Queen were not the only performers to take green they didn’t need in the name of white power. Elton John, Rod Stewart, Julio Iglesias and many others can join them in a bow for shame. At the time the rock band claimed they weren’t “political” and were playing merely in the name of “entertainment”. Entertainment they were no doubt well paid for. Hall and Oates were once offered $2m to play Sun City. They refused, and described anyone who took the gig as “jerks“.
Hall and Oates are one of those acts I always thought, because of the musical spirit of the times in which I was growing up, were complete turd and to be avoided at all costs. But then I came across stuff like this:
and this:
And I thought…hot damn. Only I didn’t really think ‘hot damn’ because people from Armagh don’t think in those terms. But you know what I mean.
That hair, damn hot.
But those tracks are complete turd and to be avoided at all cost, really.
Believe me, spend enough time listening to Music From The Big Pink on mescaline and you’ll like this stuff in the end.
Just this morning, I found myself humming Rich Girl. A worryingly sudden realisation, that, in both senses of the word.
Some years back I found myself unreasonably interested in all things 70s, Fleetwood Mac, McCartney, Lennon, Supertramp, etc, etc…
More or less the only thing that has survived is Fleetwood Mac, perhaps because they were genuinely odd in so many ways. But Hall and Oates? Pretty odd too. So kudos.
As far as genuine oddness goes, I think Macca’s first album pushes all the buttons. But yes, Fleetwood Mac are seriously odd. It is hard to believe at this remove that Rumours sold eleventy gazillion copies: that album is seriously strange, perhaps even more so than Tusk, which is explicitly nuts.
Take Don’t Stop, which was used by Bill Clinton in his 1992 campaign. When I heard it used then, I had already accepted that it was a kind of happy, bouncy optimistic thing. But I listened to it a few years later and realised that the insistence of ‘yesterday’s gone’ in the chorus indicates that yesterday hasn’t gone at all. And ‘tomorrow ..will soon be here’ says that the target of the song is still living in misery. Then it gets seriously twisted, in a verse where you have the singer of the song telling the other person:
All I want is to see you smile,
If it takes just a little while,
I know you dont believe that its true,
I never meant any harm to you.
So he didn’t mean her any harm (the sexual dynamics are confused here, because it’s a Christine McVie song but sung by Lindsey Buckingham) even though she doesn’t believe him, and he’s trying to tell her to forget yesterday. So yesterday wasn’t a place when bad things simply happened (’life was bad to you’), it was when the singer did something he doesn’t want to face up to.
The target of the song is seriously traumatised, and the singer is exhorting her to move on, even though he doesn’t admit his part in things. Basically, he’s an evil manipulating bastard.
There are many other examples of this sort of thing on that album, which makes it a genuine golden great in my view.