April 16 – The Queen Of (Blue-eyed) Soul

Today we mark the 85^th anniversary of the birth of one of the great voices of our time – Dusty Springfield. Or to her parents, Mary Catherine O’Brien, Britain’s finest Blue-eyed soul singing woman, and to many, one of that land’s greatest singers ever. Period.

We’ve looked at Dusty’s career a bit before, so today let’s just focus on one of her best, and most iconic tunes – “Son of a Preacher Man.” Although she was born to a dad who was a tax accountant, one would have believed listening to the single she was in fact infatuated by a preacher’s son. Turns out she probably would have been more infatuated with the daughter of a preacher man, a fact which would not have helped her career whatsover in the 1960s.

“Son of a Preacher Man” was a song written by the duo of John Hurley and Ronnie Wilkins, who’d actually written it for Aretha Franklin. Franklin did record it, but seemed unimpressed and didn’t release it for a long time, so when Dusty signed to Atlantic Records for North America and went to Memphis to record it was offered to her. She went to Chip Moman’s American Sound studio there, and they brought in some of the best Tennessee session players to back her on what would become Dusty in Memphis. Among them, guitarist Reggie Young who’d played on hits like “The Letter” for the Boxtops and the iconic “Sweet Caroline” of Neil Diamond’s.

The song was put out as the first single off it, and while now a classic, it did … half-decently at the time. It got to #9 at home for her, #10 in the U.S. and #11 in Canada. The album itself at the time flopped in a huge way. It only cracked the charts in the States… but there it got to only #99. Her career was actually on a downturn then; she’d been named the NME‘s Female Singer of the Year in 1965, ’66 and ’67. this would help her win it again in 1969, when “Son of a Preacher Man” ran up the charts. She’d actually had a number of bigger hits at the time, like “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me” (a #1 in the UK and #4 in the U.S.) but eventually it would go on to be double-platinum in Britain and her biggest-seller. Likewise, the album itself grew in reputation over the years – usually perpetually-negative Robert Christgau calls it “the all-time rock era torch record” for example and it’s on many lists of the Best of the ’60s.

Curiously, Dusty wasn’t enthralled with her own take on it and allegedly wanted the producers to let her re-record it. Good thing they declined? Likewise, later when she heard Franklin’s version she was noted as saying “Goddamnit, that’s the way I should have done it!” Most disagree.

Rolling Stone, who put Aretha as having the best single of all-time in their reckoning and rate her the best singer ever, put Dusty’s version at #168 of greatest recordings of all-time… way ahead of Franklin’s. Someone else who was doubtless happy Dusty did the song the way only she could was Elton John. When Dusty was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in’99, just before she passed away and just before what would have been her 60^th birthday, Elton inducted her and said she was the first person he’d ever joined a fan club of, he had posters of her on his walls when he was young and he considered her perhaps “the greatest White Singer” of our time.

Dusty’s career went downhill quickly, unfortunately, after her Memphis album, until she was asked to join the Pet Shop Boys on their hit “What Have I Done To deserve This?” in 1987, a top 5 hit almost worldwide.

April 9 – Blue-eyed Soul & Inspiration

This day in 1966 was a high-water mark for “Blue-eyed Soul”…arguably the biggest hit of the Righteous Brothers career, hit #1 in the U.S. – “Soul and Inspiration.” It was the second – and last – chart-topper for the duo of Bill Medley and Bobby Hatfield, coming about a year after “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling.”

The pair had been together since 1962, originally under the name The Paramours. But after one show at a military base, a  Black Marine stood up and yelled “That was righteous, brothers!” and they liked that moniker better. Although “Soul & Inspiration” was the first record for them without Phil Spector producing and on the (largely jazz-focused) Verve label, it sounded much like their earlier hits, in no small part due to being written by the same writers – Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill. Probably a good thing, as they’d just become millionaires through a contract to MGM Records, owners of Verve, and expectations were high on the corporate side. Although it didn’t have Spector producing, (Medley himself did that), it was produced in a style reminiscent of Spector’s Wall of Sound, and used some of the same Wrecking Crew studio musicians to complete the sound. The song seemed a more upbeat, happier flipside to their earlier hit and the public ate it up – it spent three weeks at #1, and remarkably was their only single to earn a gold record until “Unchained Melody” did in the ’90s. Nonetheless, it hasn’t gained such a prominent place in our culture as “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling” or “Unchained Melody”. The latter of course had a second-life when used in the movie Ghost, the former ended up being most-played record on U.S. radio in the 20th Century according to BMI. Writer Weill says it “will always be ‘Lovin’ Feelin’ ‘ sideways” to her.

