Introduction
PARTNERSHIP
Over the years, I’ve been asked on innumerable occasions how I would describe my forty-five-year partnership and fifty-year friendship with Daryl Hall. The question invariably goes like this: “What is the secret to the longevity of your relationship with Daryl Hall?”—implying, of course, that some secret pact, some unholy all-powerful force, has forged a bond between these two physically mismatched humans that has endured, outlasting multiple marriages, love affairs, byzantine record-label contracts, Machiavellian business associations, insanely gifted bandmates, and hell-raising wackos.
It’s actually extremely difficult to explain, and over my entire adult lifetime I’ve been prodded on a regular basis into examining the phenomenon in detail in order to distill the subtleties and complexities for journalists, fans, and musicians. Even more than with a band comprising multiple members, there has always seemed to be a more focused fascination with the dynamics of what makes a duo tick—how it works and, often, how it fails.
We are not a duo. That’s the “how it works” part. We are two creative individuals with a mutual respect for each other’s artistic skills and just enough intelligence to not get in each other’s way. If you look at the covers of our albums, you will see a common thread that may seem rather insignificant, but in reality is quite important. First you will see an album title, and then the names: Daryl Hall and John Oates. It has never been Hall & Oates. We have always insisted on being perceived as two individuals working together. “Sure,” you say. “Semantics be damned.” But it has always been very important for us to make that distinction, even though the world feels the need to truncate and find a convenient box to keep things nice and organized. But of course, there’s a lot more to it.
As people, we share many commonalities that form the foundation of our brotherhood—and “brotherhood” is a much more accurate way to portray our relationship. First and foremost, we were both blessed to be born at the exact right time. We are both old enough to have witnessed the transition from the big band era to the birth and earliest days of rock and roll. Our parents are similar in age, and we both have one younger sister. We both grew up in small Pennsylvania towns, listened to the same radio stations, went to the same type of high schools, became band leaders at an early age, and were drawn toward the city of Philadelphia and some unforeseen greater destiny.
As for the differences—let’s just say we each have our own individual lifestyle philosophies and peculiar strategies for maneuvering through the world, all the while focusing on one unwavering and clear goal: continue making music for the rest of our lives. If you must delve and really want to know more, just listen to our songs and read the lyrics.
We became friends before we became musical and business partners. We hung out, goofed off, played with many different bands and other musicians. Then, in late September 1970, I returned from Europe and, to my surprise, found a padlock on the apartment that I had sublet to Daryl’s sister, Kathy, and her boyfriend. That’s when I went knocking on the blue-painted door of the quaint, colonial-era Father, Son, and Holy Ghost house situated on narrow, cobblestoned Quince Street. (Father, Son, and Holy Ghost houses, or Trinity houses, were nicknamed that due to their unique, three-story design, with one room per floor. Unique to Philly, they were originally built for slaves or indentured servants).
At the time Daryl was married to a gal named Bryna and living there with a little red dog named Jo. After four months busking my way across Europe, all I had was my guitar and backpack. I was broke, with no apartment. Daryl and his wife weren’t exactly expecting me to arrive on their doorstep, but without a lot of drama, they kindly invited me to move into their tiny, third-floor room, which was crammed with a sofa bed, volumes of books on sagging wooden shelves, an ancient fireplace, and an old Wurlitzer piano.
That was when Daryl and I started writing songs.
Before I began this book project one of my biggest concerns was how I would be able to tell my personal story without it becoming the Hall and Oates story minus Daryl Hall. For there can be no story of our partnership and music without him—as there can be no John Oates story without the Hall and Oates experience that has dominated most of my adult life. So as the words herein unfold, please try to understand that any lack of details regarding Daryl Hall’s massive talent and enormous contribution to our music and success is not intended to diminish his importance and personal achievement. Daryl has his own unique and powerful story. One day he may choose to share it … or maybe not. But until then, I can only offer my own story.
Just a Kid
It’s Thursday night, May 23, 1985.
Daryl Hall and John Oates are on top of the world at this point in my life.
