War Babies (Hall & Oates album)

War Babies
Studio album by Daryl Hall & John Oates
Released	October 1974
Recorded	June – July 1974
Studio	Secret Sound Studios, New York
Genre	Progressive rock hard rock experimental rock heavy metal blue-eyed soul
Length	43:25
Label	Atlantic
Producer	Todd Rundgren
Daryl Hall & John Oates chronology
Abandoned Luncheonette (1973) War Babies (1974) Daryl Hall & John Oates (1975)
Singles from War Babies
"Can't Stop The Music (He Played It Much Too Long)" Released: December 1974

War Babies is the third studio album by American pop music duo Daryl Hall & John Oates. The album was released in October 1974, by Atlantic Records. It was their last of three albums for Atlantic Records before moving to RCA Records. The album was produced by Todd Rundgren. Rundgren and other members of Utopia, his then-recently-formed prog-rock band, perform on the record.

The album was a radical departure from the previous two albums, alienating fans of the blue-eyed soul material that dominated the albums. War Babies is a more rock-oriented LP with heavy keyboard work, sarcastic lyrical content, and elements of hard rock. War Babies was their first charting album, reaching #86 on the Billboard 200.

On February 24, 2017, Friday Music released a remastered version of the album along with their first studio album, Whole Oats.

Background and recording

For their first two albums, Daryl Hall and John Oates worked with venerated producer Arif Mardin. Their second album, the folk-soul release Abandoned Luncheonette (1973), produced the American hit single "She's Gone". However, for War Babies, the group switched producers from Mardin to Todd Rundgren, a decision that Hall later said "didn't make sense. But 'She's Gone' wasn't a real hit until 1975, so we had no reason to stay put. People talk about Abandoned Luncheonette as this groundbreaking album but we felt like an obscurity at the time. Why not take a chance?"

The switch from Mardin to Rundgren saw the group abandon the style of Abandoned Luncheonette, which fused acoustic pop with Philly soul. Hall believed that although the duo embodied the 'Philly sound', having worked with Thom Bell and Gamble & Huff, "what separated us was how we put our soul roots and street-corner gospel harmonies into other contexts. War Babies was the first and most extreme example. Taking something familiar, and heading to Mars. And sometimes Mars is a good place, and sometimes a cold place. That album represents both." Another motivation for the duo's stylistic change was their experiences with glam rock, particularly when supporting David Bowie on his 1973 Ziggy Stardust Tour of the United States. Hall said: "We sounded very musical and grounded, and he came on like Godzilla. We realised we could kick ass a lot harder."

Rundgren, similarly to Hall and Oates a Philadelphian who had moved to New York City, was enjoying the belated success of Something/Anything? (1972) when asked to work on War Babies, which was taped over two months at New York's Secret Sound Studios. According to Chris Charlesworth, the material Hall and Oates were writing for War Babies "veered more towards rock than soul and Rundgren was deemed more suitable." Oates later said that he believed Rundgren would be "sympathetic to the kind of thing we were trying to do", as War Babies is "a very urban-orientated album" that mixes R&B with progressive rock, "and that's what we thought Rundgren was involved with then." Hall said: "Todd was kinda on the same wave length as we were. [...] He has a very urban New York electronic thing. We couldn't think of anyone else who could actually simulate what a monitor beam sounds like when it scans, or portray that visual image on a record." The music writer Max Bell wrote that Rundgren encouraged Hall and Oates "to go quasi-metal" for the album.

Rundgren has said that, during the pre-production discussions and upon listening to the album demos, he noticed that Hall & Oates had not settled on a direction. Considering "She's Gone" to be fairly atypical of the duo's work up to that point, because their previous albums were eclectic, he added: "I think they may have been possibly chafing at the idea that they only would be able to do one kind of music. So coming into the record that became War Babies, the material already had an experimental and exploratory quality. They were on the cusp of deciding what direction to go in and War Babies gave them all kinds of opportunities and places that they wouldn't go later!" Rundgren found working with Hall and Oates undemanding, becoming impressed with their skills, singing and "willingness to experiment". He said that using his own studio for the record allowed Hall and Oates to be "more experimental", later saying: "Often I was trying to interpret ideas into techniques we could use to get what they wanted, like an echo on the voice, a certain kind of keyboard tone or an especially watery sound." Rundgren's 'supervised' credit on the sleeve was explained by Hall: "Meaning, he took more drugs than anybody else!"

Composition

Described by Oates as an urban-sounding mix of R&B and progressive rock, War Babies "abandoned the blue-eyed soul of Hall & Oates' first two albums in lieu of a more keyboard-heavy hard rock sound", according to the music journalist Bryan Rolli. Kris Nicholson of Circus, wrote that Hall and Oates used War Babies to display "their ability to be creative outside the limits of R&B", and quotes Oates as saying in hindsight: "We realized it was an album made purely for our own pleasure." The music critic Martin Aston, however, argues that it represents an extreme form of blue-eyed soul. Paul Lester described the album as the duo's "freak-funk metal experiment", one characterised by "fully-fledged urban paranoia".

