HALL & OATES LAUGH All THE WAY TO THE SYNTH BANK

"...Now no one will be able to accuse us of being fags that sing like the Spinners.” —Daryl Hall, to Jaan Uhelszki, Auqust 1977.

Five years have passed, and Hall & Oates have scored more gold and platinum hits in 1981 than any other duo/group. Their first self-produced albums, Voices and Private Eyes, are shaping up to be their most successful, a personal vindication for the decade-old pairing. After years of jumping from one musical pond to another, they seemed finally to have settled down into their own groove, having discovered the happy truth that the records they liked to make were also those that sold the most. Perfect, right?

Nah...not quite. Despite a fairly distinctive, airy sound on the last two albums, I’ve encountered people identifying everything from Paul Davis to a currently charting black artist as “Hall & Oates, isn’t it?” More than one person greeted the news that 1 was writing this story with: “Well, they’re gay, right? They live in New York, and they’re gay.” New York may have changed since I was there a few months ago, but I think there still are some heteros hanging around. I even know a few.

"We were pioneers. —John Oates"

1973: “She’s Gone” and Abandoned Luncheonette enter my frenzied collegiate consciousness, oozing seductively from my roomate’s perpetually “on” clock radio. The box is always turned to “Staryaryayr-o ...Is-land,” and Daryl and John’s Ruffin/ Kendricks vocal byplay backed with an irresistible, hook-laden blend of strings, spacey guitar and saxophone played through a synthesizer, leap out from the usual Bread mush quite appealingly. Soon the Luncheonette LP makes its debut on our dorm floor, owned by the girl who was always telling us things we still didn’t know about sex, and using the shower room for trysts with...more than one guy. I figured this band had to be pretty lurid.

At that point in their career, their second Atlantic LP, and their third year in New York, Daryl and John were trying every possible sound, in the hopes that one would snag the record-buying public... without much success. Then “She’s Gone” took off, and the third Atlantic record, War Babies was released (produced by Upper Darby, PA’s Todd Rundgren), quite a departure from any previous H&O product. People who particularly like War Babies are generally happy that Hall & Oates are surrounding themselves with strange noises on the 1980’s hits, although it seems to be assumed that if “Babies” had hit it big, that hard-edged Delaware Valley sound would have been with Hall & Oates a bit longer.

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The Sound Of Pottstowh and North Wales, PA?

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“The guys were all yelling for Joan Jett. Admittedly, there were screams from the girls for Hall & Oates.”—a line from a newspaper review of a Hall & Oates/Joan Jett show.

Well, we know what girls screaming means. Bay City Rollers, Monkees, icky girlie pablum. Guys yelling—that’s sexual but OK. With Hall & Oates, if they’re not gay, they’re creampuffs who dare to make girls swoon over their brylcreemed quiffs. Ooooooo.

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Hall & Oates In Concert: February, 1982, Toronto

I figure a Maple Leaf Gardens audience waiting to se&> Hall & Oates* Joan Jett & the Blackhearts and industry upstart Aldo Nova to be a pretty interesting study in itself, and for once I’m not mistaken. Clean—these kids are so clean and polite to each other, even in full post-modernist punk regalia. Even the fat girl who sits mostly on me for three or so hours in sympathetic—she just overlaps the chair, and can’t help it, she’s not invading my space. Her hearty Canadian warmth keeps my body thermometer at a comfortable chilly spring day temperature, so why fight it? Pressing hard on my other side were two cheerful mid-teen girls, obviously Daryl Hall fans, who snuck cigarettes into their corn-fed cheeks in between sets, let loose blood curdling screams whenever they recognized a song, and look astonished at my calm journalistic, note-taking demeanor. Aldo Nova had come and done his thing for the Gardens; we blew in just before Joan Jett’s set. Iman Lababedi writes' the truth elsewhere in this issue when he mentions seeing numerous Joan Clones at her shows: I must have counted 20 close-cropped black heads walking around in black Pro-Keds before I gave up. What went through these spikey little heads later, when Daryl and John came on to croon “She’s Gone”? To add to this pan-Canadian melting pot are the “adults” who either want the Hall & Oates hits from the days of their youth fed to them in a smooth, civilized manner with no standing up, or they want their 1970’s/ 80’s AM/FM top pop Hall, & Oates hits presented to them nicely, with no jostling and no standing up. This causes a bit of gnashing of teeth and sighs among the youths, but it being Maple Leaf instead of Madison Square Gardens,-the black clouds soon disperse and all is cool and chummy at the home of the T.O. Maple Leafs’ dogged but futile attempts at hockey. After Daryl and John run through a few newer numbers, they trot out “Rich' Girl” and I feel a surge of Philly dog pride as the audience goes a little nuts. Here are these two Wissahickon river rats, playing their old Marvelettes 45’s (via the warm-up tape) in front of thousands, dancing like hyperactive street urchins, and punctuating their best-known megahits with improvised screaming (Daryl sings “Because your kiss—AAAARGH!—is on my list...”)

