Sunday morning coming down

On Monday, the day after I wrote about the appearance of Daryl Hall and John Oates this coming Thursday in St. Paul, I ran into a senior officer of one of the prominent local bar associations. For my purposes here, I will identify him as Mr. K.

Mr. K. asked me if I still write for “that blog.” I acknowledged I did. He doesn’t read it, he said, but Mrs. K. does. His wife had been reading something by my colleague Hinderaker on Sunday and saw that “Seals and Crofts” were coming to town.

“Hey, I wrote that,” I said

“She wants to go see Seals and Crofts,” he said.

“Hall and Oates,” I said, trying to correct him.

He grimaced. “I don’t want to see Seals and Crofts,” he said.

Mrs. K., there has been a terrible misunderstanding. As you know, Daryl Hall and John Oates are not Seals and Crofts — not that there’s anything wrong with Seals and Crofts. Please grab Mr. K. and ask him to give a listen to Hall and Oates in the video below performing their first hit, “She’s Gone,” live in Sydney in 2013.

Or ask him to give a listen to them performing “I Can’t Go For That,” live at the Troubador in Los Angeles in 2008, a number 1 hit not written or performed by Seals and Crofts.

Daryl Hall has been making it new with younger artists he invites to revisit the Hall and Oates songbook as well as their own material with him on Live From Daryl’s House. In the video below he performs “Adult Education” with the husband and wife duo that goes under the name Johnnyswim (Abner Ramirez and Amanda Sudano). They give “Adult Education” a rhythmic twist, turning a middling song into something that can rev your engines. And speaking of revving your engines, the lovely Mrs. Ramirez, it turns out, is the youngest daughter of Donna Summer.

Before I felt the need to intercede with Mr. K., I had intended this week to give equal time to John Oates. Reading his memoir Change of Seasons, written with Power Line friend Chris Epting, I learned that Oates recorded his first song in Philadelphia with The Masters in 1966 at the age of 18. It is one of the buried treasures you can find on YouTube (below). Oates was on his way at the time to study journalism and English at Temple, where his musical pursuits led him to cross paths with Daryl Hall 50 years ago.

Oates writes in the book: “Everyone always asks me, ‘When did you know you had finally made it?'” Oates recalls the moment. “It was one cool autumn evening in 1967, on a dark country road near Silverdale, Pennsylvania, parking with my girlfriend, Lynne.” He was “kissing in the glow of the radio dial when I heard it, exploding from the speaker in the dash: the slightly out-of-tune horn intro with the rushed drum fill from ‘I Need Your Love.'”

“I sensed that something profoundly important had just happened,” he writes. “I had a record out. I was on the radio. My life would never be the same again.”

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