Hall & Oates

Nashville, February. John Oates takes a call. “From 1972 to 1986, we wrote, produced and then toured behind a new album,”
he recalls. “Maybe people don’t realise, but we spent the exact amount of attention and concentration on every track on every one of those albums. There was no extra focus on making singles because we didn’t even know how to pick a single to save our lives. We made the best albums we could and did that without any outside or record company interference. We wouldn’t allow any executives into the studio. We lived in an isolated bubble. We’d finish the music, do the album cover, and then we’d hand it over: ‘There you go. Here’s what we did. Now you go and sell it to the radio people.’ The singles were chosen by consensus, but we made album statements.”
Considering Hall & Oates are the most successful duo ever – their 246 weeks in the US charts made them the most popular act of the 80s, ahead of Michael Jackson, Springsteen and Madonna – they have never been taken seriously. They’re damned with faint praise for their hits; that’s if the rock press can be bothered with them at all.
It wasn’t always that way. In 1973, in the UK, when they were an unknown entity, if you were spotted with a copy of their second album, 1973’s Abandoned Luncheonette, you felt like a member of a secret society. Not hip, exactly, but like you knew you were onto something.
Charleston, South Carolina, four days earlier. Daryl Hall is on the end of the line.
“I have never seen myself as a singles act, that’s a totally false misrepresentation,” he insists, emphasising the last three words. “My medium is albums; the singles happen by accident. Without a doubt this is not a hits band. In Europe we were a cult first and then became successful. I prefer that word to ‘mainstream’. In that respect we are musically different. You need a certain sophistication to get off on it. This isn’t any old crap. It’s real.”Hall ponders the question: where do you stand? “In good company. I see us as a great band, not just a successful duo. What sets us apart is reality rather than pretension. It suits me to be perceived like that.”
Hall comes from the Pennsylvanian Dutch stock that settled in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, a suburb across the river from Philadelphia. Born Daryl Franklin Hohl (the Christian name was inspired by his mother’s love for Daryl F Zanuck), he remembers it as a conservative industrial area, though his own upbringing would prove fundamental to his later life.
“My father sang in a gospel group with his brothers doing stuff like Lord Remember Me and my mother was their choir director,” he recalls. “There was an obscure line where black and white came together in the Methodist Church. It didn’t work the way rock’n’roll history is generally written. My parents were one of the few families who had friends in the black ghettoes. I’m sure there was segregation, but a more subtle form than that of the South. Traditionally, musicians override racism so my story isn’t unique. Elvis Presley was a white kid who hung out with black kids and I was, too.
I grew up in an area that skirts the line between the Pennsylvanian Dutch – a corruption of Deutsch – and the rural areas and industrial ghetto across the river. Pottstown was a colonial town but as people gravitated towards factories integration was inevitable.
“I could ride my bike from the farms and after a mile I’d be with black friends listening to regional R&B music or doo-wop,” he furthers. “This was in the late 50s/early 60s. We were into The Spaniels, The Jive Five and Frankie Lymon. The first record I bought was Ike & Tina Turner’s It’s Gonna Work Out Fine and I discovered rock’n’roll through that.”
Oates, two years younger, was born in New York City in 1948, but was schooled in Philadelphia. “I had a broad musical personality way before meeting Daryl Hall.
I was in a rock band [The Masters] that got into soul and the folk revival: Appalachian and bluegrass. I did traditional American coffee houses then put on a sharkskin suit to play R&B. As a teenager I saw Elvis on Ed Sullivan where they wouldn’t show him below the waist. He was the prototype. His early songs were incredible – he reimagined white roots and black Afro-American deep South music.”
Unaware that Hall was often in the same hall of the local Art Déco Uptown Theatre, Oates enrolled in what the J Geils Band’s Peter Wolf calls “the college of musical knowledge”. “I saw Sam & Dave, Otis Redding, The Temptations, The Coasters, The Miracles. I saw Stevie Wonder do Fingertips when he was 12. I went every Saturday night.”
No doubt their adult education was like something out of a celluloid American lowdown and dirty teen fantasy, yet the two future comrades were still circling opposite sides of the room.