Hatfield died in 2003, but Medley still is active on the concert stage with a new Righteous “Brother”, Bucky Heard.

March 6 – Kiki’s Career Not So Dusty

Bet she’s still got the music in her even at age 77! happy birthday, Pauline Matthews, aka Kiki Dee!

We talked of Duffy a few days ago and mentioned comparisons to Dusty Springfield. Today, we laud another great Blue-eyed soul female singer and one who actually started her career being a backup singer for Dusty. She began singing at age 10 and by 16 was working in a drug store by day, singing in clubs around Leeds at night and then signed to Fontana Records. She not only sang backup to Dusty, she was also on the 1968 hit “Everlasting Love” by Love Affair.

She became the first British female signed to Motown, but her real break was catching the ear of Elton John. She was one of the first, and most successful, artists he signed to his own Rocket Records, and there she scored her first solo hits, “Amoureuse” (a top 20 in their UK) and “I’ve Got the Music In Me”, a top 20 in North America as well.

We know Elton loved Dusty’s voice, but he must have been pretty impressed with Kiki’s as well. He had her sing backing vocals on “All The Young Girls Love Alice” on his brilliant Goodbye Yellow Brick Road album, and then really put her on the map…when Dusty bowed out. Kiki of course did the duet “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” with Elton (oddly they recorded their respective parts in different countries, Elton in Canada and Kiki at home in England) after Dusty Springfield, his first choice said she was unavailable. Lucky break for Dee; the song of course went to #1 almost everywhere and was the second-biggest one of the year in 1976 both in the UK and U.S. All the while she was the girlfriend of Elton’s guitarist, Davey Johnstone. And she and the Rocketman got

together one more time with success, in 1992 doing a duet of Cole Porter’s “True Love” in 1993 that went to #2 there. Although she’s not had much commercial chart success since then, she’s put out several more albums and has remained a busy performer, mostly performing with guitarist Carmelo Luggeri in acoustic and eclectic sets over the past decade. They have three shows slated for later this month if you happen to be in the UK.

March 3 – Briefly, Heir Apparent To Blue-eyed Soul Crown

Yesterday marked the 25^th anniversary of the untimely passing of the British “Queen of Blue-eyed Soul”, Dusty Springfield. Today we look at a lass who once seemed like she was destined to take over that title – Duffy. Her great album Rockferry came out this day in 2008..

It was the major label debut for the Welsh lass, and you’d be forgiven in thinking it was her only recording. That’s not quite the case, but she does live up to the title “One Hit Wonder” . However, I remind you again, as we’ve said here before, even one hit- one work that lives on and takes on a life of its own – is quite an achievement.

Aimee Duffy was born in north Wales, in an area dominated by Welsh-speaking people (the cities like Cardiff communicate more in English). Her love of music led her to the TV talent show Wawwffactor in 2004, when she was still a teen. She came second and parlayed that into an indie contract which put out a 3-song EP of her singing in Welsh. It was a hit with the small community that understood it, but relatively unnoticed elsewhere. But in time, it found the right ears and she was saved from her life of waitressing and working as a fish monger by a contract with A&M Records. She might be Welsh but she had the “Luck of the Irish” there – her record company put her in touch with Bernard Butler, formerly of shoe-gazing band Suede. He loved her voice but not her musical interests; he gave her an I-pod with classic soul and R&B tunes. She took it to heart and worked with Butler to turn out the greatest piece of “blue-eyed soul” to come from the UK since Dusty Springfield… a lady many compared Duffy to upon listening to Rockferry.

Record company promotion, an appearance on Jools Holland’s TV show before its release and just plain, good, aching music helped the record enter the Brit charts at #1 and from there, it just went up. It was Britain’s biggest-seller of the year and earned her a trio of Brit Awards, including British Album of the Year, not to mention a Grammy for the Best Pop Vocals. With so much plastic pop from female singers and tired-sounding hip hop releases dominating back then, the time was spot on for someone to emerge that , as Jim Harrington put it “”evoked a foregone era when artists like Aretha, Dusty and the Supremes ruled the world.” Rockferry (which took its name from a town her Dad once lived in) hit #1 in New Zealand and much of Europe as well as the UK and was a top 5 hit in North America, thanks to the retro-sounding singles like “Mercy” (a #1 hit there and top 30 in the U.S.) and “Warwick Avenue.” Add in “Stepping Stone” and “Rain On Your Parade”  and she had four chart hits from her first real album. Even so,  the NME didn’t think much of it, giving it a meagre 4 out of 10 score, most other music publications loved it. Rolling Stone and Spin both gave it 4-stars for instance. When all was said and done it was 7X platinum at home and sold close to 10 million around the world.