Six number one Billboard hits
Thirty-four chart hits
Seven Platinum albums
Over forty million albums sold
MTV stars
Thousands of live performances
Fame, fortune, freedom
And that’s barely the half of it. My name is John Oates, and it’s hard to describe the lives we now lead. How did we get here? Simple. We worked like dogs. We drove tens of thousands of miles. And we never gave up in the face of failure.
* * *
BACKSTAGE. THE AIR is thick where we sit, sunk low, like twin suns surrounded by swirling planets of friends, music-business honchos, and New York City glitterati. The concert has just ended and we are at an after-show reception backstage at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. There is no more important place for us to be at this moment. This is the church of rhythm and blues.
And now we sit in silence, floating on a hot-and-sweaty high, having just come offstage with the original and legendary lead singers of the Temptations: David Ruffin and Eddie Kendricks.
Daryl Hall, whom I’ve now known for about eighteen years, is sitting next to me. The first night we ever really hung out together, back in ’67, was here at the Apollo. Daryl had arranged for us to go backstage so I could meet the Temps. He thought I’d be impressed, and he was right. Daryl’s group the Temptones had been discovered by them at the Uptown Theater in Philly. As we stepped through the legendary stage door from the back alley, leaving reality behind, David Ruffin, always the outsider, was slouched in the dark stairwell, leaning against the banister, cigarette dangling from his million-dollar mouth, his eyes half closed behind his trademark black, thick-framed glasses. Inside the small dressing room, the rest of the group casually milled about until we walked in. Then Paul Williams, who had taken Daryl and the Temptones under his wing a few years earlier, greeted us warmly, as did Melvin Franklin, Otis Williams, and Eddie. For me, that moment was a dream come true.
As the lights went down for the show we were escorted to front-row seats. Bathed in deep-blue light, the Temptations appeared: Shimmering silk suits, blade sharp, steps synced around the iconic single chrome stand with four microphones, like branches extended in an arc. Professional in every way imaginable, while delivering vocally with a blend that was at once effortless and spiritual. These memories and emotions played through my mind again in 1985, as I sensed a soulful cosmic circle completing itself.
* * *
SURROUNDED BY BUT OBLIVIOUS to the well-wishers and after-show celebrations, Daryl and I just sat quietly, looking at each other. So much had transpired since we met, that night we escaped with our lives, both our groups crammed together in the service elevator at the old Adelphi Ballroom in Philly while a gang fight raged out front, in the house. Nearly two decades have passed, we don’t have to talk that much; we share emotions unspoken. We’ve been to hell and back more than a few times. But oh, what we have to show for it.
Amid the celebratory chaos and surrounded by all of the triumphant, joyous, and boisterous noise that follows a once-in-a-lifetime show like we just performed, a calm silence hovers in the space between us. But that’s the cocoon that’s formed over the years, I guess. We just looked at each other. He knows. I know.
We both sense it.
“We did it, man.”
“Yeah. We did it.”
“There’s only one place left to go.”
“Down.”
In that moment, we nod knowingly at each other. Our partnership started here and, for the time being, it will end here.
No big announcements necessary. Just an intuitive understanding based on thousands of shared moments that it’s time for both of us to explore new things.
The legendary pianist Arthur Rubinstein said, “The seasons are what a symphony ought to be: four perfect movements in harmony with each other.” Growing up on the East Coast, the change of seasons dictated your rhythm of life. That’s how I grew up.
As a kid, I found the change of seasons whimsical. But now, having grown a bit older, I know the seasons go beyond just weather. They become metaphorical. We measure our lives against them. They reflect the circumstances of our existence.
And there would never be a season in my life quite like the one I was about to experience.
* * *
I DON’T CARE about fame. I’ve always been famous. This is not a boast, it’s just a fact. Being born the first male grandchild in a matriarchal Italian family bestows one with an anointed position from birth. Being naturally blessed with musical talent ratchets up that status. And so from birth an imaginary crown was placed atop my developing personality.
