How Hall & Oates Bared Their Soul
Daryl and John’s 70s journey was about reintegration—a place where race, class and sex didn’t matter
By Stephen Thomas Erlewine
They met when the Battle Of The Bands that they were playing at turned into actual gang warfare. Some reports say gunfire rang out, some don’t, but the two musicians fled to a freight elevator to wait for the ruckus to pass.
At that point, neither man knew the other. John Oates played guitar in the Masters and Daryl Hall sang lead in the Temptones, one of Philadelphia’s few white vocal combos. On that 1967 evening, both groups were set to play West Philly’s Adelphi Ballroom, plugging singles recently released on different imprints run by Kenny Gamble. The similarities didn’t end there. They shared a love of soul music and both were students at Temple University. Daryl Hall and John Oates formed a fast friendship, but it took a while before they decided to join creative forces — about three years, give or take. It took even longer for them to find their voice — nearly a decade, all things considered.
Hall & Oates — a moniker that never appeared on any of the duo’s official albums — spent the 70s stumbling, piling up false starts and experiments alongside hits, which certainly did arrive. Big ones, in fact: “She’s Gone,” “Rich Girl” and “Sara Smile,” all cornerstones of their legacy, a trio of tunes that confirm Daryl Hall and John Oates’ position as one of the great blue-eyed soul groups. All three songs also suggest that Hall & Oates were primarily a blue-eyed soul act in those early years, which isn’t precisely true. Their earliest recordings were folk and they’d wind up succumbing to art-rock and glam infatuations, but soul is the undercurrent that unifies the music. To Daryl & John, soul wasn’t simply a musical style: it was a utopian ideal, a place where race, class and sex didn’t matter. Soul was the music of integration.
Integration is integral to the music of Daryl Hall & John Oates.
As the duo reached the apex of their career in 1982, they sat for a revealing interview with Musician magazine’s Bill Flanagan. There, Hall claimed “We were not influenced that much, believe it or not, by black music per se. We were influenced by early rock & roll and soul music, which was not black. It was INTEGRATED music. There was no difference between black and white.”
Rock & Soul, the term Hall & Oates use to describe their music, underscores how they believed they erased borders: they played R&B with the electric vitality of an arena band and rocked with the swing of soul. Nevertheless, this framing also suggests a dichotomy, as if the rock & soul exist on separate planes. Hall & Oates didn’t divide, they combined, finding a space where differing styles, sensibilities and aesthetics existed in harmony.
Such a delicate blend was tricky to achieve. “I think it took us the whole of the seventies to really figure it out,” Hall admitted to journalist Ken Sharp in 2000. “We hit the nail on the head many times but we were sort of experimenting and trying different ways of doing it. Seeing what worked, seeing how much we could push the boundaries.”
The pair wasn’t merely negotiating their own creative chemistry, but the practical demands of the marketplace, battling expectations of record labels as well as their audience. But it was also true that the duo benefitted from the luxury of failure. During the 70s, the record industry demanded regular records and tours, an infrastructure that effectively let bands grow up in public. It was a system that allowed Hall & Oates find their voice. Ultimately, their 70s journey is about reintegration: it’s how the pair found their way back to their utopian ideal of soul.
Not long after that fateful 1967 night when Hall & Oates met, what they perceived to be the golden age of integrated soul came to an end. During 1968, a year which saw the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King and the passage of the Civil Rights Act, soul fractured into funk and harder, earthier rhythms — musical responses to an age of protest. Never mind that some of this music was still made by racially integrated groups of musicians: Hall saw these musical divisions break along racial terms.
“About 1970 a big schism happened. White music got real white and black music got real black. That’s where heavy metal comes in, and that’s when Philadelphia music threw out all the white guys,” he said. Hall & Oates responded not by going metal, but picking up acoustic guitars, yet the fact remains: by the end of the decade, neither man was playing soul.
This was a major shift for both men, who spent the 60s hustling in a Philadelphia that Hall called “the Wild West of music.” The city’s lawless indie landscape provided plenty of opportunities for young, hungry musicians. Oates was a teenager when The Masters delivered a snappy, cheerful 45 called “I Need Your Love” and Daryl Hall wasn’t much older when he sang blissful leads in the Temptones.
Hall worked his way into the inner circles of Philly soul architects Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, playing keyboards and singing backup on numerous sessions, often in conjunction with future record producer Thom Bell. Between 1967 and 1972 — that half-decade between when Daryl Hall met John Oates and when they released their debut Whole Oats — Daryl regularly played sessions for Gamble & Huff. He played on serious stuff and appeared on such trifles as “Keem-O-Sabe,” a 1969 hit by a studio group called the Electric Indian that Hall later unfairly called one of the worst records ever made.