The music reviewer Ian Birch wrote that Hall and Oates "took a risk" with the difficult concept, which he described as "The Bomb Culture years siphoned through a '70's Scenario of rock, television and war." According to Rundgren, the album was "based on a baby boomer concept" but not centred around it wholly, adding: "A lot of the atmosphere of the record was supposed to reflect a certain bleakness. That was because of the whole shadow of growing up in the nuclear age and how it had characterised the attitude of a generation. So much of what they did seemed to have a light pop attitude and this record was not intended to be a light excursion into pop music. It was a cultural manifesto." The reviewer Max Bell describes the lyrics as exhibiting "cleverness", with songs focused on antiheroes.

The music critic Martin Aston writes: "War Babies mixes up New York paranoia (the acoustic funk of 'Better Watch Your Back', the "surveillance camera operator" ballad 'I'm Watching You') and American tour psychosis, while the album's glam-soul opus, 'Screaming Though December', is Hall's four-verse diary of broken souls and automobile chaos." The title track has a heavy arrangement with phased guitar and heavy synthesiser. Bell felt that Rundgren dominates the album, to the extent that Hall and Oates do not always "[express] themselves strongly", and highlights "Beanie G. and the Rose Tattoo" in particular for its "Runtish aura", with Rundgren's "scorched" electric guitar being reminiscent of his work with Nazz. "70's Scenario" and "I'm Watching You (A Mutant Romance)" particularly display Rundgren's involvement, and generally throughout the album, Hall and Oates' vocals and melodies are obscured beneath Rundgren's harsh stylizations. "War Baby, Son of Zorro" features synth-treated vocals.

Birch compared War Babies to the contemporary work of David Bowie. He noted that "I'm Watching You (A Mutant Romance)", in which a surveillance monitor is secretly in love with a prostitute, is comparable to Bowie's Diamond Dogs (1974), while noting that a persistent theme throughout War Babies is the "obsessive power" of television; he cites the TV quiz show snippet (recorded impromptu in the studio) which was inserted into "War Baby, Son of Zorro" as being comparable to the excess of televisions watched simultaneously by Bowie's character in The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976). Hall commented at the time that television was the group's biggest influence." In Smash Hits, Birch wrote that War Babies "dipped into the same type of brittle, urban soul that Bowie was experimenting with [in the same period]."

Release and promotion

The duo's record label, Atlantic Records, were mystified by War Babies, and the duo's manager Tommy Mottola told them: "Make another record like this and you'll never make another again." Rundgren believed that Hall wanted to be an experimental artist like Bowie and repeatedly record unique albums, but Atlantic "gave the record a tepid response and didn't work hard to promote it. They expected something much more conservative, something along the lines of the blue-eyed soul type of material. Since I'd done some dabbling with that on my own records, they thought that I would steer them in that direction. I didn’t. I was perfectly happy to make the record that they wanted to make." War Babies was nevertheless the duo's first charting album. Hall and Oates were acquiring a cult following in the United Kingdom, with Abandoned Lunchonette selling well as an import, so the release of War Babies in the UK was predicted by Bell to reach a wider audience.

Subsequently, the group signed to RCA Records for their subsequent album, Daryl Hall & John Oates (1975), which proved to be their breakthrough album. It featured a more mainstream sound than War Babies. Hall noted that the duo "calmed down a bit" after recording a statement like War Babies, "because first of all pop music-wise it was completely untimely. It was too real, too close to what was happening outside and people were getting into the disco craze. Everyone was into forgetting about the world's troubles. So for the first time we became a little more concerned with selling records. Not make heavy statements, just good music." Oates commented in 1976 that the duo were not intending to work again in "the electronic area" that had typified War Babies, because "we wanna stay more in the area we're in and try and lead people a little more gently. We use electronic instruments the way we use other instruments. We blend their sound with natural instruments and achieve textures."

Critical reception

Professional ratings

Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic
The Encyclopedia of Popular Music
The Great Rock Discography	4/10
The Rolling Stone Album Guide

War Babies was met with a hostile response. According to the author Frank Moriarty, it was an esoteric album "that was greeted with dismay by fans who expected more of the soft rhythm and blues with which the duo had established their career." In his Rolling Stone reviewer, Bud Scoppa called it a "jarringly disappointing album" which discards the sweet vocals, full arrangements and sentimental lyrics that characterised Abandoned Lunchonettte in favor of "a tough, big-city stance that sounds both forced and perverse." He deemed it a shrill and effect-ridden LP with both the sound and material at fault, noting: "It's extremely rare for still growing artists to show this disdain for the audience they've managed to win."