I am a son of a greatest generation, the ones who won the war, who would build the next chapter of the American Dream, the progeny of turn-of-the-century immigrants from Europe. My father’s father was an English military policeman stationed on the Rock of Gibraltar who married a local girl of Spanish and Moorish descent. They came to America right after World War I. Around the same time, a young couple—my mother’s parents—from the Salerno area in southern Italy made that same pilgrimage across the Atlantic, through Ellis Island, settling in the growing Italian ghetto of Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
Thursday April 7, 1948, Al Jolson was voted most popular singer in America by Variety magazine and Columbia Records introduced the new 33? long-playing record album. At 1 A.M. that day, I was introduced to the world at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, starring as the first child born to Anna and Alfred Oates.
To say that I was a hit from the moment I was born would not be far from the truth. Like I said, as the first male grandson in an Italian immigrant family, my revered position was established before I could utter a sound. A few years later when I began to sing, the coronation was uncontestable.
But thirteen months later, I was back in that same hospital, rushed into the emergency room with a severe tonsil infection. The doctors informed my parents that it would be best to remove my tonsils. After the operation, in the middle of the night, with my father and mother keeping vigil by my crib, I suddenly began coughing up blood. My panic-stricken parents screamed for help. As nurses rushed me into the operating room, they told my parents, “He’s drowning in his own blood … we need to cut open his throat.” The stiches had broken and there was no time to spare. I can only imagine the horror my mother and father, just in their early twenties, must have felt hearing those words. My mother pleaded with the doctors to not cut open my throat but was told surgeons didn’t think they could operate effectively through the tiny mouth of an infant. Dr. Thoie, the man in charge, told my folks that he would try his best and somehow he managed without cutting my throat open. He saved my life and my career. I don’t even know his first name, but I owe him everything.
* * *
MY MOTHER’S LARGE Italian family, who all lived within a few blocks of each other in the lower twenties between First and Third Avenues, dominated my early life. In the neighborhood I grew up in, wash was done by hand and clothes hung on the fire escapes to dry; kids escaped the summer heat by playing in the gushing water of illegally wrenched-open fire hydrants; the Catholic church said the mass in Latin and Italian. On the other side of the East River, in Queens, my father’s side of the family seemed to gradually slip away. Over time they became seldom-seen shadowy relations.
At the tender age of two, perched upon my mother’s knee, I made my first record: An a capella rendition of “Here Comes Peter Cottontail” etched into lacquer in a tiny Voice-O-Graph recording booth at Coney Island. For about forty cents, anyone could record their own voice direct to disc. I still have that record! A few years later I’d return to that same booth, this time on my own two feet, for an encore recording: “All Shook Up,” the Otis Blackwell classic that I heard Elvis singing on the radio.
I couldn’t explain it. I just knew: I was a singer.
My mother wasn’t shy about encouraging my young gifts, so in no time I was glued to the little AM radio in our Lower East Side tenement apartment, learning the hits of the day—in English and, in some cases, Italian. My mom’s side of the family, the Italian side, dominated over the British/Spanish background of my dad’s side, and so that’s what I mostly identified with as a kid.
My first gig was a weekly residency down in my Uncle Joe’s basement in Bergenfield, New Jersey. That’s where our big family would gather on Sunday afternoons, the long plastic-covered table overflowing with antipasti, lasagna, or macaroni with meatballs and sausage, and Uncle Joe’s sweet homemade red wine served in tiny milk glasses. Then, for dessert, it was showtime!
With my biggest fan, the loud and flamboyant Aunt Mary, front and center, I would step out onto the black-and-white-checkered linoleum floor and rip into a heart-wrenching rendition of Johnnie Ray’s 1952 torch ballad, “Cry,” tearing at my shirt and dropping to my knees to bring it home. My big finish would invariably be a Jerry Vale or Perry Como number, usually in Italian, while my grandmother clapped along, laughing, her big gold teeth flashing in the soft basement lights.
