About that moustache … A Q&A with Hall and Oates

There are too many questions for a guy like John Oates to answer in one sitting. Here are more highlights of our talk:

Question: When do you think you’ll retire?

Oates: I play guitar and sing for a living. Why would I want to retire? I hate golf, so it’s not like I’m gonna go out and start doing that. And sitting on the beach is kind of boring. We’re lifelong musicians. We knew that even when we were young. We didn’t pick up guitars and start forming bands when we heard The Beatles. We were already out there performing as kids.

Question: Tell me about that down time in the ’90s when we didn’t hear much from you guys.

Oates: We were doing a few shows here and there, but mostly we were trying to find ourselves, personally. Daryl did a bunch of solo projects and moved to England. I produced some people, got married, had kids, built a house — all the things I couldn’t do while running around for 20 years before that. That gave me kind of a platform to carry on the rest of my life. It gave me a much better perspective on things. Then we both realized, we’re not over.

Question: Do you hear your influence in today’s music?

Oates: Definitely. I’ve always said that Maroon 5 was the Hall &Oates of the year 2000. Their tightness, the production, really, it reminds me of the type of impact we had in the ’80s. But there’s a lot of things out there. You hear it in singer-songwriters. You use what came before you, translate and filter it through your own personal point of view.

That’s what Daryl and I did with guys like The Temptations and Curtis Mayfield.

Question: Did you ever feel like you weren’t taken seriously as musicians because of the over-the-top styling?

Oates: In a lot of ways, we didn’t pay enough attention to our look and our thing. We just did what we were doing. We lived in New York and flowed along with the fashions and styles of what would happen in New York City, and our album covers reflect that. We never had stylists.

We wore the clothes that we liked. We weren’t as packaged and self-conscious as a lot of people made us out to be. If we looked wacky, it’s because times were wacky and that’s just what it was.”

Question: Do you ever look back at some of those photos and cringe a little?

Oates: All the time. Everybody looks back in their family albums and looks at their haircuts and clothes and thinks those things. You always cringe, but for us it’s in the public eye and it’s for the world to see.

Question: You probably get sick of talking about this, but tell me about shaving the moustache.

Oates: It has become this really bizarre icon, and I can’t believe it, honestly. I’ll tell you what it was. In 1990, I just had a whole change of approach to my life. I’d gotten divorced and wanted to start over again. I moved from the East Coast to Colorado, and it was almost like shedding my skin. I just didn’t want to be the person I had been, and I thought I could be a lot better as a person. It was some kind of weird symbolic kind of thing. I never wanted to grow it back and I never will. For some reason, the mustache took on a significance for me, personally. But it’s just facial hair.