I thought my first encounter with Hall & Oates had been via radio, but as John grew up in North Wales—just up the Sumneytown Pike from my childhood home— and Daryl hails from Pottstown, right between Philadelphia and Reading, I may very well have rubbed elbows with either at a hot pretzel stand or Connie Mack Stadium or something...Daryl, particularly, is vehement about calling himself a New Yorker, having lived there since 1970, but we all know no New Yorker is really from New York, the formative years have always been spent elsewhere. In Daryl and John’s case, I do think it matters, You don’t realize until you get out of Philadelphia to go somewhere else that the neighborhoods and schools are more integrated and area radio is more dominated by black music. White kids jump onto black music because, coming off the radio, it sounds more fun and usually danceable and the clothes are usually better. It’s nothing conscious, it’s just artother style to choose from, growing up there: The other popular style was Italian cool (due to a sizable Italian population), which was similar to black cool, involving European-cut shirts, tight black pegged pants, etc. When we moved to the midwest and my suburban Philadelphia-bred brother, wore Cuban heels to his new junior high school, he was immediately yanked into the principal’s office and given a quick primer in midwestern preppie style. So when Daryl and John say they can’t relate to West Coast musicians, musically, aesthetically or otherwise, I know what they’re saying. Philadelphia. You can go to New York and get by, but forget the rest of the country, they don’t want to know. (“Nobody in America cares about shoes,” Dairyl complained later.)

"The English everything has to do with sexual perversion! —Daryl Hall"

...and getting paid Canadian oil dollars for it.

Next, the band is allowed to go hog wild introducing itself, going all out to spoof the cliche-ness of the situation by hamming it up gaily. Mickey “White Dog” Curry dishes up a shameless, epic “Wipe-Out,” hotshot guitarist G.E. Smith is all over the place, banging his head with his guitar and staying in tune, lying on the floor, throwing up his guitar gaily and—as 10,000 or so were my witness—having it plop back into his hands in a chord. Bass player Tom “T-Bone” Wolk plays his instrument up over his head, backwards, to great cheers. But the saxophone always brings the house down; Charlie “Mr. Casual” DeChant gets the most audience response when he takes his horn for the traditional stroll.

The show winds to an end, Daryl and John both stripping down to t-shirts (a Northerner near me exclaims of Daryl: “He’s skinny!”) for their last numbers, which include John singing a spirited “Funky Broadway” and garnering more points as having the best on-stage rhythm. Show over, I glide effortlessly backstage, my path smoothed countless times by persons in command of various Gardens posts; indeed, when I enter the outer backstage area a guy is yelling my name. I respond: it’s Randy Hoffman, a member of the Hall & Oates Champion Entertainment management team, ready to process me back into the inner sanctum. He sized me up immediately as a gurrrrrl: “Oh, you like Daryl, right?” I quickly identified myself as more of a fellow traveler from the Quaker City, who wanted to finally make journalistic contact with these multi-platinum soul boys who ate the same junk food and saw the same kiddie shows I did, back in our old Pennsylvania homes. More notes on sexuality: not only, are there women backstage, but a whole caravan of blondes arrive together, to be greeted by Daryl and John as old and dear pals. Some are young, some older, but they’re all eerily reminiscent of gauzy mid-60’s Playmates, with “finished” hair and soft curves. This ripe femininity pervades the locker room/backstage to such an extent that I feel part of some huge harem. Daryl and John look happy. Nobody can find any wine.

