What Does an Imperial Phase Sound Like? The Voice of Hall & Oates at their ’80s Peak
The original concept of the pop-music term “Imperial” was coined by Pet Shop Boys’ Neil Tennant, who in an early-2000s interview said of the Boys’ own late-’80s UK peak: “I felt at this time that we had the secret of contemporary pop music, that we knew what was required. We entered our imperial phase.” The term was then amplified and established in music criticism in a May 2010 essay for Pitchfork by Tom Ewing, who suggests there are three keys to an Imperial Phase, the last of these being self-definition: “The final thing about an imperial phase is that it defines an act, setting the tone for the rest of a career. … An imperial phase sustains a career but also freezes it: Empires decline, and the memory of former glories dies hard.”
No pop act better exemplifies Ewing’s third rule of imperiality than Daryl Hall and John Oates. To be sure, Hall and Oates have had a long and varied career, but in the popular imagination they will always be frozen in time as their early-’80s, mulleted-and-mustachioed selves — pop gods from the dawn of MTV who defined new wave Rock N’ Soul for an entire generation. Today I’d like to run down the Billboard chart specifics of Hall and Oates’s peak hitmaking period and consider what their string of hits tells us about Imperial Phases generally.
After a rocky commercial stretch in the 1970s, as my colleague Tom Erlewine has discussed, Daryl and John took the reins of their career firmly in hand with 1980’s Voices, their first self-produced album. It’s still ‘70s-sluggish in spots, particularly their cover of the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling.” That cover was important to their comeback, however — it peaked at #12, the first time they’d made the pop top 15 since 1977’s #1 “Rich Girl.”
But Voices’ real breakthrough was its follow-up single, “Kiss on My List.” Here at last was a single that sounded like the ’80s, like what Hall & Oates would become. They had found their voice — THIS was what they were supposed to sound like. As natural a hit as it sounds now, “Kiss” was actually the album’s third single, following not just their Righteous Brothers cover but also the album’s 1980 leadoff single, “How Does It Feel to Be Back,” which only made it to #30. “Kiss” entered the Hot 100 the week of January 24, 1981, at #69, while “Lovin’ Feeling” was still making its slow decline down the chart. “Kiss” made the top 40 three weeks later, and eight weeks after that — 35 years ago this very week, in fact — “Kiss” leapt 4-to-1, knocking Blondie’s “Rapture” out of the top spot. Sticking with the taut new-wave sound that had propelled them to the top, the duo followed up “Kiss” with the vaguely new-wavish #5 single “You Make My Dreams.” And with this one-two punch, Hall and Oates’s Imperial Phase had truly begun.
They didn’t take long to capitalize on this success. In the late summer of 1981, just one week after “You Make My Dreams” left the top 40, Hall & Oates launched the first single from their next album, Private Eyes. The new album’s title track entered the Hot 100 at #68, the chart’s top debut the week of August 29, 1981. Like its predecessor singles, “Private Eyes” sounded very of the moment — you can hear the rock of the late ’70s morphing into the multi-genre pop of the early ’80s. This sound, which would make Hall & Oates superstars, is on full view at the very start of “Private Eyes”: a guitar lick paired with an electric piano riff, with a four-on-the-floor beat.
It was synthetic in the best sense, quite literally synthesizing new-wave rock and crisp R&B into polished pop. “Private Eyes” spent two weeks at #1, keeping the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up” stuck in the runner-up position.
Hall and Oates really came to define the new decade, however, on the immortal follow-up single, the icy-cool “I Can’t Go For That (No Can Do).” For starters, it was one of the first U.S. hits anchored prominently by a drum machine. But the song’s inspired sound went deeper than that, and its shadow was, and is, long. A little over three years later, at the recording session for “We Are the World,” Michael Jackson admitted to Hall that he stole the bassline for “Billie Jean” from “I Can’t Go For That.” Praise doesn’t get much higher than that.
