It’s So Much Better With Two: 50 Years of Hall & Oates’ Abandoned Luncheonette

There was a time when Philadelphia-bred pop-rock duo Daryl Hall & John Oates seemed unstoppable. Between 1974 and 1991, 29 of their 33 singles made it into the Billboard Top 40, with many of those same hits becoming ubiquitous in the years since—soundtracking our silliest movie scenes and eliciting goofy dances from drunk relatives at weddings from sea to shining sea. Part camp, part cringe, all feathered and falsetto, Hall & Oates were undeniable. But, in November of 1973, they were just a couple of goofballs from Eastern Pennsylvania with pretty voices and outsized dreams. Whole Oats, their debut record—and not the last with an unfortunate title—came and went with little fanfare, leaving the duo unsure of where to turn next. Like so many before them, they headed to New York City. Upon arrival, they looked to producer Arif Mardin, a growing force within popular music of all kinds, for a solution.

The result was Abandoned Luncheonette, an album with an incredible name and a hypnotic sound to match. This was the beginning of the decades-long tightrope the duo would walk between pop, soul and yacht rock, a record that flirted with the sonics that would vault them into superstardom in subsequent years—all while maintaining the kind of rough, unvarnished edge you might expect from a couple of Philly boys out of their depth. None of these songs reached the heights of their future hits, but they remain, to this day, some of Hall & Oates’ best. The duo found something on Abandoned Luncheonette, but in the decades following, they lost something, too—making the forgotten charm of their sophomore record all the more poignant 50 years later.

As a born and bred Philadelphian, I have always associated Hall & Oates with my hometown, which is why it’s funny to hear how reverently the duo talk about their big move to New York City. It may seem trite in 2023, but to a couple of 20-somethings in the early ‘70s, the Big Apple still held a glossy allure—a place where you could see Aretha Franklin, Led Zeppelin and Bob Dylan all in one glorious afternoon. More important than New York, though, was Mardin, who—in that same year—produced albums by John Prine, Bette Midler and Willie Nelson. Mardin had worked on Whole Oats and, despite its commercial failure, believed in Daryl and John enough to put his full weight behind Abandoned Luncheonette. “Mardin carefully crafted each song, every bit of nuance, bringing in the perfect players for the right moments,” Oates told the Huffington Post back in 2017 when talking about the Abandoned Luncheonette sessions. Those players included people like Hugh McCracken, Bernard Purdie, Richard Tee, Joe Farrell and Chris Bond who, while far from household names, centered the record in a way that allowed the sheer force of personality that is Hall & Oates to shine through. Album opener “When The Morning Comes” is an incredible example of how well the duo weave their honey-sweet voices to an easy, breezy effect but, without the swirl of Bond’s sliding mellotron and Farrell’s subtle oboe, the song falls flat.

Bond, especially, brought a level of experimentation not present on any of the band’s previous work, one that fits snugly around the effortless harmonization that is at the duo’s core. There are times, even, when his decisions seem more evident than those of either Hall or Oates. Even decades after Abandoned Luncheonette’s release, Hall still decries the second half as being far too influenced by Bond’s Beatles obsession at the time, and felt that his attempts to match their ornate studio trickery was ill-conceived. He’s not wrong. Songs like “Lady Rain” and “Everytime I Look At You” are not clunkers per se, but they can be a bit indulgent—nearly to a fault. It’s clear Bond hoped to stretch the limits of the duo’s sound, but to pull off Beatles-level flights of fancy, it kind of helps to be the Beatles. Still, you can’t tell the story of Hall & Oates’ ascent to pop-rock royalty without Bond, who would go on to produce some of their biggest albums ever as they moved into the mid- and late-‘70s.

Perhaps no song better evinces Bond’s invaluable influence than side one’s crescendo of blue-eyed soul, “She’s Gone.” Like all of Abandoned Luncheonette, the track took a while to catch on—its reception matching the unhurried pace of its jazzy, wordless, nearly minute-long introduction. It wasn’t until 1976, three years after its initial release, that it would peak at #7 on the Billboard Hot 100 charts, by then becoming the unheralded companion to their breakout hit “Sara Smile.” Though certainly matching in tone and substance, “She’s Gone” remains, in my view, the far superior song, taking the heartache inherent in it’s soul ballad construction and giving it a genuine, dependable pathos. “Everybody’s high on consolation,” goes the opening line, before taking a bit more of a darker, hedonistic turn: “Let the carbon and monoxide choke my thoughts away, and pretty bodies help dissolve the memories.” Notably, this is one of a few songs on Abandoned Luncheonette in which Hall and Oates share lead vocal duties, something that would become less common—as Hall became the more primary force in years to come. Here, it works to perfection, as the dual singing only heightens the hopeless longing that is the song’s core driving force.

It’s hard to tell where Daryl Hall & John Oates now land in the popular imagination. Even at their height, they seemed to come awfully close to a novelty act. Songs like “Rich Girl” and “Maneater” aren’t jokes,, but they aren’t exactly nuanced takes on emotional vulnerability. And while I am not saying the songs on Abandoned Luncheonette form some kind of poetic masterpiece, but they do have a more acute sense of how best to blend the absurd and the heartfelt. “Well, she’s here or halfway ’round the world, oh I could cry,” goes the band’s endlessly catchy “Las Vegas Turnaround (The Stewardess Song).” “I know I’ve got to pray for delays and for days ’til she’s beside me, all alone in her room and her scattered clothes remind me, Sara please, Sara, turn around.” Sure, there’s some ill-advised moments on songs like “I’m Just A Kid (Don’t Make Me Feel Like a Man)”—with its sultry, confounding spoken word—and “Lady Rain” and “Laughing Boy”—both of which meander on their way to nowhere in particular—but there’s something charming about their bumbling here, which feels less overtly staged than their later work. There’s a frivolous—even sexy—charisma to the chart-topping hits they’d make over the next 15 years, but it’s on Abandoned Luncheonette where they best thread the needle.

For all there is to recommend about Abandoned Luncheonette, the album’s cover—which features a dilapidated diner outside of Pottstown, Pennsylvania popping with surreal high-contrast color—is one of its most enduring features. The work of photographer and artist Barbara Wilson, it’s the band’s best album cover by a significant margin and, in a way, remains illustrative of the legacy of Abandoned Luncheonette 50 years later. As Daryl Hall and John Oates continued their career and moved from lovable upstarts to superstardom, the style and substance of Abandoned Luncheonette would become as overgrown and forgotten as the diner on its cover. In many ways, songs like “She’s Gone” and “When The Morning Comes” represent a road not taken for the duo or, rather, a road not properly paved. It’s interesting to imagine a different write-up of history, where these songs—rather than later singles like “Rich Girl” and “Kiss on My List”—properly broke through. But their pop sensibilities were always too sharp to become folk-rock troubadours or studio maestros.