But success was a fleeting thing for Ms. Duffy. Her 2010 follow-up, Endlessly, struggled to have a week in the UK top 10, failed to generate a hit single and dropped like a stone elsewhere. After that she declared she was on hiatus from music and recently has been working more as an actress, but in effect disappeared from the scene. Recently she’s been back in the news with an explanation for that sudden invisibility. She says that at the height of her fame she was raped, held captive and

drugged. while she doesn’t detail when that happened or who was responisible, it was obviously traumatic to her. “How can I sing from the heart if it is broken?” she asks, but says it’s slowly healing. Rumours of a new record from her soon have been swirling around so we’ll have to wait and see if we have heard the last of Duffy yet.

She may never have another record, or at least one that will speak to so many as Rockferry but her name is etched on the list of the great female voices of our current era and one of the great “blue-eyed soul” singers of any time.

October 11 – People Loved Listening To This Picture Book

What could be more simply read than a picture book? A clever introduction for kids into the world of books, and Picture Book was a clever introduction of Simply Red to the world. The Manchester band’s debut album came out this day in 1985.

The name of the band of course makes reference to the carroty-colored mane of lead singer, and heart of the band, Mick Hucknall. If there hadn’t been a term “blue-eyed soul” before Simply Red, someone would have coined it just for him. As allmusic would years later note about their initial album, it was a “steady R&B groove reminiscent of ’60s Stax, all in the service of a big-voiced soul singer.” Of course, this was nothing entirely new for Britain, Dusty Springfield surprised many people when they found she was from London, not Memphis!

They had signed to WEA Records, a branch of Warner Bros. but were not quite ready with a real sound by ’85. Luckily for both, producer/sax man Stewart Levine saw them in London around that time. Levine had already produced records for the likes of Van Morrison, BB King and Sly Stone. “The lead singer was magical,” Levine recalls, “but the music sounded like a retro American soul revue.” He had interest in working with them but told Hucknall “we needed to come up with something fresh.”

That they did. In a year of synthesizer-heavy new wave bands and emerging hair metal acts competing for attention, they created a retro-’60s soul sound that seemed authentic. The six man band recorded Picture Book partly in the Netherlands, partly at home in England, and released it to…initial indifference. It took awhile to catch on, but when it did, Simply Red had arrived. Warner obviously believed in them as they not only ponied up for a decent American producer for the unknown act, but then released the album in different formats including CDG – one that didn’t last, but at the time seemed the next big thing, offering compact disc music plus videos and lyrics playable on appropriately-fitted TVs or monitors.

The album was largely written by Hucknall, save for two cover songs – the Talking Heads’ “Heaven”, and an obscure American R&B tune called “Money’s Too tight To Mention.” It had been done by a group called the Valentine Brothers three years earlier but little-noticed (the American origin explains the reference to Ronald Reagan and American political policies in it.) That was the first single off it, and it did alright in Europe, being a top 20 hit at home for them as well as France, Ireland and overseas, New Zealand as well. But it wasn’t until about a year later they really landed with the single, “Holding Back the Years.”

 

The song was actually Hucknall covering himself. He’d written the song some eight years earlier about his unhappy childhood… his mother had left them when he was three and he and his dad didn’t get along well. He wrote it for his first band, a punk-ish outfit called Frantic Elevators, formed after he went to the famous Sex Pistols show in Manchester in ’76. That show also inspired Morrissey, Peter Hook and others to form bands! A flop the first time out, perseverance paid off and upon re-release in spring ’86, the single became a worldwide hit, being a #1 hit in the U.S. and #2 in the UK. Curiously, they wouldn’t have a #1 single at home until the mid-’90s; in Britain their star rose considerably in the ’90s (they won the Brit Award for Best Group back to back years, for example) while in North America they fell into relative obscurity at the time.