In a 2006 interview with Mix magazine, Hall said of the song’s genesis: “Remember the old Roland CompuRhythm box? I turned to the Rock and Roll 1 preset, sat down at a Korg organ that happened to be lying there and started to play this bassline that was coming to me. It’s the old recording studio story: The engineer heard what I was doing and turned on the tape machine. Good thing, because I’m the kind of person who will come up with an idea and forget it. The chords came together in about 10 minutes, and then I heard a guitar riff, which I asked John, who was sitting in the booth, to play.” Mix’s Gary Eskow asked Oates if he considered doing any other guitar parts on the song. “No, never!” Oates replied. “When we play ‘I Can’t Go for That’ in concert, I usually play some shimmery parts, but there was a leanness to the ’80s sound that we were into. The Cars and other groups had that straight, simple eighth-note feel, and it was an influence on us; it was one of the cool things about ’80s music. The ’70s were rococo, but punk and new wave flavored the ’80s, and we responded to those styles.”
“I Can’t Go for That’s” chart performance was exceptional. In early 1982, not only did it knock Olivia Newton-John’s behemoth 10-week No. 1 “Physical” out of the top spot; in the same week it topped the Hot 100, it also topped Hot Soul Singles — making Hall & Oates the last white act to top the R&B chart for roughly six years. One week earlier, the song had also hit #1 on Billboard’s Hot Dance Club Play chart. In short, “I Can’t Go for That” was, arguably, the ultimate crossover record by a white act of the early ’80s.
Private Eyes spun off two more singles: the electric piano-driven “Did It In A Minute,” which hit #9 in May ’82, and the thumping, bottom-heavy “Your Imagination,” which crawled to #33, fairly typical for an album’s fourth single. (By the way, a bit of perspective: “Your Imagination” wound up being the only single Hall & Oates released between ’81 and the start of ’85 to fail to make the top 10.) Once “Your Imagination” had run its course, further evidence of Hall & Oates’s full-on imperiality came quickly. Only seven weeks after “Imagination” exited the Hot 100, the duo were already back with the first single from a new album — H2O, their highest-charting and most hit-packed album ever.
Regarding that new single, Daryl told NME in November ’82, “We try and take chances. Our new single ‘Maneater’ isn’t something that sounds like anything else on the radio.” To be fair, “Maneater” did sound like one other thing on the radio in late 1982 — Phil Collins’s cover of the Supremes’ “You Can’t Hurry Love,” which hit the Hot 100 just a month after “Maneater,” and whose bassline — the Supremes original, that is — “Maneater” pretty clearly cribbed. But where the Collins song is clearly indebted to the past, “Maneater,” Motown bassline and all, was clearly closer to the cutting edge. That stealthy groove underpins the song, but today it is nearly as best remembered for Charlie DeChant’s distinctive sax work -all over the record, and on a memorable solo. In its 10th week on the chart (December 18, 1982), “Maneater” jumped from 3–1, and stayed there for four weeks, making it Hall & Oates’s longest-running #1 single.
“Maneater’s” parent album H2O became their biggest, spending 15 weeks at #3 and a total of 68 weeks on the album chart; it was also their first to go double-platinum. Its singles campaign kept right on rolling with the gorgeous synth-led midtempo “One on One,” which went top 10 pop and, again, R&B, followed by a cover of Mike Oldfield’s sinister “Family Man.” The latter also hit the pop top 10 and featured a slick, crackling little guitar solo from future Saturday Night Live bandleader G.E. Smith.
This period of Hall and Oates was huge for me personally. I’ve always referred to Hall & Oates as “the first band I ever loved.” Right around “Maneater”’s release, in the fall of 1982, I had just started seventh grade. I was a geeky, awkward not-quite-12-year-old with a big blonde-turning-brown white-boy afro, Honda windshield glasses, and highwater jeans.
I didn’t know much, but I knew I loved pop music. For a couple of years I’d been rushing into the living room of our Indiana farmhouse after getting home from Sunday church, eager to spend four hours next to the speakers of my Mom’s old stereo — tuner and turntable on the shelves, two huge speakers on the floor — with, of course, Casey Kasem, as he counted down the 40 biggest singles in America each week. I’d probably started listening to American Top 40 sometime in early ’81, and by ’82 it had become a glorious addiction. So much so that at some point I’d started keeping a notebook of each week’s countdown, with the artist and title of each song, its position, and its previous week’s position. And it got worse: by sometime midway through seventh grade, my classmates came to realize that on any given Monday they could ask me, “Hey, Tom, what was #28 this week?” and I could proudly tell them that it was Oxo’s “Whirly Girl” (the week ending April 23, 1983, the same week that “One on One” spent its second week at its #7 peak).