Despite all this, Hall was a satellite member in Gamble & Huff’s world. His main gig was Gulliver, a hippie-ish rock band he formed with singer/songwriter Tim Moore, who previously played drums in Woody’s Truck Stop, an early band led by Todd Rundgren. Gulliver could hit their gnarled blues riffs pretty hard but they favored paisley-spackled folk-rock. Their lone eponymous album, released on Elektra in 1969, took stock of the end of the 60s: it was clear that the group wanted to get back to the garden but had no idea how to get there.
Gulliver split quickly and their disbandment happened to coincide with Oates’ return to the states. He’d been over in Europe in an attempt to find himself, a perhaps appropriate response to playing in a country band called Valentine with Frank Stallone. During this time, John drifted toward acoustic music. Oates loved folk in a way Hall never did. John was drawn to simple, traditional tunes, going so far to cut a version of Doc Watson’s “Deep River Blues” on an early Hall & Oates demo.
Once Oates returned to America, he began living with Hall and, soon, they transitioned from roommates to partners, picking up where Valentine and Gulliver left off by playing quivering coffeehouse folk. A lot of these early numbers were cut as demos which unscrupulous labels have recycled over the years — my father brought me home a collection called Past Times Behind that was wrapped in a plain brown sleeve, as if its true identity should be hidden. The striking thing about these songs is how they seem written under the influence of the idea of Bob Dylan, not the Bard himself. They’re soft, inquisitive numbers that play like plainspoken secrets. Oates viewed this as nothing less than maturation: they were “growing out of being teenagers.”
Certainly, this aesthetic — the idea that strummed diaries were more honest and adult than tightly written tunes — propels Whole Oats, the duo’s 1972 debut for Atlantic Records. The label was perfectly content to take their time to break the duo, or at least have the two find their voice, and Whole Oats consequently has a happily unformed feel. As it drifts from dewy piano ballads to sunset acoustic numbers, its sequencing seems haphazard. If anything, there’s a sense that the album may have been rushed, which it may have been: initial promo singles for “Goodnight and Good Morning” were credited to Whole Oats, the duo’s initial attempt at a name. But there are good elements here, particularly in the moments where confessionals are underpinned by soulful rhythms: especially “Lilly (Are You Happy),” whose coda lifts to the heavens in a string arrangement worth of their old mentors Gamble & Huff.
Some of the album’s haziness derives from the fact that at the time of its recording, Hall & Oates were essentially two singer/songwriters playing their tunes in tandem. Conversely, 1973’s Abandoned Luncheonette was a record Daryl Hall & John Oates made as a collective and given a polish by Arif Marden, a big-time producer who corralled a bunch of studio pros as support. “She’s Gone,” a lush piece of Philly Soul, gave Hall & Oates one of their first Top 10 hits, yet not in 1973 when the song was first released. That year, it went no further than No. 60 on the charts.
The failure of “She’s Gone” illustrates how Atlantic had no idea how to market Hall & Oates, but the sprawl of Abandoned Luncheonette also shows how the duo was difficult to categorize. Much of the record skillfully balances soul and folk in a way Whole Oates only hinted, but in between “Had I Known You Better Then” and “Las Vegas Turnaround” — the first of several times Hall’s girlfriend and songwriting partner Sara Allen is mentioned in song — there are winding excesses where it seems as if Hall & Oates are pushing ambition with no distinct vision.
Even if these moments are murky, they’re restless, suggesting that underneath the soulful surface and acoustic guitars there was a rock band itching to get out. This urge only grew once Hall & Oates launched their first-ever tour. “The more we played, the more we wanted to rock,” said Oates. “Playing live we realized the folky Abandoned Luncheonette approach wasn’t getting over to a wild crowd in a club.” In addition to playing rock shows, they were attending them as well. “I was going to the Mercer Arts Centre and seeing the New York Dolls and those kinds of bands,” remembered Hall. “I wrote a bunch of songs that reflected the chaos of that scene.”
Like so many other musicians in the early 70s, Hall was under the spell of David Bowie. Hall & Oates opened for Bowie on the Ziggy Stardust tour, and Daryl and David wound up hanging together in Jamaica, getting drunk while listening to bad reggae. Ziggy may have directly influenced the alien imagery on 1974’s War Babies, but fellow Philadelphian Todd Rundgren shaped the sound. Todd, a soul refugee whose mind was bent by rock, shared a similar background to Hall & Oates, but he also embraced eccentricity, crafting his 1973 album A Wizard A True Star as an aural LSD trip. War Babies often plays like a miniature version of Wizard, but this isn’t a vision imposed on Hall & Oates: this is something Daryl Hall desperately desired.
