Do What You Want: Hall & Oates

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RATHER THAN SIMPLY COLLECT an artist's well-known hits along with a smattering of unreleased tracks, the best box sets have something to prove. They portray an artist in a new and more complex light, showing new facets of their catalog and recontextualizing them for a new era.

That's precisely what makes "Do What You Want Be Who You Are: The Music of Daryl Hall and John Oates" such a fascinating set: It rescues the duo from the nostalgia-act ghetto and present them as versatile songwriters, inventive producers, and innovative synthesizers of styles ranging from Philly soul to '60s folk to jazz to New Wave.

Starting in the mid-1960s, when Daryl Hall and John Oates were playing in separate bands around the bohemian neighborhoods of Philadelphia, "Do What You Want" really gets going when they mix their voices — Hall's agile growl and Oates' soaring falsetto — on tracks that only sound easygoing.

The duo peaked in the late 1970s and early 1980s with a series of self-produced albums that yielded incredibly popular hits like "Family Man," "Maneater," and "You Make My Dreams Come True." Even after that impressive run, they stayed active and adventurous throughout the 1990s and 200s.

On the eve of their Up Close & Personal tour, Express managed to wrangle a few minutes with Oates and got him to talk about reassessing their long career as well as their recent resurgence.

» EXPRESS: How did the box set come together?
» OATES: It's something that we've had on the back burner for quite a while. We've always wanted to do it, but all the parts and personnel were not in place. We didn't just want to put out an expanded version of a greatest hits, because lord knows we've had enough greatest hits albums over there floating around. What happened was there was a group at Sony Legacy that was really passionate Hall & Oates fans and just seemed to have the right sensibility and the right desire to make it something of quality. They approached us, and when we picked up on their enthusiasm, Daryl and I got involved and jumped in there creatively and really made it a group effort. That's really why and how it happened. Then we went through this incredible amount of songs and tried to distill it into a list of songs that had a very distinctive point of view. We wanted something that would really represent us properly, represent the breadth and scope of our songwriting over a thirty-year period.

» EXPRESS: There's such an impressive range of sounds and styles on here.
» OATES: For the casual fan, they know us from our hits, but we're so much more than that. What I think was a misrepresentation and a misunderstanding over the years, especially in the early days, is that we were these hitmakers who had a premeditated formula for number-one records, which couldn't be any further from the truth. We were songwriters and performers and producers who made albums, and from those albums we were fortunate and blessed enough to have these hits. The hits were a byproduct of hard work and the good albums that we made. That's really what this box set will show.

» EXPRESS: What was it like to go through and hear some of these songs for the first time in years?
» OATES: It's like you're looking at your life musically, because our music and our life are one in the same. They're intertwined. The relationships and emotions, the experiences of our life are expressed in our music so it's daunting and surprising and sad and happy and all those gamut of emotions that you have when you revisit the important moments of your life.

» EXPRESS: Can you tell me a little bit about your work as producers? Some of your songs seem way ahead of the curve.
» OATES: That's another thing that I don't think we got proper respect and credit for — our adventurousness as producers and as artists in general, even from the beginning. If you go back to the "Abandoned Luncheonette" album, we had jazz musicians playing their natural instruments and we were processing them through crude early synthesizers, and using Mellotrons and things that people just weren't doing. I don't think we ever got credit for the type of groundbreaking production stuff that we got involved in. On up through the '80s, we subtly combined the world around us, which was New York City at the time — punk and New Wave — and infused that into the style of music that we were making without ever losing ourselves in it. I think that's a very difficult and sensitive line to thread because we were always ourselves but at the same time constantly bringing in elements and influences that we felt could enhance what we did.

» EXPRESS: Were there any songs that surprised you or that you had forgotten about?
» OATES: I think there were a number of surprises — some of the unreleased tracks especially. There was one track called "Don't Go Out," which the guys at Sony had discovered in the tape archives. They called me and asked if I remembered a song called "Don't Go Out." And I was like, "No." So, they sent it to me and it sort of freaked me out. It was a thing that I personally produced. I went in the studio and spent a lot of time with the engineers putting together this art-rock piece, I guess you'd call it. It didn't fit and it didn't go on the "Private Eyes" album, because it didn't sound like the rest of the record. But it really is adventurous and very unusual, and something I don't think people would expect from me. But I wanted to put this on the set because it's really cool

And then we have these seven tracks from our first tour in Europe and our first show in London. At the time we were a cult band. We didn't really have any hits. It just happened to be a magic night when the band was on fire and we captured it and we remixed and remastered it, so these live tracks show us playing with our band at a time when we were young and had a lot of energy and when there was a certain kind of fire to our live performance.

