At first blush, Mississippi Mile might seem like a surprising title for an album that promises to take John Oates back to his deepest influences. Nearly everyone who’s paid attention to pop radio over the last four decades knows Daryl Hall & John Oates built much of their foundation on Philadelphia soul. If that superstar duo’s darker-haired half was going to make a back-to-roots move, shouldn’t it be called Philly Mile? But it’s no geomapping accident that gave Oates’ new solo album its name.
“There’s a common thread in this collection of music that otherwise maybe you wouldn’t be able to put your finger on,” Oates says, “and that common thread is that it all emanates from this one geographical place. As I assembled these songs, whether it was a Curtis Mayfield song or a Chuck Berry or Mississippi John Hurt or anything in-between, the roots of all this music are in the Mississippi Delta. It’s the birthplace of American pop music. And rock & roll really started there before it moved through the country up into the urban centers of Chicago, Detroit and Philadelphia and morphed through the experiences of the people who lived there.”
If that makes the album sound like a history lesson—and it is, in some sense—rest assured that Mississippi Mile is all about primal, gut-bucket grit and emotion, not mere musical edutainment. All but two of the songs are covers, but even if you’re enough of an R&B/folk/blues purist to recognize most of the titles, you won’t be able to predict exactly where Oates will take them. Consider the collection’s best-known song, which veers off in a far slyer and slinkier direction than the Elvis Presley version that made it a classic. Says Oates, “A lot of people are listening to it and they don’t even know what it is till they hear me sing ‘I’m all shook up,’ and then they go ‘Wow, that’s a weird, unique take on that song!’” (…Speaking of being “a little mixed up but feelin’ fine.”)
Actually, there might be one other tune on the album that rivals “All Shook Up” in pop music ubiquity, though it, too, is rendered nearly unrecognizable in this context. That would be “You Make My Dreams Come True,” a cover of, yes, the Hall and Oates smash. “The idea for re-imagining this song was just one of those musical happy accidents” Oates says. One night in his dressing room, he started spontaneously playing a Delta blues version of the 1980’s hit, and sideman Pete Huttlinger joined in with an even more incongruous jazz-style guitar part. Reviving that arrangement seemed a natural for an album this eclectic. “People went crazy when we first played it that night, and they still do. Who would ever think to do this rootsy Texas swing version of an ‘80s pop song?”
Oates has been doing solo tours for about a decade, and when he goes out on his own, most fans know by now that if he’s going to revive tunes made famous by the duo, it’s going to be in severely retooled versions. “I’m not a big fan of Hall and Oates without Hall,” he explains. “And vice versa—I think Daryl feels the same way. If a show was just Hall and Oates minus one, what would be the point? But at the same time, those songs have a lot of validity. They’re part of my life. When I play solo, I don’t ignore my history, but I put a different spin on the songs people have heard a million times.”
He took much the same revisionist approach when it came time to exhume some of his favorite non-originals for Mississippi Mile, some familiar, some obscure. “I have never been a fan of just trying to do a straight remake of a classic, because it’s a classic for a reason, so why try to recapture that exact thing if it won’t be as good? So with all these songs, I changed the arrangements. I changed the keys. Sometimes I put a song that had been in a major key in a minor key.” Occasionally it would involve a minor lyric change, like how the wintry setting of Mississippi John Hurt’s “Pallet” led him to spontaneously throw in a reference to his home state of 20 years, Colorado. In one instance, messing with the material led to an all-new composition. Oates started playing one of his favorite songs, Doc Watson’s “Deep River Blues,” but as soon as he started to play it he knew it would never be as good as the original. The band in the studio then started to improvise using some of the same chords but with a completely new groove. Then John started improvising a new melody and a set of lyrics about the devastating Nashville flood, and that became the original “Deep River.”
All these re-workings happened on the spot, improvised by Oates and the crack band of players he assembled in a Nashville studio last fall, after the flood in question put off their original recording dates by three weeks. Mike Henderson, his co-producer, played slide guitar and harmonica, and the other players included such Tennessee-based luminaries of Americana as Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas, and “my favorite female vocalist of all time,” Bekka Bramlett.
Of all the adjectives and appellations applied to Hall and Oates over the years, “raw” probably hasn’t been foremost among them. So a bit of a surprise may be in store upon the first needle (or laser) drop onto the title track and hear Oates sounding as grizzled as the lyrics would suggest. “I did things with my voice that I had never done before—these weird kind of cracks and breaks in strange places,” he acknowledges. “And it was totally unconscious. These are the loosest, least crafted, least thought out, most emotionally pure vocals I’ve ever done in my life on a recording. Because 80 percent of them are the scratch vocals I sang while I was playing the song on acoustic guitar with the rest of the band playing with me. Wherever the band was taking me is what I did. And there are notes that aren’t quite in pitch, and I’d say, ‘But Mike, I’m singing flat in this little section!’ He’d be like ‘Man, don’t worry about it! You got it!’