There was always music in our apartment. My parents loved to dance the jitterbug and Lindy Hop to the big band music of their teenage days, and that became the soundtrack of my first couple of years. I loved it then, and I love it now. After every song my father would tell me who was playing, “That’s Tommy Dorsey … that’s Lionel Hampton … that’s Benny Goodman … that’s Glenn Miller…” The sophisticated, complex arrangements, the beautiful, memorable melodies oozed from the thick, warm pads of saxophones and clarinets were punctuated and slammed home by the bright blasts of energy from the brass sections. I still listen to the big bands today and to me, they sound like childhood.
* * *
WHEN I WAS four years old my sister, Diane, was born. With my dad gone all day at work and my mom tending to the new baby, I would spend long afternoons and evenings at my grandma’s nearby apartment.
Her name was Clementina DePalma and she was the mother of seven children: four daughters and three sons. Her husband, my grandfather, died the year I was born, so I never really knew him. The only thing I have to remember him by is a tiny $2.50 gold piece that he bequeathed to me for my first birthday. It was a magnanimous gift and I’m sure a huge sacrifice. My grandmother lived alone in a tenement in an Italian neighborhood, just around the corner from us, on Twenty-sixth Street between First and Second Avenues. She was a character. She didn’t really speak to me in English, except when I would ask her where my mom was. That’s when she’d chuckle and say, in her thick Italian accent, “She went-a to Cali-forn-ia.” She thought that was just the funniest thing. It was her favorite broken-English punch line.
“Grandma, where’s my mommy?”
“She went-a to Cali-forn-ia.”
While Grandma cooked in the kitchen (and she was always cooking in the kitchen), I’d spend hours kneeling on a hassock, leaning on my elbows and staring out the third-floor window, gazing through the iron grate at life below, on the Lower East Side street. The neighborhood for a few square blocks was populated entirely by Italian immigrants and the air in the streets smelled like warm bread and pastries wafting from the local bakery. Down below, the occasional fruit vendor would make his way slowly down the block on a squeaky cart pulled by an old, worn-out horse. It was always cool, quiet, and sanctuarylike in that apartment. Grandma’s dark wooden bureau displayed a carefully placed collection of religious icons: silver crosses and hand-carved wooden rosary beads along with small, framed pictures of Jesus and Mary, as well as other assorted, mysterious saintly figures. In the kitchen, Grandma would knead and roll pasta dough into flat, thin noodles that she then spread out on a white linen sheet on her bed. Later that day she would layer them with fresh mozzarella, ricotta, ground beef, and savory sausage, and cover it all in a fragrant red sauce that had been simmering for hours on the stove top.
The warm apartment would fill with tantalizing aromas from the fresh ingredients until finally, from the oven, the mouthwatering masterpiece would appear, hot and bubbling in the pan. It tasted like a religious experience. When she made spaghetti and meatballs, Grandma would always pick one or two meatballs out of the pot and present them to me on a plate. No one else was allowed in the kitchen. I was the first male grandchild, and in an Italian family, that made me the boy king. Nobody was ever spoiled more than I was by my grandma.
When Grandma was finished cooking, we celebrated with spumoni or cherry-vanilla ice cream, which she liked to eat straight out of the cardboard carton. A few years later, after she moved in with my Uncle Joe and Aunt Lou in Jersey, she added watching professional wrestling on a small black-and-white TV to her list of life’s simple indulgences. Anyone who really knows me will recognize that my tastes run along exactly the same lines!
After the war my dad had bounced around doing odd jobs, but in 1947 he was hired by the Transicoil Corporation. During this postwar period, Manhattan actually had an industrial base, and this upstart company produced electric motors used in the navigation systems of the burgeoning new guided-missile programs that were expanding as the Cold War era loomed. But by the 1950s, Manhattan real estate values were forcing the city’s industries to relocate. Transicoil Corporation was moving its operation to a freshly built facility in rural Pennsylvania, located in a big field adjacent to a new Nike guided-missile base. Any employees willing to move with the company from New York City would be promoted, so my dad made a bold decision … one that would forever change my life.