“The Uptown was a part of the Chitlin’ Circuit that developed out of vaudeville,” Hall recalls. “As Philadelphia changed from a white Jewish ghetto to a black region so the crowds dictated the music. It was the equivalent of the Royal Theatre in Baltimore, the Apollo in New York, the Regal in Chicago, the Fox in Detroit. It was quite a normal part of my life to hang out singing on street corners because that was the place of opportunity for a budding singer. They had talent contests on the sidewalk with groups wanting to be Jackie & The Starlites. It’s not even an American phenomenon, more of an East Coast regional thing: Philly, New York, New Jersey. You sang and snapped your fingers with no instrumental accompaniment. You’d do it for nobody or in high school washrooms between classes – sort of like early breakdancing. Usually you did it for the girls.
“It was an extension of barber shop mixed with church singing,” he explains.
“You brought what you knew from singing a cappella at Sunday school. My mother had taught me to sight read so I had the advantage of sitting at the piano and working out parts.
I told the others what to do.”
From spiritual to carnal matters. Hall and his group The Temptones (named after Temple University where Hall was a music major) found themselves one night involved in a running knife-gang fight at the Adelphi Ballroom where they were due to take part in a battle-of-the bands, lip-synching their first single, Girl I Love You, for Gamble & Huff’s Arctic label (1966). It was on this evening that Hall finally met his future sidekick, Oates.
“The Adelphi is in West Philly so the crowd was 75 percent black,” says Hall. “The headliners were Howard Tate & The Five Stairsteps. Before we went on the atmosphere suddenly got heavy. The High School frat gangs all had Greek letters and symbols on their baseball jackets, and they started a dogfight with knives and chains. Suddenly, I heard a couple of gunshots, so I figured that, for me, the dance was cancelled. I took the back door to a lift and inside was this little guy, a journalism major. We discovered we were both at Temple and needed room-mates.”
That, according to Hall, was the end of The Temptones. “We were totally soul, with the steps and magenta silk suits.” As for Girl I Love You: “It’s not too bad,” he concedes. “Sounds like Smokey Robinson. I do anyway.”
Hall & Oates (they grabbed the name from a mail box inscription in one of their shared digs) underwent a slow apprenticeship. “Lots of people heard us and turned us down across four years. We were frustrated. Daryl and I risked a trip to California and met an art dealer who was good friends with Ahmet Ertegun. We played for him in his Hollywood garden and then got introduced to Atlantic in NYC. It wasn’t auspicious. Daryl was sick and the piano was out of tune. Jerry Greenberg, Mark Myerson and Arif Mardin were watching us next to our nervous manager, Tommy Mottola. We played five songs, looked at each other and thought, ‘We’ve blown this’. But Arif stood up and said [approximates Turkish accent], ‘I want to produce these guys.’ It was the best thing that could have happened because we were mentored by one of the greatest producers of all time.” Label boss Ahmet Ertegun agreed. He’d take a flier on these two longhaired wannabes.
What Arif heard was a grab-bag of callow post-hippie tunes that he’d beefed up with horn and string arrangements, Bill Keith’s pedal steel and an encouragement to Hall to trip through his repertoire of keyboards, synths, mandolin, vibraphone and cello playing. “It was all we had,” Hall remarks while Oates agrees that “we were just getting off the ground. We got lucky. Arif was from that era when record companies and producers elected to find artists who might be nurtured into a substantial career. He saw through our immaturity and located the talent, the voices and the songwriting.”
To say that their tentatively alluring 1972 debut Whole Oats sold badly is an understatement, but the follow-up, Abandoned Luncheonette, was far more coherent. Between-times the pair were put on the road supporting everyone from stoner dudes Cheech & Chong to jazz-rockers Blood Sweat & Tears, Billy Paul and Music Of My Mind-era Stevie Wonder. Even early David Bowie. The Bowie connection was made in Memphis, on Sunday 24 September ’72, at the Ellis Auditorium, during the first US Ziggy Stardust tour.