The end result was Picture Book going to #1 in the Netherlands, surprisingly, while it got to #2 in the UK and #16 in the States, where it still earned a platinum record. At home, it went 5X platinum. Besides the two big hits, “Come to My Aid” and “Jericho” also dented the British singles charts.

The few reviews of it were generally good; Q called it the “most accomplished debut of the year” and Stateside, curmudgeonly Robert Christgau opined that the only two real good songs on it were the covers, but it was a good album “carried off” on “mood and groove alone.” Years later, the Punk Panther agreed with the overall positive assessments, noting that they serve up “immaculately played, quality soul” and this debut was “far deeper (and) more credible album than one may imagine.”

Simply Red are still rolling, and put out their 13th studio album, Time, earlier this year.  It kept their unbroken string of Brit top 10s going.

September 26 – Palmer’s Timeless Style Carries On Two Decades Later

On this day on the calendar, we recognize the birth of one stylish singer (Bryan Ferry), we recall the death of another. Robert Palmer died at age 54 from a heart attack on this day in 2003. Heavy smoking may have hastened his passing.

Palmer was a Brit with an asterisk, spending much of his childhood in Malta, moving to the U.S. in the ’70s when he began his solo recording career, and from there lived in the Caribbean and Switzerland before passing away. The suave singer put out 14 studio albums over nearly 30 years, plus a couple with Power Station. That, of course was a Duran Duran spinoff featuring Palmer singing with musicians John and Andy Taylor of DD as well as Chic’s drummer Tony Thompson. They did well, but were a side note compared to his back-to-back ’80s smashes, Riptide and Heavy Nova. Helped along by trademark videos featuring white-shirt-and-tie-adorned Robert backed with slim, heavily made up models acting as his backing band and well… irresistible… singles like “Addicted to Love” (his only American #1 song), “I Didn’t Mean To Turn You On” and “Simply Irresistible”, it put Robert on top of the music world in the mid-to-late part of that decade. “Addicted to Love” and “Simply Irresistible” earned him Grammy Awards for Best Male Rock Performance in 1987 and ’89 respectively. 

That being said, many thought his shining moments came before that, when he made more eclectic-sounding records that fit the nature of Island Records perfectly. Albums like Secrets and Sneaking Sally Through The Alley won great reviews in the ’70s before he was widely known. Allmusic considered him one of the finest blue-eyed soul singers, and lauded his earlier work which was “a skillful assimilation of rock, R&B and reggae” while panning his more successful latter work which it felt owed less to the music than the racy videos. The Guardian newspaper said of him “a gifted soul singer whose hedonistic image belies his musical integrity” and speculated that “he was often just far enough of pop music’s curve ( songs like “Johnny and Mary” in 1980 come to mind) to have missed the big payoff.”  Somewhat true, but he didn’t entirely miss out. And he succeeded on his own terms. “I loved the music, but the excesses of rock’n’roll never really appealed to me. I couldn’t see the appeal of getting up in front of a lot of people when you weren’t in control of your own wits” he’d once said “I can’t think of another attitude to have toward an audience (other) than a hopeful and a positive one. And if that includes such unfashionable things as sentimentality, well, I can afford it.” Probably the reason people still get sentimental thinking about him, two decades later.

July 9 – Turntable Talk 16 : Palmer Pleased Paul Even Without MTV

Welcome back to Turntable Talk! Thanks once again to all the regular readers and welcome to any new ones. If you’re keeping count, this is our 16^th instalment…if you’re wondering about past topics, I have most previous topics indexed here. For any new readers, briefly, on Turntable Talk we have a number of guest columnists from other music sites, sounding off on one particular topic. This month, our topic is Coulda Been A Contender. We asked our guests to write about a song which wasn’t a “hit”…but should have been. Now, it’s upto them to really define what is, or is not, a “hit” – some songs hit #1 in say, Canada but get ignored elsewhere, or else they get to #41 worldwide, etc … hit ? Not hit? – but there’s no doubt, there’ve been a lot of very good songs that missed the mark somehow.

Today’s we have Paul, who co-runs Once Upon a Time in the 70s with Colin, whom we had here yesterday. His “shoulda been a hit” is:

My initial approach to the latest Turntable Talk topic was to choose a song that although well known, had never made an impression on the charts.

A track everyone’s heard like “Rose of Cimarron” by Poco, or “Stir It Up” by Bob Marley & The Wailers.
In the end however I chose a personal favourite, which I’ll be surprised if many people have heard of.

