One day during my first year at Chappell, I was told to make time to meet two young songwriters coming up from Philadelphia. Made sense. When you’re the young, contemporary manager, you’re the guy who gets called to meet the unknown young new writers and acts.
I was a little surprised when they showed up, because I had been told the two Philadelphia guys who were coming had worked with Gamble and Huff, so I expected a look, and music, along the same lines.
Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff were two of the biggest songwriters at that time. They collaborated on “I’m Gonna Make You Love Me,” which was recorded as a joint single by Diana Ross and the Supremes and the Temptations. And they were about to start Philadelphia International Records as an alternative to (and competitor with) Motown. Songs they’d write for that label, like “Back Stabbers” and “Love Train” for the O’Jays, and “If You Don’t Know Me By Now” for Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, would become identified as the sound of Philadelphia. That’s sort of what I was expecting.
The two guys stepping into my office didn’t look like the O’Jays. For one, they were white. So, it was a strange encounter for a moment, also because their looks were so striking.
One of them looked like David Bowie, about six feet three inches tall, with long blond hair that fell way past his shoulders. He was wearing a short green leather jacket, but it was his shoes that wouldn’t let my eyes go. His shoes were made of patchwork-colored leather—like they should’ve been a quilt but somehow got confused and ended up in another factory.
His buddy was about five foot five, with long black curly hair down to his shoulders, and a mustache. If he’d been carrying a sword instead of a guitar, he would’ve looked like D’Artagnan from the Three Musketeers.
It was a very friendly meeting. The tall blond-haired guy was quiet and withdrawn. The short black-haired guy was a little more talkative.
They’d both gone to Temple University and were obviously well educated. They had a quasi manager who’d brought them looking for a publishing deal, or a record deal, or any kind of deal, something to get them established in any kind of way. It was easy to see that they were at that early stage where an artist latched on to whoever could take him forward.
After we finished talking, I said: “Okay, let’s go to the studio.” We had one on the floor, a large room with a piano, where demos could be made. The tall blond guy sat at the piano. The short black-haired guy got out his guitar.
As soon as they started playing, my mind started racing. This is unbelievable! This could be the best music I’ve ever heard!
It was a strange combination of folk music and R & B. What was unique about it was that I never really liked folk music, but from these guys it came out as a brand-new kind of sound. They were not a copy of anything. They were absolutely original.
I was very quiet as this music came into me. I knew this would be big, and from that day forward I knew my life was changed forever.
That’s how I met Daryl Hall and John Oates. Looking back, I can only wonder if they knew what I knew in that moment. They didn’t play “She’s Gone” for me that afternoon, or “Rich Girl.” But it was as if I could hear the seeds of those songs in what they were playing.
Two stark questions came to me: How can I make it happen? And how can I be part of it? Those questions grabbed every cell in my body and just wouldn’t let go.
I was a year younger than Daryl. That’s important to understand. In some ways these guys were looking at me like: Yeah, this kid’s got balls, but what can he really do?
There are many snapshots in my memory that show exactly where my head was around that time. Once, when I was in the Atlantic Records recording studio at 1841 Broadway, I came out of a session and saw an elegant bald-headed man, with brown tortoise-shell eyeglasses, and a 100 percent perfectly groomed goatee, wearing a perfectly fitted suit and tie, turning down the same hall. It was Ahmet Ertegun. It was the Rolling Stones; Wilson Pickett; the Young Rascals; Led Zeppelin; Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young; Bette Midler; and Aretha Franklin all in one coming down the corridor toward me. Ahmet Ertegun was all of that and more. He was the chairman and a founder of Atlantic Records, the man who put jazz into R & B. He was one of the pioneers of the industry. He was a giant.
Thirty-five years earlier he’d been an eleven-year-old boy when he arrived in the United States as the son of the Turkish ambassador. But it was hard for me to envision him that way. In my eyes at that moment, he was the godfather of the music I loved. I don’t want to overexaggerate my reaction in that hallway. But I stood against the wall and nodded with respect.