“It was usually the second or third take that we kept; we seldom did a fourth. We cut 16 tracks in four days, and the album was basically done, with a very minimal amount of overdubs. It’s as close to a live album as you can make without being recorded live in a public venue. With technology today and all the things at your disposal, it’s too tempting to get paralysis by analysis. I also wanted to make sure that we cut this album in the traditional style that suited this music—meaning, assemble a great band and then put everybody in a room together where you’re all looking at each other and just play!
When I was looking for a co-producer for this project, “I had asked my friend Sam Bush to recommend a great slide player, which I thought would be essential to the sound of the album, and he mentioned Mike Henderson, who’s in a Nashville progressive Bluegrass band called the Steeldrivers but also has a really raw blues band called Mike Henderson and the Blue Bloods. As co-producer, I told him along the way, ‘Your job is make sure I don’t screw this up.’ By that, I meant, not do all the things that I might do without an objective person tapping me on the shoulder saying ‘Hey, man, this is good, leave it alone. Stop screwing around with it.’ I would think, am I really going to let this go out with this kind of raw vocal approach? I’m not used to it. But when Mike would stand up and go ‘Nope, that’s it, we’re done,’ and walk out of the room, I would go, ‘Okay man, I trust you .”
“I was trying to re -visit my roots that preceded Hall and Oates,” he explains. “And there’s a lot to it: There’s urban R&B, there’s doo-wop, there’s folk, there’s folk-blues, there’s Appalachian… But on this particular album, I was going more for the Americana/roots stuff, and a lot of that is what I feel I personally brought to the table in the partnership between Daryl and I. He wasn’t very much exposed to a lot of traditional American music when we first met, so I introduced him to a lot of that kind of stuff. I was going to the Philadelphia Folk Festival, and studying and playing with the great folk musicians in and around the Philadelphia area. And I always had kind of a split personality. Before I met Daryl in 1968, I was always going back and forth between playing in R&B bands and playing solo acoustic blues and folk in coffeehouses.
“And to this day, really, I’m still doing the exact same thing. I’ll go out and play with Daryl, and then I’ll do a songwriters-in-the-round thing with just an acoustic guitar and me. So in a sense, it hasn’t changed very much. The Hall and Oates shows are big, powerful, and high-energy, and that’s an amazing experience. I love playing in the Hall and Oates band. I’m very proud of the legacy of music that we’ve created, and when we do it together, it’s amazing and it’s powerful. But then I love stepping away. I make the joke that playing the Hall and Oates show is like visiting a great museum. It’s fun spending time there, but I don’t want to live there. For me to go into a small theater or club and play on that level is also great in a completely different way. It’s much more personal. There’s no entourage and no giant equipment vans and semis. I love the contrast, I literally show up at the gig with a guitar in my hand and that’s the show.”
Ironically or otherwise, Oates is paying homage to the influence of the great blues, folk, and early rock musicians at the same time as younger artists are paying tribute to the Hall and Oates legacy. Last year, the acclaimed duo the Bird and the Bee even did a CD titled Interpreting the Masters Volume 1: A Tribute to Daryl Hall and John Oates, in which they put a less melismatic, more electro-pop spin on eight classics. Oates was delighted by the disc—Greg Kurstin’s arrangements are faithful yet unique and its wonderful to hear A female singer, Inara George, give a feminine perspective to the well known lyrics. There have been campier homages, too, and Oates enjoys it all, even if he feels slightly strange about being written into the history books quite this soon.
“I’m happy that a younger generation is still rediscovering it what Daryl and I have done—and also that the music has held up,” he says. “What I’m proud of most of all is that these songs are still resonating and people still care about them enough to re-record them. Even the tongue-in-cheek takes on us, the ‘yacht-rock’ stuff, none of it seems to be done in a mean-spirited way. Even the wacky stuff is done with a kind of hip reverence, in a way. I think some of the tributes focus on the ‘80s and the MTV video generation and the images that stuck in people’s minds—which are completely separate from the music. So that’s one thing. But the songs have held up. And you have younger artists like the Killers and Gym Class Heroes who tell their fans how important our music was so them, and their whole fan base basically has really turned on to us. It’s been a cool thing to have happen later in our career, and it keeps our music alive and allows us to go forward and do new and exciting things.”
Or old and exciting things, in the case of Mississippi Mile, which goes a long way toward re-illuminating 20th century music’s missing links and proving that there’s no expiration date on classicism. We can’t all literally get back to the region that Oates calls the birthplace of most popular music as we know it, but this veritable Mississippi Delta Airlines flight is the next best thing to being there.