John Oates has traveled one of the more envious roads in rock and roll history. As half of the dynamic hit machine Hall and Oates, there is little left on the bucket list for the guitarist, but he soldiers on behind his latest solo effort A Good Road to Follow. Recorded with the likes of Jim Lauderdale, Ryan Tedder and more, Oates explores his rootsy side while still maintaining the hook-driven ways of his most notable project.
Oates sat down with Jambands.com following his induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to discuss the honor, his new solo record and traveling a different road in life—one that has also put him on stage with the likes of moe. and Umphrey’s McGee.
I wanted to start with Hall & Oates’ Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction earlier this year. It seems as if every artist has their own take on what the honor ultimately means. What did it mean to you and Daryl and does it properly honor your career’s work?
There’s no simple answer to that question, there’s so many levels of stuff going on here. First of all, the thing that has always struck me about the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in general is that it’s such a subjective judging process. It’s really some sort of club that has a point of view. Every year they get together and they exercise their point of view, and the world of music, especially American music and popular music, is too vast to be contained under the roof of a museum and to be limited by a small group of people’s opinions.
That’s the way I feel about it, and that being said, I’m glad we got in, I’m really glad this was our year. It seemed to be a growing movement among the public and the press, and eventually with some new members in the committee that I think really was the tipping point that caused us to get in. Now that it’s all said and done, we’re in, it’s a fantastic thing and we’re really happy about it.
How do you honor and pay tribute to all the amazing music there has been and still be done? Interestingly enough, which is something I didn’t realize until the induction ceremony, is that Daryl and I are the only Philadelphia musicians in the entire Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. That’s is a really really unusual thing. Philadelphia has an incredible musical history going back way before rock and roll, but how about the beginning of rock and roll, how about Bill Haley and the Comets? They did a song called “Rock Around the Clock,” and whether you think it’s good or not, “The Twist” by Chubby Checker was probably the biggest record, one of the biggest records in the history of rock and roll. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. What about all the great Gamble and Huff artists, Stylistics, Delfonics, Harold Melvin and the Bluenotes. The list goes on and on.
That being said, my feeling is that it’s a political thing on a lot of levels, but we’re in, and we got in for a reason. I think our body of work deserves it and I think, you know, I feel like we deserve it and I’ve always felt like we’ve deserved it. But at the same time I wasn’t losing any sleep over the fact that we didn’t get the nod over the years.
Hall & Oates was eligible for induction in 1997. Does there come a point where you mentally and emotionally move on from the idea?
It’s typical of a lot of big events that have a long kind of gestation and building process. Like when you’re a kid and you want to turn sixteen so you can get your driver’s license or when you want to turn twenty-one so you can drink. All these things, these landmark moments that you wait for and then all of a sudden it happens and you’re like “Oh, OK it happened,” now let’s move on. I’m not a nostalgic person. It’s nice to look back at the past but I always kind of think about moving forward. It was a long period of time from the early fall when we were part of the nomination and then months went by and then we got picked in December, and then months went by before the event. So by the time the event came it was anticlimactic in a way.
You mentioned the nostalgia factor—how difficult of a mode is that to snap into since you are still an active artist and you and Daryl still tour together?
It’s weird. It’s a very weird thing. Everywhere I’d go people were always congratulating me and saying “Man, that is so incredible.” It seems more exciting to people looking from the outside in than the inside out. And, like I said I don’t want to diminish the fact that we’re in and it’s an honor. I’m really happy about it, trust me, I don’t sound that way but I am.
In a way, when we dreamed of getting a record contract and we worked really hard to get the record contract, then we got the record contract, and it was like ‘OK, well now we got that thing that we were hoping to get, oh now we got to go on the road, now we got to tour because now we got to play our music for people. Oh wow it’d be great if we were popular enough to play Madison Square Garden. Hey, we just sold out Madison Square Garden, this is awesome. Hey you know what we’ve never been to Japan, yeah it’s really cool we should play in Tokyo, wow I’d love to play in Tokyo, let’s play Tokyo!” That’s how my life has always gone. “Hey, you know it’d be great to have a number one record, it’d be great to have a platinum album.”
I’ve been very fortunate and blessed in my life to have achieved so many of these dreams. I realize that they’re fleeting. They’re wonderful and they’re satisfying but they don’t really feed your soul. They just mark time. I probably sound like an old curmudgeon here, but I’m not. I’m really grateful and really happy for all this stuff, but I’m nostalgic for the future. I can’t wait for tomorrow. That’s who I am as a person and I can’t help that. All these great accolades and all these great moments and all these great landmark, you know things, are really kind of like, you know they sit on a shelf they’re trophies that sit on a shelf. And do you go and stare at them and polish them every day and, you know, sit down in front of them and stare at them going, wow, man, look at that, look at that Grammy, look at that American Music Award, look at that, you know that Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Award, that’s incredible, no! You just, you put them on a shelf and people come to your house and go “That’s cool, yeah that’s cool,”“ but meanwhile you’re writing a new song in your head. You know, that’s what it’s all about.
So the experiences are worth more than the trophies, essentially?