* * *
IT WAS JUNE of 1952, just another ordinary hot summer afternoon in the city. In the middle of the block, some older kids had wrenched open a fire hydrant and were playing in the gush of water. A few doors down I was bouncing on an old discarded mattress on the sidewalk with another little boy who lived nearby, on Twenty-fourth Street. Suddenly I heard my mom calling, and I ran toward her. There, idling by the curb in front of our apartment, was a dull-green 1947 Chrysler sedan. It was my father’s first car. I hopped into the back seat and moments later, with his young family settled inside, my dad pulled the car away from the curb and we drove west toward Pennsylvania. We were moving … just like that.
Our destination was the small country town of North Wales, about twenty-five miles north of Philadelphia. Going from an ethnic, urban melting pot like New York City to this little village settled by Welsh immigrants back in the 1700s, where the community was made up primarily of folks with German-sounding names along with a scattering of Amish and Mennonites, was a true culture shock. We moved into a small upstairs apartment in a clapboard house adjacent to the Reading railroad tracks. The house was on a quiet tree-lined street in the old part of town. Not too far away was a huge pig iron foundry that belched black smoke and employed many of the local residents. Coming from New York City, my family and I were outsiders in a strange, small-town world.
I don’t recall seeing much of my father after we moved because he worked two jobs. He seemed to be gone all the time. I’m sure my mother had her hands full dealing with a rambunctious four-year-old boy and an infant baby girl all by herself. She was only twenty-four years old, had no friends, and no family.… I’m sure it was very hard on her.
Eventually my father received the promised promotion and became a supervisor in the company. Shortly afterward, courtesy of the GI Bill, we moved into a newly built house on Tenth Street, at the outskirts of town. Our yard backed up to a sheep farm with an old red barn decorated with huge hex signs. I wasted no time exploring this strange new world of woods and fields, learning how to trap muskrats in the creeks, making friends, playing war with the local kids, and just living the life of a transplanted country boy in this innocent and beautiful 1950s setting.
New York had yellow taxicabs. North Wales had black Amish buggies. You could walk the length of the entire town in about twenty minutes. And good luck trying to find sausage and peppers, linguini, and cannoli. This place was more about Pennsylvania Dutch food like Lebanon baloney, scrapple, pickled beet eggs, and the local regional delicacy, the famous submarine sandwich known as the “hoagie.”
But thankfully, I had the best of both worlds, because we drove back and forth to New York City pretty much every weekend. My folks were homesick and missed their friends and family. The long drive was boring, but there was one saving grace: the radio.
My baby sister, Diane, and I would lounge on the sofalike backseat of the lumbering Chrysler. The musty, soft, fuzzy upholstery made the car feel like a rolling living room as I watched the Pennsylvania countryside pass until it gradually dissolved into the suburban sprawl of New Jersey. I would press my face up against the window when the majestic New York City skyline appeared, as we crossed the final bridge on the Pulaski Skyway before rolling underground into the Holland Tunnel.
There were dull metal slats on the bridge that, as I gazed through them from the backseat window, created a flickering illusion, much like an old-time black-and-white movie. As we approached the city, the static on the AM radio began clearing and big band music filled the car, making the perfect soundtrack to accompany the strobelike, hand-cranked, cinematic effect.
My dad would always tune the dial to a show called Make Believe Ballroom on WNEW radio. It was hosted by Martin Block, who was different from other announcers on the radio. He wasn’t corny and didn’t speak in a big radio voice. He was low-key and spoke just like a regular guy, which for some reason made me pay attention. Block’s Ballroom also had a “Saturday Night in Harlem” segment, where Cab Calloway, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and other jazz musicians’ music were featured.
When the big, roomy Chrysler would emerge from the darkness of the Holland Tunnel into the light of Canal Street and glide through Greenwich Village, my mother would invariably turn from the front seat and say, “Johnny, this is the Village. This is where the kooks live.” We were driving through the heart of the Beat Generation’s neighborhood and to my mom, that’s what the Beatniks were: “kooks.” Little did I know then that years later that’s exactly where I would end up living … a rock-and-roll kook! Perfect!
