Hall and Oates
Abandoned Luncheonette

I’ve always liked this record, but now I consider it a classic. I could listen to it every week for a year and never tire of it.

Don’t write these guys off as some Top 40 blue-eyed soul popsters from the 70s that time has forgotten. They are all of the above, but they don’t deserve to be forgotten, if only on the strength of this album. Without question this is their masterpiece. We also consider it a Desert Island Disc and a true Demo Disc.

If you’re looking for a big production pop record that jumps out of your speakers, look no further. This record is alive. Until I picked up one of these nice originals, I had no idea how good this record could sound. For an early 70s multi-track popular recording, this is about as good as it gets. It’s rich, sweet, open, natural, smooth -- most of the time (although the multi-tracked vocals might be a little much on some songs, depending on your front end) -- in short, it’s got all the stuff we audiophiles love.

This vintage Atlantic pressing has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records can barely BEGIN to reproduce. Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn't showing signs of coming back. If you love hearing INTO a recording, actually being able to "see" the performers, and feeling as if you are sitting in the studio with the band, this is the record for you. It's what vintage all analog recordings are known for -- this sound.

If you exclusively play modern repressings of vintage recordings, I can say without fear of contradiction that you have never heard this kind of sound on vinyl. Old records have it -- not often, and certainly not always -- but maybe one out of a hundred new records do, and those are some pretty long odds.

What The Best Sides Of Abandoned Luncheonette Have To Offer Is Not Hard To Hear

• The biggest, most immediate staging in the largest acoustic space
• The most Tubey Magic, without which you have almost nothing. CDs give you clean and clear. Only the best vintage vinyl pressings offer the kind of Tubey Magic that was on the tapes in 1973
• Tight, note-like, rich, full-bodied bass, with the correct amount of weight down low
• Natural tonality in the midrange -- with all the instruments having the correct timbre
• Transparency and resolution, critical to hearing into the three-dimensional studio space

No doubt there's more but we hope that should do for now. Playing the record is the only way to hear all of the qualities we discuss above, and playing the best pressings against a pile of other copies under rigorously controlled conditions is the only way to find a pressing that sounds as good as this one does.

The Sound of Tubes

This is the sound of tubes. I’m sure the album was recorded with transistors, judging by the fact that it was made in 1973 after most recording studios had abandoned that "antiquated" technology, but there may be a reason why they were able to achieve such success with the new transistor equipment when, in the coming decades, they would produce one failure after another. In other words, I have a theory.

They remember what things sounded like when they had tubes in their chain. Most modern engineers have forgotten that sound. They have no reference for Tubey Magic.

A similar syndrome was then operating with the home audio equipment manufacturers as well. Early transistor gear by the likes of Marantz, McIntosh and Sherwood, just to name three I happen to be familiar with, still retains much of the rich, natural, sweet, grain-free sound of the better tube equipment of the day. I used to have a wonderful Sherwood receiver that you would swear has tubes in it, when in fact it’s simply an unusually well-designed transistor unit. No one listening to it would ever know that it’s solid state. It has none of the sound we associate with solid state, and for the most part that’s a good thing.

What We're Listening For On Abandoned Luncheonette

• Energy for starters. What could be more important than the life of the music?
• Then: presence and immediacy. The vocals aren't "back there" somewhere, lost in the mix. They're front and center where any recording engineer worth his salt would put them.
• The Big Sound comes next -- wall to wall, lots of depth, huge space, three-dimensionality, all that sort of thing.
• Then transient information -- fast, clear, sharp attacks, not the smear and thickness so common to these LPs.
• Tight punchy bass -- which ties in with good transient information, also the issue of frequency extension further down.
• Next: transparency -- the quality that allows you to hear deep into the soundfield, showing you the space and air around all the instruments.
• Extend the top and bottom and voila, you have The Real Thing -- an honest to goodness Hot Stamper.

What A Recording

If you have a copy or two laying around, there is a very good chance that side two will be somewhat thinner and brighter than side one. That has been our experience anyway, and we’ve been playing batches of this album for well over a decade.

To find a copy with a rich side two is not that easy.

Most copies lack the top end extension that makes the sound sweet, opens it up and puts air around every instrument. It makes the high hat silky, not spitty or gritty. It lets you hear all the harmonics of the guitars and mandolins that feature so prominently in the mixes.

Vinyl Condition

Mint Minus Minus and maybe a bit better is about as quiet as any vintage pressing will play, and since only the right vintage pressings have any hope of sounding good on this album, that will most often be the playing condition of the copies we sell. (The copies that are even a bit noisier get listed on the site are seriously reduced prices or traded back in to the local record stores we shop at.)

Those of you looking for quiet vinyl will have to settle for the sound of other pressings and Heavy Vinyl reissues, purchased elsewhere of course as we have no interest in selling records that don't have the vintage analog magic of these wonderful recordings.

If you want to make the trade-off between bad sound and quiet surfaces with whatever Heavy Vinyl pressing might be available, well, that's certainly your prerogative, but we can't imagine losing what's good about this music -- the size, the energy, the presence, the clarity, the weight -- just to hear it with less background noise.

A Must Own Pop Record

Or is it a Must Own Soul Record?

It's actually both. Which means:

It's a Demo Disc quality recording that should be part of any serious Popular Music Collection. Others in that category can be found here.

And it should also be part of any serious Soul-Blues-R&B Collection. Others in that category can be found here.

