Sitting Down with Daryl Hall: October 06, 2011

Daryl Hall stopped by the Sirius XM studios this week to talk with Ron Bennington about his new album, Laughing Down Crying, and his new television show, which has already been an internet phenomenon, Live From Daryl’s House.  Of course you already know Daryl as one half of the duo Hall and Oates, the band that released huge hit songs like Rich Girl, Kiss on My Lips, Private Eyes, Sarah Smile and so many more.

Ron Bennington: Daryl Hall in studio. How you doing man?

Daryl Hall: I’m right here, I’m good.

Ron Bennington: I’ve talked about this a lot on my show, of what a gigantic fan I am of the show that you started doing out of your house, Daryl’s House, which honestly, is the best show about music; in history. There is more to that show for people who like music, and more of a chance to find out what music’s about than anything I’ve ever seen before.

Daryl Hall:  That’s why I did it. I figured it was time to show people– everybody says this to me– it’s the only time you get to see musicians outside of their act; offstage. Because you only know people from what you see from the audience perspective. And I tried to do something where the audience would be like fly on the wall, right in the midst of it.

Ron Bennington: One time I got invited to a rehearsal at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. It was so cool, that I ended up going over to the side and being quiet, figuring I’m going to get thrown out of there. That’s what your show feels like. It feels like they are being themselves, and you get the chance to sit in.

Daryl Hall: They are. Everything you see is real. There’s no rehearsal. I mean, we all do our homework once we figure out what songs we’re going to do. And then we just get into the house, the day of, set up, start banging our instruments. The guest comes, I meet them at the door, exactly as you see, walk them into the room and we start playing music.

Ron Bennington: The other thing about it that’s just amazing, is that this is far and away the best sound, not just on the internet, but it’s better than what Saturday Night Live is doing, its better than the Tonight Show, its better than these big network shows.

Daryl Hall: I had the same engineer since 1988 or 89 and I have to give him credit, Pete Moshay is his name, and he has done the engineering on most of the Hall and Oates records since then as well as my solo stuff, and then he does all the Live From Daryl’s stuff, and then he does our front of house as well. I mean this guy’s good.

Ron Bennington: The beauty of it too, is that you’re working in a way that nobody ever saw. You put this together on the fly. And if you go back and watch these, you’ll see the show kind of evolving. Cause the first show, you’re still kind of talking to the camera, welcoming people in.

Daryl Hall: The first show was a road crew and my manager at the time holding handy cams. I didn’t know what to say! I love to watch the first one, because I was so not ready for this, and we had no guests, it was just me playing some songs. Right away I said I need a director, man, somebody tell me what to do. So I got a director and we went from there. Then we starting bringing guests in, and brought some food in and you know, it just evolved.

Ron Bennington: And that whole sense of community, it’s really like being invited to this really great party that just stays throughout the day and its amazing.

Daryl Hall: That’s what it is. It’s just a good party.

Ron Bennington: There’s people that I cant wait to see on, but then sometimes I don’t know the people and I get turned on to them.  And sometimes I don’t think people are going to be able to hang, and then they do great. And it’s kind of pissed me off cause I’m waiting for that first person to really shit the bed. The other thing is I’m waiting for someone to piss you off, someone disrespect the house and bring the Philly out of you.

Daryl Hall: I’m waiting for that too. You know what, I come prepared for that idea every fucking time. I don’t know what to say about that. I don’t know if it’s the kind of people that I want to have on the show, and their personalities reflect whatever it is that I like about them musically. But I have not had once asshole in my house. And I’m waiting for the first asshole, but it hasn’t happened. They’re all good people. I noticed the new generation especially, they have a very realistic attitude about where they stand in the world. I grew up in the 70s and 80s where you did something and you had a chance to be the super-duper star. And I think it affected the egos of my generation where they took themselves very seriously and they still do.. And these kids, they don’t do that.

Ron Bennington: So you’re actually even more comfortable with young people coming up.

Daryl Hall: Yes I am. I bring in the occasional what I call veterans, and a lot of people I bring are my friends like Todd Rundgren. We’re friends so that just works so easily but I really like bringing the new guys in.