Yes. And you know what it is even more, the experience here again is something that is fleeting. It’s the relationships. I think it’s the relationships and the people who were a part of making it happen, who are in the trenches doing it. That’s the stuff that I hold closer to my heart. To me, that’s more important, way more important to me. When I think back on those records that we made and the hits and stuff, I remember those sessions and I remember T-Bone and GE Smith and Mickey Curry and cutting those tracks and you know the excitement of, you know, Daryl sitting down at a keyboard after a session was over and coming up with the keyboard part for “I Can’t Go for That,” and him and I just recording that with the engineer and no one else around. Those are the kind of things that really stick in my mind. That’s the stuff, that’s the real thing.
You and Daryl mentioned in your speech that you spent as much time on the deep cuts as you did on the hits. I thought that was a really important message for young musicians to hear. The music business seems to still be hit-driven these days.
Well, you know it’s not always the fault of the artist. I think that if you were to transport a modern artist back to our era of the 70’s and even the 80’s, they would have done the same thing that we did. They would have spent as much time on their music, because that’s what it was about. The hits were a by-product of the hard work. And the hits were a consensus of marketing people, and record company and radio. And I really do mean that.
That’s why when Daryl and I go onstage I’m frustrated in lot of ways when we do the Hall & Oates tour because we have this incredibly big elephant on our back. And it’s wonderful. These hits, these huge hits that are ubiquitous. We’re proud of them and that’s what people come to hear. As a professional, you have to respect your audience so obviously we play them. But, at the same time I’d rather go out there and do a deep tracks tour where we would just pick the really cool musical songs that I think we’ve done over the years that have largely overshadowed by that stuff.
I think a lot of people would be up for a Hall & Oates deep tracks tour.
So would we but we’d never get away with it. We insert these album tracks in our shows and we rotate them. And it keeps us interested and it keeps our die-hard fans who see us a lot, keeps them you know happy because then they get to hear different songs. But at the same time the core of our set is just this incredible group of hit records.
A good problem to have I guess.
Oh, it’s the best, believe me it’s a fantastic problem to have.
Transitioning to your solo album, A Good Road to Follow. You released it in three different parts. What sort of benefits did you discover within the current music model that allowed you to do that?
Well, the original idea for this project fit perfectly with the modern music model, which was to release a series of digital singles with no album. In that regard it was very modern, and very of the moment. But, it didn’t work. I don’t know what the reasons were, I think the reasons were that the kind of audience that pays attention to me would rather hear an album so even though I tried it and I released five or six digital singles that got a lot of buzz, there was really no sales and it just wasn’t connecting for some reason. The fallback position, which I didn’t really even consider until fans on social media said “Where’s the album?” I said, “Well there isn’t one but there could be,” so the album was made after the fact.
I dug myself a bit of a hole because I had all this music that was so different and unique. And it didn’t seem to work together as an album because it wasn’t conceived that way. Like I said I kind of came at it backwards, and then I said, “OK, let’s see if I can sort through this music and create something that has flow and some sort of consistency.” So, I had 28 songs and there’s no way that was going to work, so I edited myself down to 15 and I left a few really great songs on the table. And then that was how the concept of the three discs, the three EP’s came out. I wanted something that was manageable and something that was musically coherent so I found five songs that seemed to work, and then another five that seemed to work, and that’s it.
You know as a business model, it’s really stupid. The package is too expensive to make. As we all know people don’t buy CD’s, so you talk about a vanity project and this is the ultimate vanity project.
Each EP sort of has its own little sound, and you also surrounded yourself with a bunch of different musicians. As the songwriter what did you notice about being in a room with, at various points, completely different people with various backgrounds and styles?
Well there’s always a lot of similarities in the songwriting, composition process and I think the similarity is that a lot of traditional songwriters people like Vince Gill and Jim Lauderdale, they approach writing very much like I do. The more modern writers like Hot Chelle Rae and Ryan Tedder, they produce, they approach the writing process. Their process is intrinsically linked to the production. The production and the writing are really one in the same and that’s the difference, which is cool by me but that’s what I wanted. I wanted to step into the world of the modern pop writer and I wanted to see how modern pop records were created.
I wanted to, and what’s interesting is those guys wanted me to bring the old school sound. And in a way as the project went on I kind of had to become a musical traffic cop. I was the only one who actually knew the kind of music I had in my back pocket that had been created by all of these various collaborators. I didn’t sit down with Ryan Tedder and Vince Gill and play them 20 songs and go, “Alright here’s the 20 I’ve got now let’s write something different.’”It wasn’t like that at all. I didn’t play them anything. I just wanted to see what was going to happen. As we got into the writing of each song, I was aware of it.
In the back of my mind as the songs began to evolve, I skewed it in a certain way because I knew it had to. I have this, I have that and they didn’t know that but I did. It was kind of a weird thing. I was being the referee, I was being the songwriting referee. But not being overt and obvious about it, not telling them that, but I was aware of it. Does that make any sense?
You let them do your own thing with your blueprint in the back of your mind.