Side One

• When The Morning Comes
• Had I Known You Better Then
• Las Vegas Turnaround (The Stewardess Song)
• She's Gone
• I'm Just A Kid (Don't Make Me Feel Like A Man)

Side Two

• Abandoned Luncheonette
• Lady Rain
• Laughing Boy
• Everytime I Look At You

Pop Matter.com Review

Daryl Hall and John Oates will be forever associated with the 1980s, when they were a ubiquitous presence on top 40 radio with a string of peppy, edgeless, and almost inexplicably catchy hits: “Kiss on My List”, “Private Eyes”, “Maneater”, “Out of Touch”, these were as familiar as the taste of toothpaste and about as exciting. Much like kindred spirits Huey Lewis and the News, Hall and Oates blended bland, earnest white-soul crooning with some of the trappings of new-wave production (drum machines, synthetic horn arrangements, etc.) to produce songs that were as unobjectionable as they were unexceptional, and they haven’t aged especially well. They are tainted with too close an association with the decade’s zeitgeist, making it nearly impossible to hear anything but nostalgia or camp humor in them. Also, the duo’s dreadful live album recorded at the Apollo with former members of the Temptations seems one of the era’s most hubristic embarrassments.

But before they become quintessential ’80s hitmakers, Hall & Oates had a pretty extensive career in the 1970s as singer-songwriters in the Bread mold — not penicillin but sensitive, introspective soft rock aimed squarely at couples confronting midlife crisis. Many acts tried to cash in on the lucrative market opened by James Taylor and his ilk, and Hall & Oates’s innovation, as natives of the Philadelphia area, was to blend acoustic pop balladry with elements of Philly soul; Hall had in fact started his professional career working with Gamble and Huff, the architects of the genre. The most effective expression of this synthesis comes on Hall & Oates’s second album, Abandoned Luncheonette.

If you know Hall & Oates only by their hits, the first surprise that comes from listening to any of their albums is the sound of Oates’s voice. In the 1980s, Oates — the curly-haired, mustachioed one — tended to seem like a useless appendage, an Andrew Ridgely type whose function in the group was difficult to discern. He certainly didn’t seem to deserve co-leader status with Hall; Hall sings lead on almost all of duo’s recognizable hits. And in their videos, while Hall was accorded full superstar treatment, Oates was typically shown doing nothing other than dancing around foolishly and adding his voice to the chorus of backup singers. Sometimes he wouldn’t even have the fig-leaf dignity of having a guitar strapped to him.

But in reality, Oates suffered from the same fate as James Griffin, David Gates’s partner in Bread. Gates wrote all the band’s hits — “Make It With You”, “Baby I’m-a Want You”, “If” — and thus came to dominate the band, while Griffin’s equally worthy if not superior material was subordinated. Abandoned Luncheonette, however, comes early enough in the Hall & Oates saga for Oates to have a prominent role (though chances are he was never the foul-mouthed ass-kicking leader of the group, as depicted in the brilliant Yacht Rock). He contributes three of the album’s better songs: “Had I Known You Better Then” is a mellow acoustic track with elaborate harmonies. “I’m Just a Kid (Don’t Make Me Feel Like a Man)”, a deceptively complex song about a sex-hungry pickup artist, has a hooky bridge that foreshadowed the duo’s later hit “Rich Girl”. The breezy “Las Vegas Turnaround (The Stewardess Song)”, a character study of sorts about a woman named Sara (perhaps the Sara of another subsequent hit, “Sara Smile”), casually exploits what must have been the inherent fascination at the time with the displaced people who made a living in commercial aviation. That they can pass off this gimmicky concept off-handedly, with little trace of desperation, is characteristic of much of the duo’s material and is suggestive of what would ultimately make them so successful; audiences are perhaps primed to forgive them their transparent attempts to be hip because they simultaneously come across as implausible, likable underdogs who can’t be held to a higher standard.

The lowered expectations they evoke allows them to continually surprise, especially on their hits. Oates and Hall collaborated on Abandoned Luncheonette‘s most famous track and the pair’s first hit, “She’s Gone”. On this slick soul pastiche, one can clearly hear the influence of the Righteous Brothers (Hall and Oates would later serve up a rote cover of “You Lost That Lovin’ Feeling,” before Top Gun overexposed the original) as well as the strength of their singing — it builds effectively to a climax that hinges on Hall’s ability to belt out the chorus with that precise control over his voice that paradoxically conveys unrestrained emotion.

Hall’s writing contributions are far more eclectic than Oates’s, with less consistent results. The album’s opener, “When the Morning Comes” is a strummy folk pop augmented with a warbling synthesizer part and Hall’s occasional excursions into the falsetto range. “Laughing Boy” is a maudlin ballad, heavy on emoting and dreadfully short of melody. The title track is a more ambitious composition, a Billy Joel-esque storytelling song that attempts a cinematic sweep across several different tempos and genres, including cabaret, big band and nourish incidental music. The lyrics aren’t strong or coherent enough to unify the disparate musical elements, and it fails to rise above the level of corny curiosity. The album closer, the seven-minute-plus epic “Everytime I Look at You,” is far more successful a piece of pastiche. It starts off approximating, improbably enough, hard funk, and then passes through a proglike instrumental break en route to finishing with a country hoedown, of all things. Miraculously, this all holds together without becoming pretentious or seeming overly pleased with its experimentalism. And this spirit is probably what allowed Hall & Oates persevere and thrive through so many changes in style and so many false starts down blind alleys on their way to superstardom.

- Rob Horning