I come now to praise Daryl Hall and John Oates, without their ampersand. Listen, if you grew up with this stuff playing in the background, you hated it after a while. But now there’s a box set in release called “Do You Want, Be What You Are.” That was a song title from H&O long ago. But I would have named the box set after one of my favorite H&O songs, “It’s A Laugh.” But they are not a duo with much of a sense of humor.
Like most duos, H&O fought all the time. Things finally unhinged when, in the 80s, Daryl Hall started bragging about his voice. Then Lynn Hirschberg nailed them in a 1985 Rolling Stone piece and the party was over. This is what you didn’t say in an interview in 1985, but Daryl said it anyway. The conversation was about gossip that he and Oates had been lovers (they weren’t):
“”The idea of sex with a man doesn’t turn me off, but I don’t express it. I satisfied my curiosity about that years ago. I had lots of sex between the ages of three or four and the time I was fourteen or fifteen. Strange experiences with older boys. But men don’t particularly turn me on. And, no, John and I have never been lovers. He’s not my type. Too short and dark.”
It got worse. “It’s weird,” Hall told Hirschberg. “I’m just about the best singer I know, and it’s time for everybody to say that. I have total facility with my voice. And for some weird reason, critics don’t talk about it. Americans think that if you’re popular there must be something wrong with you. To me, the best music now is music that everyone’s listening to. Obscurity is just obscurity. There’s no romance in obscurity.”
Could there be more? Uh huh. “I think we’re the Eighties Beatles,” Hall said. “If we had been born twenty years earlier, maybe the world would have seen that. There’s something about our personalities that is very Lennon-and-McCartneyesque. And there is something about the body of work that we both have that’s similar. I know people will have trouble accepting that. But I don’t have any trouble accepting it.”
Yikes. I have to stop there. Hirschberg was not arrested for murder because the Culture Police ruled it suicide. Read on in the story. Fifteen years down the drain.
So now to the box set. I have always held great affection for the second H&O album, “Abandoned Luncheonette.” It was produced magnificently on Atlantic Records by the legendary Arif Mardin. It’s a gem, a classic that contains the duo’s wonderful R&B hit, “She’s Gone.” It has the promise of so much.
But then Hall & Oates moved on to RCA, where they got commercial. Lots of hits followed, including some that I have enjoyed hearing again: “Your Imagination,” “It’s A Laugh,” “It’s Uncanny,” “Rich Girl.” There are also a pair from later in their hit run: “Out of Touch” and “Some Things Are Better Left Unsaid.” The latter should be a reference to that interview. Too bad they didn’t take their own advice.
Well, it’s water under the bridge. H&O were humbled for their hubris. After Hirschberg, the hits dried up. At one point, Daryl sang on an Elvis Costello record for cred. It didn’t help anyone. He does have a beautiful voice, as does Oates, and they always complimented each other well. You hear them more on “She’s Gone” and “Sara Smile” than on later records where the sound is pumped up for radio action. Listening to the box set, putting aside the interviews and the videos (they didn’t help — you wanted to run from them in the 80s), Hall & Oates made a lot of really nice music. Not in the realm of the Beatles. (Ahem, who knows what fueled that conversation?) But it’s nice to hear it all one more time.
October 22nd, 2009 at 6:22 am
Mr. Friedman,
As a long time fan of H&O I can tell you that Daryl Hall has a dry sense of humor and the stuff you are quoting was probably said “tongue in cheek” so to speak. But Daryl was right about one thing, he has one of the greatest voices of our generation. He and John have long been underrated because of their pop hits of the 80’s. They were part of the TSOP and they have been together over 35 years. They have continued to make music on a regular basis with the exception of the down time of 91-97 which they did solo stuff. As a die hard fan, I am tired of reading the critics writing the same old stuff. The only journalist that really “gets” H&O is David Wild. Daryl and John have longevity because they have TALENT. How about the music critics starting to give Hall & Oates what they deserve- RESPECT!
October 22nd, 2009 at 7:08 am
Where to start? First of all, you can’t pan a musician’s entire 40+ year career by quoting a single 25-year-old Rolling Stone article? I mean, your “hair envy” is loudly coloring your opinion, sweetheart. It takes you until the final paragraph to proclaim, “Well, it’s water under the bridge” and “it’s nice to hear it all one more time” ?!
Secondly, how can you even pretend this is a “music review” when you don’t review the actual MUSIC? They PAY you for this BS?
So Hall has an ego. At least he’s dead-accurate about being about one of the best singers out there. He still is. He never got his due for being the monster-talent that he is. Can you blame him for being a tad perturbed?
And why does Oates gets lumped in to what you are singularly attributing to Hall? I guess you didn’t dig deep enough to know that he wrote the hooks for almost all of their top hits.
I must thank you, however, for showing me that a new career as a “music critic” would be much simpler than I ever dreamed! Time for a career change!
October 22nd, 2009 at 7:26 am
Many artists have had those “diva” moments – so what? Daryl Hall and John Oates are great musicians and are still recording and touring to this day! They’re awesome!
October 22nd, 2009 at 9:44 am
Daryl and John are outstanding musicians and songwriters. Daryl Hall is one of the greatest singers ever. Too bad you don’t excel at your profession. You don’t even know what you are talking about. You rehashed an old story by another writer and didn’t give an actual intelligent music review of the boxset, which I think was suppose to be the point of this article.
October 22nd, 2009 at 10:14 am
So, basically, you reviewed Lynn Hirschberg’s hatchet job on the guys, circa 1985, rather than giving the box set it’s full due, yes?
I guess if you focus on one parameter of their career through one source, and then give the product that you were *actually* supposed to review a cursory listen, this is what we end up with.
I won’t repeat what has been already said above my comment. They speak for me and so many others who appreciate the music of H&O (that’s Hall and Oates in “fan-speak”, so you know).
