Huey Lewis, band still working for a living as they hit Green Valley Ranch

Seven things you didn't know about Huey Lewis and the News, but now you do:

1. Huey still has a full head of hair, and he doesn't do much to it.

"The No. 1 showbiz axiom is: You're not in showbiz if you're not spending money on your hair. And I'm not!" he says.

But Huey and the News, despite being an anti-glam throwback, thrived on hairspray, just as any band has.

"We sprayed it up back in the early days. Our backstage smelled just like Motley Crue's, man. You didn't want to light any cigarettes backstage."

2. As a fly fisherman with a home in Montana, he's never accidentally slung a hook into another fisherman's face. But one time, he was rowing a boat with a friend when the friend hooked a big stone fly into Huey's nose cartilage.

"He hooked my nose. And then he started reeling it in, because he couldn't figure out where it was. Fortunately, I cut the line just before he got the string taut. And then we had to figure out how to get the bug out of my nose," he says.

"I have a picture to prove it."

He doesn't have a scar.

3. He likes Lady Gaga.

"I think Lady Gaga does a wonderful job, frankly, as a pop artist. I mean, come on: The meat dress? That's fantastic. It's not the first meat dress, either. Back in Playboy a hundred years ago, somebody wore a meat outfit for some PETA deal. But it's fantastic."

On the other hand, Huey would like it if pop music were more music driven and less dependent on visuals.

"Music used to be the domain of blind artists. I don't think we're gonna have any more Stevie Wonders," he says.

"At the Grammy Awards -- which is the music awards, right -- they're employing dancers galore and very few musicians. When you discount Barbra Streisand's set, there's almost no musicians on the gig. They're all rapping to tracks."

4. Huey would have gone wilder stylistically in the '80s if he had ever needed to. The decade was marked by punks with tattoos, Prince's frilly shirts, Madonna's bangle bracelets, Bon Jovi's leather pants and A Flock of Seagulls' crazy hair.

But Huey Lewis and the News had hit songs on the radio as soon as they put out records in the early 1980s, so they continued dressing in regular-people clothes and wearing normal haircuts.

"Our thing was kind of anachronistic at the time, but it worked," he says.

"When we started making videos, we didn't have tattoos or pierced ears, or any of that stuff -- not that we wouldn't. Three years later, I'd have been tattooed head to foot, for God's sake, if I thought it helped me get a hit."

5. Huey stole his sax player, Johnny Colla, from Sly Stone's Sly and the Family Stone.

"Sly was on drugs. Johnny and the whole band would go to the studio every day in L.A. and wait for Sly, and he would never show up.

"I said, 'Johnny, what the hell? You're not even playing. Why don't you come on and up and we'll play? He'll never know you're gone.'

"So he did. He quit the band. And we started our action."

Since Huey and the band were based in San Francisco, he talks proudly of fellow San Franciscans Sly, Jimi Hendrix and the Grateful Dead.

"Sly was the man. He single-handedly created funk music," he says. "Jimi Hendrix took the blues, turned it up to 11, and single-handedly created hard rock. The Grateful Dead took bluegrass and turned it up to 11 and played it for eight minutes long because they didn't know how to end it -- and that was jam band.

"These are broad generalizations but almost true," Huey says.

6. Filmmakers Seth Rogen and Judd Apatow personally talked Huey into cutting the title track to the 2008 pot comedy "Pineapple Express" as a sort of "Back to the Future" song.

Recently, Apatow called the band's office with a new request.

"My assistant is so funny," Huey says. "She said, 'Judd A-pa-toe called and wants some T-shirts. They're doing a film and they're curious if it's OK if one of their characters wears a Huey Lewis and the News T-shirt.' "

Huey told her, "Of course. ... Send them one of each."

His assistant responded, "Should I charge them?"

Huey laughed and said, "No."

7. The News have a new album out, a collection of soul covers called "Soulsville." This is right up their alley.

"I always tell everybody: We used to be a beer and hotdog band, but now we're hanging with the wine and cheese set."

Doug Elfman's column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. E-mail him at delfman@reviewjournal.com. He blogs at reviewjournal.com/elfman.