Ron Bennington: This Potter girl [Grace Potter] that you had on, I didn’t know her at all, by the end of it– I’m completely in love with her. Now I gotta go out and find out everything there is about her. And she’s been around for a while. It’s one of the things that gets more difficult though, to keep up with new music cause its coming from so many different places.

Daryl Hall: I think that I’m starting to become a go-to place for record companies and managers. They actually call me because they know my show resonates in a different way than going on Jay Leno or something. It has more impact for the artist.

Ron Bennington: And there’s always these great unexpected moments. To me…I thought it was one of the best moments I’ve ever seen in music: you’ve got Smokey on, you guys are doing Sarah Smile and then you kind of force him into a doing a song that he wasn’t ready to do.

Daryl Hall: I’ll tell you a story about that. When we were– and T bone was still alive so he was a part of this. When T bone and I were figuring out what songs to do with Smokey….I mean Smokey! I wanted to be Smokey when I was a little kid, so that was total idolatry there. I called his people, I said, okay here’s a list of songs I’d really like to do. I’ve Been Good To You, then went down the line, Ooh Baby Baby. The management comes back and says, well you know Smokey doesn’t like to do Ooh Baby Baby. I said WHAT!? Come on man what are you talking about? That would be like me not wanting to do Sarah Smile or something. But I said, ok, ok. And T Bone and I plotted. And we said, you know what? We’re going to drag this out of him. And we’re going to do it so that he doesn’t have any way to not respond. And you see it. What you saw there was my favorite moment in the whole four years we’ve been doing it. We pulled something so great out of him by doing it that way! I mean what a moment! What a magic moment.

Ron Bennington: And you saw at first, I mean he just stands there, like I’m not selling this…you’re not going to get this man…

Daryl Hall: ….and I’m going come on Smokey, come on.

Ron Bennington: And then you start singing his song to him. The first time I’m watching this, I was like, shit, this is really cringy. I’ve gone back and watched that so many times because of that purity.

I want to go back… you mentioned T Bone. T Bone Wolk who was your friend and collaborator for many years. This is another great thing about what you’ve done with that show is that over the course of it, you get to see how important a guy like T bone is, not just to music but to a society.

Daryl Hall: Yea. Yea. He was an amazing human being as well as an amazing musician. We were so good together man, in every possible way. I mean he was my closest friend. And we were so intuitive and worked off each other, in ways that’s just hard to describe. The way we played guitar together, and just everything we did. And things like getting Smokey to do that. There was some duo vibe that we created and it was really an incredibly confusing and chaotic thing when he died so suddenly. And, uh, it was right in the very first week of the album. And the song, Problem With You which is on the album are the very last notes he ever played. And three hours later he was gone. In fact his picture is in there, doing those notes that I’m talking about.

So I had to pick up the pieces on the album and on Daryl’s House too. I got really lucky that one of the first people I thought to call was a guy named Paul Pesco who did play guitar with us over the years when Bone was playing bass sometimes and he was in the Hall and Oates band and he was a musical friend, as well as, I knew him quite well. And he dropped everything and came in and turned both projects around and made something positive out of all of the bullshit that happened, you know? It was an incredible thing, I owe him a lot for that. Somehow we turned it around.

Ron Bennington: I think that the greatest thing that you were able to do for your friend, is that all this footage exists now. That we didn’t know this guy. Even though we’ve been playing the music forever. And for me to have felt a real loss when I found out he passed away, I mean it was like losing somebody that I knew because you felt like you knew the guy after watching your show.

Daryl Hall: I think a lot of people felt that way.

Ron Bennington: Were there moments when you were like do I even want to keep this show going without him?

Daryl Hall: There were moments when I thought– he was such an important part of the show, I was wondering if people’s perception would change. If people wouldn’t want to see the show without him. But I found out early on that people wanted the show to continue. I got a lot of support and proof that it wasn’t revolving only around his presence. That it was such an important thing that I could go beyond it. I felt that way with everything. It wasn’t whether I was going on, it was how I was going to go on.

