Let it be said, for starters, that Daryl Hall has a really nice house. It’s a rambling old place, somewhere in rural Pennsylvania. He needs to do something with the landscaping — the place is set way back from the road, on a hill, surrounded by a huge, bare open lot, and like a lot of mini-mansions it looks like it fell out of the sky — but the interior is beautiful; lots of exposed brick and beam, warm, dark wood tones, comfortably cluttered and tastefully appointed. In the web show “Live from Daryl’s House,” we don’t see much more of the place than the rec room-slash-home studio (of which more later) and the massive eat-in kitchen, but it looks like a gorgeous blend of traditional and modern. In one, Hall mentions that the basic structure dates back to the 18th Century; the entire house has been extensively remodeled and relocated.
Not unlike Daryl Hall’s face, actually. If you haven’t paid much attention to Hall & Oates lately — and let’s face it, why should you? — you may be surprised to note that Daryl has… well, he’s had some work done. The eye job is the most obvious change, but a side-by-side comparison shows an odd lengthening of the chin, as if all his facial features have migrated slightly northward. It might be a face-lift gone awry, or a bone-distorting disease like acromegaly; in any case, if this keeps up, Daryl Hall will eventually resemble Rondo Hatton.
My first concert was a Hall and Oates show, back in the ’80s, before Daryl began his slow metamorphosis into the Creeper. I hitched a ride with my friend Stu to a hockey rink in the desolate ass-end of Massachusetts for one of the shows on the Big Bam Boom tour. I only went because I wanted to see the opening act (I was a music snob even then), but the show was a perfectly satisfying pop product; the band was tight and solid and consistent, bopping along like a pizza-parlor jukebox. What struck me about Daryl Hall that night, though — as in all the H&O concert footage of the period — is the disproportionate effort he was putting in. He was in constant nervous motion, bouncing and mugging and shimmying beneath his extravagant mullet, oversinging and overselling every song, trying to inject a streetwise jive into the material — which was pretty shopworn, even then. Occasionally, he even succeeded; but man, was he over the top.
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