Suddenly, at twenty-two years old, I had to figure out a way to make Hall & Oates trust me enough to guide them, and after that I had to figure a way to guide them into Ahmet Ertegun’s world.
I always knew to trust my instincts, and when I did I was usually very convincing and got a great result. So I kept calling and spending time with Daryl and John. I took them into the studio and produced about six demos of their latest material. I got them some small advances from Chappell Music so that they could get an apartment in New York City. We began to hang out night and day and soon became close. I gave one of their demo tapes to a guy whom I’d become very friendly with at Atlantic Records named Mark Meyerson. Mark was the director of A&R, and he fell head over heels in love with the music. Not long after that, when Daryl, John, and Ahmet were all on the West Coast, Meyerson set up a meeting between them.
The meeting was a dinner at the home of one of Ertegun’s friends named Earl McGrath. The joke back then was that just about anybody could get their own label if they were friends with the head of the company, and that was definitely how McGrath got Clean Records. Over dinner and lots of wine, Ahmet told Daryl and John that they were welcome to become part of Clean.
Daryl and John were ecstatic. I was not as happy. Clean Records was not what I had in mind for them. I wanted them to be on our dream label, the Atlantic label, because I sensed we would never be treated the same if we were on Clean. Yeah, I was inexperienced, but I knew one thing for sure: the closer you are to the people in power, the better your results are going to be. It was a difficult situation. Ahmet had already committed to his friend. But luckily, Mark Meyerson also thought that it would be better to have Hall & Oates on Atlantic. He enlisted a famous producer to tell Ahmet that the Atlantic label would be the best fit, and worked it out internally.
I ended up getting Hall & Oates a three-album deal, a deal that gave Atlantic the option to extend the contract by putting up additional money. It wasn’t huge money—it was the kind of money that got a band started. I only realized that we’d hit the jackpot when I asked Meyerson about the famous producer who’d campaigned for us.
He told me that it was Arif Mardin, and that Arif wanted to talk to me about producing their first album.
You can imagine how I felt when I heard that name. No, you can’t. If I listed all of Arif Mardin’s great work, this book might be ten pages longer. Arif Mardin arranged “Respect” for Aretha Franklin. That’s all you really need to hear. But let me give you just a few more examples: “Where Is the Love” for Donny Hathaway and Roberta Flack. “Pick Up the Pieces” by the Average White Band. “Jive Talkin’ ” for the Bee Gees. “Wind beneath My Wings” for Bette Midler. We’re talking about a guy who won eleven Grammys. Only a few months earlier, I couldn’t even have gotten in the same room with Arif Mardin. Hall & Oates had basically gone from zero to a thousand, from obscurity to working with one of the greatest musician-producers of all time—and, by the way, one of the nicest men God ever created.
There was a developmental process in the early seventies that no longer exists today. Now, it’s either come out with a hit or die. Back then, your first album could be sort of a place marker, an introduction. Our concept was simply to record a collection of songs that John and Daryl had already written. No gigantic aims, just get some music out, engage an audience, start to create a following, and see where it all leads. Of c
ourse, we would’ve loved to have a big hit. But back then, there was time. It took Bruce Springsteen three albums to get to Born to Run.
Hall & Oates’ first record was much more of an acoustic album with undertones of their R & B roots. It was called Whole Oats, and it was linked to a cool piece of art on the cover, a box of Quaker Oats. The album didn’t have any hits. But it was a critical success, and one song on it, “Fall in Philadelphia,” backed by Arif’s great string arrangements, became the blueprint for nearly every Hall & Oates hit that would follow.