» EXPRESS: On the flipside, some of these more popular songs sound really fresh on here. Can you tell me what it's like to live with hits like "Maneater" or "Rich Girl" for so many years?
» OATES: They live on because of the substance there. I think you have to remember that we started out as songwriters; that's what we care about, that's where everything begins. The production, the musicians, the singing, the harmonies — all that stuff is really after the fact. The reason these songs are still still being played, the reason they're still moving people, the reason people still like them, is because of how well they're written and crafted. When you're a songwriter, that's your ultimate goal — to write a song that stands the test of time. I think we're very lucky to have done that on a number of occasions.

» EXPRESS: Can you tell me about starting out in Philadelphia? It seems like an interesting place to be at the time you were there?
» OATES: We lived in the hippie enclave of downtown Philadelphia. We lived communally, and had a lot of friends popping in and sleeping on the floor. There were a lot of young people hanging out. We were playing coffeehouses and art galleries. We did that separately and together. Daryl was playing in a band, and I was playing in a blues band. I was teaching folk guitar lessons, and hanging out at the Philadelphia Folk Festival. That's what was going on, and eventually we got a little more serious and a little more dedicated to doing something together. Then we moved to New York.

» EXPRESS: There's such a strong Philly soul influence in your music. What attracted you to that style and made it so vital to your songs?
» OATES: It's interesting that we've been so heavily identified as a Philadelphia group. We both grew up in small towns outside of Philadelphia, basically in the country. We listened to Philadelphia radio, and when we came to the city as students at Temple University to make our mark in the local music scene, Philadelphia had a lot going on. It had the folk traditional American thing going on with the Philadelphia folk festival, and I was very much involved with that. And then it had the doo-wop street-corner R&B urban thing that was happening. And really, it's the combination of those two sounds that makes Hall & Oates Hall & Oates. Daryl and I brought our distinct personal points of view together, but we're different people. We think differently, yet we have a lot of the same roots. So it's very complex thing that's going on here with what we do, but Philadelphia is very much at the core of it. The interesting part is, I've lived a total of four years in Philadelphia my entire life, and never recorded an album in Philadelphia ever, either individually or with Daryl. So it's very interesting that although our connection to Philadelphia is so strong, the reality is that we never recorded there. All our albums were made in New York, with the exception of three of them that were made in L.A.in the mid-'70s.

» EXPRESS: You've experienced a resurgence and critical reassessment by a new generation that was young during the early '80s. How do you feel about that?
» OATES: First of all, it doesn't surprise me because it's in the tradition of pop music. Pop music borrows, steals, rides on the shoulders of what came before it. That is the tradition of pop music. I think what's really happening is that a whole new generation has grown up on our music — it's part of their youth, and we've become part of their roots. They understand how difficult it is to not only have success once, but to sustain success over a 30-year period of time. I think they talk about it, they tell their fans. They're very respectful, and it's a great feeling to know that there's a whole new crop of musicians who are using us as a springboard to create something of their own.

» EXPRESS: Has your audience gotten younger?
» OATES: Oh, yeah. I think because of the fact of what I just said, they're coming out, they're curious to see what we're about, what their heroes are talking about. And then they come see us and see what we do and how we do it, and I think they really enjoy it. So yes, our audience has been definitely changing, definitely getting younger.

» EXPRESS: Has working on this set changed your set list?
» OATES: It's going to. But every time we tour it's like a box set. We have a really good problem: We have a lot of hits. That's a problem because that's what a lot of people expect to hear when they come to a concert. We don't want to disappoint them, but at the same time, we have this entire lifetime of music, which is impossible to get into in a reasonable amount of time. So it's a really hard juggling act. We definitely play the hits, but at the same time, we're always interjecting these album tracks and stuff that we want to do. People really seem to like that, and the hardcore fans come and they always have huge signs — play this, play that. And they're always picking the most obscure album track they can think of. And we do our best to do it, and we do have a fairly big repertoire. But you can't do everything.

» 930 Club, 815 V St. NW; Wed., Oct 21, 7 p.m., $55; 202.265.0930. (U St.-Cardozo)

Written by Express contributor Stephen M. Deusner
Photo courtesy Shore Fire Media