Daryl Hall: “I Never Enjoyed Music”
To quote an old hit of his, say it isn’t so! As anyone who’s ever seen Hall & Oates perform live can tell you, the group — even today, where many aging performers feel content to give less than 100% — epitomizes the musician’s slogan “pro gear, pro attitude.” And with a catalog of both blockbuster hits and soul-satisfying deep cuts (all of which are present on the new Hall & Oates four-CD box set, Do What You Want, Be What You Are), who could have ever known that for Daryl Hall (pictured at right on the website CoolMensHairstyles.com), making music was a joyless enterprise all along? Talk about bummers. But according to Hall, that’s pretty much the deal. In this interview with The Onion’s A.V. Club, we witness the following exchange:
The A.V. Club: At what point in your life did you make the transition from just enjoying music to saying, “Okay, this is going to be my career?”
Daryl Hall: I never enjoyed music.
AVC: Never?
DH: No. I’ve been a professional since I was 2 years old. It’s work. I come from a musical family, my mother was in a band… music to me was hard work. It was learning how to be in front of people, and how to deal with audiences. Practice, constant practice with instruments. It was never what most would call a pleasurable experience.
AVC: Even now, you’d say that?
DH: More so now even than then. I’m a professional musician. I have been my whole life. When people are born into the arts, they don’t tend to see art as pleasure, they see it as work.
AVC: Would that be true even listening to other people’s music? Listening to the Motown artists and Gamble and Huff, and people like that?
DH: I get pleasure out of it, but pleasure in a different way. Informational pleasure.
Whoa, what? What the hell kind of Cole Hamels shit is this? And really? Could it just be that, like most of us, Daryl Hall simply has no time for The Onion these days? (The real news is now fake enough, thank you.) In any case, we might all owe Daryl Hall an even greater debt than we know: While we were all grooving to “Fall In Philadelphia,” “Rich Girl” and “I Can’t Go For That,” poor ol’ Daryl was suffering and putting on a brave face, dreaming of what he’d be doing the second he got off stage: Restoring a Georgian-style home in London, England, first built in 1740, one of only 50 houses with direct waterfront access to the River Thames. Truth be told, yeah, fair enough: That is kind of better than playing “Method Of Modern Love” one more time.
November 4th, 2009 at 5:12 pm
This may be the saddest thing I’ve read in months.
November 4th, 2009 at 5:36 pm
In a way, I now have more respect for the man: he’s a classicist, not a romantic.
He has great taste in restorations, too. Georgian: the thinking man’s Victorian.
November 4th, 2009 at 5:42 pm
True artists are, effectively, day laborers. Flashes in the pan are for the MTV generation and readers of Philadelphia Magazine. Someone once said imagination without skill gives you modern art. Much the same can be said about musicians and their work.
It’s like the difference between the Yankees and the Phillies. Hype versus competence. I can’t believe I just made a sports metaphor. My inner Chomsky is slowly dying.
November 4th, 2009 at 7:17 pm
@conorcorcoran
“Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.”
Tom Stoppard, “Artist Descending a Staircase”
British dramatist & screenwriter (1937 – )
November 5th, 2009 at 11:43 am
WTF? It’s the Onion and it isn’t fake news? Or is it? Or is the real news so fake now that I can no longer tell the difference? Or maybe it isn’t Hall and Oates being interviewed at all but it’s Glenn Beck’s evil little appendix fucking with us all. Hall doesn’t enjoy making music? He’d rather spend his time restoring old houses? I think it’s Beck’s evil appendix doing the talking.
I do like this statement from the interview:
“We were very fortunate. We came up in an era where the record companies allowed us to make the music we wanted to make, and then they found a way of marketing it and selling it, which is 180 degrees from what happens today in the business. We were very conscious of making albums with substance. Every song needed to have some redeeming quality, or else we basically didn’t put it on the record. So it wasn’t about making a few hits and filling out the album with quickies; that wasn’t the way we approached things. The albums were thought of as a piece of work, and the singles that emerged from those albums were the songs radio gravitated to. Many times, we allowed radio to pick the singles. We would just put the whole album out there, and the record company would mull it over, and they’d run it by various radio people, and they would say, “That’s the one, let’s go with that.” We were very much not involved with the picking of the singles.”
I miss that at one time an album was considered a piece of work in itself—a collection of songs with a cohesive message or a reflection of the craft and art of an artist at a given time.
November 5th, 2009 at 12:26 pm
So it turns out Yacht Rock was a work of fiction?
November 5th, 2009 at 4:10 pm
Onion AV Club is non-fake entertainment reporting. Actually has some of the better music and film reviews on the web.