I slipped into work quietly that Friday morning, opened up Do What You Want Be What You Are (RCA/Legacy), the new 4-CD box set from Daryl Hall and John Oates, took out disc three, and put it in the boombox. The opening notes of “You Make My Dreams” cut the late-morning cubicle din, unmistakable to people of a certain age and synonymous with wedding receptions. By “I Can’t Go for That (No Can Do),” people in the nearby vicinity started singing along, trading verses.
“Maneater”: Colleagues have been drawn in from other parts of the building, fingering my box set with envy, heads nodding in recognition.
“Out of Touch”: The office has transformed into something out of a choreographed dance scene from a 1980s film.
My Hall & Oates Irresistibility Experiment had yielded good results.
I’ve always posited Hall & Oates as part of pop music’s fabric: impeccable harmonies, catchy refrains, and Brill Building song structure. Across the decades, they’ve written variations of the perfect pop tune, and, as a result, those songs have been karaoked and culturized to another level, one placing them in a very special kind of limbo between legendary and novelty.
My Hall & Oates experience started with MTV and the video for “Maneater,” which sort of terrified me, but that sax solo was killer. I made my mom buy me Big Bam Boom on cassette, and I took to dancing on my parents’ water bed to the video for “Out of Touch,” until a leak mysteriously appeared.
I listened to them through the bad techno and ska phases of my teens and throughout my early 20s, when I was often living in shitty apartments where shitty bands crashed. Hall & Oates were something punks and mods and hippies could all agree on. “They strike a universal chord,” a college friend once said, right before dropping liquid acid into his eye.
Do What You Want Be What You Are illustrates that sentiment.
Countless Hall & Oates compilations usually capture only one period, the 1980s, which rightly was the duo’s decade. Though packaging here is too Behind the Music, the discs go back to 1966 in overview of the complete discography, which tallies 16 albums. The duo compiled all the songs and annotated the majority of the 74 tracks, as well as their decades-long friendship.
Soul infuses the first disc, leading with Motown-inspired tracks from a teenage Hall in vocal group the Temptones (“Girl I Love You”) and Oates fronting the Masters (“I Need Your Love”). Folkie early 1970s as Whole Oates and 1973’s Abandoned Luncheonette, their first LP as Hall & Oates, find them rounding the curve, and “You’re Much Too Soon” and “Is It a Star” from ’74’s War Babies are straight up Steely Dan. The five live tracks from London 1975 find them jamming way harder than the Dan, too. Disc two then turns the wheel.
In the mid-1970s, when H&O were pegged “blue-eyed soul,” the music they produced is really what vocal harmony groups like Grizzly Bear are reframing now: the clapping, easy harmonies of “Rich Girl” and textured stutter of “Have I Been Away Too Long.” In the Do What Be What liners, Hall mentions working with Robert Fripp on Sacred Songs, his first solo album, and “Have I Been Away Too Long” is of that mindset, as is the Eno-esque “August Day.” He calls it “progressive R&B,” the perfect name for earwigs like “Kiss on My List” and “Sara Smile.”
Disc three contains the golden ticket, from the early to mid-1980s, when Hall & Oates veered easily into the New Wave pop of radio and stylized videos of MTV. Note that Hall’s vocal range has gotten even more elastic by songs like “One on One” and “Method of Modern Love.” Live tracks from the Apollo in 1985, when they were joined by Temptations Eddie Kendrick and David Ruffin, bring it all full circle. “After doing that show,” writes Hall in the booklet, “it made me think, ‘Okay, we’ve done this, now what?'”
Cue the last CD, spanning the late 1980s to present. It’s certainly not throwaway material – the unreleased tracks are a nice bonus – but the post-1980s stuff is more a quick cleanup, like being rushed out of a restaurant after dinner without seeing the dessert menu.
Last month, I was on a plane overseas, half-watching (500) Days of Summer. My eyes snapped open during a scene that could have been totally sappy in another movie: A love-struck Joseph Gordon-Levitt dances giddily down the street in step with choreographed dancers to “You Make My Dreams,” after a sleepover with the alluring but unavailable Zooey Deschanel. Guy wants girl; girl wants guy, but not … that way. There it is, possibly every Hall & Oates song ever written. Positivity in the face of impending heartbreak.
“I don’t think our songs are that positive at all,” John Oates disagrees by phone. “Take ‘Kiss on My List.’ Your kiss is on the list of the best things in life, but it’s not the best thing. ‘I Can’t Go for That’ is about rebellion in the music business. Our songs are deceptively simple, but I think once you delve into the lyrics, there’s more there than you might think.”
Oates sees Do What You Want Be What You Are as a chronological evolution, as well as a place for the more adventurous and avant-garde songs they don’t usually get credit for. He also recognizes their bizarre shelf in pop culture’s cupboard. Hall has a Web show, Live From Daryl’s House, where he plays with contemporaries and younger players who no doubt grew up idolizing him. Flight of the Conchords’ traded verses and simple melodies mirror H&O’s, and Hall’s cameo on the show, as an open-mic host butchering the band’s name, was comic catharsis.
Oates has been on the cult MTV show Wonder Showzen, and a cartoon has been created about his once-iconic mustache. It may seem like novelty, but the box set largely succeeds as a continuum. Instead of being relegated to the casino circuit, doomed to play “You Make My Dreams” over and over for eternity, Hall & Oates have figured out how to keep the legend relevant.
“We’ve become weirdly iconic.”
Yes, as my experiment proved. You okay with that?
“Yeah, I’m fine.”
My H&O Mixtape
“Method of Modern Love” (1984)
“Sara Smile” (1975)
“Maneater” (1982)
“Have I Been Away Too Long” (1978)
“Kiss on My List” (1980)
“Time’s Up (Alone Tonight)” (1979)
“I Can’t Go for That (No Can Do)” (1981)
“Abandoned Luncheonette” (1973)
“One on One” (1982)
“She’s Gone” (1973)
“August Day” (1978)
This article appears in December 11 • 2009.