and the News

SONG:  Stuck With You

ALBUM:  Fore!

DATE RELEASED:  August 31, 1986

PEAK POSITION ON THE BILLBOARD CHARTS:  #1 for 3 weeks

Ah, yes.  Huey Lewis and the News.  A band made up of (at that time) Huey Lewis, Sean Hopper, Bill Gibson, Johnny Colla, Mario Cipollina, and Chris Hayes.  I don't know what it was about these six guys that made their songs so infectious, but I have to admit that their songs always made me get up on my feet and dance!  In fact, I'd say that "Stuck With You" always stuck with me as being one of my favourites, mainly because it was one of the first songs I remember hearing a lot of when I was a child.  You see, the song came out right around the time I was beginning kindergarten, and I'd hear this song a lot on the radio no matter where I was.  

From that song, I grew to like the album "Fore!", the first single off the album.  From there, I was introduced to their 1983 album "Sports", which many consider to be the band's breakthrough album, and well...basically this song helped make me a Huey Lewis and the News fan for life.

Anyway, let's talk a little about the song itself.  The song was a collaborative effort between Huey Lewis and Chris Hayes, and essentially it's a song that could be used to describe a couple who have been together for a substantial amount of time.

I like to consider it as the ultimate wedding anniversary song.

Just have a listen to the lyrics of the single.  Obviously this person has had moments in his relationship in which he questions whether or not they should be together.  And I'm sure that any married couple (or an unmarried couple who have been together a long time) would tell you that they certainly have asked themselves those questions in their relationships.  In the case of this single, they openly have thought about breaking up, or thinking about other people, or throwing all those years away.  However, they come to the conclusion that they would miss each other too much and that they're perfectly happy being stuck with each other.

Now, some people might choose to see this as a negative thing, but I really don't see it that way at all.  When you're in love with somebody that deeply and that strongly, that's all that matters.

The video for this song is also fantastic as well, with the whole video being shot in the Bahamas.  The director of the video was Edd Griles, also responsible for directing music videos by Cyndi Lauper, Sheena Easton, and Eddie Murphy.  And when it came down to filming techniques, he left nothing out of bounds.  He filmed the band on the beach, on a boat, up in the air, and even underwater!  I remember as a kid watching that video and wondering how the cameraman managed to film a video underwater, believing that the camera would get completely destroyed in the process.  I mean, sure, with modern technology, taking photos and videos underwater has never been made easier, but back in the eighties, I was really impressed.

Of course, in the eighties, I was a child...and everything impressed me back then.

Oh, and the woman that features prominently in the video?  That would be news personality Keely Shaye Smith - also known as Mrs. Pierce Brosnan.  This video was filmed right around the time that Smith was starting her career.  She was, after all, only twenty-three years old when this video hit the top of the charts.

(In comparison, Huey was thirty-six.)

Now, filming this video in the Bahamas was surely a once-in-a-lifetime experience for the band, and I would think that it was an incredible shoot.  However, the shoot wasn't without its problems.  Because the video focused mainly on Huey Lewis and Keely Shaye Smith, the rest of the band, the crew filming the video, and the extras that were used in the barbecue scene had to stay on a barge that was moored several hundred feet away from the island where the land scenes were shot so that they wouldn't be seen. 

All in all, though, the video helped catapult the single to #1 less than a month after it was released.  Not a bad day's work, huh?