But I’m getting ahead of myself. In the fall of ’82 I didn’t yet have my own stereo, or even a radio, and I wanted one, badly. I played trombone in the junior high band, and that fall, our school system’s “Music Boosters” — an organization made up of the parents of all of the kids in both choir and band in grades 7–12 — held a contest amongst said students to sell tickets to their annual variety show, a fundraiser for the music programs. The grand prize was a Panasonic AM/FM/cassette boombox, and I was damned and determined to win it. I was gonna do whatever I had to do to win it, so I sold and sold and sold. I sold to friends of my parents, I sold to people at church, I even sold door-to-door near my grandparents’ house.(We lived out in the country, so I couldn’t exactly go door-to-door there.) And the end result was that this dorky seventh-grade trombonist sold 64 tickets to that stupid variety show (of which I remember not a moment), and won the boombox. The runner-up was a trombonist in the eighth grade, and he hated me for the rest of the year, because I beat him by a single pair of tickets — he sold 62. As Kurtis Blow said, that’s the breaks.
Now that I had the boombox, it was time to start collecting cassettes to play on it. I loved the radio, of course, but I wanted to be able to listen to what I wanted when I wanted it. The first week of December, I hosted a couple of junior high buddies for my 12th birthday party. I already knew that I liked Hall & Oates, who were by this point becoming about the hottest act in the U.S. My friend Curt had both Private Eyes and the newly-released H2O, and brought them to the party so that we could listen to them on my new boombox. I jealously wanted those for my own. Curt gave me my first cassette tape as well, not by Hall & Oates, but instead the also-hot Toto IV (which I’ll defend to this day). Soon enough, though, I checked both of those Hall & Oates albums out of the public library and home-taped them at my grandfather’s house, thus confirming the RIAA’s worst suspicions. And a musical romance was firmly established.
Of course, at this point, most of America had fallen pretty heavily for Hall and Oates. With H2O still on the album chart, in late October ’83 they released their first greatest hits record, Rock N Soul Part 1 — by the way, never, ever put “Part 1” in the title of your hits album! The album was led by a new single, and one of their best: “Say It Isn’t So.” By this point Hall and Oates had become so big, with so much pent-up excitement for a new Hall & Oates single, that “So” smashed into the Hot 100 all the way up at #30 — this at a time when even superstar singles usually debuted below the top 40. Three weeks later, “So” was in the top 10, and by December 18, 1983, it got up to #2. It was sadly stopped there, stuck for four weeks behind the Michael Jackson–Paul McCartney juggernaut that was “Say Say Say.” (No offense to Michael and Paul, but as Hall and Oates’s new single was scaling the chart, I was tracking its American Top 40 performance and rooting for “So” to hit #1 for my 13th birthday. But not all birthday wishes come true.)
Beyond its chart exploits, I need to talk about “So” as a song, as it was a major step forward in the evolution of the Hall & Oates sound, even more sleek and streamlined than what had come before it.
Written by Hall and produced by the duo with journeyman producer–mixer Bob Clearmountain, “So” was in a way their most synthetic single yet, and I mean that as a compliment. While fairly synth-heavy, you can clearly hear guitar, bass, and drums on the record — but the taste it ultimately leaves you with is of a high-grade synthetic oil, the kind that helps vehicles run more smoothly. “Say It Isn’t So” performed this lubricating effect on the radio at the turn of 1984 — kicking off what is widely regarded as Top 40 radio’s greatest-ever year.
Hall and Oates’ contribution to 1984 pop was the other new Rock N Soul single, the electronic fantasia “Adult Education.” Again produced by the Hall/Oates/Clearmountain trinity, “Adult Education” leans heavily on drum pads, yet it struts like a rock song. It sounded tailor-made for remixing, and indeed it was — the duo’s second straight single given an extended dance mix by no less than John “Jellybean” Benitez. Jellybean’s remixes of the two Rock N Soul singles are both excellent, but frankly, “Adult Education’s” remix deserved better on Billboard’s dance charts. While “So” was another #1 dance single, “Education” stalled at #21, likely because of its harder edges and perception as quote-unquote “rock.” With hindsight, it’s one of Hall and Oates’s most forward-looking singles, its danceable rock hybrid pointing the way towards future pop.
