| Their themes are
familiar enough: alienation, lost love, life on the road. Hall and Oates compose songs
both individually and with each other. Hall's output is about twice that of Oates. To the
usual themes Hall adds gentle sermonettes for young girls, urging them to seek their
potential ("Do what you want girl / But be what you are"). He has tougher
lectures for them about copping attitudes ("You're a rich girl and you've gone too
far"). Incidentally, the rich girl in the hit single was not inspired by Patty
Hearst, as some DJs have speculated, but by the male heir to a fast-food fortune. John Oates has a sunnier nature, and he seems to go for nymphets. One verse
reads: "Now there's no use you resisting / This is the Cradle Thief insisting / I
think you better let me have it my way."
Written singly or together, their seamless material is
tasteful and intelligent. Its strong phrasing and polite sensibilities are the product or
two young intellectuals fleeing suburbia for the ghetto.
Hall and Oates' breakthrough has been nine years in coming,
12 years if you go back to their separate career |
beginnings in the
ghettos or Philadelphia.Both were raised in comfortable suburban homes and had music
training from an early age, Hall in voice and classical piano, Oates on accordion, then
guitar. Before he was six, Hall rode his bike to visit family friends living in a nearby
ghetto and came to feel more comfortable among blacks. By high school he was sitting on
the black team's side at football games, cheering against the white team. "I kept
getting into trouble," he says. "All these muscular farmers got down on me for
hanging out with blacks: 'Hey fucking fruit.' I got my first sense of oppression, for
being different." Before long, Hall was haunting Philadelphia's black music world,
picking up session work. Oates would later do the same. They became street-corner greasers
who led doo-wop vocal groups. Sometimes, in order to plug sales, they gave lip-sync
performances of singles they'd recorded for black record hops. They finally met each other
one night in 1968, when Hall of "the Temptones" and Oates of "the
Masters" were waiting backstage to go on at a hop. They didn't go on - that night
someone on the dance floor got plugged with a gun, and Hall and Oates ducked out thealley.
They became friends, then roommates while studying at Temple University, and their
partnership had begun. |
Daryl Hall and John Oates
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