The song is by Robert Palmer, who I loved before he became famous and commercial, not because I’m highfalutin but because his early material was soulful and wonderful.

In fact, a decade before an Armani draped Robert Palmer was on an MTV loop, backed by chic Vogue models with unplugged instruments, he was hanging out with some of the best musicians on the planet and producing a very different type of music.

Don’t get me wrong I’m pleased Palmer made it big, he deserved it, he had a good voice, he was a decent songwriter, he surrounded himself with good people (in the early days at least), he seemed like a good guy, and he ALWAYS looked a million dollars.

My introduction to Palmer came via a pal, Grant Kinnell, who raved about his debut album, Sneaking Sally Through the Alley.

Truth be told, I’d never heard of him although I was vaguely aware of Vinegar Joe, the band he’d co-fronted with Elkie Brooks.

To be fair his debut album is a tad patchy but the Allen Toussaint title track is class and the album has such a great feel and groove, largely down to the players he surrounded himself with.

One half of the album features The Metres accompanied by Little Feat’s Lowell George, whilst the other half features the cream of ’70s New York session players – basically Paul Simon & Aretha Franklin’s backing band.

Palmer backed by The Meters & Lowell George on the album’s title track

Palmer’s follow up album Pressure Drop was his peak IMO and is one of my all-time favourite albums.

On this jewel the backing band is Little Feat in tandem with a hall-of-fame rhythm section – legendary Motown bass player James Jamerson and drummer Ed Greene who played on all the early Barry White hits as well as Steely Dan and Michael Jackson sessions.

To top it off the strings were arranged by Gene Page who had provided the orchestration on multiple classics, including hits for Barry White, Marvin Gaye, Diana Ross and Elton’s “Philadelphia Freedom”.

Page even found time to have a hit of his own, “Satin Soul”, produced by White.

Gene Page – “Satin Soul”, with Ed Greene on drums and with REAL strings

The first single from Pressure Drop was a peach of a song – “Give Me an Inch”.
Written by Palmer, it’s the epitome of blue-eyed-soul at its best – a love song pure and simple “Give me an inch girl, I’ll give you a mile”

Everything that’s great about this song is laid out in the first 20 seconds of the track.

Mel (Kokomo) Collins’ flute intro blends gently into Page’s lush strings whilst Jamerson’s bass lines dance along on top, Greene sets the beat and then we’re introduced to the voice.

I’m not sure Palmer was a supreme vocalist ala Daryl Hall but he possessed a distinctive voice that worked across several genres and it was never better than this.

Despite its quality the single did nothing in the UK and failed to make the top 100 in the U.S. Billboard charts.

In truth, it probably confused radio programmers who thought it too urban for rock stations and not urban enough for R&B stations, but it possibly nudged the door open for artists like Boz Scaggs to gain airplay going forward.

Robert Palmer – “Give Me an Inch”

Palmer would eventually chart a few years later with the Andy Fraser (from Free) penned “Every Kind of People” but it took another seven years for his big breakthrough with “Addicted to Love”, which ticked all the boxes in the MTV driven landscape of the mid-’80s.

Robert Palmer would go on to have a pretty good career recording 14 studio albums and winning Grammy’s as well as collaborating with Chic and Duran Duran on The Power Station project.

Moving into the ’90s Palmer experimented with different genres, recording jazz and blues-based albums and his last album Drive, released in 2003, was hailed by critics as a return to form.
Sadly, four months after its release Palmer suffered a fatal heart attack in Paris at the age of 54.

I still play the Pressure Drop album quite a bit and after five decades “Give Me an Inch” still sounds like the one that got away for me.

April 9 – Righteously Good Song Still Took Second Place For Bros.