The album put Daryl and John in a good place and gave me open access to all the departments of Atlantic Records. I found myself once again as the artist-student, soaking up everything and looking over the shoulders of the masters. The head of promotion, Jerry Greenberg, would later become the president of Atlantic Records at the age of thirty-two, making him the youngest president of any major record company in history. Next to his office in promotions was a woman named Margo Knesz, who worked the phones like a truck driver: “Listen, you motherfucker, you’d better fucking play these fucking records!” Barbara Carr, then head of publicity, would later go on to comanage Bruce Springsteen with Jon Landau. Dave Glew, the senior vice president, showed me the ropes of distribution, marketing, and sales. I never forgot a thing he taught me. When I took over at Sony fourteen years later, he was one of the first executives I brought in. I was seeing, listening, and learning the promotional strategies that were propelling all of Atlantic’s big stars, knowing that this was the same machinery that was going to carry my acts out to the radio and into the record stores.
No area was too small or trivial to be overlooked or studied. When Hall & Oates hit the road to play clubs around New York, sometimes I needed to drive the truck, sometimes I needed to carry guitars and amplifiers, and sometimes I needed to set up the lighting and sound because the budget couldn’t pay anyone else to do it. So I learned how to do everything, and this was all after I’d pounded the pavement for Chappell Music during the day.
You can go to school for four years and graduate school for another couple, get some diplomas, and still not necessarily know anything about how the world works. When you go through the crash course, nobody in a cap and gown hands you a diploma to hang on your wall. That’s okay. It’s written all over you.
I first heard Oates play the chords on his guitar and sing the melody and lyrics to “She’s Gone” in their New York City apartment. It was just the raw roots of a song, but then Daryl stepped in and put those magical vocals on it, as only he could. When they sang the lead in octaves, I could tell it was going to be a smash.
Daryl and John started working on their second album right after the first one came out. We’d gotten the message that Whole Oats was too acoustic, that Atlantic and Arif wanted to put together a strong rhythm section to enhance Hall & Oates’ Philly soul and R & B. This time, Arif was bringing in the big guns. He put together a killer rhythm section with players like Bernard Purdie on drums, Gordon Edwards on bass, and Hugh McCracken on guitar, to name a few. If you don’t know anything about the world of studio musicians, you might not recognize those names, but you’ve heard their sound on over a hundred hits. These guys played on a lot of the hit records produced by Arif, Jerry Wexler, and Tom Dowd. It’s impossible to overstate what they brought to the game. It was like adding Kobe Bryant, Dwyane Wade, and LeBron James to your pickup basketball team. With these guys and “She’s Gone” in the mix, the second album seemed destined to break out.
“She’s Gone” was inspired by two women. One had stood John up on New Year’s Eve. The other was Daryl’s first wife. Daryl and his wife were going through a painful split at the time. When I think back on that period, I’m reminded of a lot of conversations Daryl and I had about the similarities in our marriages. Daryl’s wife at the time was also Jewish, and he was dealing with so many of the same religious and cultural issues that I was. His experience might’ve felt like: “She’s Gone.” But my experience was starting to feel like: I’m gone.
I was working the equivalent of two full-time jobs and then going out with Daryl and John at night. I’d drive back home to New Rochelle late, but the reality is I was more connected to Hall & Oates than I was to my marriage. I wanted to be a good husband. The more time passed, though, the more I saw what Sam Clark had seen from the beginning: there was little connection between us. It wasn’t really about the long hours. Hard work and success had always been the ethic in the Clark home. So Lisa understood. And it didn’t really have much to do with religion. It was more like we were from two different worlds.
What she grew up with was the ritual of Friday night candles, Saturday night dinners, and Sunday morning golf brunches at the country club. I wasn’t at home on Friday night, and I didn’t really feel at home at the country club. At the same time, she didn’t seem to be thrilled when I brought her into my world. I remember taking her to my first Rolling Stones concert. The buildup to that concert had gone on for years inside me, ever since driving with “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” blasting from the radio in my friend George’s Corvette down the Major Deegan Expressway to a club in the Bronx called Cholly’s. The Rolling Stones, man! I was finally going to see the Rolling Stones! Halfway through that concert I looked over at Lisa and got the impression that she’d rather be at the country club.
