John Oates on Controversial and Bizarre Hall & Oates Music Video: “Your Perceptions of Us Will Never Be the Same”

Pop-rock duo Daryl Hall & John Oates contributed a large volume of classic hits to the 1970s and 80s musical canon, but the latter musician would argue that one lo-fi music video from 1973 was the height of their artistic expression. The video was almost lost forever. Thankfully, Oates found the footage while cleaning out his house and transferred it to DVD.

Oates described the video as a “a very bizarre and comical pre-MTV music video” with a “cult following.” He also called it their “best video of all time.”

John Oates Puts This Controversial Music Video Above the Rest

Daryl Hall & John Oates, known by their stage name Hall & Oates, blended elements of pop, rock, and soul. The result was a somewhat vague mixture that most people tend to either love or hate. Songs like “You Make My Dreams Come True” and “Rich Girl” have become so ubiquitous that they border on harsher descriptors like “annoying” or “cringey.” (Although this writer would humbly argue that “I Can’t Go For That (No Can Do)” is objectively a bop. I digress.)

For Oates, one of the peak examples of the group’s artistic vision was a music video for “She’s Gone”. It almost never saw the light of day and nearly banned Hall & Oates from Philadelphia television and radio stations. “To this day, I think it’s one of the weirdest and coolest things we’ve ever done,” Oates wrote in his memoir, Change of Seasons.

“It was totally surreal and very disturbing for the traditional TV station production staff, who I’m sure were having their minds blown,” he continued. “The immediate reaction was not good. The entire TV crew got p***ed off and basically kicked us out of the studio as soon as we were finished.”

Oates said, “No one had ever done anything like this. I guess the TV station thought we were mocking them.” In retaliation, the station refused to run the music video, called Atlantic Records to complain, and threatened to ban the pop-rock group from television and radio stations in Philadelphia. Interestingly, the music video wasn’t threatening, violent, or offensive. It was just plain weird.

A Bizarre Gem From Hall & Oates’ Early Career

Some moments in pop culture history make so little sense that you just know they’re ripe for a cult following. David Lynch. Rocky Horror Picture Show. And yes, even that Hall & Oates video that John Oates loves so much. The music video for “She’s Gone” off Abandoned Luncheonette featured Daryl Hall and Oates sitting on high-back chairs, which they sourced directly from their apartments, per Oates. “Blank” might be too descriptive a term for the utterly vacant facial expressions both men don throughout the video.

As the men absently lip-synched to the song (save for a few times where Hall skipped a line to take a drag from his cigarette), a woman lithely floated across the screen. The woman was Sara Allen, Hall’s girlfriend. Shortly after she appeared, a mustached man in a sparkly devil costume—Randy Hoffman, the band’s new road manager—casually walked in front of the musicians. Each time the devil passed, Hall & Oates tossed Monopoly money into the air to punctuate the line, “I’d pay the devil to replace her.”

Even all these decades later, Oates’ love of the abstract music video remains. Speaking to The Guardian in 2021, he encouraged reporter Alexis Petridis to look up the video, saying, “My friend, I don’t know you very well. But you’re missing a great moment in music history. Your life will change. Your perceptions of us will never be the same again.”

Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

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