| Listen closely to The Daryl flail and John Oates Collection and you'll
understand that the Hall & Oates story is ultimately less about all those familiar
smashes though there's a bunch here and more about the distinctive, rockin' soul these two
brought to a new generation of pop music fans who didn't know their Four Tops from their
The Three Degrees. I should know I'm one of those late-coming suburban soul men who first
discovered The Temptations and Smokey Robinson & The Miracles through the sounds of
Daryl & John. I'm a kid who desperately collected bubblegum wrappers in a sticky
attempt to win a free Hall & Oates show for my New Jersey high school (sadly, I lost).
I'm the wannabe Garden State Romeo who took my first girlfriend to see Hall & Oates on
my first big date in Manhattan (gladly, I scored). So please let me be the one to say for
the record that Daryl Hall and John Oates are now and always have been pretty fly for a
pair of white guys. |
Together these two
created a distinctive sound and an impressive body of work that was as they would title
their first platinum album Bigger Than Both Of Us. When I was growing up in the late
Seventies and early Eighties, Hall & Oates were unstoppable. They were a veritable
two-man hit factory producing a steady stream of music that was immediately catchy yet
built to last in the proud tradition of Motown and Philadelphia International Records. Hall & Oates came of age artistically on the edges of the Philly soul
scene playing in bands, cutting their teeth at sessions for the famed Philly team of
Gamble and Huff Philadelphia forever shaped the sensibility of these two men no matter
where they would eventually travel. "I mean, Philadelphia was sort of the, the cool
capital of America, up all through the late '50s and early '60s," Daryl Hall
explained to Behind The Music. " And I sort of grew up in the midst of all that
watching it." |
Daryl Hall and John Oates
German Website
