I've been meaning to write this post for a few weeks now, but I haven't been able to. I haven't had enough time, not just to sit down and write it but to make sure I wrote it with appropriate delicacy because it involves a real person with real feelings and a preference to be private. But I'd mentioned earlier that I'd seen three Huey Lewis and the News concerts in August, and that I'd wanted to write about the third in particular. So I am, even now, because it was too special a show to let slip away into history unrecognized.
For this was the concert where they were rejoined by their original bass player, for the first time in a dozen years.
If you've ever seen a Sports album, you've seen Mario. If you've ever heard a HLN hit, you've heard Mario. Mario Cipollina is one of the founding members of the News, one of the original six, who as of about 1995 all but disappeared. Suddenly he was gone from the band, with nary a word why. Fans were left to wonder what must have transpired to prompt his exit. How horrible must have the circumstances been for that to have happened, and then nothing to be said about it? The silence ended up telling the story, and the dots that fans were left to connect were not good.
Last year some of those dots got confirmed in an article describing the serious drug-induced trouble Mario found himself in. Then this summer there was another article (here and here) with more details. But this year's article was positive. It seems he had been able to get into some sort of diversion program, which helped him get clean and identify some of the underlying mental health issues that had prompted his drug use in the first place. Having done so, he was now in a place to reconnect with the band he had so suddenly departed.
Since that time HLN has continued with a different bassist, John Pierce, who had already on occasion substituted for Mario in the mid-80s when he'd had some problems with his hand. John's now been fully brought into the fold, "on the bus," as Huey describes it, and has been the bassist on all the new recorded tracks dating back to Time Flies. When we show up to a HLN concert now, he's the guy we expect to see. And, as everyone acknowledges, will continue to be whom we expect to see.
But on that August Tuesday in Sacramento, for the encore, he yielded the stage to Mario, who got to take a place where he hadn't been for over a dozen years. And yet so natural did it feel to see him up there it was almost like he hadn't been away.
At first there was sort of a palpable sense of nervous anticipation, of wondering what this would be like. But with every note it was boiled away as everyone came to realize the answer was so much more than just fine. In introducing him Huey had said, "We asked him what he wanted to play, and he said, 'I don't care, as long as it rocks.'" HLN always rock, but with such a strong R&B influence in their music some songs rock more than others. "Couple Days Off," from 1991's Hard at Play album, is probably one of their most hard-driving, straight forward rock songs. And that night, did it ever rock. It was incredibly intense, watching this emotional moment of musical chemistry reignite after over a decade, played out in a song that the band now rarely plays. In a way the song seems to really need him and the particular edge he brings in order to really take flight.
Mario's musical oeurve has always been sort of edgy. Not quite Alice Cooper biting-heads-off-animals edgy, but a more clean-cut, PETA-approved edgy. Well, except for all the leather... Which, with the shades, cigarettes, sideburns, and implicitly snarling expression, cultured a fairly menacing image. But while it may reflect his musical taste, people who've met him know it does not actually reflect him.
I wrote last year about what it was like to meet him in person back when I was a teenage teeny-bopper. My first ever experience meeting this band whom I idolized came when I was 14, and it was intimidating to see these people I'd known from posters suddenly stand before me in three dimensions. No matter how cool and suave I aspired to be at that moment, I knew I was still a geeky and awkward kid. The drummer and keyboardist were then fairly scary to me, Huey threw my twinkies (long story), and so I just got quick autographs from whomever I could -- but with Mario I got a conversation. I don't remember what we actually talked about, but I do remember that I forgot just how geeky and awkward I really was.
So I write this post to celebrate that Tuesday night in Sacramento. Enormous fan of this band that I am, I felt I couldn't let such a momentous musical occasion go unacknowledged. I appreciate their music too much not to recognize how special it was to have that particular musical dynamic perform before me.
And also to say how heartening it was to see him again. All these years, I (and many other fans, I'm sure) worried about him. He had earned our affections through all the work he'd done, and for the kindness he'd shown us personally, even when he could have so easily shown none. I'm fighting the temptation now to see the evening as the happy ending we all have been hoping for -- for people who struggle with addiction, it's never that simple. But to have gotten this far is enormous, and we're all so happy for him.
Me and Mario, "looking mean" per his suggestion, 1991