Robert Duncan of Creem was interested by Rundgren's domination of the record's content and production, adding: "Speaking strictly in terms of the music, the album might be able to stand alone without the True Star. But it sure sounds like some of those nifty riffs and syncopations were shots in the ass from Todd. As really shows in the lyrics, these boys can get a bit self-indulgent and trite." However, he notes that the album sometimes contains catchy material and "vital, sometimes haunting music" which gets obscured by Rundgren's excesses. In his review for New Musical Express, Max Bell described War Babies as a "bona-fide goodie" which "maybe having worked on it will rescue Rundgren from the Utopia he's unfortunately ensconced in. With this sort of competition, it will need to."

Ian Birch, writing retrospectively for Sounds, described the "underrated" War Babies as the duo's least consistent but most rewarding album. Martin C. Strong, writing in The Great Rock Discography (2006), describes the album as "a heavier, more experimental set" whose commercial failure "marked the end of [the duo's] ill-fated tenure with Atlantic." In his review for AllMusic, Stephen Thomas Erlewine notes the rock-oriented material marked a stylistic departure for the duo and stated: "Some of the tracks work, but the duo's performance sounds forced throughout much of the record."

Legacy

In 2024, Ultimate Classic Rock ranked War Babies at number 39 in their list of the top 50 albums of 1974. Martin Aston of Mojo describes the "practically forgotten" War Babies as representing the fullest expression of the "glam-smitten, acid-laced and frazzled kind of blue-eyed soul" that Hall and Oates explored at the time. In Record Collector, Max Bell described War Babies as "a crazed train wreck of an album" and a "screaming, mutant, discordant mess", adding that it was Hall and Oates' "most experimental early work." He recommends the album to those who "want to imagine a climate where blue-eyed soul gets slaughtered by disgusto-heroin chic". Paul Lester of Uncut credits the album's "crazed electro-distorted soul" for anticipating Lewis Taylor's eponymous 1996 album. In 1982, Susan Whitall of Creem wrote that fans of the album were pleased that the duo had "[surrounded] themselves with strange noises" on their 1980s hits.

In 2016, Hall described the album as "so ridiculous, it makes me laugh. But it is incomparable and free-spirited, an outsider mood as raucous as the environment it was made in. I got that out of my system. It was chaotic. We sounded like demented squirrels." Interviewed for Phonograph Record, Hall described War Babies as the culmination of the duo doing "basically were doing whatever we wanted to, but that was a turning point. The culmination of not paying attention. We realized that it was our pleasure or the commercial field. So our [self-titled] album was our first concession to that, to thinking about what people actually expected from us." In 2005, Hall believed that the duo could have become "a bit edgier through the years if War Babies had sold — which it didn't. Now, I don't care if our music's safe or not. I want to express my emotions, not attitude. And War Babies had a lot of attitude." In her Creem piece, Whithall reflected that "it seems to be assumed that if Babies had hit it big, that hard-edged Delaware Valley sound would have been with Hall & Oates a bit longer."

Track listing

Side one

No.	Title	Writer(s)	Length
1.	"Can't Stop the Music (He Played It Much Too Long)"	John Oates	2:50
2.	"Is It a Star"	Daryl Hall, Oates	4:41
3.	"Beanie G and the Rose Tattoo"	Hall	3:01
4.	"You're Much Too Soon"	Hall	4:08
5.	"70's Scenario"	Hall	4:00

Side two

No.	Title	Writer(s)	Length
6.	"War Baby Son of Zorro"	Hall	4:10
7.	"I'm Watching You (A Mutant Romance)"	Hall	4:27
8.	"Better Watch Your Back"	Hall	4:15
9.	"Screaming Through December"	Hall	6:35
10.	"Johnny Gore and the ‘C’ Eaters"	Hall, Oates	5:18

Personnel

• Daryl Hall – lead vocals (3–10), backing vocals, keyboards, synthesizers, guitars, mandolin, vibraphone
• John Oates – backing vocals, lead vocals (1, 2, 10), keyboards, synthesizers, guitars
• Don York – keyboards, arrangements on "Is It a Star", ARP String Ensemble on "70's Scenario"
• Todd Rundgren – lead guitar, backing vocals
• Richie Cerniglia – lead guitar on "Is It a Star"
• John Siegler – bass
• John G. Wilcox – drums
• Sandy Allen – backing vocals on "War Baby Son of Zorro" and "Johnny Gore and the "C" Eaters"
• Gail Boggs – backing vocals on "War Baby Son of Zorro" and "Johnny Gore and the "C" Eaters"
• Hello People – backing vocals on "Johnny Gore and the "C" Eaters"
• "Admiral Television" – "soloist" [presumably TV-broadcast noise] on "War Baby Son of Zorro"
• Tommy Mottola – voice ["Erased Conelrad warning"] on "War Baby Son of Zorro"

Production

• Produced and Engineered by Todd Rundgren
• Assistant Engineer – David Lesage
• Mastered by Jean Ristori at Sterling Sound (New York City, New York).
• Art Direction – Bob Defrin
• Artwork – Peter Palombi
• Photography – David Gahr and Armin Kachaturian
• Musical Assistance – David LaSage and Gene Perla