Crash-Course, No. 10: Daryl Hall & John Oates. Not Hall & Oates. A Little Respect.

It's still a stupid question.

Personal
If you grew up in the early 80s, you couldn’t avoid these two. At the same time, I might have bit a few dance moves from “You Make My Dreams.” It is very, very hard to lose the rhythm on that one.

A Little History
Daryl Hall and John Oates met very accidentally in Philadelphia, PA. Fate still had to throw them together at a late-1960s “battle of the bands” kind of event at the Adelphi Theater. They showed up separately, Hall with The Temptones and Oates for The Masters. When gunshots chased people from the event, Hall and Oates bumped into one another in an alley, introduced themselves, realized they shared enough inspirations and influences and, by every account I read, the rest was history.

They roomed together at Temple University, then various places across Philadelphia. One key person noticed them early – Tony Mottola, the managerial legend (who later married/managed Mariah Carey) – and they became his first act, and he their first manager. Atlantic signed them before they found their feet musically, or maybe just before they had the status to push-back. Atlantic connected them to producers, and fairly big ones (Todd Rundgren, I recognize, Arif Mardin, I don’t), and they churned out an album per year: Whole Oats (1972), Abandoned Luncheonette (1973), and War Babies (1974). The sound bounced between folk (B-side of Whole Oats, especially), soul, pop, and, by the time Rundgren got his hands in their production on War Babies, something closer to rock even...(gasp) hard rock. Nothing charted in the Atlantic years (“She’s Gone” did all right, and Minneapolis/St. Paul liked ‘em), and Atlantic dropped them after both they, and their fans couldn’t figure out what to make of War Babies. In an infamous-to-anyone-who’s-read-it Rolling Stone article in 1985, Oates offered this thought:

“That was our first test right there. It would have been easy to make Abandoned Luncheonette II. That would have set our entire career, but we didn’t do it. And people walked out of our concerts when we didn’t.”

When it comes to Hall & Oates, that sentence contains multitudes. Moving on…