Camp, Revamped, and On Tap

“It’s the beginning of a new age..."

—Lou Reed

“When John and I first got together,” says Daryl Hall, the taller half of Hall and Oates, “it was to try and devise an alternative way of making a musical career for ourselves...outside the normal mode.”

I sit talking with Daryl and John in Hall’s tastefully appointed Greenwich Village apartment. Illusions are being shattered right and left.

“When we first started it was just the two of us, without a band. Then we got a band fairly fast. But I remember us talking about it that long ago, saying how do we do this so it’s not going to be the normal, typical rock ’n’ roll situation where you have your two or three years and that’s the end of it? How do you make a life of it? We always had that in mind.”

It seemed to some observers that Hall and Oates had hit a downhill slide after scoring such hits as “Sara Smile” and “Rich Girl.” When They appeared at the Bottom Line a few months ago in the midst of a club tour, I can recall the comment of an industry insider to the effect of: “Well, they’re really washed up now.”

“Misunderstanding is not a new thing,” says Daryl. “If we had to pay attention to how we were being perceived all the time it would be constricting. People that do things first or early in the game have to be subject

to people misunderstanding their motives for doing things.”

“Like in the summer tour we’re starting in late June,” says John, “we’re doing the same venues we played when we had all the hits a while ago. Playing the clubs was a really necessary thing to do for us as musicians and as a touring band. We had evolved into this big production syndrome, and our productions were getting more complex and unwieldy. We felt it was time to break things down and be flexible enough to play large halls, arenas, and clubs, that would be the ideal situation. Also we wanted to break down the concept of touring for six months a year, and then being off. We’re not doing that anymore. Now we’re touring for a few weeks at a time, taking a few weeks off, then going back out. We’re very flexible—if a gig came up tomorrow that we wanted to do, we could do it. We were never able to do that before.”

“People have to realize,” says Daryl, “the music business and musical times are changing. This whole idea of large concert touring, big-budget tour support, carrying a lot of roadies and all that—it’s not necessarily the best way of dealing with your life as a musician. We wanted to be one of the first ones—and we were one of the first major bands—to break down and start touring places like small clubs. It’s a much more accessible way for people to get to us. It’s easier for us in some ways, and it’s also harder because sometimes we have to play two shows. But it’s a more direct thing. It was absolutely an artistic move...a move to communicate better...for a better form of playing to people.”

The snickers and derision from the industry didn’t lessen when the band then set out after the club tour on a tour of high schools sponsored by Carefree Sugarless Gum.

“That was a unreal insert into the whole thing,” explains John. “It just happened.”

“We did that for the money, actually,” admits Daryl.

“They were looking for a band to do it,” continues John, “and we happened to be there.”

“Also,” Daryl points out, “besides the fact they paid us good, it was an interesting idea, and something that I think a lot of bands are going to be following suit with. It’s the idea that somebody other than the record company or a musician can sponsor a tour, and underwrite a tour and make it financially feasible to go out and do something like play a high school, which you could never afford to do if you were doin it yourself. It was interesting in that way, but also a challenge. A new form of touring keeps things fresh. To play a series of high schools is really off the wall—we never would’ve done it in a million years if we were supporting the tour. But it was great—the kids went crazy...they go nuts. And it’s the same old story—you build fans forever that way. They’re 15 years old and they’ll be with us for the next 15 years. But besides that it was really interesting to get directly to kids in an environment that we never would have hit without this unique outside support.”

"It’s easy to be idealistic when you're starting out. —Daryl Hall"

Somehow, misunderstanding has plagued Hall and Oates all the way along. Every one of their albums is different, from the smooth folkie-soul styling of Abandoned Luncheonette to their slick hits to their dabbling with a tough, punkish androgynous image during the mid-70’s. They’ve kept critics, and probably their fans, wondering just what would come next.

One reason for the image problem was their working with different producers. “We choose producers for their musical and arranging abilities, which means that they usually have strong musical opinions themselves,” says Hall. “In the past it’s resulted in that kind of thing—too much other people’s personalities on record. We’ve never been totally satisfied with a record we’ve done, as far as the production goes. Songwriting we’re always happy with, but there’s always something we would have done differently if we were doing it ourselves.”

