This is one of a couple of Daryl Hall & John Oates related pieces that I wrote for RnR magazine a few years back, this one an interview with John Oates around the time of the release of his blues and roots solo album, Mississippi Mile. I spoke to him on the phone to his Colorado home and found him approachable and friendly, and happy to chat Hall & Oates as well as talk about his work away from the duo.
I've liked his records with Hall ever since first hearing them around the time of Private Eyes and 'I Can't Go For That' and owned most of their catalogue on vinyl back in the day, bar their debut Whole Oats LP, which to this day I've still never heard. For such a major act, their catalogue has been rather neglected over the years with much of their 70s output having limited availability in recent times - my current, less extensive than when I owned the vinyl back in the 1980s, collection, is I suspect a typical hodge-podge: Private Eyes, H20, Voices and Abandoned Luncheonette I have as jewel-case CDs, my copy of Along The Red Ledge, probably my favourite record of theirs, is a Japanese pressing that I acquired from Tower Records in Piccadilly (sigh) in the early 90s, and I found a cardboard sleeve copy of X-Static in a local record shop a while ago, broken down from a vanilla-release replica sleeves set I suspect. Ooh Yeah! which I have a soft spot for, I've owned since its original release. Others in the catalogue seem elusive to find in any format. Must be a catalogue ripe for reappraisal and reissue, surely.
The chance to interview John Oates was too good to miss, one of those opportunities that keep me wanting to write about music - the chance to chat with someone whose work I've enjoyed. Here it is:
There’s a moment on the Daryl Hall and John Oates album Voices where they declare themselves ‘still hung up on the Duke of Earl’. It reflects of one of the wide range of influences displayed in their brand of Philly-soul-pop. I’m dialing in to Colorado to talk to John Oates and chew over some other influences, to discuss his own particular reference points and how he’s revisited them in the gritty, rootsy, Americana of his latest solo album, Mississippi Mile. It’s his own interpretation of classic songs that he’s loved, a couple of new entries into his own canon, and one glance backwards at a Hall and Oates classic.
He looks at the songs he chose for this project as being “everything that mattered to me as a musician before I met Daryl and we started working together. This was the stuff that turned me on to music and gave me the dream of pursuing a career in music. It’s the artists, the songs, the style; from folk-blues to r’n’b and rock‘n’roll. There were many other influences, but I had to be realistic and touch on those that meant the most.”
The resulting album was released mid-2011 in the US; a full UK and European distribution is set for January 2012. It’s a captivating wander through his musical starting points and Oates is an enthusiastic and friendly interviewee who seems to genuinely relish talking about his long career. I ask him about the way this project evolved and how he approached re-imagining songs that clearly meant a lot to him. “It’s a very delicate balance to treat a classic song in a way where you honour the original but at the same time try and make it your own” he concedes. “The key to the album was the song ‘All Shook Up’. I was sitting in my home studio, playing the guitar in this sort of delta blues riff and for some reason, I have no idea why, began to sing ‘All Shook Up’ over it, imposing the original melody and words over this minor-key thing. I loved it. Elvis was an icon and an inspiration to me.”
Oates then began to consider others in his list of favourite ‘old’ songs. “Maybe I could do [the same] to others. I began to look at Chuck Berry and at Curtis Mayfield, Mississippi John Hurt and Doc Watson, these important artists. Their songs had become my personal repertoire over, and I hate to say it [laughs], the last fifty years. If I’m with a group of people, just jamming or picking, I play these songs. ‘Make Me A Pallet On Your Floor’, or ‘It’s All Right’ by Curtis Mayfield, or a Chuck Berry song. I discovered that I could re-imagine them without, in my personal opinion, messing with the original.”
I enjoy the way he approaches this. “I had to define what a song is. A song is lyrics and melody. I think the chord changes and the arrangement are up for grabs, the approach, the attitude, the energy. They don’t constitute the song, the song is the lyrics and the melody and in that regard I kept those things pretty much intact. It was the chord changes, the feel and the groove that I messed with.”