“I’d been a fan of Hunky Dory and loved his arty singer-songwriter mood, but when we opened for him we had no idea what lay in store,” Oates recalls. “We did no homework. Then he and his band came onstage, looking like they did, and recreated Ziggy. It was mind-blowing. I was still a hippie living the dream. His manager [Tony DeFries] wouldn’t allow us backstage beforehand because he was trying to create a mysterious persona who was treated like a superstar, though he wasn’t. We drove to Memphis, did our set and were told, ‘You now have to leave the venue.’ ‘Whaaat? Whatever.’”
Oates smoked a joint, gulped down a Quaalude and stood at the back of the theatre. “I was dumbfounded. The smoke and strobes kicked in and then the opening theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey began and suddenly there’s these guys in jumpsuits, the orange hair and platform boots and I was like, Oh my God! This is groundbreaking. You’ve gone from an acoustic guitar and a guy wearing a dress to this? The rulebook was thrown out the window. I enjoyed it so much I smoked another one and tried to pick up a girl.”
Hall can’t remember whether he watched Bowie, though he relished the idea “of so many different audiences that took us from the underground to the relatively hip. A new world of experience that was cool and exciting and changed our perception.” Suitably kicked up the ass, the duo upped their game on Abandoned Luncheonette, whose front and rear sleeve immortalised a glorious 50s diner landmark frequented by Hall as a kid, now left to rot in the countryside outside of Pottstown. They often cite this as their favourite album. “It was exceptional,” declares Hall. “We were getting serious as an act. I was still doing demos with other artists [Kenny Gamble was very keen to wrest him and Oates away from Atlantic] and I was still a gun-for-hire. But those were jobs; this was me. Arif encouraged a more ambitious sound that defined us. It was prescient song-wise and had a unique sound. I’m very proud of that record.”
Moving from Philly to New York did Hall & Oates a favour. Much as they loved what became known as The Sound Of Philadelphia, they didn’t want to be hidebound by R&B. “Arif selected the greatest NYC musicians at that time,” says Oates. “The sax man Joe Farrell, drummer Bernard ‘Pretty Boy’ Purdie, Gordon Edwards on bass, Rick Marotta on drums, percussionist Ralph McDonald, guitarist Hugh McCracken, pianist Richard Tee. It was pure music. We stopped thinking rock’n’roll, or folk and R&B, because now the song dictated everything.”
The keynote was She’s Gone, a soul-drenched ballad that came with H&O’s best proto-video, where they dressed in partial drag and were promptly banned by a whole raft of local Philly TV teen pop shows, much to Atlantic’s chagrin. It’s a great clip.
This was arguably the golden age of the album. “Yeah, people were willing to delve into an artist’s mind-set. They wanted to study the artefact and read the liner notes,” says Oates. “But it’s also the rise of black power and an Afro-centric approach, with subtle artists like Marvin [Gaye] and Stevie. It was so expressive; there were no limitations for a songwriter.
It was like the precursor of hip-hop.”
In 1974, Hall & Oates parted company with Mardin and made War Babies with production wunderkind Todd Rundgren, a Philly peer. “I knew him from nearby Upper Darby when he was fronting The Nazz,” Hall recollects. “Around 1968, when I started getting flowery and dropping acid, he loved The Beatles. I didn’t, apart from Sgt Pepper’s.
I hung out with black performers. To my mind, white artists were just copying good music. We were very reactionary to the British Invasion. There were Ban The Beatles campaigns on local radio. We had most to lose from the encroachment of a foreign power.” He laughs. “Todd must have hung out with a lot of white kids, is all I can say. He’s a great singer, though he never used to be.”
Rundgren took the duo into Secret Sound studios in Chelsea, New York and persuaded them to go quasi-metal. “I listened to that album recently,” Hall chortles. “It’s so ridiculous, it makes me laugh. But it is incomparable and free-spirited, an outsider mood as raucous as the environment it was made in. I got that out of my system. It was chaotic. We sounded like demented squirrels.” War Babies was a crazed train wreck of an album, with Mottola adding synth-treated vocals on War Baby Son Of Zorro accompanied by Hall’s future girlfriend, Sandy (aka Sara Allen), on that and the equally bonkers Johnny Gore & The “C” Eaters.
