Change of Seasons

January 9, 2017
The mustachioed half of one of the best-known duos in pop history, Oates offers a memoir that might lead even his greatest critics to revisit the ’80s icons. Encouraged to sing by his mother’s traditional Italian family, Oates found rock ’n’ roll and his first guitar before he was seven. Half-hearted journalism studies at Temple University in the late 1960s gave him time to explore the dynamic Philadelphia music scene before partnering with Daryl Hall. Stardom was a long time coming, and en route Oates took interesting detours—including a hippie wanderjahr across Europe and an auto-racing career. Defined by a relentless work ethic and interests ranging from Beat poetry to Delta blues, Oates is a child both of the ’60s and blue-collar America. Oates can gloat, pointedly listing his accomplishments as a skier, wrestler, pilot, and tennis player. Yet, above all, charm and curiosity distinguish him from the standard-issue pop star. Oates writes with brio on songwriting and the studio (although little about his relationship with Hall), but his early years and travels are even more intriguing. Such an engaging narrator is Oates that it’s easy to miss the strict limits to his revelations—romance goes almost unmentioned and ’80s excesses are discretely elided. The second half loses focus, but there are still plenty of entertaining anecdotes on such topics as having Hunter S. Thompson for a neighbor.

February 15, 2017
Amiable memoir by the shorter, quieter partner in the renowned duo Hall & Oates.In partnership with Daryl Hall, Oates has racked up some impressive chart stats indeed. As he opens his look backward, he rehearses some of them: countless live performances, seven platinum albums, more than 40 million albums sold, and "fame, fortune, freedom." Though Hall & Oates are remembered as a creature of the mid-1980s, Oates points out that his friendship and collaboration with Hall dates back a decade and a half earlier, in the second generation of rockers, informed by the likes of Bill Haley, Elvis, and the soul sounds of the Philadelphia streets. Oates has reason to boast, but his prose is workmanlike and modest; more than anything else, he comes off as a fan of many artists of the day, from the Beatles to the Temptations and the earliest manifestations of Elton John and David Bowie. There's some Zelig-like right-place, right-time things happening here, too, such as a residence at LA's famed Tropicana Motel: as he writes, nicely, "can't say I wasn't blown away by the fabulousity of it all because I was." Oates works quickly over his earliest years, marked by a stint as a high school wrestler and time in journalism school, before settling into the journeyman stuff, where knowing fans will find a wealth of notes on how the hits came into being, from the early "Abandoned Luncheonette" to the later, more polished, but far less engaged "Ooh Yeah!" ("my head and my heart were not into it"). There's some sex and drugs along with the rock 'n' roll, but Oates emerges, like Hall, as a pretty sensible guy who recognized when he was going off the rails; in the end, he emerges as a seeker not of pleasure but of wisdom, even as the duo acquires new street cred in the place of being a "Reagan-era punchline." Oates' musical admirers will find much to like here.

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February 1, 2017

Oates, half of the legendary pop duo Hall & Oates, recounts his path to stardom in this fascinating memoir. Raised in a middle-class Italian American family, he develops an early interest in music, experiments with drugs while a student at Temple University during the Vietnam War era, and begins a fortuitous partnership with Daryl Hall that parlayed itself into a record deal in the early 1970s. Prior to becoming superstars in the 1980s, they struggled, yielding a few big early hits ("She's Gone," "Sara Smile"). Oates recalls the travails of a hardworking musical group constantly touring and recording, sometimes succeeding, often failing. With 1980's "Kiss on My List," Oates details the dizzying blur of superstardom in the new age of music videos and corporate-sponsored world tours. After retreating from the limelight, Oates experienced financial straits as a result of shoddy management and byzantine record deals. He discusses being a husband and father and relates stories about his notorious next door neighbor, writer Hunter S. Thompson. VERDICT Highly recommended for fans of Hall & Oates and those interested in how much work it takes to be a hit act in the music business. [See Prepub Alert, 10/31/16.]--Brian Flota, James Madison Univ., Harrisonburg, VA

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Starred review from February 15, 2017
In the early 1990s, just after Hall and Oates faded from ubiquity, Oates found himself in Tokyo, staring into the mirror of a hotel bathroom, shaving off his iconic mustache. No one will understand how much that mustache affected my life, he writes. I resented it. Seasoned readers of celebrity memoirs might expect to learn precisely what effluvia and intoxicants befouled those accursed hairs. But Oates' foray into the genre is remarkably discreet. Unnamed women flicker through the book, and Oates only hints at the venal excess expected of '80s MTV stars. Whereas Keith Richards, in Life (2010), takes great pleasure in snarking on Mick Princess Jagger, Oates avoids saying anything unflattering about Daryl Hall. In the absence of grisly details or petty complaints, Oates has, with Epting's help, written an exceedingly entertaining, somewhat rueful chronicle of his life, from an Italian-American childhood eating meatballs in the basement to late-middle age in a tony Aspen enclave. He spent the '70s and '80s as a tiny, mustachioed Zelig, flitting about the Boomer demimonde. Andy Warhol, Michael Jackson, David Bowie, Lou Reed, Quincy Jones, Miles Davis, and Edgar Winter all make appearancesin airports, recording studios, arenas, and, in the case of George Harrison, a 120-room Gothic castle, complete with a miniature replica of the Matterhorn.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)