One of the joys of aging, and there aren’t many aside from being able to eat whatever I want whenever I want and no longer being aroused by even the slightest shifting of my trousers, is having the pop culture of my youth become quaint. For example, it’s quaint to think that when I was a kid a lot of people worried that heavy metal music was responsible for youth committing suicide. Today the likes of Judas Priest get regular airplay on Classic Rock and modern versions of “oldie” stations while their hair metal brethren are deemed hilarious Halloween costumes or perfect party themes.
It is similarly quaint that this song was equally controversial for apparently promoting recreational use of narcotics. Today, of course, we have long since shed our collective fear of recreational drug use and welcome the health benefits many of these … oh wait. Hmm. Well, I still maintain it’s quaint that a song ripped off for use as the Ghostbusters theme could possibly have been considered controversial or that a musician named Huey could be viewed as subversive. And yet that’s where we were in 1983/1984.
I was, thankfully, nothing more than an innocent twelve-year-old, borderline bumpkin discovering pop/rock music and falling in love with a great song. Music videos were all the rage at this time and seeing a guy shove his face into a sink of ice water while singing was pretty cool too. Hey, we didn’t have Youtube.
This song has aged very well, at least to me. I still light up when I hear that definitive opening revving guitar riff. There are few camping excursions where I don’t revel in listening to this entire album on cassette in our quaint travel trailer replete with AM/FM/Cassette entertainment centre while preparing our evening meal. And since it is summer what better way to kick off a camping weekend with the dangerous “I Want A New Drug” from the monster, and sadly underrated, album Sports released in 1983 by Huey Lewis and the News.
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