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Daryl Hall John Oates

Photo: Daryl Hall & John Oates in the 1973 “She’s Gone” video (still from YouTube)

Lyndsey Parker·Editor in Chief, Yahoo Music | This Saturday at 8 p.m. ET on NugsTV, John Oates and his wife Aimee are putting on a free virtual concert for Feeding America, Oates Song Fest 7908, featuring all-stars like Dave Grohl, Sammy Hagar, Dan+Shay, Darius Rucker, Sara Bareilles, Bob Weir, Jewel, and Oates’s Hall & Oates bandmate, Daryl Hall. Oates’s co-host for the evening will be viral video star Saxsquatch, whom Oates met on Instagram; during the event, Oates and Saxsquatch will also premiere their new EDM version of Hall & Oates’s classic “Maneater.”

The pairing with musical internet sensation Saxsquatch is a full-circle moment of sorts for Oates, because it could be argued that Hall & Oates made one of the first viral music videos — even though it took decades for the bonkers “She’s Gone” to actually go viral, because Instagram, YouTube, and even MTV did not exist way back in 1973.

“She’s Gone” has become the stuff of internet legend, and Oates says it’s “absolutely” his favorite Hall & Oates music video, more so than any of the duo’s clips that dominated MTV after the cable network eventually debuted in 1981. The budget art mini-film, which still looks surreal almost 50 years later, features a glassy-eyed Daryl Hall and John Oates — the former in a bathrobe, Bowie mullet, and platform sandals with socks, and the latter in a rented penguin costume — reclining on dentist’s-waiting-room ‘70s chairs among scattered Monopoly money, on what appears to be the Between Two Ferns set, while a red-sequined devil and a woman in a floral maxidress occasionally saunter into frame. After Oates’s penguin-flippered faux guitar solo, he and Hall walk off the set, leaving only the unitarded devil onscreen. It’s three minutes and 29 seconds of what Oates describes as pure “performance art,” and it’s almost downright punk-rock.

“It was pre-punk rock, actually, but yeah,” Oates tells Yahoo Entertainment with a chuckle. “I mean, we just thought it was the most hysterical thing we’d ever done.”

So… what’s the story? Oates seems delighted to tell it. “You have to put yourself in the context of the time. It was 1973. There was no MTV. There were really no music videos being played,” he begins. When Hall & Oates bristled at the notion of lip-synching one of their earliest hit singles, “She’s Gone,” for a local teen dance show in Atlantic City, they came up with another plan, enlisting the help of Oates’s sister.. .
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Check out John Oates’s extended Yahoo Entertainment interview below for full details on Oates Song Fest 7908, the stories behind the “Private Eyes” and “Jingle Bell Rock” music videos, Oates’s memories of opening for David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust tour, his latest musical projects, and much more:

Read the whole story here:
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/john-oates-shes-gone-video-most-hysterical-thing-wed-ever-done-005014235.html

 

 

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