A screaming, mutant, discordant mess, it’s their most experimental early work. “We’d toured briefly with Lou Reed [during his smacked-out Rock And Roll Animal US tour],” notes Oates. “Not really that great for us. Least said the better.” Still, if you want to imagine a climate where blue-eyed soul gets slaughtered by disgusto-heroin chic, this is your friend.
In 1975, they finally made an album called Daryl Hall & John Oates, practically a reinvention as Mottola parlayed a superior deal with RCA. Often called The Silver Album thanks to Pierre LaRoche’s camp cover, the gents are dolled-out like fem-bot drag queens, leading to many pondering the question: is he really going out with him? And, of course, the whole androgynous look was all the rage. Hall remarks with barely-faux narcissism, “I loved it because I looked like the girl I always wanted to go out with.” O-kaaay… “Bowie introduced glam and the world embraced it,” adds Oates. “We were living in Greenwich Village and absorbing the scene. But not just us: Rick Derringer, Mick Jagger, they adopted that LaRoche ‘look’. We hung out with Pierre in the Village. We went to see the New York Dolls, Television and Patti Smith and it was terrific. We had dinner one night and Pierre said, ‘If you want me to do an album cover,
I will immortalise you.’ And he did, ’cause to this day, that and Abandoned Luncheonette are the only album sleeves that anyone ever asks us about.”
New York back then was the craziest place on Earth. “Pre-AIDS, pre-everything,” Oates points out. “It was the epicentre of the universe. We were swept up in that vibe and musically it influenced us. Patti [Smith] and Television were way outside our norm and you’d meet new people, an international crowd, and you’d gravitate to that energy as a songwriter. It affects you.”
The songs on The Silver Album dealt with different tableaux: divorce, studied ennui and synonyms for copulation. More intriguingly, H&O produced it, with a sizeable assist from guitarist Christopher Bond. Uh-oh!
Hall: “Our next album was [1976’s] Bigger Than Both Of Us, produced by Bond. The song Sara Smile had broken us at last because we’d given up on the [Silver] album. We were in Germany and they told us, ‘There’s a noise in America about that track.’ Welcome news! We needed a vehicle to get to the world and that single was a huge advantage. John and I had no doubts that it would work eventually, but it hadn’t yet. So we stayed with Christopher for Bigger Than Both Of Us and Rich Girl became our first No 1 single.”
David Berkowitz, alias notorious serial killer Son Of Sam, once claimed Rich Girl motivated him to commit murder. Meanwhile, check the credits and you see that the brilliant, also murderous, lunatic Jim Gordon plays drums, while Leland Sklar is on bass. Yep, we are back in Hollywood and Hall isn’t entirely glad. “Previously, we hired producers who were team players. It’s all incredibly well-produced but I had an up-and-down relationship with Christopher. He was autocratic and I tend to like people who don’t dictate but give way to the artist.”
That antipathy persisted, according to Hall.
“I don’t really like Beauty On A Back Street [1977]. I fought a lot with Bond so I wasn’t happy in the studio but that’s personal rather than objective.” Point out the virtues – the rhythm section of Leland Sklar and Jeff Porcaro – and he digs in. “Maybe I should listen to it and change my mind, but I only recall the bad stuff.”
His mood wasn’t improved by the fact that his debut solo album, Sacred Songs, recorded with Robert Fripp, was rejected by RCA on the grounds it wasn’t commercial (see panel) while the rise of disco left the pair in temporary limbo. Along The Red Ledge (1978) didn’t do much, either. “Oddly, I like that one,” says Hall. “David Foster, the producer, wasn’t our style and was just starting out but I used a lot of the new elements I’d applied on Sacred Songs.”
While it went largely unnoticed, this album featured heavyweight guests: guitar players like Jay Graydon, who’d recently soloed on Steely Dan’s Peg (Aja), Rundgren, Fripp, Toto’s Steve Lukather, Cheap Trick’s Rick Nielsen, Alice Cooper’s accomplice Dick Wagner, and George Harrison. “It was a little more slick than I liked,” he admits. “Because of the Toto connection we were in Los Angeles a lot. George was hanging out with John so that was his influence whereas I knew Cheap Trick personally. We went to George’s house in Surrey [more likely Friar Park in Henley-on-Thames] where he was starting a new Beatles spoof [The Rutles’ All You Need Is Cash] and he played acoustic guitar for us. No big deal.”