Perhaps you would like to try again? Lock yourself into a room, and listen to the whole box set. Let the music tell you what Hall and Oates are really about, and then blog about that.
And in the future: read less back issues of Rolling Stone, and listen to more music.
October 22nd, 2009 at 10:15 am
H&O are still better than 98% of the musical duos who have ever recorded. I hope they make a comeback and FINALLY get the credit they deserve. Terrible that Daryl says he was raped as a small child.
October 22nd, 2009 at 10:52 am
They were COMPLETELY overexposed by the late 80’s and I, for one, was sick of them. Michael Jackson, Madonna, Phil Collins…everyone who was huge in the 80’s was HUGE, and it got tiresome to the public. That’s the cycle of a career, and the people who come back to popularity are the exception.
That interview was amazing. God bless anyone who is so honest and open. You’ll always pay for that in this society.
October 22nd, 2009 at 11:25 am
Good grief! If being a “music critic” required no more than the IQ of a pencil eraser, then you deserve your position. Daryl Hall DOES have the best voice in the business. He has perfect pitch, had classical music training and dammit, he can sing. John Oates’ voice is as good as anyone else’s out there too. I’ve been a headphone-wearing, liner-note reading listener of their outstanding music since “She’s Gone” days and they’ve shown no signs of deteriorating with their singing, songwriting, production or anything else that warrants their induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame.
If anything, Daryl Hall & John Oates never got the exposure they deserved. As a radio professional close to the scene, stations kept passing up chances to play their hits during the 70’s in favor of the disco hype. It wasn’t until “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling” was released for two months did radio programmers wake up. Even then, they still remain under-rated or glossed over with mustache jokes from clowns who don’t know good when they hear it.
October 22nd, 2009 at 12:34 pm
Cocaine’s a helluva drug.
And Hall and Oates were not afraid to use back in the day.
Reading Hall’s words through that prism shows that he was just oversharing and being grandiose.
Typical cocaine behavior.
October 23rd, 2009 at 3:57 pm
You’re quoting one of the worst articles ever written about Daryl Hall and John Oates as the basis for your own “review”? Not much originality there. Besides, you need to do a little more research. You’re giving too much credit to the Hirschberg interview, as if that were somehow the pivotal point in their careers. It wasn’t.
You claim the hits stopped coming as a direct result of this story. Look again. The Hirschberg interview was published in January 1985. Now, go to the Billboard website and look up their chart history. They had “Method of Modern Love” which peaked at No. 5 (Feb. 16, 1985), “Everything Your Heart Desires” which peaked at No. 3 (June 11, 1988) and “So Close” which peaked at No. 11 (Dec. 1, 1990). There are more, but those are a few of the highest-charting singles after the .
Did the hits slow down? Sure, and for a variety of reasons. One big reason is that after 1985’s “Live at the Apollo” (which they considered the artistic culmination of their career together up to that point), they took a few years off, as a duo, to pursue their respective projects on their own. Some consider that point is being the truly pivotal one — and if you want to call it commercial suicide, so be it — but it was something they both felt they had to do, as artists, in order to continue making music.
Plus, I think that as was the case with most ’80s artists, music videos created a hyper-saturation of the market which made for short-term gain, but often with long-term pain, as people just grew tired of acts more quickly. It seemed to accelerate the “next new thing” marketing cycle, and I think that for Daryl Hall and John Oates, they reached their commercial pinnacle in 1985. It was pretty much inevitable that, as they temporarily parted ways to do their own thing, that commercial success would dwindle.
However, their artistic merit did not, and the boxed set (which you devoted so little space to actually reviewing) reflects a remarkable career spanning four decades. Next review: I suggest that you spend less time reading old interviews, more time actually listening.
October 23rd, 2009 at 4:00 pm
There are more, but those are a few of the highest-charting singles after the ***Hirschberg interview***.
October 23rd, 2009 at 5:08 pm
I’m not a Hall & Oates superfan, but they did put out a bunch of great, unique pop hits that didn’t sound much like anything anybody else was doing. My personal favorite was “Say It Isn’t So”.
Now to get the history straight, they didn’t commit career suicide-by-interview. I remember reading that interview at the time, and I didn’t think twice about it. They actually committed career suicide by not putting out any music for more than four years. They had an amazing 5-year unbroken stretch of hit singles and albums from ‘80-’84, and then stopped cold. By the time they came back in ‘88, with the “Ooh Yeah” album, the career momentum they’d had was lost. They still managed to eke out a handful of hits, but it was clear that their days at the very top of the charts had ended (though the music they were making was still worthy).
BTW, for me their great lost gem has to be a song called “Goodnight and Good Morning”, with which Hawaiian duo Cecilio & Kapono had an FM radio hit in 1975, and which, amazingly, isn’t on this box set.
October 24th, 2009 at 11:07 am
You could have watched the VH1 interview and gotten more of their personalities than Lynn’s article perceived. Anyone who has seen it has commented on how much their feet have remained on the ground. Some diva behaviour? Yes we’ve seen it. However, if you look at the big picture, it’s a small part of what Daryl’s able to give his audience and you couldn’t meet a more decent guy than John Oates. Dig a little deeper next time.
October 25th, 2009 at 8:09 am
I think this half-assed review could also be considered “career suicide!”
October 25th, 2009 at 9:05 am
Who cares what some magazine writer had to say in her article in 1985–and let’s remember writers always like to have something they feel is controversial to write about and attention-getting. I agree with Daryl, he does have one of the very best voices-ever. I go to their concerts every chance I get and enjoy all of them. I’m one of those long-time/life-time fans. They have always been the best and remain the best. I love Hall and Oates
March 5th, 2010 at 8:45 am
i enjoy your style of writing