Huey Lewis and the News’ I Want a New Drug is famous not only for being a huge US hit, but also for helping to inspire an even bigger one.
Released in 1984, the song became the second single from the News’ third album, Sports, which had dropped the year before and saw the band achieve their big commercial breakthrough. I Want a New Drug peaked at number 6 in the Billboard Hot 100, but attention was refocused on it when, in June 1984, Ray Parker Jr’s theme from the original Ghostbusters movie was released, and people started to notice some similarities.
This led to Huey Lewis and Chris Hayes - the News’ guitarist at the time and co-writer of I Want a New Drug - calling in the lawyers, and an out-of-court settlement was eventually reached. One of the stipulations of this was that none of the artists involved was allowed to comment on the case, but Hayes has now said as much as he feels comfortable saying in an interview with Vertex Effects.
“I am under an NDA [non-disclosure agreement], but I think everybody knows what happened, so I don't think it's a big deal, and it was all resolved out of court,” he begins. “What happened was, Ivan Reitman - I think he's the guy that was the producer on Ghostbusters [he also directed the film] - so he came to us, and we were on the road at the time, so we were pretty busy, but he came to us and said, ‘Hey, we want to use I Want a New Drug for our movie, Ghostbusters.’”
At this point, of course, Ghostbusters wasn’t the cultural phenomenon that it would become later. In fact, Hayes and the band had never heard of it.
“It was like, Ghostbusters - what the hell is that?” he remembers. “Is that gonna be any good? Really, Ghostbusters? What's that about?”
Hayes goes on to say that Bob Brown, Huey Lewis and the News’ manager at the time, advised them to pass on the project, but the story doesn’t end there. In a 2004 interview with Premiere magazine, the filmmakers admitted that they’d already been using I Want a New Drug as temporary background music during certain scenes, and if they couldn’t have the original, were keen to create something similar.
“I think what happened behind the scenes is somebody went to Ray Parker and said, ‘We need a song that sounds like this,’ and then that's what happened,” explains Hayes. “And you know: a lot of songs are derivative, you know, I totally get it, but they did end up settling, so it all worked out. It was with CBS, so they don't want to be bothered with any kind of lawsuits, so they settled it all out of court. It was all for the good.”
While Hayes isn’t allowed to discuss the specifics of the case, and how much money he’s ended up making from it, he does say - with a raised eyebrow and a wry smile - that “I love Ghostbusters now,” and he also has some kind words for Ray Parker Jr himself.
“I love Ray Parker too. Great guitar player and a great guy. I got no complaints about Ray. I think Ray's great.”
Speaking to Guitar World in 2023 about how he came up with the riff for I Want A New Drug, Hayes said that he was inspired by the success of one of Huey Lewis and the News’ previous hits.
“I kind of fashioned it after Workin’ For A Livin’,” he explained. “That song was something of a success, so I said, ‘I’m gonna write a song like it.’ I came up with that bouncy guitar riff, and that was that. It was actually super-easy; it came right out.”
While Hayes told Guitar World that he recorded his part using a “Les Paul and a 50-watt Marshall through a 4x12 cab, cranked all the way up,” in the Vertex interview he says he thinks his weapon of choice might have been a Gibson Spirit, which he no longer owns.
He does reiterate that the riff came out fast and fully-formed, though: “I was on my couch and just went, you know [plays riff]. That was it. I mean, that's the song. That's all there is to it.”
Like Workin For A Livin’, says Hayes, I Want a New Drug was “stupidly simple”, but suggests that this was part of its charm. I was writing pop music. “You don't want to be too intricate or heady or harmonic or anything.”
In 1985, of course, Huey Lewis and the News would go on to become synonymous with another movie, Back to the Future, but that's a whole other story...