It’s debatable whether Oates wanted to move in this direction: seven of the album’s 10 songs are Hall’s alone. Oates later said, “Making that record was pretty much a crazy, intense, psychedelic experience. It wasn’t too much fun for me, and I’m kind of ambivalent about that album.” Ambivalent Oates may be, yet War Babies is one of the duo’s best albums and the record where they truly started to integrate rock and art into their sound, to start to expand upon the idea of what they could achieve.
Rundgren encouraged them to explore: “Up until that particular record,” he recalled, “they had always thought of their harmonies in terms of the two of them, like the Righteous Brothers. On this album, we began to work with some deeper, three part harmonies and got them thinking more in terms of a section thing as opposed to a lead vocal and one other guy.” Todd recently told Marc Maron that this also is where Hall began to think conceptually and from this point on every LP, no matter how flawed, would be bound by a unifying idea.
Pivotal though it may be, War Babies bombed so badly that Atlantic soured on the duo, cutting them loose. They quickly resurfaced on RCA, releasing an eponymous album in the summer of 1975. That record was dubbed “The Silver Album” due to the cover’s metallic hue but the true visual hook of the artwork was a portrait of the duo designed as an androgynous daydream by Mick Jagger’s makeup artist. The two looked divine. More than that, the contoured cheekbones hinted that the duo were still glam, but thanks to producer Christopher Bond — who played guitar on Abandoned Luncheonette — Hall & Oates began to bring back R&B, interlacing it with rock throughout the record. Occasionally, the duo took risks, but the record turned into a hit because the soft soul of “Sara Smile” was so seductive.
It was soulful, but it was also soft rock, that supple, supine sound that seduced the mid-70s. Perhaps “Sara Smile” gave Hall & Oates an audience — in its wake, “She’s Gone” became a Top 10 hit — but its mellowness, combined with that glamour shot, softened the duo’s image too much. “I don’t think people understood at all what we were,” Hall said in 1982. “I think half the people thought we were like the Little River Band or something like that: real AM, just surface, nothing else there. I still get that. And a lot of people thought we were effete bisexual snobs. I got that vibe. Put that combination together and it’s not a very positive image: ‘Fags who only deal with the surface.’”
To this day, detractors argue Hall & Oates are superficial, but it took the duo a bit before they combatted this notion directly. First, they capitalized on their success, doubling down on The Silver Album with Bigger Than Both Of Us, a record that pushed the pair toward something grander and slicker, almost disco in its glitz. This gambit worked: the group scored another huge hit with “Rich Girl,” a song that ate up all the oxygen on the LP, but elsewhere they developed effective articulations of their rock & soul: beneath the glitterball strings and laser sound effects, “Back Together Again” bore a spikiness not far removed from Rundgren, while “Do What You Want, Be What You Are” — a phrase that turned into a credo — dressed its slow jam in arena rock flair.
After a traumatic 1977, the duo saw no other option other than hardening their sound. Much of that turmoil came from working with Christopher Bond yet again on Beauty On A Back Street, a record so disdained by Hall & Oates that no tracks from it have shown up on their hits compilations. It is, as they say, a transitional record — the duo is pushing against the constraints of Bond, whose instincts as a producer bent toward streamlining.
Hall & Oates claimed later that Bond’s insistence on recording with studio musicians, not their touring group, pushed them toward anonymity and it’s possible to hear where their complaints lie. Compare “The Emptyness,” an Oates number given a truncated reading on Beauty to the version unveiled on Live Time, the time-filler LP released the next year: on Live Time, it’s the work of a band embracing expanding vistas. On record, it’s subsumed by gloss. A bigger problem on Beauty is how Bond tends to play toward the supposed style of individual songs, highlighting the groove of “Why Do Lovers Break Each Other’s Heart” or turning “Don’t Change” into AOR, when it may have been better to accentuate its sharp angles.
After Beauty, the duo decided to take a break. During this time, Oates went into hibernation while Hall reignited a friendship with Robert Fripp, the cantankerous guitar genius from King Crimson. The pair met back in 1974 at the height of the singer’s infatuation with Bowie, but they reconnected in 1977 and cut Sacred Songs, a Hall solo album that proved as pivotal as War Babies to reconfiguring the direction of Hall & Oates’ music. What Fripp brought to the table was clarity of conception. Where Rundgren oversaturated the mix, there was room to breathe within Fripp’s brightly lit production, a cleanliness that felt vibrant and modern.
