When the Morning Comes: Hall & Oates’ Abandoned Luncheonette at 50
Food for thought on an overlooked classic
Daryl Hall and John Oates are a genre unto themselves. Just as Enya describes her music simply as “Enya,” theirs can only be called “Daryl Hall and John Oates.” No other label fits them.
They’re most frequently dubbed “blue-eyed soul,” a label they dislike and consider racist. “I grew up with this music. It is not about being black or white,” Hall told Salon in 2016. So why not simply call them “soul”? After all, they’re from Philadelphia, as in Philly soul. Their 1970s output shows that they were kindred spirits of the O’Jays, the Stylistics, the Spinners, Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes and similar artists.
More recently, they’ve been called “yacht rock,” which brings up images of faceless artists with handlebar mustaches playing easygoing songs. Daryl Hall and John Oates aren’t always easygoing, and they sure aren’t faceless. Most yacht rock artists saw their careers sink with the rise of MTV, which is when these guys reached their commercial height. Besides, Oates shaved his mustache years ago.
What other labels might fit them? Perhaps “rock and soul”? After all, their 1983 greatest-hits album was titled Rock ‘n Soul Part 1. What about “yacht rock and soul”? How about “yacht soul”?
Daryl and John began their recording career on Atlantic Records with their 1972 debut, Whole Oats, produced by Arif Mardin. Google their earliest publicity photos, and you will find them with long, flowing hair and flared pants, looking very different from their sharply dressed 1980s selves, far removed from the Billboard charts, MTV and yachts. The album is dominated by ballads, which are alternately somber, intimate, and offbeat. On “Fall in Philadelphia” and “Lily (Are You Happy),” there are traces of the smooth soul-pop that would make them famous.
You’d think Atlantic, home to soul’s crème de la crème, would have been an ideal fit. However, the chart hits would come several years and one label change later. Meanwhile, they relocated to New York City to record their next album, 1973’s Abandoned Luncheonette, with Mardin producing once more.
In 2015, Oates told Ultimate Classic Rock, “We look back at Luncheonette as our first record, even though it was technically our second….The first one was just to get it out of our system – ‘We have a record contract, let’s put something out.’ With Luncheonette, in that regard, we were really starting out from scratch.”
The album cover, depicting said luncheonette, conveys both homeyness and strangeness. With the first two songs, “When the Morning Comes” and “Had I Known You Better Then,” listeners during the early 1970s might have expected an album of breezy acoustic pop-rock of the James Taylor / America / Seals and Crofts variety. “Morning,” written by Hall, is distinguished by a swirling oboe and Mellotron. “Had I Known,” a country-tinged Oates composition, is about falling in love just as you’re about to move away.
But then Daryl and John dispense with the soft-rock niceties—after all, at this point, they’re two talented, ambitious young men, still inventing their own genre. For the third track, Oates’s “Las Vegas Turnaround (The Stewardess Song),” they blend disco and yacht rock years before most people knew those genres existed.
Next up: “She’s Gone,” which was a game changer for Daryl Hall and John Oates, one of the finest songs they ever wrote. Here their Philly soul sensibilities emerge for the first time on the album. The song seems to creep out of a haze, with the guitars setting an otherworldly mood. Hall’s elastic tenor soars above the mix right before the plaintive, soul-baring chorus. In contrast, the lyrics are straightforward. There are no poetic metaphors to describe a breakup’s aftermath, just matter-of-fact statements: “She’s gone/I’d better learn how to face it.”
The song also inspired Daryl and John’s first music video, which went unaired for decades. When a local TV station asked them to lip sync “She’s Gone,” they went to the station with the goal of trolling. In the resulting clip, directed by Oates’s sister, they lip-sync sporadically and toss around Monopoly money. This, by the way, is the least weird thing about the video, which co-starred their tour manager, Randy Hoffman, and Hall’s then-girlfriend, Sara Allen. (During the 1980s, MTV had a series called “Closet Classics,” which aired early music videos. It’s a shame this one wasn’t available at the time. Imagine Daryl and John’s 1980s fans watching it.)
VIDEO: Daryl Hall and John Oates “She’s Gone” live at the Trubadour 2009
In a roundabout way, “She’s Gone” was also their first commercial success. In 1974, Tavares had a #1 soul hit with their version of the song. As for Daryl and John, their own version became a Top 10 pop hit when it was re-released in 1976.
“I’m Just a Kid (Don’t Make Me Feel Like a Man)” blends Philly soul and folk-pop in a song that sounds like a deconstruction of young-love cliches. There’s still something comforting about the album so far, even as you get the feeling things are about to get even more adventurous. Which they do.
This brings us to Abandoned Luncheonette’s title track, written by Hall. It begins as a sauntering jazz number and then segues into soul balladry as the luncheonette becomes a metaphor for lost youth. Daryl Hall, by the way, has always had an arty, offbeat side. Robert Fripp, in fact, produced his first solo album, Sacred Songs, in 1980.
“Lady Rain” is the closest thing to driving rock on the album, albeit with mandolin and Mellotron. It’s followed by “Laughing Boy,” which is the closest thing on the album to piano-driven art pop.
Abandoned Luncheonette closes with the seven-minute “Everytime I Look at You,” which begins as rubbery funk, followed by a chorus that would make Thom Bell or Gamble and Huff smile. Four minutes into the song, it morphs into progressive rock (remember what I said about the Fripp/Hall connection?) before ending as a hoe-down, complete with fiddle.
The pair went even further into left field with their next album, 1974’s War Babies, which was produced by fellow Philadelphian Todd Rundgren. Afterward, they jumped to RCA and had their first hit, “Sara Smile.”
Today, Daryl Hall and John Oates are famously known as a singles act, their body of work represented mainly by compilation albums. Meanwhile, Abandoned Luncheonette was finally certified platinum in 2002, and those who check out the album because of “She’s Gone” might be surprised what else they discover. It’s a landmark for Daryl and John, as much as any of their beloved 1970s and 1980s hits. After all, how many albums are responsible for an entire musical genre?
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Politics Behind the Show:
We wanted to see Hall and Oates when they played at The Bottom Line.
I was away in school. Two guys were at Queens College.
Both wanted to go as well.
But one of them refused to lay out any money for tickets in advance as others had done for him.
Fantastic album, one of 1973’s finest, especially side two. I developed a 20,000-word H&O write-up with in-depths on this album and everything through Big Bam Boom. It’s still a work in progress.