Many years ago Daryl and John contributed a cover of ‘Can’t Help Falling In Love’ to the classic NME mix-album The Last Temptation Of Elvis. I remind him of this and recall how my own ‘indie-kid’ friends were blown away with, to them, the compilation’s unexpected highlight. “We have a great respect for other songwriters and that translates into our ability to interpret. You want to interpret something so that you’re comfortable you’ve made your mark on it, but honouring the original is very important.”
I’m interested in the part these songs played in his own development as a musician, though he concedes that his first single, ‘I Need Your Love’, recorded in 1966, was more representative of what was happening in Philadelphia back then, a Philadelphia r’n’b that he was a part of. “But I made a joke today that back then I had two distinct musical personalities. I would be wearing a denim work shirt and singing in a coffee house, doing traditional Appalachian ballads and delta blues and the next night I’d be wearing a Sharkskin suit and playing r’n’b with a band. To this day I’m doing exactly the same thing! I’ll play with Daryl and we do our version of r’n’b pop and the next night I’ll be playing with [Mississippi Mile collaborators] Sam Bush and Jerry Douglas in some little place in Nashville. Nothing’s really changed!”
Recognising that duality in his work I wonder whether, despite often being quoted as the most successful duo in pop history, he sees Daryl Hall and John Oates as a duo or as a band, since over the years they’ve gathered around them a recurring set of collaborators who seem to give them a ‘band’ ethos. “We’ve always been a band,” he considers. “We perceive ourselves as being two individuals working together. Our company is called ‘Two-Headed Monster’ because that is exactly what we are not. We always recognised ourselves as individuals with the freedom to do our own thing. That’s the premise of our relationship and probably the reason we were able to stay together. But I agree with you, Ian, the co-writers, Sara Allen, Janna Allen, were very important, and the sound of the band in the ‘80s, T-Bone [Wolk], G. E. Smith, Mickey Curry and Charlie [De Chant] defined those pop songs... and vice-versa. Those songs were a vehicle for the band to do what it did.”
I’m also delighted to find him in agreement when I mention my contribution to R2’s ‘It Started With A Disc’ feature, a write-up of my enthusiasm for their 1978 LP Along The Red Ledge. “It’s one of my favourites as well.” It leads me to ask how he now perceives the body of work that he and Daryl have established, since their catalogue together is diverse in tone and texture from the folk of their initial recordings, the progressive War Babies with Todd Rundgren at the helm, and their most commercially successful years with Private Eyes and H2O. Which albums does he think really nailed their vision?
“I’ve thought about this a lot; there are very specific albums that represent an important change or moment. The first is Abandoned Luncheonette; the next would be Along The Red Ledge, the next Voices because that was when we started producing ourselves. Then I’d say Big Bam Boom because it’s so experimental and is our transition from the analogue to digital world. That’s it, right there. Those set the course for the rest of our lives.”
Returning to his latest work I ask him how he chose the one Hall and Oates cover included, ‘You Make My Dreams Come True’. “It’s the album’s oddball song. We recorded the album in a very old school style. All the band members were sitting in a circle looking at each other. Eighty percent of the vocals are what I sang while we were cutting the tracks. There was one guitar solo that we didn’t like and replaced with a harmonica but other than that there are no real overdubs. What happened, it was one of those happy accidents. Between takes I’d been fooling around with this kind of Texas swing feel and I sang ‘You Make My Dreams Come True’ and everyone laughed and said, ‘That’s cool’, so we just cut it and everyone loved it. It’s a bit of an aberration, though now I come to think of it, it is a song of my youth!”
What John Oates achieved, in his youth and across his very full career is now being repaid in respect from younger musicians so perhaps in that sense he’s come full circle in reflecting his own loves. “Believe it or not, it’s now one of my more fertile musical periods. The success of Hall and Oates has given me the freedom to do other things, and I love it.
“A lot of younger artists feel like they took inspiration from what we accomplished, and they reach out to me. Sometimes they think it’s going to be this nostalgic thing and yet I come bringing a completely different energy. I’ve been playing with jam bands and I’ve been playing with lots of great bluegrass musicians and this is all part of my background that few people know about. They think I was born with a moustache and playing ‘Maneater’ but I had an entire musical life before that!“