They weren’t even done writing hits in 1984, however. Again, with their previous album still on the charts (Rock N Soul became their second double-platinum effort), that September Hall & Oates unleashed “Out of Touch,” which took the electronics in their sound even further. Crucially, when it appeared on their next album Big Bam Boom, “Out of Touch” was preceded by the track “Dance On Your Knees,” a largely instrumental, disjointed groove. Credited as a co-write by Hall and the legendary New York dance producer Arthur Baker, “Knees,” which basically melts into “Out of Touch,” is fully shaped by Baker, even if his album credit only reads “Mix Consultant and Additional Production.” You can really hear his hand in shaping the sound of both “Dance on Your Knees” and “Out of Touch,” even if the latter was another Hall/Oates/Clearmountain production. The controlled cacophony of “Out of Touch” is Arthur Baker’s sound without being a formal Arthur Baker production. (Baker did wind up remixing all four of the Big Bam Boom album’s singles for the 12” market, notching the duo another dance club #1 with its lead single.) Of course, in that magical time for pop music that was 1984, “Out of Touch” was in good company on the charts. Talk about an iconic stretch of singles: its two weeks at #1 were sandwiched between a pair of artists’ first #1s: Wham!’s “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” and Madonna’s “Like A Virgin.” And finally — finally! — young Tom got his wish: “Out of Touch” ascended to #1 on the Hot 100 the week ending December 8th, meaning that it went to the top the very week of my 14th birthday. Before “Out of Touch” even fell out of the top 20, in early January ’85, follow-up “Method of Modern Love” had already leapt into the top 30, on its way to a single week at #5.
That’s when the faucet of hits began to suddenly go dry. Big Bam Boom’s third and fourth singles, “Some Things Are Better Left Unsaid” (oh, that title!) and “Possession Obsession” (a rare single with John on lead vocals) crept to numbers 18 and 30, respectively. In the late summer of ’85 they released what I would actually call the final evidence of Hall and Oates’s Imperial Phase — a record done more for them than for the public. It must have seemed like a great idea at the time: a live EP recorded at New York’s Apollo Theatre with the Temptations’ David Ruffin and Eddie Kendrick. Its lead single was a misguided, as-retro-as-it-gets medley of “The Way You Do The Things You Do” and “My Girl,” which made it to #20 largely on the back of the previous five years’ goodwill amassed with radio stations and the record-buying public. At that summer’s Live Aid concert in Philadelphia, Hall & Oates were the de facto house band, not only playing their own set but also backing up Mick Jagger and Tina Turner.
And just like that, the Imperial Phase was over. After Live Aid, I can only imagine, they were probably just tired. The duo took a three-year hiatus from recording together. In the interim, Daryl Hall released a solo album, Three Hearts in the Happy Ending Machine, produced by Dave Stewart of Eurythmics, in the autumn of ’86. Its lead single, the swirling rocker “Dreamtime,” got to #5 and then quickly vanished, and no other singles from the album made it any higher than #33. Hall and Oates had forged a magnificent groove that was the essence of the first half of the ’80s — and when they abandoned it, they were kings no longer. When their next album, Ooh Yeah! finally appeared in the spring of 1988 — with the duo now on Clive Davis’s Arista Records after a decade on RCA — it notched a lone top 10 hit in its leadoff single, “Everything Your Heart Desires.” Hall and Oates never hit that elite circle again.
To me, what’s in some ways most remarkable about Hall and Oates’s Imperial Phase is that, according to the duo, they weren’t even fully aware it was happening. “We never worried about hits,” Oates told American Songwriter in 2009, discussing their songwriting approach. “Even during the ‘80s…that was the last thing on our mind. We’ve always had the rap of being these pop masterminds who had this formula, just had some kind of key to unlocking the door for pop success. But nothing could be further from the truth. We never picked our own singles. Our philosophy was always, make the best record you can, let the radio and record company people — who sell the music — decide what songs will be released as the singles. First off, we’re not gonna put a song on a record if we don’t like it, so we don’t care which song they pick. There are always songs that seem to stand out that people say, ‘Oh, that sounds like a single.’”
This says a lot about Daryl Hall and John Oates, who were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2004, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2014. But it also says a lot about artists’ creativity at the height of their success. If Pet Shop Boys’ Neil Tennant is right about Imperial acts possessing the secret to contemporary pop music, it may be possible to possess that secret without looking for it.