And as for the changing music over their career, “Times change and people change” says Daryl. “We evolve as musicians, which is really healthy. “It’s real easy to be idealistic when you’re not doing very well or just starting out. But when you’re at the point where you actually have a choice—take the money or do what you believe in—that takes a little more self-discipline and a little more personal will-power and believing in yourself. Without being high-handed about it, that’s what we did.

"We’ve never been totally satisfied with a record we’ve done. -Daryl Hall"

“We had a chance—we could have gone for the money and done a million ‘Rich Girls’ and been the Doobie Brothers Jr. But we didn’t really want to do that. It’s not where we’re coming from. We never want that. We never wanted to do that, so we opted for doing what we wanted to do, and it paid off in the long run.

“It’s the American way to go for the big bucks all the time. The old capitalist system is if you have something just keep on going for it—sell yourself out if you have a shot. We’re not like that...we’re not that kind of people.

“It certainly leaves you open for misunderstanding...”

Speaking of misunderstanding, there’s also the issue of RCA withholding a fine record like Sacred Songs, Daryl’s solo LP with Robert Fripp, for nearly three years.

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“They got scared,” says Daryl of the record label. “It wasn’t a follow-up to “Rich Girl,” which had been a single a month before that album was recorded. It just took them by surprise. “I understand it. I was pissed off about it, but I understand it now in retrospect. It’s certainly a lot more accessible now than two and a half years ago. Then, it was really weird. People didn’t know how to relate to it...they didn’t understand the album at all. Now it seems completely understandable, but a lot has changed. That album preceeded a lot of things that happened. My ego says, wow, I wish it would have been released then, because everybody would’ve said I was the first to do certain things. But what do I care? It actually did better sales-wise being released now.”

As for integrating that material into Hall and Oates, “We did ‘Sacred Songs’ on the bubblegum tour,” says John.

“Which was completely out of context for that tour!” says Daryl. “We may do that one and another on the summer tour, but I’d basically like to keep the two separate, because I could always go out and do a Sacred Songs or a Hall tour sometime, maybe with Robert, maybe without him. We’ve talked about it.”

Much of this talk is not of the normal sort rolling out of rockers’ mouths—too much talk of change, efficiency, musical integrity, and the like. I wondered if they gave a thought all along to their place in the scheme of things, if only to buck the tide.

“Yeah, we do” says Daryl. “We try to figure out what it is in our music that communicated to people’s perceptions as they asr at a certain time. It’s hard to say what people would want, because they don’t usually know what they want.

“If you ask somebody, they’d say: ‘Oh well, we want...

“The soaring harmonies.injects John.

“‘Oh, why don’t they do “She’s Gone’” But that was 1974, and this is 1980. There’s other ways we can communicate what gave them a good feeling about that song without copying that,” stresses Daryl. “If we did succumb to that, we’d be just like groups like Pablo Cruise and Ambrosia, who are doing the sound now we did then, and just marking time and doing something we did a long time ago.

“We waged a musical war with the 70’s. That’s really where it’s at. We refused to fit into it. I hated the 70’s...I hated music in the 70’s. We had a couple abberations that turned out to be hits. I think we were always more of an 80’s band, and just locked into a period of time when we had to deal with what was going on.”

Not surprising they always had producer problems during the decade of the producer. “They wanted to do this 70’s trip to us,” explains Hall. “It was always us fighting their pushing us to be that in some mold. ‘Why don’t you slick it up, do this, do that.’ They were always doing it.

“You’ll hear from the new album, it’s like the 70’s didn’t exist in there. It went straight from the 60’s.to the 80’s.”

Finally producing themselves (“A move we should have done five years ago, but the time was right to do it now,” says John), Hall and Oates feel that Voices is, as John says, “the purest version of what we do, without a doubt.

“We were always trying throughout the 70’s to keep the purity of what it is that we do, and also what it is, when the song is written—that moment when you finish the song on piano or guitar—and we were never able to translate that to a record, because of using sidemen, session musicians, producers, and all the other things that get in the way, that come between the concept and expression. Now the time seems right.”

“It’s really weird,” concludes Daryl, “Other musicians now seem to understand what we do a lot better than they did two years ago."

“It seems very normal and acceptable for us to do what we do now,” says John, “but before it was like pulling teeth...”