It’s been more than a minute since I’ve made time and space to sit down to listen to a record and write: life is insanely busy, the holidays came and went, Vault Boy is home for a month from college (I guess it would be more accurate to call him Vault Man since he’ll be 19 soon but that feels waaaayyyy to weird), and the records on my to-do stack are numbering close to 100 so it’s time to get back on the listening and writing wagon. I grabbed Simply Red’s debut record for a few reasons – it was sitting on top of one of the stacks and its big hit song, “Holding Back the Years,” is on my New Year’s playlist so it feels right this time of year.

“Holding Back the Years” went to #1 in the US (the week of July 12th, 1986) and to #2 in the UK (it was initially released there in ’84 when it went to #51). It earned Simply Red a Grammy nomination for best pop performance. It’s also the only song on Picture Book that I have any familiarity with or connection to and I am therefore going to ignore the rest of the LP (I’m listening to it now, it’s pretty boring overall though Simply Red’s cover of The Valentine Brothers’ “Money’s Too Tight” is OK). “Holding Back the Years” was omnipresent on the radio and MTV during the first half of ’86; one of my all-time favorite memories hearing “Holding Back the Years” is from around spring or early summer of ’86. I had stopped by Tom’s Drive-In (not an actual drive-in as this local fast food chain joint was downtown Appleton), possibly after school as I know I was on my brown 10-speed Schwinn bike, to see who was hanging out there. I can’t remember everyone present but I do know that (if they were even there) my girlfriends had all left, leaving me to hang with the group of punk boys who were a little bit scary and a lot of bit awesome. “Holding Back the Years” started playing on the restaurant’s speakers and one particularly scary punk, Kevin, got up and started doing a remarkably great slow stomping dance with his shaved head, army jacket and combat boots while singing along – even a hard-ass punk knew all the words.

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I’m not a big Hall & Oates fan but this album is OK. Overall it’s a very 80′s record, mixing blue-eyed soul, pop and new wave (and as with many many records from the era, lots of saxophone). Allmusic states, “Though the production is state of the art for 1981, what keeps Private Eyes from sounding robotic is that it never gets in the way of the kinetic energy of Hall & Oates’ touring band, who give the music muscle; they are what keeps the album sounding vibrant 20-plus years after its release, since while elements of the production have dated, it still captures a real band working at a peak. These are the elements that make Private Eyes a sterling example of the sound of mainstream pop circa 1981, but the record was a hit, and has aged well, because both Hall & Oates, along with regular songwriting collaborators Sara and Janna Allen, were at a peak as writers….Though they continued their streak of excellent hit singles, Private Eyes was the culmination of the sound they’d been developing since Along the Red Ledge, and it stands as the pinnacle of their time as the biggest pop act in the U.S.A.”

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Being the first (and last!) time listening to Daryl Hall & John Oates, I realized I have heard a few of these songs. “Camellia” and “Alone Too Long” were both released as singles, the latter reaching #98 on the Billboard R&B charts and the former failed to chart at all. I have a special loathing for Hall & Oates’ breakthrough single “Sara Smile,” their first to reach the Top 10, hitting #4 on the Billboard Hot 100 in early 1976. That song, along with Starship’s “Sara,” are awful tunes that are inevitably sung to me, though thankfully not so much now as back in the 70′s and 80′s. Thank goodness Boss Hog redeemed the name with “Some Sara” in the 90′s.

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