"The reason why a lot of avant-garde music doesn't sell is because It stinks. —Daryl Hall"

"Why do I like the song `No Can Do'? Because it's like.. .Kraftwerk. "-The office Can aficionado.

Well, he listens to Can-I listen to a black radio station, and I think the drum synthesizer intro and the synth Iir~es running through the song sound.. ."ur ban," shall we say, to avoid further racial labeling/polarization. Proof: way back during Super Bowl festivities a televised party from a downtown bar featured a black cover band doing a flawless version of "No Can Do," drum synth intro and all. Official I-I&O comment: "Great, we can hire them to go on the road for us." -.

The reason for detailing the band’s sparer self-production and the cool, flippant use of synths is this: the band’s basic strength is their voices, and the instrumental back-up is finally as quirky and intense as their vocals, instead of enveloping them in lush waves of strings, or flailing armies of guitars. I mentioned Soft Cell to Daryl and John, and was about to point out a similar vocal/instrumental relation... in a bent sort of way.. .but never got to that point, as Daryl.exclaimed, “Soft C^ll? (To John) Was that the band we saw on TV? It was? Aaaaaaaargh! That guy, the lead singer, wearing all that make-up!” He pulled a disgusted face. So much for comparative rock criticism.

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H&O Confab, Ponchartrain Hotel, Detroit

I prefer to wing questions out as life goes on, in varied locales, but the specific Q-and -A session makes people feel better, and is inevitable. Topics discussed:

Machines Vs. Us.

Daryl boldly claimed responsibility for his machines, stating firmly that synthesizers were a great tool now within the reach of many, unlike the old days of the first ARPs when considerable technical ability was necessary. John noted that the new synths were perfect for their road work, being easily programmed and left at that. The sort of mensch machine theory of Kraft werk scoffed at as old-fashioned auto maton nonsense.

An English review of "I Can't Go For That (No Can Do)"

Daryl: "I saw that, yeah! He said it was a bondage song. The English.. .everything has to do with sexual perversion! The English press is great..."

The New COver on Voices? (A Puzzler Here At The Office)

TURN TO PAGE 59

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 38

They saw it on a Japanese greatest hits package, liked it, and used it for a new run of the Voices album, “for the fans;”

The Proliferation Of Two-Man Synth Bands In England...

“See, we were pioneers. We did that years ago,” laughed John.

Rock Against Racism

Both had heard of a supposed boycott of their records by some black stations because white stations didn’t play black crossover hits, but they weren’t aware of anything definite at any station. Any sort of separation of music by race, conscious ot otherwise, was deplored. I pointed out that in Detroit black-oriented WGPR played “No Can Do” (as well as the B-52’s and Tom Tom Club), which the white AOR stations wouldn’t touch. Why—too soft? Soft is...mushy ballads sung by soprano male voices fronting supposedly “heavy” bands, played , constantly on “white” AOR stations.

Pet Peeves

By judicious prying, I was able to discover that Daryl shared a view we hold around the office...that there is an incredible amount of D. Byrne product loose in the world, and what’s the big deal about sounding like him, anyway. He did profess affection for the Tom Tom Club, and considered their charting position “a vindication.” Daryl had been opining that the view of some in the “avant-garde” that to be commercial was by definition to mean a record was bad, was more or less bullshit. “The reason a lot of avant-garde music doesn’t sell is because it stinks.”

John Oates

If it seemed he didn’t talk much during all of this, it’s because (1) Daryl jumps thr> conversational gun and (2) John often finishes sentences for him. Hard to attribute quotes to two different people at once.

Gifts

In the interest of inter-magazine harmony, I hand over my unread copy of Musician: Player & Listener to Daryl, reasoning that I didn’t like to ?ead other people’s stories before I wrote my own anyway, and besides, he’s on the cover and wants it more. I depart with a tropical flower, Daryl Hall & John Oates board a waiting bus to Lansing, they think, and the black parking lot attendant gets his autograph. Later, pushing a grocery cart in a local food mart, “You Make My Dreams Come True” comes on the store P. A., and I realize the absurdity of trying to sum up in a few words any theory on a band who’ve become as ubiquitous as vanilla yogurt. So I won’t...

Best Single of ’81-’82

“I Can’t Go For That (No Can Do),” Al Green high notes and all.