Ron Bennington: I’m from Delaware county, so we have this feeling of Hall and Oates that sometimes I think the media outside of Philadelphia would be a little rougher on you. And I think if you’re going to be a soul singer, and you sing in the style of Ray Charles, Rolling Stone is going to embrace you. But if you sing in the style of Smokey Robinson, suddenly they’ve got a different vibe about it.

Daryl Hall: That’s what it was in that generation. I call it Rockist. They don’t get the soul thing at all outside the Philly area, and a few other places. As far as the rock crit group of people, in my day, in our day. But now, that’s gone away. That perception’s gone.

Ron Bennington: Did that surprise you at first? That, the same music that everybody was loving, everybody was dancing to…

Daryl Hall: It surprised me for a long time. The fight that I had with a certain group of people that refused to accept what I was doing as real. Whereas they would accept this sort of half assed versions of other things as real. I don’t want to name names but, I’m nothing if I’m not real. I think people that grew up with the music I grew up with, like you, and people in our area, they know its real.

Ron Bennington: And you guys would get played on urban radio stations where that crossover is entirely harder, in my opinion. Like for a black artist to move onto a white station– its not easy but for a white artist to move onto a black station it’s almost unheard of.

Daryl Hall: Almost unheard of! I started on black radio. The first records I ever made were played on WDAS in Philadelphia and HAT in Philadelphia. Now they are the black stations. And it took me awhile to cross over to white stations and it wasn’t until Sarah’s Smile that I did it. And that record started on the entire black radio network system and crossed over to pop radio. So I came in from that door, man, it was a very, almost unheard of thing that happened to me.

Ron Bennington: And for you, was it even a conscious decision? Or were you just like…this is what music sounds like? or did you say I like black music as opposed to white music.

Daryl Hall: I liked my music. That’s what I grew up with, that’s baby food to me. That’s the only kind of music I heard. I grew up in a very racially integrated environment, as most people do if they live in the Philadelphia area, and that was just the music that I knew. I wasn’t listening to it on the radio like the Rolling Stones and said I Want to do this…that was just the neighborhood.

Ron Bennington: The other beauty for you is that the instrument has always stayed for you.

Daryl Hall: I got lucky with that. My parents are both singers and my mother was a vocal teacher, so she taught me to sing the right way, since I was a tiny tiny kid. I don’t sing from my throat so I don’t have to worry about that kind of losing your voice thing.

Ron Bennington: I know that you did something with Todd in Atlantic City. He was in here and he said he had a great time with it. Do you want to take that Daryl’s House energy out?

Daryl Hall: We’re doing it. That was the first one, Live from Daryl’s Live. I did it with Todd. I did sort of a prototype of one with Fitz and the Tantrums, but I”m going to continue to do those and next year I’m going to probably do a lot of those as well as solo stuff.

Ron Bennington: And do you have plans for where you want this to go? Or you just want to keep rolling around with it.

Daryl Hall: I just keep going. It’s already going to the place I want it to go. And now it’s on regular television. It started the weekend before yesterday. On the 24th. Just about every town in the United States has it. 80% of the United States right now to start.

Ron Bennington: What kind of control do you keep?

Daryl Hall: Complete control. That’s why I did what I did. I wanted to go that route, as opposed to going to networks, because I didn’t want anybody to change anything. It’s just basically re-editing.

Ron Bennington: What’s great about your show is that you don’t know what you’re going to get.  The new album is out, and you can pick that up if you go to LiveFromDarylsHouse.com. Cause he’s running everything out of there. It’s a business. It’s a home. There’s food. It’ basically a record company at this point, right?

Daryl Hall: It’s just like Motown.

Ron Bennington: And of course check out the show. Laughing Down Crying, great songs on here. Thanks so much for coming in and seriously thank for the show man, its been so much fun.

 ==========================

Check out this week’s 5: our favorite episodes of Live From Daryl’s House.

Follow Daryl Hall on twitter at @LFDHcom

And, of course, visit the website, Live From Daryl’s House.

To hear this and other interviews in their entirety check out Ron Bennington Interviews on Sirius XM’s Stars Too and Virus channels.  Don’t have Sirius XM yet?  Click here for a free trial.

You can purchase Daryl’s new CD by clicking the link below.