I never expected to be divorced. No matter how bad the fights were, most couples I saw growing up didn’t get divorced. Whatever the problems were, they just dealt with them. My deepest influences were what I’d seen at home as a kid. I can’t remember my parents spending a night apart. But I hadn’t taken the time before I got married to consider the depth of the connections my parents had: Their Italian-American Catholic heritage. Christmas. Easter. The shared dreams they had for their children. And deep, deep, down underneath it all was a love for music. These were things I couldn’t build on with Lisa at the time. The more time passed, the more I began to realize my marriage was going to be a long haul.
Daryl was able to adjust his life more quickly. He’d met a stewardess named Sara Allen, and eventually she moved in with him and John in the New York City apartment and became the inspiration for a song on that second album called “Las Vegas Turnaround (The Stewardess Song).” Singing that song with John helped turn Daryl’s pain into a happy rebound. I was not writing any songs to confront what was rumbling around my gut. So I buried the feeling underneath twenty-hour workdays.
Arif and his boys pulled the best out of “She’s Gone” and “Las Vegas Turnaround” with additional help from a truly talented guitar player/band member named Christopher Bond. We were ready to roll.
The second album was called Abandoned Luncheonette. On the cover was a photo of an abandoned diner sitting in weeds that John and Daryl used to drive past outside of Philly. The album cover became a piece of pop history. Fans and photographers would make treks to find it and find out about it. It turned out the diner was originally located in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, but went out of business and was dumped in a small wooded area outside of Philly, where it was eventually carted away to clear the land. Sad, too, that album covers like Abandoned Luncheonette are now gone, but we’ll get to that later. Trust me, at the time that cover was a big deal.
We were shocked when “She’s Gone” failed to become a hit as soon as it was released. But by no means was I disillusioned. I knew that “She’s Gone” was a hit. I knew it was a smash. I knew that Atlantic had dropped the ball. I was determined to at some point make that song a hit. Anyway, the album became the pivotal point in John and Daryl’s career. It had total clarity. It described exactly what they were. It showed their Philly rock and soul side, their acoustic side, their vocal harmonies. It branded them. Reviews were great—and back then not every idiot could blog whatever the hell he thought without having even sat down and listened to the record a few times. Back then, reviews really meant something. They could make or break an artist. The Atlantic executives saw Hall & Oates on the verge of becomi
ng the company’s next giant superstars. The album was not a commercial success. But stories began to trickle back that Led Zeppelin’s lead guitar player, Jimmy Page, was seen carrying around the Abandoned Luncheonette album while on tour. That made Daryl’s day. It made his day more than if you’d told him that “She’s Gone” was at the top of the single charts, because Jimmy Page was one of Daryl’s idols, and that meant integrity and credibility.
We were poised to smash through on album number three. The developmental process in those days was almost like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. Only a few more pieces in just the right places and it would be complete.
Just at that point, Daryl said he had a different puzzle in mind.
As crazy as that might sound, it was completely understandable. “I don’t want to do Abandoned Luncheonette Junior,” Daryl said. He was like an actor scared of being typecast into a specific role that was making him famous but threatening to confine him for the rest of his life. Daryl was an explorer. He didn’t want to be locked into the velvet coffin of pop music—and John didn’t want to be locked away with him.
For their third album they wanted to do something totally different. Daryl was infatuated with David Bowie, and loved musicians from England like Brian Eno and Robert Fripp, who made incredible but totally noncommercial music. Daryl wanted his next album with John to be progressive rock ’n’ roll.
I did not agree, and one night at Joe’s restaurant on MacDougal Street after enough martinis, wine, Sambuca, and grappa had gone down, we got into it.
“Hey, man, getting to this point was hard work,” I told him. “We’ve just built an audience of people who found Abandoned Luncheonette so compelling that they went out and bought it. They bought the music that they heard and loved. You don’t know how they’re going to react to a completely different sound. We are trying to build a dedicated audience here. It takes time.”
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