POP REVIEW : HUEY LEWIS GETS THE JOB DONE

Yes, it’s true that Huey Lewis hasn’t been the boldest of rock stars. Think of him as Springsteen Lite: one-third less challenging than the average socially conscious rocker.

But all that changed Friday in the first of two nights Lewis & the News played at the Pacific Amphitheatre. Daringly abandoning his non-threatening, boy-next-door image--the kinda guy whose idea of a great time is sipping a cold beer at a good baseball game--Lewis went public with his controversial and, for this crowd, decidedly unpopular stand on a hot topical issue.

Lewis admitted he’s a Celtics fan.

So you were expecting maybe Bob Geldof? No, the Bay Area man with the cleftest chin since Robert Mitchum knows his strengths--and limitations--and isn’t about to tinker with a hit-making machine that isn’t broken.

Lewis is the embodiment of Paul Simon’s “One-Trick Pony,” in which Simon sings: “He does one trick only/It’s the principal source of his revenue . . . He’s just a one-trick pony/But he turns that trick with pride.”

So what if there’s not much range to his songs, and that the melodies, arrangements and general tone of his current “Fore!” album are almost indistinguishable from his 1983 “Sports” album or his 1982 “Picture This” album?

As long as there’s a market for catchy, R&B-tinged; pop, it’s nice to have someone as unprepossessing as Lewis to deliver it. The New World’s answer to Phil Collins--go ahead, tell me your mother doesn’t find them equally adorable--Lewis at least retains the down-to-earth stage manner honed through the News’ years of paying dues in clubs and bars.

He also deserves credit for enlisting the aid of a real horn section--the Tower of Power horns--in the second half of the 90-minute performance. Maybe there are some new-generation digital sampling synthesizers that can parrot the sound of trumpets and saxophones, but let’s see a machine do the flashy choreography that these five veterans displayed.

Lewis is such a sports fan--he talked with glee about the “league-leading San Francisco Giants,” the 49ers and, of course, the Lakers-Celtics playoffs--that it’s more fitting to look to sports for useful analogies.

In that respect, Lewis could be considered the Don Sutton of rock. Like the Angels pitcher, Lewis isn’t too flashy and doesn’t have a lot of surprises up his sleeve, but from performance to performance, year in and year out, he can be depended on to get the job done.

Cutting Crew, the latest product off the British assembly line that every six months seems to churn out a new group of terminal romantics, opened the show. The group’s 40-minute chameleon-like set naturally included the curious recent hit “(I Just) Died in Your Arms,” a title that begs a Monty Python comeback like: “Well that’s cast rather a gloom over the evening, hasn’t it?”

Lead singer Nick Van Eede echoed A-Ha with his falsetto vocals in one song, became a breathy U2/Bono sound-alike in another, all the while punctuating the songs with more leg kicks than the Rockettes. Does rock really need another band like this?