Daryl Hall
Last year, when Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach fused muses for a collaborative LP and tour, they extended a long-standing pop tradition: since as far back as the 70s, rock/pop luminaries have come together to twine their creative tendrils and see what unique flora might spring forth. These collaborations have ranged from the indie underworld (Yo La Tengo/Jad Fair) to the avant-garde (Frank Zappa/Captain Beefheart) to the mainstream (Neil Young/Pearl Jam, Bob Dylan/the Grateful Dead), and while the results have varied in quality, they generally succeed in stirring up media coverage and public curiosity.
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The recent reissue of Daryl Hall’s Sacred Songs (1980) returns to print one of the few truly weird collaborations in pop history–Hall and guitarist Robert Fripp. Though nominally Fripp was just the producer, Sacred Songs was a genuine songwriting, performing, and arranging collaboration between two seemingly ill-matched musicians. In 1977, when the record was cut, Fripp was only three years past the most aggressive, abrasive version of King Crimson ever assembled. Sick of the music business, he’d decided to work as a solo performer outside the industry machinery, creating improvised, guitar-based soundscapes with his “Frippertronics” tape-delay system. Hall and his partner John Oates had been plying a smooth, sophisticated brand of blue-eyed soul and folky pop for the previous five years and were fresh from recording their first platinum LP (Bigger Than Both of Us) and number-one single (“Rich Girl”). On the verge of becoming a Top 40 fixture, Hall seemed a distinctly odd partner for the crotchety experimental guitarist.
Hall and Fripp got more adventurous with the thoroughly catchy “Something in 4/4 Time” and the Beatles-esque “Babs and Babs.” The former is the most radio-friendly cut on the album, but its sarcastic chorus articulates the duo’s slightly subversive mission: “You’re selling yourself / And that’s a matter of fact / Your love is your life / And your life is your act… So ya gotta have something in 4/4 time / Ya gotta have something that always rhymes.” It’s cleverly underscored by Fripp’s off-kilter guitar break, which slurs the song’s 4/4 meter without actually violating it. On “Babs and Babs,” a rolling piano tune reminiscent of “The Fool on the Hill,” Hall’s lyrics depict a conversation between the left and right brain, while a spacey, hypnotic swarm of Frippertronics textures in the middle section and outro jarringly but effectively echo the surreal lyrics.
