Daryl Hall & John Oates – Private Eyes

The song that defines Hall & Oates was started by neither of them, and its own co-writer gave it away.

The cassette held a song its own co-writer had decided she did not want. Janna Allen had worked on it in Los Angeles with a musician named Warren Pash, carried the tape home to New York, and thought about it for roughly a month. Then she phoned Pash with her verdict: it was not right for her, but it was perfect for Daryl and John, so she had handed it over. Pash, by his own account, was appalled. He did not think the song was a hit, and he was sure it had just cost him any chance of working with Daryl Hall again. The song was Private Eyes.

Keep watching: Daryl Hall & John Oates – Kiss on My List · Daryl Hall & John Oates – Maneater

His nerves were reasonable, given where the idea had come from. Pash was driving along Ventura Boulevard in 1980 when he passed a billboard for The Private Eyes, a detective comedy starring Tim Conway and Don Knotts. He turned the car around, went home and wrote a chorus around the title. He had met Hall and Allen earlier that year and had already tried writing with Hall, with nothing to show for it. Allen was the better connection: Hall’s regular collaborator, the younger sister of his longtime partner Sara Allen, and the co-writer of Kiss on My List, another song first meant for a record of her own. She was working as a receptionist when both songs came out.

What Hall heard on the tape was a song that was nearly there and not yet his. He has said that Pash and Janna Allen wrote most of it, and that he then took it apart, changed the chords and rearranged it before he and Sara Allen wrote the lyric. “It’s a real family song, the Allen sisters and me,” he told American Songwriter. The chords he put in are the part musicians notice. John Oates has called it the trickiest of the duo’s hits for a guitarist, built on major sevenths and suspended voicings that heavy pop songs do not normally use. Oates has no writing credit on it at all. The duo cut it at Electric Lady Studios in New York in 1981, producing with Neil Kernon, with G.E. Smith on lead guitar, John Siegler on bass, Mickey Curry on drums, and a handclap in the chorus that no audience has left alone since.

Two Hours at Electric Lady

The video was made as casually as the song had been acquired. Director Jay Dubin has described getting a call from the duo, who were at Electric Lady recording and wanted to know whether he could come over within a couple of hours and shoot something. There was little money and less time. The concept took the title at its word: the band in trench coats and fedoras, film-noir detectives against a black backdrop, miming the song, with Oates peering into the lens through a magnifying glass. Dubin has said the whole thing took about two hours. It reached television in the first months of MTV, which had gone on the air that August and needed clips exactly like it.

One Song Between Them and Themselves

RCA released the single in August 1981 and the album of the same name on September 1. On November 7, 1981, Billboard’s Hot 100 ranked Private Eyes No.1, where it stayed for two weeks: the duo’s third chart-topper and their second of the year, after Kiss on My List. Olivia Newton-John’s Physical then took over for ten weeks. The record that finally replaced it was the next Hall & Oates single, I Can’t Go for That (No Can Do). Britain was cooler, with the Official Charts Company placing the song at No.32, and RPM’s Canadian chart had it at No.6. The RIAA certified the single gold.

Janna Allen died in 1993, at 36, with two No.1 songs to her name from the same year. Pash, who had feared the worst, later compared the outcome to hitting the songwriting jackpot. The song they started is now the one most people would hum if asked to name Hall & Oates, which makes its history worth knowing: a movie billboard, a co-writer who passed, and a partner in the duo who did not write it. What it shows is the skill Daryl Hall had in 1981 that mattered as much as his voice. He could hear a hit inside somebody else’s unfinished tape, and he knew which chords to change.