Saturday, April 25, 2009
Ruffin, Kendricks, Oates and Hall
We were at dinner last night at one point I said: "I hated the eighties." And the fact is they sucked big time, especially in pop music. Looking back now I see I barely tolerated the mainstream in music. Prince provided some highlights and style. Byrne and Talking Heads created a nice body of work. But for every hour of MTV there was damn little that I cared about then or now. Examples: that overly smug turd Phil Collins. ubiquitous Madonna dance attitude anthem of the season and that David Bowie China Girl Let's Dance nonsense. And then there was the Stevie Winwood comeback that never seemed to end. And it took me about three plays to hate Dire Straits' Money for Nothing for the rest of my life. Grumble, grumble grumble. Give me Miles or give me Grateful Dead, and even then the former's Michael Jackson and Cindi Lauper covers almost the death of cool and as for Touch of Grey, it kind of blew up their scene with unintended consequences.
Here is an exception and its only because two of the great voices of the sixties took up a late seventies duo with an eighties string of video hits to another level. David Ruffin rough shouting and Eddie Kendricks' sweet falsetto left the sound of The Temptations in 1968 and 71 respectively. Both did okay with solo careers on the R and B charts but never crossed over very well. However, both produced some fine soul records that sound pretty darned good to my ears today. Their paring with Hall and Oates at the Apollo was their last great public exposure. They both died in their early fifties pretty much on the cusp of the next decade. The decade of grunge.
In 1985, Hall and Oates were pretty much top dogs in the seventies pop video music game. They hooked up with Kendricks and Ruffin for the reopening of the Apollo Theater. It is easy to be a little bit cynical about this paring, but it is also easy to crack jokes about John Oates' height. (Annie Leibovitz confessed last Fall in Portland that she felt bad about pointing out this feature of the mustachioed one putting him on a box--or was it a stack of catalogs?-- in a photo shoot she did for Rolling Stone ) I think the collaboration worked and these clips reveal that.
The Motown hits medley is okay, even if some of the dance moves are a little over the top when the Hall and Oates try to execute them. Certainly Eddie and David show they have plenty of chops and passion left. And once in a while the four voices really connect during My Girl.
But surprisingly, the performance that is worth revisiting was when the four of them take back Hall and Oates album track Everytime You Go Away which had been covered and made it big on the charts by Paul Young who Daryl refers to only as "an English artist." I'm reminded in a way of Otis Redding when the hardest working soul star would kick it up a notch further whenever he sang Respect after Aretha blew it up. If you haven't seen or forgot about how this unlikely gang of four work out with this song, it is worth eight minutes of your day to check it out.
Daryl Hall was one pretty rooster in 1985 and he puts as much soul as he can into this, But the great stuff happens about five minutes into it when Ruffin shouts some exchanges to him. And then there is this very cool showbiz coda that takes it on home in a way that transcends the unfortunate era it was performed in. I can't think of too many other musical moments of the eighties as worthy of revisiting.
posted by well-executed buffet at 5:03 PM
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