But within certain parameters, and you know what the parameters were? The bottom line was—can I sing this song? Can I pull this off vocally? Is this a song that I can make my own, and really make it believable and real? If I couldn’t pull it off vocally, then I moved on or steered it in another direction because in the end I had to sing this stuff. I’m not an extremely versatile vocalist. I do a certain thing pretty well but I’m not the kind of person that can just take any song and sing it.
For instance, when Jim Lauderdale and I have been writing—we write all the time. He’s an amazing singer and he has a very unique style. We’d be writing and Jim would start singing and he’d have these really cool melodies and this phrasing that’s very unique to him. And we’d finish the song and I’d try to sing it and it would sound phony. It would just sound weird. I’d go “Jim man this is an awesome song that we wrote but I can’t sing this.” And Jim’s cool he would say, “well why don’t you live with it a little bit and maybe you’ll figure out a way.” And that’s what I would do. I would actually take the songs away and I would marinate on it and live with it, and then I would kind of recraft the vocals so that I could be comfortable and pull it off.
So a lot of the songs like “Six Men,” started out like a country, almost like a folk song. I turned it into like a some sort of Philadelphia meets chain-gang. But I had to do it because I loved the song so much so I recrafted the song for the record. It’s like I had my songwriters hat on and then I take that off and I put my producers hat on and then I figure out how to make the song that we wrote work for the record.
It sounds like you went out of your way to make yourself uncomfortable to get the results you were looking for.
I definitely had to keep my eye on the ball. It’s just when you work with so many different unique people they all bring their unique personalities and style to the day and to the moment. It’s really like I said it’s a songwriters hat, a producers hat and a vocalist hat, a singers hat, and you wear different caps because it’s a self produced, co-produced project and that’s what producers really do. Except the difference was I was there from the beginning. A lot of the times a band or an artist would come to a producer and say, “Here’s our twelve songs,” and the producer then has an objective point of view. He hears the songs cold, he says “How do I surround this band with the right musical environment and framework to make these songs come alive?” He’s totally in the producers role. Whereas I had to do all of it. But obviously with the help of a lot of really great people.
Right, just sort of looking at it from a bigger perspective, what motivates you now do you think as a songwriter, a musician, I mean you’ve been making music for the better part of your life. I mean you sound so excited about this what keeps you going now. Is it the challenge, is it the drive to sort of make new things, what is it?
You know what it is, it’s just the fact that I have been lucky enough through hard work, and good fortune and many other things, to be in this position of total artistic freedom. Not many creative people get to that point. They dream of it but they very seldom get there. I feel like it’s a personal responsibility to not squander that and really respect it. It is hugely important to take that hard earned freedom and do the best I can with it. And that’s where I’m coming from. People would dream to be in my position so I don’t take that lightly. I take it very seriously. That’s why I want to do the best work that I can and I want to do the best work for the people who I’m surrounded with who I’m bringing along on this crazy ride. So, that’s just how I am as a person—I can’t help it.
Over the last couple of years you’ve also collaborated with some bands that we cover, one of those being Umphrey’s McGee.
Oh, I love those guys.
How’d you get hooked up with them?
A lot of it had to do with doing the Jam Cruise a couple years back. My wife and I went, we were invited and I just had my guitar and I figured I’d just jump in with both feet, if I can play it I’m gonna play. That’s how I met moe. Our guitar tech for me also works for moe., and then I met the Umphrey’s guys and they asked me to jam. Plus, when I was spending a lot of time in Colorado there’s this great club called Belly Up, that a lot of bands when they come through town play. And living in a small town I’d always get a call from the guy who owns the club, and he’d say, “Hey, so-and-so’s playing in town you want to come sit in? They’d love for you to come and jam,” and I’d say, “Yeah.”
Once I started doing it it was really good for me because every band and every musician approaches their music differently. Different sets of chords, different arrangements ideas, different sounds, different dynamics between the band members, so by sitting in and being almost like a fly on the wall in real time it pushes you. It forces you to think outside your box. A lot of guitar players, me included, when I pick up a guitar I’m going to go back to those comfortable chord changes and those riffs that I’ve done over the years. When you play with another band you can’t necessarily rely on the old tricks, it pushes your boundaries, so by pushing my boundaries, it’s an insight as to where they’re coming from as musicians and as people. I hear how they craft a song and where they put their chord changes, how they arrange their melodies, and how they impose the melodies over a chord structure. That stuff to me is insightful because then I bring it to my work because I’ve learned something.
I love it every time I get up there it’s like walking a tightrope. You don’t know where they’re going, you don’t know their music. Half the time you’re flying by the seat of your pants.
Umphrey’s did some Hall & Oates stuff but you also did some of their material as well.
(laughs) That was not easy.
Their arrangements are complex, for sure.
I had to do some serious woodshedding, and then I came onstage and of course they decided to do different songs. But that’s typical of the jamband and that’s what I love about jambands—they just go for it, and they’ve got this incredible repertoire of hundreds of songs, and they love to change them up every night which is a really cool thing to do. And I come from a much more structured place, so for me it really takes me out of the comfort zone.