X-Static (1979) saw the duo fully embrace synth programming, adding specialists to what was now a proper Hall & Oates band, though the tentative stabs at disco and dance weren’t a great success and the record became a charity
shop regular.
Sensing it was time to focus, they came up with Voices (1980), the first of four straight classics. “Voices set a new template,,” agrees Hall. “The sound permeated everything we did. It was like we’d started again because Kiss On My List [written by Sara Hall’s sister Janna], You Make My Dreams, Everytime You Go Away and a cover of the Spector/Mann/Weil standard, You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’ were heavy-rotation super-hits.”
Private Eyes (1981) was even better. “We simplified the process and we were very happy with I Can’t Go For That (No Can Do) [whose bassline Michael Jackson admitted he and Quincy Jones purloined for Billie Jean] and the title track because we felt we’d returned to R&B and managed to hit the black urban market.” Alongside Prince’s Controversy this was one of the year’s must-have platters.
The double-Platinum H2O (1982), containing their biggest hit, Maneater (four weeks at No 1 on the Billboard Hot 100), maintained the formula and the greatest hits package, Rock’n Soul Part 1 (1983) – their first compact disc – ensured AOR longevity, bolstered by new songs Say It Isn’t So and Adult Education. The former benefitted from a smooth club mix courtesy of John “Jellybean” Benitez, but the latter was hampered by a ridiculous video directed by Tim (The Cure) Pope that fell foul of every New Romantic cliché he could shovel in.
Though they didn’t know it, Hall & Oates were about to encounter both their finest moment and the beginning of the end of their chart domination. Big Bam Boom (1984) was their all-conquering moment. The singles, Out Of Touch and Method Of Modern Love, played footsy with the charts, MTV helped bankroll the accompanying tour and there was a satellite broadcast of a radio show taped at The Forum in Inglewood, California where 18,000 fans gave them a rapturous reception.
“That album, technically our best, came from unique circumstances,” muses Oates.
“It was the zenith of analogue and the birth of digital. The former couldn’t get any better than 32-track but new digital recorders gave the musicians another arsenal to explore.
We had synths, polyphonic chords, sampling and manufacturers were starting to throw equipment at us: ‘Try this! This is brand new! Have a processor!’ The skill was keeping your eye on the ball and not letting tech become the focus. The song was still the core; we just had different tools. It was so tempting to let the new inventions take centre-place, but the whole point of Big Bam Boom – the concept, the title – was to reflect that we didn’t do that and we didn’t get enough credit for what we achieved.”
Big Bam Boom was an artistic triumph, thanks in part to the mixing prowess of Arthur Baker and the clear vision of producer Bob Clearmountain. “It was a perfect storm,” says Hall. “They were up-to-speed and on top of their game and the songs hit every market from R&B to rock and clubs. We also had an amazing band and a 15-year history, meaning we had full command of the old and a fascination with the new. We didn’t abandon where we’d come from.”
Could it get any better? “No,” admits Oates. “We reached a place in our lives that seemed like a full-stop. We knew we couldn’t outdo what we’d just done: we headlined Live Aid in Philadelphia [July 1985], we did We Are The World and recorded Live At The Apollo with The Temptations’ David Ruffin and Eddie Kendricks, another amazing moment. But we were smart enough to realise we’d come full circle and perceptive enough to say, ‘Let’s step back and let this thing die down.’ We ceased to be slaves to the next No 1 record.
Our manager Tommy Mottola told us we were nuts. He jumped ship and became President of Sony Music. I don’t blame him, but it was traumatic at the time. With all the hits we became victims of our own success. But hey, it could be a lot worse.”
How does Hall view this prolific era today? “We didn’t stop immediately but we looked at each other as individuals who could go their separate ways,” he says of the end of their chart hegemony and decade-long creative spurt. “There were new combinations to explore and we’d always felt like solo artists who happened to work together. Very few have lasted like us because it’s hard to sustain the intensity and expectation. Now when we tour it feels like John and Daryl rather than Hall & Oates. But it still works. We’re still very proud of what we’ve done.”