Seriously Everyone Has A Little Place For These Guys: Hall & Oates

After a sweet rejuvenation vacation GBOAT is back!! Hooray.
This entry is by Marisa Meltzer.

I have recently realized that three of the best moments of the past six months of my life has passed with the soundtrack of one band playing. That band was the number one charting duo in rock history. That band has had six number one hits on the Billboard charts. That band was responsible for eleven of RCA's top one hundred singles, second only to Elvis Presley. That band, my friends, was Hall and Oates.

All you really need to know if that Daryl Hall is the one hair highlighted a shade I can only call Studio Musician Blond. John Oates is the one with the curly black hair and vaguely creepy mustache. That's the essential part. They met as college students at Temple University, in Philadelphia, in the late sixties. They started writing folk songs together, but never to any commercial or critical success. Then, in 1975, they moved to RCA and scored a hit with the sublime "Sara Smile". (Which is universally hated by all girls named Sara, for similar reasons that Elvis Costello's "Alison", a totally legit song, is hated by my mom.) Years pass with a few minor hits.

Then it becomes the eighties, and everything changes. Hooks and melodies and soft rock are suddenly craved by the record buying public. First "Kiss on My List", then "Maneater", "Private Eyes" and "I Can't Go for That (No Can Do)" (which also spent a week at the top of the R&B charts -- a rare accomplishment for two white dudes with mullets). By 1983, they had already released a greatest hits album, Rock 'N Soul, Pt. 1.

Their next album, Big Bam Boom had a few more hits, among them "Out of Touch", but the band quickly announced they were on hiatus. They reformed in 1988 and seem to still be touring the state fair circuit, but the glory days are firmly in the past.

So let's turn to my Hall and Oates inflected glory days:

February: I am more than a little bit broken hearted and on vacation with one of my best friends in Costa Rica. I am quite possibly the worst traveling companion ever, spending hours in a hammock alternately listening to the Harold and Maude soundtrack, playing solitaire, staring at the ocean, and crying. My friend persuades me to rent a car and drive to the volcano with her. We spend hours listening to Radio Dos, the best radio station ever. Somewhere in the middle of singing along to a really weird dancehall version of "Hey Ya" followed by "Private Eyes", I realize I am going to be okay.

May: I am in San Francisco at a friend's house. She puts on "Maneater" and proceeds to do a choreographed dance to it than she remembers from grade school. This woman is now thirty. Where, we wonder, Does the useful information go?

July: I am at a party in Brooklyn and "I Can't Go For That" comes on. Everyone is dancing to it completely seriously. For the first time I realize that the lyrics are not "I can't cope with that", as I had always maintained. I was like, Really? Are you sure?

To tally it up: chart-topping duo who cures broken hearts and enlivens dance parties. Total Greatest Band of All Time.