This day in 1966 was a high-water mark for “Blue-eyed Soul”…arguably the biggest hit of the Righteous Brothers career, hit #1 in the U.S. – “Soul and Inspiration.” It was the second – and last – chart-topper for the duo of Bill Medley and Bobby Hatfield, coming about a year after “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling.” The pair had been together since 1962, originally under the name The Paramours. But after one show at a military base, a  Black Marine stood up and yelled “That was righteous, brothers!” and they liked that moniker better. Although “Soul & Inspiration” was the first record for them without Phil Spector producing and on the (largely jazz-focussed) Verve label, it sounded much like their earlier hits, in no small part due to being written by the same writers – Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill. Although it didn’t have Spector producing, (Medley himself did that), it was produced in a style reminiscent of Spector’s Wall of sound, and used some of the same Wrecking Crew studio musicians to complete the sound. The song seemed a more upbeat, happier flipside to their earlier hit and the public ate it up – it spent 3 weeks at #1, and remarkably was their only single to earn a gold record until “Unchained Melody” did in the ’90s. Nonetheless, it hasn’t gained such a prominent place in our culture as “You’ve lost That Loving Feeling” or “Unchained Melody“. The latter of course had a second-life when used in the movie Ghost, the former ended up being most-played record on U.S. radio in the 20th Century according to BMI. Writer Weill says it “will always be ‘Lovin’ Feelin’ ‘ sideways” to her.

Hatfield died in 2003, but Medley still is active on the concert stage with a new Righteous “Brother.”

April 7 – The Lesser-known Half Of Philly’s Favorite Duo

Happy 75^th birthday to a rock figure immortalized in a fictitious band on The Simpsons. that show had John Oates join Messina, Garfunkel and Lisa Simpson form a band that made a record called “Born to Runner-up.” Pretty funny bit and pretty representative of most people’s opinion about Oates – always the lesser sidekick to Daryl Hall. But there’s more to the moustachioed one than met the eye.

Before meeting Hall, he was part of a band called The Masters in Philadelphia which had a local following and with Daryl he co-wrote most of their hits including “Maneater”, “Sara Smile” and “Adult Education”. As well as playing guitar, he did add vocals to some of their tunes, including the lead on their version of “You’ve Lost that Loving Feeling.” Apart from him, Oates has worked with (and co-written for) Icehouse – he co-wrote their hit “Electric Blue” and sang backup on it – and the Parachute Club. He produced that Toronto band’s ’87 album and co-wrote their Canadian hit single “Love is Fire.” As a solo artist, success has eluded John, though he’s put out five solo albums. the latest of those was Arkansas in 2018, an album allmusic rated as 4-stars, saying it was “a warm and inviting affair” consisting of “the kind of folk that was popular in ’60s coffeehouses.” Just recently he put out a new “single” online, a cover of the ’70s Timmy Thomas tune “Why Can’t We Live Together”, recorded with session musicians in his new hometown of Nashville. But given even Daryl Hall’s lack of solo success, it’s obvious the pair worked best as the duo put in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2014.

Oates released an autobiography, Change of Seasons, in 2017 which details his career and shock when in 1987 he was told the pair were broke. “We were the kids – encouraged to enjoy the wild, crazy protracted adolesence that is life of a rock star,” and not pay attention to cashflow apparently. Publisher’s Weekly review the book well, saying he “writes with brio on songwriting and the studio but his early years and travels are even more intriguing.” By the way, Oates might have ended up being written about in different fields. Through high school he was a star competitive wrestler, and he was actually offered a college scholarship for it but he decided against it and stayed in Philadelphia, attending Temple University, where he ultimately met Hall.

March 26 – It Helped Hall & Oates Become Rich Boys!

Not much good comes out of a gunfight in a nightclub…but one odd exception to that rule might be Billboard‘s “most successful duo of the rock era”: Daryl Hall & John Oates (and it should be noted that they always preferred that designation as opposed to “Hall And Oates”.)

The Philadelphia kings of “blue-eyed soul” met at a 1967 concert when they ended up in the same elevator trying to get away from a gun battle! They found they both went to Temple University and enjoyed much the same music. Hall by then was rubbing shoulders with and working sporadically with the artists who’d go on to form the foundation of “TSOP” – the sounds of Philadelphia, like the O’Jays and Spinners. Daryl and John formed their own band in 1970, initially had little success (although Tavares did have an R&B hit with their version of “She’s Gone”) until a Minneapolis station started spinning their version incessantly and soon had it to #33 nationwide!

On this day in 1977, the pair had their first #1 hit, “Rich Girl” which was in fact about a rich boy! Daryl Hall said he wrote it about a rich and spoiled ex of his then girlfriend, Sara.(Yes, the same Sara he wrote “Sara Smile” about.) Later on that was identified as Victor Walker, an “heir to a fast food fortune,” a pancake house and several KFC outlets. He apparently acted foolishly and said his dad would pay for any damage he did; Hall simply changed the song to about a woman since he wouldn’t feel comfortable singing about a “rich boy.” The pair have since had five more chart-topping singles in the U.S.