Around this time I attended my very first concert. My folks took my sister and me to the nearby Willow Grove Amusement Park, a circa-1890s park midway between North Wales and Philadelphia. One magical summer evening my life changed as I stood near the edge of the stage, under the arch of the bandshell where years before John Philip Sousa had regularly performed for more than twenty years. That night the headliner was Bill Haley & His Comets. The moon-faced Haley, with that famous spit curl, in his black pants and ivory-colored dinner jacket, backed by five guys all dressed exactly like him, kicked it off with his now-famous opening: “One, two, three o’clock, four o’clock rock!” With the distant roar and screams coming from the Thunderbolt roller coaster in the background, that was all it took. My clock was rocked.
Even at that young age, I was deeply affected by the performance. I pushed my way up to the lip of the low stage to get closer to the heat and the jacked-up rockabilly beat. Haley, with his honey-brown sunburst Gibson, cut a hypnotic and powerful image, filling the sultry moonlit night with punchy, early rock-and-roll classics like “Shake, Rattle and Roll,” and “See You Later, Alligator.” The upright bass player, Marshall Lytle, straddled his instrument and rode it like a wild bucking bronco. Wide-eyed, I took it all in. This was not big band music. It was something entirely new, young, and alive.
My next rock-and-roll epiphany came later that year, in November 1956, when my Aunt Mary took me to see Elvis Presley’s screen debut, Love Me Tender, at the Paramount Theater at Forty-third and Broadway in New York City. As we approached the theater, weaving through the hundreds of teenage girls who were obviously infatuated with Elvis since his first appearance a month before on The Ed Sullivan Show, something amazing caught my eye. Gazing up through the throngs of bundled-up New Yorkers was a spectacular, two-story-high cardboard Elvis (with guitar) mounted on the building above the marquee. He looked Olympian and godlike to a kid like me.
The lights dimmed in the majestic theater and about twenty minutes into the Civil War–era western, many of the girls started screaming for apparently no reason, as three men rode up on horseback. Huh? None of these guys looked like Elvis, but then I figured it out. In the distant background, barely discernible, a young man and a mule were plowing a field—just a speck on the screen. Many of the girls had apparently spent the day watching the film over and over, and they knew. The plowboy was Elvis, and the mere hint of him on screen was enough to spark a primal kind of insanity. Later, when he performed the film’s title song, many in the house wept.
Nobody cried at Bill Haley. This guy was different. This guy was reaching kids on an entirely different level.
Weeks later, I was back at the Voice-O-Graph machine at Coney Island, plunking down another couple of quarters to record my own aforementioned rendition of Presley’s version of the Otis Blackwell–penned classic “All Shook Up.” I was all in.
* * *
BY THE LATE 1950s, my grandma had moved to New Jersey to live with my Uncle Joe and my godmother, Aunt Lou. Since that was where Grandma was, that’s where our large family would gather, and we ended up spending many weekends in Bergenfield, New Jersey. Still the anointed one in my grandma’s eyes, I was the only one allowed in the kitchen while she cooked, and she always made sure I got to taste the first meatball. She also spoke a bit more broken English by then, and would smile as she advised me, “Play-a violin, Johnny. Real musicians play-a violins, not-a guitars.”
Besides my mother and grandma, my Aunt Mary, who had no children of her own, was probably my biggest fan. Family legend has it that when I was just old enough to talk, she would roll me in a baby carriage down the block, stopping in front of a bunch of mechanics who worked at the local garage on Twenty-fifth Street and making me sing for them. She also dropped me headfirst onto the concrete stoop in front of my grandma’s apartment. The fall split my chin open, which didn’t go over very well with my mom, who never really forgave her for it. Aunt Mary was pretty flamboyant. Her husband, Sammy, was a butcher. They drove a big two-toned Mercury convertible and were both incorrigible gamblers; she would babysit me by taking me to the Belmont racetrack to bet on the horses. I guess she was the black sheep of the family. Maybe that’s why I loved her so much … she was fun.
But as I got a bit older, those family get-togethers became much less fun. I wanted to stay in Pennsylvania and practice my guitar and hang out with my friends.
Copyright © 2017, 2018 by Hi Lit Productions, LLC.