Sacred Songs pointed the way toward the duo’s new wave future but it’s clear Hall is collaborating with a rock guitarist: it doesn’t contain the soul undercurrents endemic to his work with Oates. Once the singer reunited with his partner for Along The Red Ledge the shift is evident: the album crackles with the thrill of artists finally figuring out what may work. The cover of the 1978 record depicts a visual image of Daryl Hall & John Oates that would become iconic: Daryl sports a smart haircut, a look balanced by Oates’s workingman indifference.
The album isn’t quite as precise as its image. At times, the record hints at the clean snap of the forthcoming Voices but it still has an eye on the soft spot of the adult contemporary charts, a place that would become very familiar to the record’s producer, David Foster. Although he’d later specialize in anodyne adult contemporary, Foster was in the earliest stages of his career and he recognized the value in having the duo supported by their road band. He also saw the need to bring in plenty of guests, including George Harrison and Rick Nielsen, plus old friends Todd Rundgren and Robert Fripp, a guest list that illustrates how the album covers a lot of ground without being precisely focused.
Focus finally arrived on X-Static, Daryl Hall & John Oates’ last album of the 1970s. Despite giving them their biggest hit since “Rich Girl” in the form of “Wait For Me” — a gorgeous heartbreak number bearing a significant debt to Rundgren — X-Static is their only album since War Babies to not go at least Gold, yet it’s crucial to their artistic development: this is where the duo finally become Hall & Oates. Some slickness remains, particularly on the slower, smoother moments, but there’s sharpness in the articulation. Hall finally takes advantage of the lessons he learned from Fripp but just as important as the arrival of art is the embrace of disco. There are times on X-Static where Hall & Oates push the heavy four-four beat quite hard and they’d later claim this is one of the reasons why X-Static never clicked: it arrived in the middle of the Disco Sucks backlash.
Never mind that Hall & Oates exploited this rhythm to their own ends, adding in jagged guitar and pop harmony: that beat blinded a rock public stoked to hate anything disco. A few years later, they were still incensed by the racism of it. Hall said, “I wanted to go out and kill that DJ who was responsible for that. I mean, that guy was PROUD of that shit. I keep using the word ‘racist” but it keeps poppin’ up.” To Hall & Oates, this attitude was anathema: they believed in integration.
When X-Static saw release in 1979, audiences weren’t ready for this integrated rock & soul. Hall said, “The rock people were accusing us of being disco and the disco people thought we were too weird and not R&B enough. We were nobody’s friend at that point.” Hall & Oates confronted this dilemma by dialing back the disco and sharpening the contrast in their rock, achieving a hybrid that could be played with ease on both rock and R&B radio because it sounded like it belonged in both places — and they achieved this crossover with their next album, Voices, in 1980.
Voices was the first album Daryl Hall & John Oates produced on their own but they already asserted artistic control on X-Static: at the close of those sessions, David Foster told them they no longer needed a producer — they knew what they wanted and they knew how to get it. So bright, crisp and modern was Voices, it seemed like a simultaneous tribute to both synth-pop and urban R&B — new wave, by any other name. Hall & Oates didn’t subscribe to the conventional notion that new wave was post-punk. Hall said, “If there’s a new wave in our perception it’s this realignment, this coming back together of black and white musical forms. Which is the unique American music.”
At the point Hall told Bill Flanagan this in 1982, Hall & Oates not only ruled the Top 40 and the fledgling MTV, but they had a number one R&B single with “I Can’t Go For That (No Can Do).” Oates claimed, “We were accepted on black radio and on white radio; we opened the door for Prince and Michael Jackson” which possibly is overstating the situation, but maybe not. After all, at the dawn of the 80s, rock and soul were sharply divided: R&B had little room for rock, while AOR certainly had no tolerance for disco. Hall & Oates changed this dynamic — and they did it prior to 1999, prior to Thriller, so they did indeed break down barriers that existed in the early 80s. They reintegrated rock with soul, something that took the duo the entirety of the 70s to achieve.
Along the way toward reintegration, Hall & Oates experienced a ton of trial and error, but they never would’ve gotten to Voices if they didn’t make mistakes. And, in some ways, those 70s records, where the duo tried to figure out what they were, are more satisfying than the albums that followed: listening to them as a body of work, it’s possible to hear Hall & Oates create themselves — to hear them find their voice.
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